“Oh, right. The butcher knife.”
“Little good that did me.”
“It poked a hole in my best scarf.”
He had the gall to look amused, which irked her. She tried to catch him off guard. “Tell me about the war.”
Her probe had found a sore spot. He pulled his legs in, sat up straighter, took a sip of coffee. Normal, inconsequential actions, but in this case, revealing.
“Well?” she said.
“What do you want to know?”
“What branch of the service were you in?”
Nothing.
“When did you serve?”
Nothing.
“Where?” When he didn’t answer that, she said, “Nothing to say on the topic of warfare?”
“Only that I don’t recommend it.”
They eyed each other across the table. In his steady gaze she read a warning that he wanted the discussion to end there. She didn’t press her luck. “The boxes of bullets on the shelf in the bathroom…”
“I thought they’d be out of your reach.”
“I had to stretch on tiptoe. If you have bullets, you must have guns.”
“My arsenal didn’t turn up during your search?”
She shook her head.
“Too bad. Otherwise you could have shot me instead of attacking with your fingernail and a butcher knife. It would have taken less energy.”
Again, he was making fun of her. She struck back. “Was yours a violent crime?”
His grin dissolved. No, not dissolved, because that denoted a gradual fade. His levity vanished in an instant, that corner of his mouth dropping back into place to form the firm line it usually was. “Extremely.”
His blunt reply filled her with desperation and a wrenching sense of despair. She wished he had denied or mitigated it. Still clinging to a vain hope, she said, “If it was something you did during wartime—”
“It wasn’t.”
“I see.”
He gave a harsh laugh. “You don’t see a bloody thing.”
He stood up so suddenly, she nearly jumped out of her skin. In reaction, she shot to her feet, sending her chair over backward. When it crashed to the floor, she cringed.
He stepped around the table, picked up her chair, and set it upright with angry emphasis, banging the legs against the floor. “Stop jumping every time I move.”
“Then stop scaring me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are!”