by Lora Leigh
“Daddy will take a switch to me,” she groaned. “I am such dead meat, Caleb.”
She was aware of Raeg frowning at her and Falcon’s curiosity as they listened to the exchange.
“Eh, not this week,” her brother promised, highly amused. “His knees are acting up. Just run. Hell, you could outrun him in those four-inch heels you wear if you wanted to.”
Her momma would do it then.
“Breakfast, boys.” Caleb lifted his hand and headed for the garage door. “I’d get there early, Summer. Help Momma with breakfast. You know how she likes that. Then she might not chase you down for Daddy when he mentions that switch.”
He just wasn’t going to be nice to her tonight, was he?
“You’re bein’ ugly to me, Caleb,” she sighed, pretty much resigned. “And that is so not fair.”
Without answering the accusation, he shot her an amused grin before he disappeared into the garage. Seconds later a muted beep to her cellphone had a map flashing on screen of the yard, showing his and Whitt’s progress.
At least the security system worked.
Rising from her chair she stared at the cups still on the table and the coffee pot Caleb hadn’t returned to the maker, and held back a sigh. Collecting them, she quickly washed them in the sink, aware of both Raeg and Falcon as they moved through the house. They checked the security system as well as the footfall alarms on the wraparound porch and cement walk.
By the time they finished, she was getting her luggage, wondering why the hell Caleb always managed to forget his manners with her. He should have carried them right to her room himself. She was going to tell their momma on him first thing. Maybe she could be distracted from being put out with Summer by getting put out with her son instead?
Doubtful. But she could hope.
“Here.” Falcon grabbed the two suitcases she was struggling to haul from the Suburban. “We loaded them, dammit, did you think we wouldn’t unload them?”
The tone was completely irate and Falcon was hardly ever irate with her.
“Now you’re gettin’ ugly with me?” she asked as she grabbed her makeup bag and headed into the house. “Just what I need, you in a bad mood too.”
It always took a while to settle in when she arrived home, Summer remembered as she led the way to her upstairs suite. The transition was always a pain in the ass.
“Summer, do you always have to travel with half a dozen bags?” he asked, more amused than irritated as her brothers or even Raeg could get. But his expression was still a little tense.
“I try to travel light.” She shrugged, wandering to the balcony doors and unlocking them before stepping outside.
And there it was.
The fog was rolling in from the swamp, steamy and thick, coming in as floating tendrils, fingers of humid moisture reaching out and creeping across the backyard.
She could hear the gators, bellowing out an eerie sound into the night. In the distance, a big cat called out—panthers or even cougars were known to wander the Okefenokee.
When she was younger, her daddy had tracked a cougar that had killed one of his calves. He’d never caught it, but he’d come back with tales of monster alligators, panthers stalking him from the tops of the trees, and a fog so thick and heavy he swore it moved him through the swamps as if it had a will of its own, for miles at a time.
Watching it now, the thick threads reaching closer to the house, she could well imagine such a thing happening.
“Now that is eerie as hell,” Falcon whispered as his arms slid around her, pulling her closer to his obviously aroused body.
Summer let her head settle against the chest behind her, her hands resting against his linked ones where they came together low on her stomach.
It took everything she had to control her breathing, to fight back the heat that rose inside her whenever he touched her like this, whenever he let her feel how much he wanted her. But it also calmed her whenever he held her. No matter how upset she was or how worried, when he pulled her against him, Summer could almost feel herself drawing on his strength and his power. Sometimes, those qualities seemed inexhaustible in Falcon.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “Soon, it will surround the house like a blanket, ghostly white, that little bit of moon giving it a glow that sends chills up the spine if you’re not used to it. And those fingers of fog will seem to be probing at the seams of the door, the windows, as though hungry to reach the inside and consume it as well.”
She was used to it, and still, she’d been known to give a little shiver.
Aunjenue would actually sit out on her balcony sometimes when it came through as though soaking up the moisture, enjoying the tendrils that wrapped around her. Summer avoided them. Not that she was scared of them, or spooked by them, but the curious-like threads of moisture always seemed far too sentient to her for comfort.
“You’ve missed being home,” he murmured. “I was seeing it in you before we took that job with Davis Allen.”
She had missed home. Learning her dearest friend in the world was in danger had been far more important though. Home was always waiting, but Alyssa might not be if she didn’t get there in time.
She’d gotten there in time, but that job had gone to hell so fast she still had trouble acclimating herself to the consequences.
“I always miss home,” she revealed, something no one but Alyssa had known before now. “When I’m away for too long, I begin to feel off balance. The person you’ve always known isn’t who I am, Falcon,” she revealed sadly. “This is where I’m me. This is where all my hopes and dreams began and where I hope to live to an old old age. This is where I took my first breath and it’s where I want to draw my last breath.”
“Think I don’t know that the woman that flits and flirts around DC isn’t really you?” he questioned her softly. “Do you think I don’t know the sweetness that exists beneath the woman you show the world?”
Perhaps he did. Falcon always saw deeper, probed at the layers of a person until he could reach the inner parts. Not because he was nosy or because he felt they were being secretive as Raeg did. He did it because he genuinely cared about people. He wanted to know who they were and what they were.
