Lover Beware

knees and she was smiling at him. Sarah’s smile was enough to stop a man’s heart. Damon took a good look at her clothes, at the gun still in her hand. He stiffened, swore softly. “Damn you anyway, Drake. I should have known you were too good to be true!”
    “Were you believing all the stories about me, after all, Damon?” she asked. But dread was beginning even though it shouldn’t matter what he thought of her. Or what he knew. She had a job. It shouldn’t matter, yet she felt the weight in her chest, heavy like a stone. She felt a sudden fear crawling in her stomach of losing something special before it even started.
    “Who sent you, Sarah? And don’t lie to me. Whom do you work for?”
    “Did you really think they were going to let you walk away without any kind of protection after what happened, Damon?” Sarah kept the sympathy from her voice, knowing it would only anger him further.
    He swore bitterly. “I told them I wasn’t going to be responsible for another death. Get the hell off my property, Sarah, and don’t you come back.” Something deep inside of him unexpectedly hurt like hell. He had just met her. The hope hadn’t even fully developed, only in his heart, not his mind, but he still felt it. It was a betrayal and his Sarah, mysterious Sarah with her beautiful smile and her lying eyes, had broken him before he’d even managed to find himself.
    “I can assure you, Mr. Wilder, despite the fact that I’m a woman, I’m very capable of doing my job.” Deliberately she tried to refocus the argument, putting stiff outrage in her tone.
    “I don’t care how good you are at your damned job or anything else. Get off my property before I call the sheriff and have you arrested for trespassing.” Damon slammed the window closed with a terrible finality. The light went off as if somehow that would cut all communication between them.
    Sarah sat on the ground and stared at the darkened window with a heavy heart. The sea rolled and boomed with a steadiness that never ceased. The wind tugged at her hair and the clouds drifted above her head. She drew up her knees and contemplated the fact that old prophecies should never be passed from generation to generation. That way, one could never be disappointed.

Chapter 4
    SARAH DIDN’T BOTHER to knock politely on the locked door. Damon Wilder was hurt and angry and she didn’t really blame him. She was nearly as confused as he was. Curses on old prophecies that insisted on messing up lives. If they’d been two people meeting casually everything would have been all right. But no, the gate had to stand open in welcome. It was neither of their faults, but how was she going to explain a two-hundred-year-old foretelling? How was she going to tell him her family came from a long line of powerful women who drew power from the universe around them and that prophecies several hundreds of years old always came true?
    Sarah did the only thing any self-respecting woman would do in the middle of the night. She pulled out her small set of tools and picked the front door lock. She made a mental note to install a decent security system in his house and lecture him about at least buying a dead bolt in the interim.
    As a child she had often played in the house and she knew its layout almost as well as she knew her own. Sarah moved swiftly through the living room. She saw very little furniture although Damon had moved in well over a month earlier. No pictures were on the wall, nothing to indicate it was a home, not just a temporary place to dwell.
    Damon lay on his bed staring up at the ceiling. He had started out seething, but there was too much fear to sustain it. Sarah had nearly walked into an ambush. It didn’t matter that she had been sent to be his watchdog, she could have been killed. It didn’t bear thinking about. Sarah. Shrouded in mystery. How could he fixate on a woman so quickly when he rarely noticed anyone? If he closed his eyes he could see her. There was a softness about her, a femininity that appealed to him on every level. She would probably laugh if she knew he had an unreasonable and totally mad desire to protect her.
    Damon bit out another quiet oath, not certain he could force himself to pick up and leave again. Where could he go? This was the end of the earth and yet somehow they had found him after all these months. No one would be safe around him.
    “Do you always lie in the dark on your bed and swear at the ceiling?” Sarah asked