She met his gaze without flinching. “Apparently, we both pretended to be something we weren’t, right from the start.”

He tilted his head at her reference to their initial meeting. “I didn’t want anything from you. You, on the other hand, went beyond the harmless in your deception.”

She didn’t like the way it sounded when he said it—so petty, so dirty. And so true. If his fingers hadn’t been biting into her wrist, she might have found herself apologizing. Instead, Lee held her ground. “I have a perfect right to be here and a perfect right to try to sell an article on any facet of this conference.”

“And I,” he said, so mildly her flesh chilled, “have a perfect right to my privacy, to the choice of speaking to a reporter or refusing to speak to one.”

“If I’d told you that I was on staff at Celebrity,” she threw back, making her first attempt to free her arm, “would you have spoken to me at all?”

He still held her wrist; he still held her eyes. For several long seconds, he said nothing. “That’s something neither of us will ever know now.” He released her wrist so abruptly, her arm dropped to the table, clattering the cup. Lee found that she’d squeezed the flaky pastry into an unpalatable ball.

He frightened her. There was no use denying it even to herself. The force of his anger, so finely restrained, had tiny shocks of cold moving up and down her back. She didn’t know him or understand him, nor did she have any way of being certain of what he might do. There was violence in his books; therefore, there was violence in his mind. Clinging to her composure, she lifted her coffee again, drank and tasted absolutely nothing.

“I’m curious to know how you found out.” Good, her voice was calm, unhurried. She took the cup in both hands to cover the one quick tremor she couldn’t control.

She looked like a kitten backed into a corner, Hunter observed. Ready to spit and scratch, even though her heart was pounding hard enough to be almost audible. He didn’t want to respect her for it when he’d rather strangle her. He didn’t want to feel a strong urge to touch the pale skin of her cheek. Being deceived by a woman was perhaps the only thing that still had the power to bring him to this degree of rage.