“Maybe you do,” she sighed, watching the fog come closer. “I hated leaving you though. As bad as I wanted to be home, I want you to know that. I hated walking away from you.”
And Raeg. Though she left that unsaid. Falcon would know, just as he’d known she wasn’t the person she showed the world.
“You didn’t come straight home.” He rested his chin against the top of her head, meeting her gaze in the reflection of the glass door. “Why not?”
Why hadn’t she?
It had been six months, and there had been times she’d ached to find her own bed, to hear her momma’s laughter, her daddy’s booming voice, in person rather than on the phone.
She’d needed to heal first though, she’d thought. She hadn’t been able to shed the person she was in DC as easily as she had in the past, because the wounds that had been left in her soul had seemed to fuse that part of her to the woman she was inside. She couldn’t face her family like that. She wasn’t herself. Just as she never showed the inner woman to the world, she never allowed the agent she was while in the world to return home with her, where her dreams and laughter awaited her.
“I was too ragged,” she finally answered honestly. “If I had come home then, Momma and Daddy would have worried and Caleb would have headed straight to Arlington to demand even more answers from you. I couldn’t be me, yet. And I didn’t want them to see or to know who I was away from them.” Her eyes closed as his head bent further, his lips brushing over her bare shoulder.
“I would have avoided him just as I always do,” he promised her, the light Spanish accent he still carried washing over her senses. “I would have protected your secrets if I could have, Summer. Caleb knew them though. When we arrived here to warn him of Dragovich and see if he knew where you we
re hiding, he already had all the answers. I warned you long ago he no doubt knew exactly what you were doing.”
Yeah, that sounded like Caleb. He’d ask questions even when he knew the answers. That was just his way. And she should have known he was aware of what she was doing. He was too nosy. There had just been no indication of it, so she’d hoped he’d accepted her explanations.
Her eyes closed as Falcon’s lips moved closer to the sensitive column of her neck. In the next heartbeat she forced herself to step away from him and turn back to the bedroom, only to come to a stop.
Raeg stood leaning against the wall, just on the other side of the bed, his expression shadowed but not enough to hide the lust she could see in his face.
For once, there was no sense of anger or judgment coming from him. As though he were simply enjoying the sight of her and Falcon, of hearing them talk, their voices low. Could he find pleasure in that? Was that part of what caused these two men to share something so intimate as the women they both desired?
“Falcon knows where the guest rooms are,” she told him, uncertain now what to say, or what to do. “There’s one on each side of this suite, and they’re comfortable.”
“From the looks of things, Falcon doesn’t need a guest room,” he pointed out, though without a sense of jealousy or even his normal insulting, snide attitude.
“Falcon is not nearly that lucky,” his brother grunted, pausing to kiss the top of her head before walking across the room. “Just sometimes, when I’m a very good boy, she allows me to pet her a little.” He shot her a teasing smile over his shoulder before turning back to his brother.
Raeg still held her gaze, his dark eyes probing, intense. If he said something nasty to her, she simply didn’t know if she could handle it.
His gaze moved over her, and Summer felt her breasts swell further, her nipples aching, her sex melting. And how futile was the arousal rushing through her, flooding her body and her senses? Falcon would never take her without Raeg, and Raeg despised her. Oh, he became aroused by her occasionally, but actually touching her was something he wanted nothing to do with. He’d made that plain over the years.
“Good night, Summer,” he told her softly, nodding his head before straightening and leaving the room ahead of Falcon.
“He hates me,” she whispered as Falcon paused, then turned back to her. “Why?”
His expression softened, his pale blue eyes, normally cool even when he wasn’t, darkened with those shadows she’d always glimpsed in both him as well as his brother.
“He doesn’t hate you.” There was a heaviness to his voice that left her confused, aching to know the origin of his pain so she could soothe it.
“I think he does.” She used to hope he didn’t, had tried to tell herself he didn’t. But now? Now, she just didn’t know.
Falcon shook his head. “And I know he does not. What he does feel though, we may all have to work through eventually.” His gaze touched hers. “And that may be far more dangerous to us than we ever imagined Dragovich being.”
With that, he left her bedroom, leaving her to stand in the darkness alone as the fog reached her balcony doors, spreading over them, easing against each crack and crevice, searching for an entrance that didn’t exist.
That was how she felt sometimes, as though searching for an entrance into the hearts of two men who wanted her, but were determined to keep her from being a presence in their lives.
What had Raeg once told her? He’d join her and Falcon, if she wanted to give into his brother’s seduction, for a night or two. But she wasn’t the type of woman he’d ever give his heart to.
And how that had hurt.
It still hurt. She was certain she’d spent a week crying into her pillow whenever she was supposed to be sleeping. He’d stripped her bare with those words. And even though it had been years since he’d given her the warning, she’d never forgotten it. Just as she’d never forgotten Falcon’s warning that he and Raeg did share their lovers, and that should one of them ever marry, then she could count on the fact that it would be both of them the wife would be sharing her bed with.
And she wasn’t in the running for a wife. Raeg had made that one clear right from the get-go.
So what the hell was her problem?
