Her gaze searched him for signs of serious injury. She jostled the handful of men standing between her and the ring. She yelled, demanding they let her through, and slapped at the ones who didn’t listen.
Gage finally picked up his head. His gaze connected with hers through the flimsy barrier of ropes. The same punch she always felt hit her, as if she’d been the one taking shots to the solar plexus. But just like always, she ignored it.
Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. His right eye was already swelling and bruising. Hope’s hands curled around the edge of the ring floor. The sharp pain of a splinter pierced her left palm.
His golden-brown eyes flared with recognition and something warmer before narrowing down to indecipherable slits. He frowned and asked gruffly, “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.”
In one lithe movement that belied the fact that he’d just been knocked silly, Gage bounded up from the floor and over the ropes. His feet slapped the dirty cement beside her. Several men around them smacked his back and shoulders, offering encouragement he obviously didn’t need.
The man deserved an Academy Award to go with his other decorations. “You threw the match,” Hope breathed out, the realization hitting at about the same time the shocked words fell from her lips. Why the heck would he do that?
His frown deepened. A few people around them stared and grumbled ominously. Gage grasped her arm and pushed her ahead of him through the crowd.
People parted to let them pass. She glanced back to look at Gage because they sure weren’t moving out of her way. They hadn’t done it any other time she’d slipped through the rowdy crowd. After seeing his expression she had to admit she didn’t blame them. If he’d raked her with that hard, cutting expression she’d have gotten the hell out of the way, too.
And if he hadn’t had a death grip on her upper arm she might have done it now.
Her heel caught on a crack in the floor. Before she could stumble Gage was there, keeping her from twisting an ankle by pulling her back against the wall of his chest.
His hard, sweaty chest. A shiver rocked through Hope. She just hoped he was too preoccupied to notice.
Dumping her out into the chilly February night, he finally let her go. This time she did stumble, letting the building catch her. The metal siding rattled. In the distance a peal of female laughter was cut short.
Gage stood in front of her, his legs planted wide, arms crossed over his chest. Unruly dark brown hair, longer than she’d expected, fluttered in a gust of wind. Hope shivered again, but this time it was because seeing him standing out in nothing but a pair of shorts made her cold. Spring was definitely on the way, but it was still close to forty this late at night. It didn’t seem to bother him. Which bothered her.
He pinned her in place with the glittering intensity of his stare. That was new. And she wasn’t sure she liked it. Where was the laughing, mischievous boy she remembered? The one whose favorite pastime was talking her into things that inevitably got them both in trouble?
Hope gathered herself, crossed her own arms to fight the sudden feeling of being exposed and stared right back.
Gage Harper might be able to intimidate a lot of people, but not her. She knew his darkest secrets—at least the ones from his childhood. She’d seen him cry when his dog was hit by a car. And she knew exactly how to get under his skin.
She didn’t think he’d changed that much in twelve years. So she waited, knowing that saying nothing would eventually drive him crazy. If there was one thing Gage hated, it was silence. He needed action, movement, motion.
It only took a couple minutes for him to ask, “Why?”
“Hello to you, too, Gage. It’s nice to see you home. Yeah, my daddy’s doing fine, thanks for askin’. The cancer scare was difficult, but he’s in remission now,” she answered in the sweetest, kill-you-with-kindness voice she could manage.
He ignored her point and breezed right over the niceties. “Why were you looking for me? And for God’s sake, why here? Do you know how dangerous this place is? Half the guys here are ex-cons and the other half just haven’t gotten caught yet.”
He was exaggerating. So none of the men inside would be up for Teddy Bear of the Year, but some of them had looked decent enough. She might have felt out of place, but not in danger.
“Please. I’m a journalist. I can handle myself.”
Gage laughed. The sound wasn’t what she remembered—his laugh had been loud and deep—but was brittle, with a sharp edge that could have sliced straight through skin. “You are not a journalist.”
Hope jerked at the punch of his words. They shouldn’t have mattered. Who cared what Gage thought? But they did. Probably because he, more than anyone, should have understood how much they would hurt. And maybe he did.
“Running Daddy’s paper hardly qualifies you as a journalist. I’ve been home for two days and haven’t seen your name on a byline yet.”
Hope tried to rein in the temper she could feel bubbling inside her.
“Does my degree from Clemson make me a journalist, then?” she growled.
The minute the words left her mouth she regretted them. She watched as the expression on his face shut down, his eyes going completely blank. He took a single step backward. He didn’t move far, but she realized there was more to the distance than merely putting inches between them.
He’d wounded her on purpose, but she’d done it accidentally. She should have known better. Not getting into Clemson was a sore spot for him. With that single statement she’d brought them straight back around to a history neither of them wanted to rehash.
“What do you want, Hope?”
Even his voice was distant.
“To interview you,” she said, unsure how to reverse what she’d carelessly done. She could feel the opportunity to tell his story slipping through her fingers. It frustrated her.
His gaze swept across her. The contempt that grazed her made her want to walk away, but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
“I’m not giving interviews.”
Even before Gage had shown up in Sweetheart, the reporters had begun crawling out of the woodwork. Several national news teams had taken up residence at the local B and B and their satellite-equipped trucks were permanently parked on every corner of the town square.
The propaganda videos released by the insurgents had made Gage Harper an overnight media sensation. The camera loved every dirty, bloody, defiant inch of his beautifully distant face. The same cuttingly intense expression filling his golden eyes had captured a nation.
And then he and his men had been rescued. Not since Jessica Lynch had there been such a media storm surrounding the capture and rescue of a U.S. soldier.
Just about every citizen of Sweetheart had been stopped and questioned about Gage—his childhood, his parents, his sister. They’d even interviewed elementary school kids who hadn’t been born when Gage left and never met the guy. But in the absence of a real story, they were trying to fill in with whatever they could get their grubby hands on.
Didn’t he realize that saying nothing could be worse? People filled in the blanks, anyway, with whatever they were given—whether it was fact or fiction.
The influx of reporters had become a nuisance and the town council had even called an emergency session to discuss how to deal with them. They’d hoped when Gage came home and spoke that would be the end of it. But Gage refused to talk to anyone.
Hope had thought she—and the Sweetheart Sentinel—would be the exception to Gage’s no-comment policy. Apparently not.
“But