“I suppose.” Lee ate, thoughtfully studying the view over his shoulder. Had anything ever tasted this wonderful? Would anything ever again? “But not everyone makes it work as well as you.” Reluctantly, she accepted some of the dried fruit he offered. He seemed to have an unending supply, but Lee had yet to grow used to the taste or texture.

“If you could change one thing about your life, what would it be?”

Perhaps because he’d asked without preamble, perhaps because she was so unexpectedly relaxed, Lee answered without thinking. “I’d have more.”

He didn’t, as her parents had done, ask more what. Hunter only nodded. “We could say it’s your fate to want it, and your luck to have it or not.”

Nibbling on an apricot, she studied him. The lowering light and flickering fire cast his face in shadows. They suited him. The short, rough beard surrounded the poet’s mouth, making it all the more compelling. He was a man a woman would never be able to ignore, never be able to forget. Lee wondered if he knew it. Then she nearly laughed. Of course he did. He knew entirely too much.

“What about you?” She leaned forward a bit, as she did whenever the answer was important. “What would you change?”

He smiled in the way that made her blood heat. “I’d take more,” he said quietly.

She felt the shiver race up her spine, was all but certain Hunter could see it. Lee found she was compelled to remind herself of her job. “You know,” she began easily enough, “you’ve told me quite a bit over this week, more in some ways than I’d expected, but much less in others.” Steady again, she took another bite of trout. “I might understand you quite a bit better if you’d give me a run-through of a typical day.”

He ate, enjoying the tender, open-air flavor. The clouds were rolling in, the breeze picking up. He wondered if she noticed. “There’s no such thing as a typical day.”

“You’re evading again.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s my job to pin you down.”

He watched her over the rim of his coffee cup. “I like watching you do your job.”

She laughed. It seemed he could always frustrate and amuse her at the same time. “Hunter, why do I have the feeling you’re doing your best to make this difficult for me?”

“You’re very perceptive.” Setting his plate aside, he began to toy with the ends of her hair in a habit she could never take casually. “I have an image of a woman with a romantic kind of beauty and an orderly, logical mind.”

“Hunter—”