Bare Facts by Katherine Garbera Page B

understood more about Sekijima she could figure out what made him tick. Her own knowledge of the Yakuza was rough, barely formed. Kenkichi hadn’t been in the Yakuza and he’d been the only thing she’d focused on in Japan.
    Her training had taken her into sex clubs, and she’d met a few of the local gang members but she hadn’t allowed her focus to slip. She needed to bring that focus to bear now. She needed to find a way to tap into that same single-minded determination that had brought her to her quest against Kenkichi ten years ago.
    But she didn’t like that part of herself. Hadn’t wanted to admit that behind her pretty face and body there could lurk a need for such revenge. Yet there had been.
    “I’ll help in any way I can. What I don’t know, Justine will.”
    “What are the strengths of your team?” he asked.
    “That we’re all so different. We all think and fight in unique ways. Justine is a street fighter—”
    “Like me,” he said.
    “Yes, and she has no give in her. She’ll fight using whatever means are necessary. She’s a dirty fighter when she has to be.”
    “And the other girl?”
    “Anna lives by the rules, but she’s smart enough to outwit anyone. I’ve never seen anything like it. She hates to fight and she almost never has to.”
    “And you?”
    “I’m lethal with weapons. I don’t like getting personal in a fight the way Justine does.”
    “You keep yourself above it,” he said.
    Was that true? She thought about the way she relied on her weapons, the fact that she could make a kill or take someone down without getting in too close. And when she had to, she used martial arts training to quickly subdue her opponent.
    “I guess I do.”
    “Why is that?”
    She shrugged. “I’ve never analyzed it.”
    “Would you like to hear what I think?”
    “No.”
    “I never would have figured you for a coward,” he said.
    “I’m not going to let you goad me into this. I’m not scared of anything you have to say.”
    He turned to the front of the vehicle and the silence built between the two of them. And just as she was sure he’d planned, she couldn’t stop wondering why he thought she fought the way she did.
    He wouldn’t be right because there were things about her that no one knew. Not even Sam, with his extensive connections, had ever been able to find out what made her tick.
     
    The glimpses of vulnerability he caught so fleetingly crossing her face made him want to stand up for her. Tell her not to worry about whatever faults she imagined she had, because he knew she was so much better than he was.
    “You are so used to wielding your looks and lethal talents that most people don’t know how to deal with you—and you like that.”
    “Are you sure? It could be that people really just don’t know how to deal with me . Most women are afraid to trust their husbands and boyfriends around me.”
    “Is their fear of you or the men?” he asked, leaning closer.
    She shrugged. “What does it matter?”
    “I want to know.”
    “I think it’s a mixture of both. Usually they are right and their men make a pass when we’re left alone. So it’s not that I’m hiding, exactly—it’s just that…”
    He loved the cadence of her words and the softness of her voice. In all his life, softness had been absent. Even now, with all his wealth and supposed security, he still hadn’t found any way to bring that into his life.
    “Every time you let someone in, they disappoint you,” he offered. He wished they’d met two months earlier. Hell, two days earlier would have been great. Any time before Sekijima had resurfaced, and he could have courted her the way she deserved. Instead he was going to have to use her as cover to set up a trap that could endanger her.
    Well, didn’t that make him the catch of the year!
    “I’m not complaining. Most of the time I come on full-out bad-ass to scare people. It’s easier that way.”
    He wanted to laugh. She was so blasé about her