Page 8 of Silent Threat
Cole towered over her, waiting for her to give up and tell him they were finished.
Annie held his dark, contemptuous gaze. If this was a staring contest, she wouldn’t be the one to look away first.
Sure, he could be an obstacle to her goals,ifshe let him. But if he was a boulder, she would be water. She would run over him and around him. She would wear him down, until his resistance was nothing but a manageable little pebble that she could put in her pocket.
OK, she might have crossed from positive thinking straight to fantasyland there, but she didn’t let that discourage her. She unhooked her thumbs from the belt loops and rocked back on her bare heels.
“Fine.” She replaced her professional smile with an equally professional listen-to-me-buddy look. “Let’s cut the bullshit, then, on both sides and save ourselves a lot of time. You are here for a reason. Pretending that you don’t need any of this is poppycock. So how about you suck it up and do the work?”
The corner of his mouth looked like it was struggling to twitch, but she couldn’t be sure, because the next second he bent to unlace his boots at last.
She felt as if she’d moved a mountain.Better not get overconfident.
She waited until he straightened, kicked off his boots, and looked at her once again. Then she said, “Ecotherapy is basically ecopsychology. We use nature to connect to our inner nature.”
There. I’m the boss, and you’re going to have to get with the program.“About seventy percent of people report improvement in their depression after a green walk. We start by paying attention to the energies that connect us to the land and all other living things—”
He turned and strode forward on the path in front of her, effectively shutting her down, like turning off the TV.
Fine.She could use a breather from his intensity. She needed a moment to process her first impressions of him. Like that massive wall inside him that she sensed hid scary things. Dead things. Things she wasn’t sure she wanted to know about. Surface Cole was all she could handle this morning.
However, she did have to prove in this first session that shecouldhandle the ill-tempered SEAL. So Annie hurried after him.
Inside the main building of the Hope Hill facilities, a man stood by the window. He stared absently at the trail where the big Hawaiian had disappeared minutes ago with Annie.
The man at the window had a plastic bag of pills in his pocket, and he worried them through his fingers, as if praying the rosary. He finally had enough pills to put even a large man to sleep.Permanently.
He had sent Mitch Moritz to his rest. He was ready to send another.
He didn’t think of it as murder. They were all troubled souls here. He would simply give another one the rest that the man desperately needed anyway.
He liked taking care of people. He took care of his mother. He was a good son.
He kept fingering the pills. The thought of finally using them was giving him an erection.
That was where pretty little Annie Murray came in.
Annie with her carefully kept distance. That wasn’t polite, now, was it? Soon she’d learn that trying to keep him at arm’s length was a poor decision on her part.
Poor decisions had consequences. Women were to be protected. But only women who knew their place.
He would teach Annie.
He liked helping people.
He only wished that they were smart enough to understand that he was the good guy here.
Chapter Three
COLE MAKANI HUNTERwanted nothing to do with the woods, or the ecotherapist.
At least he got to choose if he wanted to look at her, had a way to turn her off.
Or maybe he didn’t.
She skipped ahead of him and began walking backward.
She was tall, neither lean nor overweight, but full of soft curves. She wore khaki cargo shorts that reached her knees and a soft, flowing, short-sleeved, greenish cotton shirt. Her camo colors blended into the trees. She had plain, symmetrical features. Her reddish-brown hair—it looked like her natural color—cascaded to the middle of her back, uncurled, unironed, and frizzy from the humidity. No makeup. The cosmetic industry wasn’t getting rich off her.
