There wasn’t always safety in numbers, though, and the innocent didn’t always persevere. The Callahan men and their wives had learned that one snowy, miserable night on a mountain road as they made their way back from Aspen. With them had been an infant daughter. Bright-eyed, dark-haired, and just beginning to smile. She too had been taken from life far too soon.
Placing his feet silently on the floor, Logan rose slowly from the couch. The memory of the infant’s baby sounds drifted through his mind as he held the weapon at his thigh and moved through the dining room, keeping close to the shadows.
Pushing back those long-ago memories, Logan concentrated on the lack of sound that processed along the side of the house. He was listed as a medic with the special forces, inducted from the marines, but he’d been far more than that. Just as his cousins had been.
Logan had been expecting problems since he’d returned to the house nearly six months earlier.
Another sound drifted into the house. The sound of tiny growls, immature and fierce. The sound had a silent snarl of fury curling at Logan’s lips.
The little squatter camped on Logan’s patio outside the living area was already fiercely territorial, even for her small size. The pup was an innocent bystander in the war beginning to heat up between the Callahans and the patriarchs of the three ruling families of the county. The Barons, as they were called. Logan’s, Crowe’s, and Rafer’s grandfathers had set out to destroy the sons of their only daughters the moment those daughters had died.
Logan could see that particular little ball of fluff being harmed just for the hell of it. He knew Saul Rafferty had brought it simply to torment him. He’d done it to give Logan something to care about so she could be taken in the cruelest way possible.
Just because she was small enough, innocent enough, and because enemies would assume it belonged to Logan.
If only someone could convince her to actually come to them or take a treat from them, then they could harm it. Thankfully, the little female pup refused to associate with anyone but Logan.
Hell, trying to get the little squatter to come out from the sheltering evergreens that bordered each side of the yard as well as the side of the house had proved difficult even for Logan’s neighbor each time he caught her attempting it. Hopefully, the little invader would stay out of the way while Logan took care of the intruder slipping through the night. Because every time Logan walked out to the yard, the first thing the pup did was try to sleep on his sneaker.
The pup was silent now, hidden in the evergreen and mass of plants bordering the side of the house. The knowledge of that assured Logan that the intruder was coming much closer.
Fuck. Logan didn’t need this. Not another death on his conscience. Not an innocent pup, an innocent woman or friend.
Please, God. How much more guilt was he supposed to carry?
A second later there was another fierce little growl and puppy yap.
As though someone was trying to entice the tiny invader from her hiding spot in the bushes next to the door.
For what reason? To make her pay perhaps for the perceived sins of the home’s owner?
He wasn’t even going to consider it. He sure as hell wasn’t going to allow it.
Hell no! If anyone was daring enough to even try to harm her, then Logan promised himself he was going to get the fight Logan been brewing since moving back into the house earlier in the year.
A tight, hard curve curled his lips. He hoped whoever was out there was brave, daring. Or just plain stupid enough to let Logan catch them, because he had years of pent-up fury that had brewed inside him.
Sneaking along the wall to the glass doors, silent, his senses open and alert. Logan watched the shadows outside the glass carefully.
Then, surprisingly, a shadow moved into view.
The moonless night didn’t help to identify who crouched at the side of the house, or their intent.
Their position, movements, and the darkness that filled the inner yard aided the intruder, and they were reaching for the pup.
Before they could slide beneath the sheltering evergreen, Logan jerked the door open before gripping the back of their neck and jerking them inside.
Who was more surprised, herself or the intruder, he wasn’t certain.
He couldn’t have expected it, and he sure as hell couldn’t explain the anger that rose inside him at the sight that met his eyes.
“What the hell are you doing?” he growled.
Shoving the weapon into the waistband of his jeans, he reached down, gripped the young woman trying to rise from the floor under her arms, and dragged her to her feet.
“Hey, bully!” Surprised and not the least bit happy, his trespassing little neighbor stumbled back before staring up at him with a glare on the pert features of her gamine little face. “What’s your problem, Logan?”
Rising to her full height wasn’t much of a stretch. At five feet, four inches, she wasn’t exactly the tallest woman around.
That short, delicate little body had fit him to a T when he had braced her against the side of a tree and kissed her senseless, though. Not that he’d had many of his senses left himself that night.
Standing on her bare feet, hands propped angrily on her hips, she confronted him with an expression of outrage.
Dressed in another of those filmy, lacy gowns, she looked like pure temptation. It wasn’t black; instead, it was the softest spring green he’d ever seen. The robe brushed the floor, shielding the filmy gown beneath that only just showed the shadowed hint of feminine flesh between her thighs, and pert ni**les topping her br**sts.
“Manhandling women went out in the Dark Ages, Callahan,” she informed him tartly when he didn’t respond.
He ignored her sidekick completely. It had expertly wiggled in just before he slammed the glass door closed.
Son of a bitch, this woman was more than just the reason for his hard-on. She was the star of every sexual fantasy that could spark in his too-sexual brain. The terrifying fact was, she was beginning to play in fantasies that, surprisingly enough, weren’t all sexual.
He couldn’t allow that.
“What’s my problem?” he snapped as hunger, emotion, and a need clenched his guts as his resentment, his fury against the circumstances he could chance, flooded his system. “It’s three in the morning and you nearly got your head blown off sneaking around to play on my patio like a nine-year-old. Why the f**k didn’t you just cross the yard rather than sneaking around?”