No, it hadn’t been her body that he had hurt. It had been something far more delicate. He had hurt her young heart and possibly scared the hell out of her when he spoke of bringing his cousins to their bed.
As he lay in his bed the next morning and stared up at the ceiling, he would have snorted at that thought if he weren’t more concerned about waking the woman now sleeping next to him.
Share her? He couldn’t imagine it. Even then the thought of sharing her had sent a spike of denial tearing through his chest, despite his stubbornness to remain dedicated to the extreme, raunchy pleasure to be had in the act.
And now? Hell, he hadn’t shared one of his women in years, despite Natches’s obvious dissatisfaction in his cousin’s recent lack of desire to participate in the games of their youth.
The truth had become obvious when Rowdy returned home from the Marines last year to claim his stepsister. Even as the sharing had begun to wane, Dawg and Natches both had been certain they had known what was coming. That when Rowdy returned, the need for the fun and games would return.
For Dawg, it hadn’t returned, though. He had seen the possessiveness his cousin felt for Kelly immediately. He had been amused. More understanding than Natches had been, but privately relieved.
As much as he had once desired the little vixen that Rowdy was now engaged to, he found that over the years that desire had slowly changed. Affection and protectiveness had replaced the lust.
But the need for Crista had only grown over the years. Maybe he had understood Rowdy more than Natches did because Crista had been back in town when Rowdy returned, and Dawg had been fighting the demons that came with her return: the knowledge that he was missing something with her, that something had been taken away from him. And now he knew exactly what he had lost.
A night of memories. The knowledge of how she smelled, how she tasted, the sounds of her cries and the whisper of her desire as he took her. All the things he cherished about the sex act were missing from the night he had spent with her in his bed.
All he had were the dreams. Fragmented, broken, more tease than knowledge of an event that threatened to take his head off with the pleasure.
Oh yeah, he remembered that much. In his dreams, he remembered being consumed by a fire so overwhelming it had been all he could do to survive it. The same fire had ripped through him the day before when he took her downstairs on the couch, pushing into her, possessing her.
He should have known, he told himself as he turned his head to stare at her. All these years, he should have known that something had happened that night. If not because of Crista’s abrupt change, then because of her brother Alex’s.
Alex Jansen had become more mocking, if possible, and even more critical of the cousins’
lifestyles the same week Crista had gone from an emerging sex kitten in her flirtatiousness with Dawg to a cold, frightened woman running from a nameless terror.
Too young and too dumb, Dawg thought now. That was what he had been.
Which made him an even bigger bastard now in her eyes. His lips twitched at the memory of her fury the previous day as soon as she realized exactly how damned sexy she had been when he took her.
He couldn’t believe he had dared to blackmail her into his bed. He could still remember the shock in her eyes, the disbelief, the way she had watched him through the day as though expecting him to suddenly smile and declare it had all been a joke. Right up until she had opened her eyes, stared into his, and realized there was no chance to escape now that he had had her.
She was dreaming if she thought that was ever going to happen. Dawg had learned a lot of things in the four years he had been in the Marines and then the last four years training and working with the ATF. He had learned how to be hard. How to kill. He knew how to assess a situation in a single moment and make lightning-fast decisions that had saved his life on more than one occasion.
And he had known, standing outside that warehouse with Crista safely hidden in his pickup, he had known there wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to come to his bed in any conventional manner.
No, he would have to take the choice from her first, then work on making her forgive him for it.
He turned his head and looked at her now, a smile playing at his lips. It had taken hours to get her to try to sleep. She had spent the day pacing the downstairs section of his houseboat, railing and arguing and coming up with some damned good arguments as to why he was a class-A bastard and a disgrace to the human race.
Her last argument still had him holding back a chuckle.
“Alex is so going to kick your ass!” she had raged as he finally grew tired of the arguments, picked her up, and carried her to his bed. “He’ll have your balls for this, Dawg.”
As though she would tell Alex.
Alex most likely knew about the night they had spent together, but he didn’t know enough to want to kill Dawg. Eight years ago he could have done it. It would be a little harder job now, however.
She was in his bed, though. Still wearing her T-shirt and panties, but minus the jeans that had covered her slender legs when he pulled her up here. She might have been too angry to give him another taste of the heated arousal he knew she felt, but the knowledge that she felt it was still there.
He drew the sheet from her legs slowly, ignoring her mumbled little protest as she shifted on her back, one leg bending at the knee, the other stretched out along the bed.
A soft cotton thong covered her pu**y, the material shaping itself over her mound and revealing the soft curls beneath. Dawg rarely liked that silky growth on a woman’s mound. It hampered his dining pleasure when he was going down on a woman. He wanted to taste her flesh, feel the responsiveness of each soft fold that hid the treasure beyond.
Those curls would have to go. Binding Crista to him wasn’t going to be easy. She was stubborn as hell, and she had already made up her mind that Dawg and his sex games were too far out of her league.
Because she was scared. He had seen that flash of fear in her eyes. That feminine knowledge that she had come up against something or someone that she wasn’t certain how to handle.
She would learn how to handle it, how to handle him, because the bottom line came down to the fact that he couldn’t risk letting her go.
The information they had on the female within the group of thieves that had stolen that arms shipment en route to the U.S. Army garrison in Fort Knox was too similar to Crista’s description. There were no photographs yet, no one had managed to identify her, and Dawg was going to make damned sure that Crista didn’t get identified in the criminal’s stead.