He was damned if he wanted her to leave.
“Take the dog home with you,” he finally snapped as anger got the best of him. “If I wanted it, I would have brought it in. And I don’t have time for a trip to the shelter. Remember they put down unadopted dogs there. There’s no way that mutt is going to get a home the way it howls and cries twenty-four seven.”
And the puppy needed out of the mountain air. Pugs could sicken easily. They needed care. Just like women and babies did.
“If she wanted me, she would have come into my house the first two times I sweet-talked her across the yard instead of turning and hightailing it back to a door that stays locked against the poor little baby,” she informed Logan with that hint of anger. “What is your deal where this puppy is concerned? You can’t keep her and you don’t want to take her to the shelter. What do you want to do? See her starve in your backyard?”
“I don’t have a deal,” he said between clenched teeth, trying to ignore that deeper spark raging at him to end this now. “And I feed it.”
That spark that had his dick hard and his hands itching to touch Skye. It was the same spark he’d felt the first time he’d met her, strangely enough, in his own backyard just after moving into the house.
“You have something,” she informed him as she slowly straightened. “But nothing that relies on you, depends on you, or could survive without you. Right?”
And she just had to point that out, didn’t she?
“Deliberately,” he assured her as he watched her expression, her expressive eyes, and what he saw there had his chest tightening in both anger and regret.
Because he saw pity there. Pity and sorrow.
And he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.
“You think all that responsibility is something to sneer about then?” she asked him accusingly, anger sparking in her own eyes then. “That it doesn’t matter, because there’s nothing or no one you can survive without?”
That wasn’t exactly true.
“I have my family,” he stated.
He heard that rasp in his voice that assured him he was losing control of that tight rein he had on his emotions, on his angers. On the f**king hunger to have her.
She had no idea—
No idea the hell he and his cousins had suffered through over the years and the losses they’d had no choice but to survive. Losses that had forced them out of Corbin County, only to once again force them back.
“Your grandfather?” she asked archly. “Or just your cousins? The cousins who own everything you have ever worked for or deserved in your life? One of whom has his own fiancée now? The other who has just invested in his own business? Possibly two of them? Everyone in this county is gossiping about the fact that you signed over everything you own, everything, Logan, to two cousins who are evidently determined to at least try to have a life.”
“And what the f**k is your point?” he snarled, feeling the loss of that precious, careful control now.
Damn her to hell, she had no idea how much it hurt to sign over everything he had ever dreamed of having in his life. To watch Crowe and Rafer fighting against the hell he could see was coming with every shred of lost dreams that still existed inside them to have a life.
He had no choice. Someone had to watch out for the other two. Someone had to be seen as the Callahan monster to, he hoped, make the monster haunting them back off.
“What do you have for yourself, Callahan?”
“One too-nosy neighbor who doesn’t seem to know how to call me by my first name rather than my last and a too damned delicate pup that refuses to let me find it a home?” he questioned harshly as his arms dropped from his chest and he advanced on her, his head lowering as he glared down at her. “What business is it of yours, Ms. O’Brien?”
The anger and needs surging through him had him moving then. Had him making what he knew, even as he did it, was the biggest mistake of his life.
He touched her.
Before he could think or stop himself, he had his hands on her upper arms, pulling her to him, bringing her flush against his body as though he needed her.
“I have a hunger eating my guts out for a woman that I know has happily-ever-afters shining in her eyes.” He held her like a desperate man. As though he needed her touch. “That won’t happen with me, and you’re determined to hurt both of us by pushing it.”
As though he needed something or someone to claim.
And Logan knew he didn’t. He didn’t dare.
“You would never make one night with me enough,” she repeated her warning, her eyes spitting back at him furiously. “What kind of game are you playing? You warn me off, then jerk me in your house as though you have no other choice but to fight with me over a dog we both know you want. You want that damned dog almost as bad as you want me in your bed. Why, Logan? Why can’t you have either of us?”
“Because I don’t dare.”
As he stared into her wide, surprised gaze Logan realized he’d wanted her since that first glimpse he’d had of her. And he shouldn’t. That small taste he’d had of her last week as he held her beneath that tree hadn’t been nearly enough.
He shouldn’t want her, but he craved her. Craved her with a need that made no sense and a sudden, overwhelming hunger that he couldn’t seem to control.
And maybe she was right. One night would never be enough. But they would both pay for it.
“Are you waiting on your common sense to return again?” she whispered, her fingers gripping the tops of his biceps, kneading them.
She wasn’t protesting or pushing him away. She wasn’t fighting it. But he was, with every ounce of control he was fighting it, and he was losing.
Her fingers were kneading the tensed muscles of his biceps. Straight little nails nipping into the hard flesh covering them and sending sparks of fiery sensation straight to his balls.
“Hell if I know.” He was trying to stop himself. “I didn’t show any last time. Why should I do it now?”
There was no way to stop what he knew he was about to do.
Holding her gaze, drawn by her, feeling as though he was held to her by chains as invisible and yet as tight as any made by man, Logan knew he was doomed.
His head lowered, his lips touching hers, feeling them part, feeling the silk and heat, the tremble of hunger. As he watched the darkening of her gaze and the flutter of her lashes as they drifted closed, he knew he was a goner.