Because Dawg couldn’t imagine sharing her, not eight years ago and definitely not now.
He headed to the stairs, moving up them with slow anticipation as his body tightened with the thought of her wearing the clothes he had bought her, the lacy panties he had picked out or the brief pajamas he had imagined seeing her in. The image was tightening through him with the same force as the knowledge of her lovers.
Her lovers.
God help him if that was what she needed now. Once, the thought of sharing her with his cousins would have had his c**k pounding in glee. Now, he had to shake back the jealousy, fight to hold back his outrage that she would leave him for not just one man but two.
She had taken from others what she had refused to consider taking from him? He had always thought she had run because of his reputation, because of her fear of the ménages. To find out she had run straight into another one had his temper riding a thin, sharp line.
When he entered the upper-level bedroom, he came to a hard stop.
She was sitting on the bed, wearing one of his large shirts rather than her new pj’s, slowly spreading some kind of lotion over her legs, which looked silky, rounded, and too damned tempting to believe.
For a moment, memory flashed through his head. Those silky legs spread, his mouth buried between them. His senses erupted with the remembered taste of silky, sweet feminine cream and hot, rich, satiny flesh. He could remember being as drunk on her as he was on the whiskey, as her fingers clenched in his hair and she whispered. His teeth clenched. She was a vocal lover. Begging, pleading, urging him on.
She set aside the lotion, her hands gripping the shirt where it covered her abdomen and glancing down at it as she rose nervously to her feet.
Oh, baby, it would pay for you to be nervous, he thought with a mix of lust and anger. Because there were so many wild, wicked things he intended to do with that hot little body.
“You have lousy taste in pajamas.” She finally glared up at him. “There’s not enough material to them to cover a postage stamp, let alone me.”
He glanced over at the chair where some of the articles lay. The snug boy short panties and camisole tops would have covered more flesh than he liked, actually.
It wasn’t the pajamas he wanted to discuss, though.
“Tell me something, Crista.” He began unbuttoning his shirt. “When did you intend to tell me that you didn’t have just one lover but two? Lessing and his friend Ty Grayson?”
Her gaze flickered, her eyes narrowing back at him as the buttons released from his shirt and his flesh sensitized with the need to touch her.
Then, a slender brow arched tauntingly. “Why would I tell you anything, Dawg? It was none of your business. And that’s beside the fact that they weren’t my lovers. I simply lived with them.”
“You slept with them,” he snarled. “You admitted to sleeping with Lessing.”
She shrugged. “I slept with them occasionally.”
“Both of them?”
Her arms crossed over her br**sts then. “Both of them,” she agreed.
“At the same f**king time?”
Her lips thinned, irritation sparkling in her eyes then. “At the same time.”
Crista had never considered herself to be the type of woman who walked heedlessly into danger, but she admitted to herself that right now, that was exactly what she was doing.
She would have thought that suspecting she had two lovers would have pleased him. She had expected him to suggest blackmailing her to sleep with Natches as well. Instead, he seemed angry.
“You ran away from me, by your own words, because I said I wanted to share you with Rowdy and Natches, yet you leave my bed and move in with two other men?” Incredulity filled his voice, causing it to rise as she stared back at him in surprise.
“What I did after I left you is none of your business.” She stepped back as he threw his shirt to the side of the room.
He looked enraged. Dark brows were lowered heavily over brilliant, light green eyes that seemed to glow in his dark face. His lips were a flat, thin line, his shoulders bunched with tension.
He wasn’t frightening; he was sexy. He should have been frightening. Instead, she could feel a sense of overwhelming eroticism, anticipation. She should have been enraged, at least as angry as he was. But she was seeing so much emotion in his face, something besides the mocking amusement or cynical awareness he normally displayed.
He was—jealous.
Dawg, jealous?
She felt her br**sts become more sensitive, her ni**les beading impossibly harder against the material of the T-shirt that she wore, and it made no sense. He had no reason to be jealous; she didn’t want him to be jealous. But he was.
Dawg had never been jealous about another woman. Never possessive. That possessiveness had every cell in her body hypersensitive and screaming for his touch.
Her cl*t was swollen, the folds surrounding it heated and wet. She stared at him, mesmerized, watching as his hand went to the wide leather belt cinching his waist, seeing as though in slow motion the loosening of the leather, the way he left it hanging to jerk the snap of his jeans free.
“What are you doing?” The words rose unbidden. He was furious with her; she could see it.
Furious and aroused and so possessive she could see the emotions blazing in his eyes.
“You agreed.” His lips twisted, lost their flat, furious line, only to appear fuller, almost swollen, hungry.
The metamorphosis was hypnotizing. Watching anger fall beneath hunger, suspicion beneath possessiveness, and need overtaking his expression.
“You agreed,” he repeated as he toed his boots off and tossed them aside, “to sleep with me. To f**k with me.”
She flinched at the sound of his voice, not his words. It was rough, guttural, filled with lust. And it struck a chord inside her own sensuality that had her womb clenching violently.
“That’s my shirt,” he rasped when she continued to stare back at him. “Take it off!”
Crista shook her head slowly, watching as he advanced on her, as muscles rippled across his chest and shoulders, along his tight abs.
Below, pressing hard and tight against his jeans, his rampant erection demanded freedom.
She knew what Dawg was like when hunger beat him. She had seen him drunk and aroused but never sober and hungry. Not like this. Powerful, intent, focused only on the lust burning inside him.
Burning inside her.
Even before, the one night she had spent in his bed, she hadn’t known the powerful draw he could be. Tanned and hard, strong and dominant. The determination glowing in his eyes was like chains, holding her still, silent, as he advanced on her.