There was no point in being at each other’s throats for the next two weeks, she decided as she found a convenient rock to sit on. Relaxing might be out of the question, she mused, watching him take clever, compact cooking utensils out of the pack, but animosity wouldn’t help, not with a man like Hunter. He was playing games with her. As long as she knew that and avoided the pitfalls, she’d get what she’d come for. So far, she’d allowed him to set the rules and change them at his whim. That would have to change. Lee hooked her hands around a raised knee.

“Do you go camping to get away from the pressure?”

Hunter didn’t look back at her, but checked the lantern. So, they were going to start playing word games already. “What pressure?”

Lee might have sighed if she weren’t so determined to be pleasantly professional. “There must be pressures from all sides in your line of work. Demands from your publisher, disagreements with your editor, a story that just won’t gel the way you want it to, deadlines.”

“I don’t believe in deadlines.”

There was something, Lee thought, and reached for her notepad. “But doesn’t every writer face deadlines from time to time? And can’t they be an enormous pressure when the story isn’t flowing or you’re blocked?”

“Writer’s block?” Hunter poured coffee into a metal cup. “There’s no such thing.”

She glanced over for only a second, brow raised. “Oh, come on, Hunter, some very successful writers have suffered from it, even sought professional help. There must have been a time in your career when you found yourself up against a wall.”

“You push the wall out of the way.”

Frowning, she accepted the cup he handed her. “How?”

“By working through it.” He had a jar of powdered milk, which she refused. “If you don’t believe in something, refuse to believe it exists, it doesn’t, not for you.”

“But you write about things that couldn’t possibly exist.”

“Why not?”

She stared at him, a dark, attractive man sitting on the ground drinking coffee from a metal cup. He looked so at ease with himself, so relaxed, that for a moment she found it difficult to connect him to the man who created stark terror out of words. “Because there aren’t monsters under the bed or demons in the closet.”

“There’s demons in every closet,” he disagreed mildly, “some better hidden than others.”

“You’re saying you believe in what you write about.”

“Every writer believes in what he writes. There’d be no purpose in it otherwise.”

“You think some—” She didn’t want to use the word demon again, and her hand moved in frustration as she sought the right phrase. “Some evil force,” Lee chose, “can actually manipulate people?”