“What sort of dream are you having?”
“I’m in my happy place. A mountain cabin by a quiet lake. No one around for miles. And newsflash, you’re not invited.”
“That’s not very welcoming of you. I thought you might be glad to see me.”
Glad to see him? Why would she be glad to see him? Didn’t he understand that he was interrupting her?
“Are you deaf?” she asked.
“No. I hear just fine.”
“Dumb?”
“Better than average IQ.”
“Then you should easily understand this. Go. Away.”
“Wish I could do that,” he replied in a surprisingly soft voice. “But I can’t leave until I’ve gotten what I came to retrieve.”
What he came to retrieve?
“You’re the weirdest dream ever.”
“Never had anyone call me a dream. Now a nightmare, that I can be . . . wake up, Keira. We need to talk.”
His voice went very serious and commanding all of a sudden. A shiver raced through her. Okay, she didn’t find that sexy, did she?
She shouldn’t. She was over men. Jerks, every one of them.
“That doesn’t seem very nice to label all of us as jerks. You don’t even know me. Statistically speaking, I’m certain there are just as many women that are jerks as there are men.”
“Done some research on that, have you, buddy?”
“Open your eyes, Keira.”
There he went again, all commanding. Too bad for him she wasn’t in the mood to obey.
“No.”
“I could make you.”
“As a threat, that’s really unoriginal,” she informed him.
“It is?”
“Yeah, you got to put more detail into it to make it really threatening.” Damn it, her hands were numb.
That wasn’t a good sign. Was she getting nerve damage?
“Detail?”
“Like, how are you gonna make me? Beat me? Yeah, that’s kind of been done. Tie me up? Too late. Kill everyone I love? There’s one problem. I don’t have anyone.”
“Everyone has someone.”
“Nope, Pollyanna, they don’t.”
“My name isn’t Pollyanna,” he said.