She’d known him since she was sixteen, two years before he ever went to work for the senator, and they’d been fighting for just as long. He’d snipe at her and just get as mean as a feral cat. She’d scratch back, then they’d stay at each other’s throats whenever possible.
Putting away the last of her clothes, she snagged a nightie and matching robe before heading to the shower. By the time she crawled into bed, she gave a weary sigh at the knowledge that life was about to get crazy again.
Tomorrow was just going to be hell, and there was no help for it. This was what she got for waiting a year to come home, and when she did return, bringing Falcon and Raeg with her. Hell, this was what she got for giving a damn if Falcon and Raeg were with her. If they meant nothing to her, then her daddy would just give them a few warnings about playing with his little girl’s heart and leave it at that.
But her daddy knew her, just as her momma did, and they knew what Raeg or Falcon would never guess. They meant far more to her than just friends. Far more than she should have allowed them to mean to her. And if she wasn’t very, very careful, she’d end up loving them.
She almost thought another bullet in her shoulder would be preferable. She was damned sure it wouldn’t hurt near as long.
And it would destroy all her plans too.
She was tired of aching for two men she couldn’t have, and she was tired to being so alone, of ignoring the dreams that had slowly grown inside her during the long nights she’d spent with no one to lie beside her.
The dream of returning to Georgia, of having a family of her own, babies of her own. If she was ever going to let go of the fantasy she knew she couldn’t have, then she was going to have to start looking at what she could have. She could have a husband and babies. One husband would be far less complicated than two men sharing that role, now wouldn’t they? And she could live with caring for a man instead of giving him all of her. She could make do with that, because she knew she couldn’t have the two men she longed for. It wasn’t settling for second best when there was absolutely no chance at first choice. Right?
Lifting the remote next to the bed, Summer turned on the television and sat crossed-legged on the bed with her brush. As the late-night world-events anchor discussed yet another DC scandal, she pulled her hair over her shoulder and began brushing the heavy mass.
If she tried to sleep without braiding her hair, she’d probably be strangled in her sleep.
Just as she began brushing, she was surprised by a low knock on the door a second before it swung slowly open.
Falcon had showered as well. His hair was still damp, the elastic band of the loose, gray pants he wore rested low on his hips, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt.
But he was carrying a brush identical to the one in her hand.
Without speaking, he strode to the side of the bed as Summer scooted to the middle of the mattress and sat cross-legged while he settled in behind her. A heartbeat later, pleasure began singing through her body. The stroke of the brush through her hair, the caressing tug against her scalp, and the rhythmic, steady movements erased every tension, fear, and wariness.
She’d always found this incredibly sensual. Falcon brushed her hair with an enjoyment that always surprised her, but never failed to please her.
He was one of the reasons she refused to cut her hair, not some vain pleasure she found in it. Falcon seemed to love it. The very mention of cutting her hair was enough to have panic gleaming in his pale blue eyes.
“Had you actually cut this beautiful hair, I believe I might have spanked you with your own brush,” he sighed, causing a smile to tug at her lips.
She actually believed him too.
“You should have known better,” she mur
mured as he laid the brush aside and began to slowly pull her long strands into an intricate braid that he left loose enough that it wouldn’t leave her head aching from the pressure, but would keep the long strands from tangling or from strangling her.
“You owe me for making me believe you had done something so cruel to me as to cut this beautiful hair.” The humor in his voice was always contagious.
And maybe he was right. She had known that if he had actually believed she had cut her hair, he would be furious. Maybe even hurt.
“Okay, I owe you,” she agreed, the feel of his fingers working her hair, pulling her into a drowsy, sensual haze.
As good as he was making her feel by just braiding her hair, she thought how good it would feel to be touched by him, to have his fingers stroking over her body, touching her. To be allowed to touch him.
“Hmm, what should I demand as payment?” he asked, his voice just a little rough, the dark sound a pleasure on its own.
“Whatever you want,” she murmured, her senses drugged with the sensations.
She could feel him binding the end of the braid with the elastic band, and wanted to moan in regret. She wasn’t ready for it to end. Not yet.
“I’ve missed this.” His hands caressed her bare shoulders, the slightly calloused warmth of his palms sensitizing the nerve endings beneath her flesh. “Sitting with you, braiding your hair, feeling you against me.”
He never stopped at just braiding her hair. Maybe that was why she had missed it herself. Falcon liked touching her, and she so loved the feel of his hands on her, stroking and caressing her.
“Raeg says you’re addicted,” she said, reminding him of the accusation Raeg had made the previous year.
“Such jealousy he harbors,” he chuckled, the sound of it gentle, filled with the affection she knew he felt for her. “We feel sorry for him, don’t we?”
“He would probably disagree with you.” Her head lowered as his fingers began rubbing against the top of her spine, sending waves of exquisite pleasure rolling through her.
Oh yes, she had missed this. The calloused pads of his thumbs working the muscles beneath, firmly massaging her neck, draining the tension right out of her. It sent another type of tension invading her, but even that she looked forward to. Those sensations intensified the pleasure of his touch, heated her, and reaffirmed the fact that she was indeed a woman. A woman who ached for a touch denied her far too often.