“You’re lying.” Cold, brutal certainty filled his voice.
She was already too pissed off to take that one silently. Her hand lowered from her lips as her gaze raked over his body with heated memories and fiery anger.
“You know better,” she sneered. “You were falling down drunk outside of town the night you buried your parents, Dawg. How do you think you got home? I brought you home, and you spent the night screwing me. All night,” she cried out. “Before you told me exactly how those Neanderthal bastard cousins of yours were going to f**k me. Where and how, and how long.”
She hated the fear and the pain and the fist-sized lump that tore at her chest every time she remembered. By God, if he was going to blackmail her into his bed and sneer at her attempts to protect her heart from him, then he could hear the truth.
“Don’t worry, Dawg,” she spoke in ragged bursts now, just trying to find the breath to sustain her through the rage. “You don’t have to worry about the one that got away. Because she never got away from anything but the foursome you seemed determined to force her into.”
She stepped back, fear and panic raging through her body with the same force, as eight years of pent-up anger finally flowed free.
Escape. She needed to get away from him. She needed to run, just as she had before, just as far away from him as she could get.
“Touch that f**king door, and I’ll have you arrested in an hour flat.” His gaze smoldered with anger now.
Oh, this wasn’t the Dawg she knew. The Dawg she knew was unaffected, playful, cynical. He didn’t become enraged, and he sure as hell wasn’t tormented. Which was exactly how he seemed now.
He paced into the kitchen, jerking another beer from the fridge before uncapping it and tilting it to his lips. In two long draws, he emptied it. A second later it shattered as it hit the wall.
Crista flinched violently, staring at the dark paneling across the kitchen, bits of glass clinging to the dampness a small amount of the liquid had left. Dawg rubbed his hands roughly over his face before pushing them through his hair and dislodging the leather thong that held the loose ponytail at the nape of his neck.
“Did I rape you?” His voice was unemotional, but his eyes weren’t. They seethed, darkening in spots, lightening in others as he stared at her from across the room.
“You didn’t rape me,” she gritted out, there were times when she wished she didn’t have such an aversion to lying.
“What happened?” His lips were a thin, furious line, his expression rigid.
Crista shook her head wearily. “Dawg—”
“What. Happened,” he bit out again, his voice harsher, icier.
“You were drunk. I brought you home. We had sex. End of story.”
“How?”
“What?” She watched him warily now, her stomach knotting in tension at the tone of his voice. It was hoarse, brutal.
“How did we have sex?” he repeated, his chest moving harshly, nostrils flaring as his expression seemed to grow colder.
“The usual way?” She retreated an additional foot.
His gaze sharpened at her movement as his lips twisted in contempt. “I didn’t rape you then; I won
’t do it now,” he rasped. “Now answer me. How?”
“I answered you.” Her fingers tugged nervously at the bottom of her shirt as the air filled with dangerous tension.
“You were a virgin.” It didn’t sound like a question.
Crista nodded slowly.
“I took you.” He swallowed tightly at that point. “I took you hard.”
Did he remember? He didn’t appear to, yet he was right. He had taken her hard, and she had loved it.
Crista nodded again. She began to shake.
“I f**ked your ass!” His lips curled back in an enraged snarl as his hands curled into fists and the muscles beneath his T-shirt rippled and bunched tensely.
She didn’t shake her head, she didn’t answer him. She stared at the phenomenon that she was certain no one else had ever seen.
Dawg enraged. She had only rarely heard of him appearing truly angry, let alone enraged. Even drunk, he had been playful, mocking, a little silly, but never angry.
“Answer me!” he shouted, causing her to jerk violently.
“Why should I answer you?” she snapped back. “It’s obvious you’ve remembered it. Why pursue a piece of ass you’ve already had? And why the hell would you be stupid enough to blackmail me into giving you more? You didn’t think much of it the first time, or you wouldn’t have wanted to give it away.”
She watched him cautiously, rather like watching a rabid bulldog straining at a chain.
Dawg saw the wariness in her dark eyes. He dreamed of those eyes. Dreamed of being mesmerized by the chocolatey color, drowning in them, burning in them.
And her face, a flush of arousal burning across her cheekbones, her lips swollen from his kiss, and her voice whispering across his mind. Begging for more.
It hadn’t been a dream. The words crashed in his skull. The dreams that tortured him for eight long years had been insidious memories that had managed to survive the drink-induced haze his mind had been in. He had had her, and the memory of it, so dim and shadowed, had haunted him ever since.
FOUR
Dawg shut back the rage and the fear that he had somehow hurt her and she wasn’t admitting it. No doubt, this changed things. Son of a bitch, he couldn’t blame her for staying as far away from him as possible all these years. But that didn’t mean he was willing to let her go.
He would have been inclined to doubt that he could forget a night with her, but there were too many dreams, too many indications that she was right.
He had taken her virginity. He had taken her without consideration of her innocence, her youth.
He had taken an eighteen-year-old virgin to his bed and done things that even mature women would blink at being asked to do.
He cleaned up the glass from the broken bottle carefully, aware of her watching him now with quiet concern. Fuck that; he didn’t need her concern. He wanted her. He wanted her hot and wild, all that hunger and passion he had glimpsed in her burning for him.
She would have loved him, he thought, to have followed him into his bed all those years ago. It made him cringe, wondering what he had done to her, how he must have hurt her to make her run before he even awakened.
And he deserved it even less now than he had eight years ago.