Edge of Desire by Rhyannon Byrd Read Free Book Online Page A

hard it’d been a physical pain. He’d been gorgeous as a boy, but the man. God…the man was stunning, with a drop-your-jaw-and-stare-at-him-on-the-street kind of masculinity that no doubt got him noticed wherever he went. He was animal beautiful. Like something…something feral and wild. Predatory and dangerous.
    She wasn’t buying the story he’d continued to spill when he’d come back that afternoon, but then he never had been able to lie worth a damn. In clipped, graveled tones, he’d explained how Saige had become an anthropologist, claiming that she’d been in search of a family heirloom that some dangerous people were working to get their hands on. An heirloom they had reason to believe was buried out in the woods, because of a map that Saige had found. When she’d pressed him for details, he’d refused to tell her anything more, saying again that the less she knew, the better. And while she found the whole story incredulous—the idea of something that belonged to the Buchanans being buried there in Washington…on her land—Hope knew there was something bad going on for Riley to still be there. Something was up. Something that was important to him, though God only knew what it could be.
    But his frustration at having to deal with her had been obvious. She knew, if he’d had the choice, that he’d have turned and gotten out of Purity so fast he’d have left a trail of smoke behind him. And while she’d tried to tell herself throughout the late morning and early afternoon that she didn’t care if he came back or not, there had been a strange sense of panic in her chest until he’d finally walked back through the front door of the café at three o’clock.
    The feelings rioting through her were a bad sign, but who knew? Maybe having him there would be a good thing. Help her to move on. Find closure. It was the only reason she’d given in that afternoon, pretending that she bought the load of drivel he’d given her, allowing him and his too-handsome-for-his-own-good friend to take one of their cabins.
    Yeah, sure it was.
    She blew out a shaky breath, and argued with the voice in her head. After all, allowing him to stay was exactly what her therapists would have told her to do. Closure, she reminded herself. That was what she could get out of this. Finally, after all this time.
    The only problem was the way he made her feel, as if she’d crawl out of her skin if she didn’t get her hands on him. It was a strange, startling sensation, after going for so many years without feeling anything even remotely sexual. It was as if that part of her had shut down, only to be zapped back to life, and now she was hungry. Starving, actually. And nothing in the café’skitchen was going to ease the craving that churned through her veins like a molten burn of fire.
    But she had to face the facts. She was one pathetic puppy. Even if she weren’t furious with him, she wouldn’t know how to get what she needed. From an early age, she’d been lectured on what good girls do and don’t do. Her mother had gotten pregnant by a married man at the age of seventeen, and left a newborn Hope with her devastated grandmother, then hit the road in search of a new life. Desperate to make her grandmother happy, Hope had allowed the woman’s lectures to form the framework of her personality, and it had led to disaster.
    Good girls married the men they had sex with.
    Good girls didn’t walk out on their husbands.
    Good girls put up with whatever was forced down their throats.
    And in the end, good girls paid for being such pathetic wastes of space.
    She almost wished she could just forgive Riley for the pain he’d caused her all those years ago, shovel it off her chest, and for once in her life act on pure, gut instinct. Just open the door, sink her bare feet into the cool, damp blades of grass as she stepped out into the silvery moonlight, and go to him.
    And when she reached him, she’d place her hands on that hard, wide