by Lora Leigh
Just the right touch.
Just the right pressure and the climactic explosion would destroy any peace she thought she had in her life.
It was the most pleasure she had known in her life. But she knew there was more. She could sense it; she could almost feel it.
“I’m going to end up taking you here against this tree if we don’t stop this.” His voice was ragged, a gravelly sound of hunger that clenched her womb and amped the power of each sensation charging through her.
“Okay.” Yeah, like she was going to object.
A serrated chuckle inflamed her already overly aroused senses.
“It might not be a good idea.” His lips stroked over the curve of her breast as she arched again, trying to get closer, to push her nipple back into his mouth.
“Stop thinking,” she demanded. “I don’t want to think.”
But they had to think.
Logan laid his head against the curve of her breast as he fought to draw in a breath that wasn’t filled with her scent.
This close to her, it was impossible. There was no way to breathe without pulling in the sweet scent of her, or tasting the silk of her flesh.
And he had to think. He had to protect her, protect this. This pleasure he had never imagined could actually exist for him. In his wildest imaginings he had never believed there was a woman he would actually want more than he wanted his own sanity.
Or that there was a woman he would place above his own or his family’s protection.
Before he could allow himself to be drawn further into the heat and the wild promise she represented, Logan forced himself back.
“What are you doing?” Disappointment filled her voice as he set her on her feet, filled her gaze as her lashes lifted so she could stare up at him.
“If we keep this up, I won’t stop with a few kisses beneath this tree,” he warned her as he stared down at her intently, fighting himself more than he was anything else.
“I said okay,” she reminded him fiercely.
“And I don’t want a lover, Skye.” He forced the words past his lips, forced himself to stare into her eyes as he said what had to be said. “This won’t begin a relationship for us; you have to understand that.”
She frowned up at him then. “I’m not asking for a wedding ring, Logan,” she said impatiently.
“Are you asking for just one night of hot, nasty sex?” he asked her then. “Because that’s all I have to offer. One night and then never again. No matter how much both of us might want more. Because when morning comes, that’s it. No more.”
She stared back at him in disbelief. “You limit the amount of time you spend with a lover?”
“One night,” he repeated, hating himself, hating the hunger eating at him, assuring him he was a class A bastard.
“One night, huh?” She stepped away from the tree, facing him.
They were still enveloped by the darkness beneath the tree, sheltered from prying eyes and the possibility of an enemy learning more of his actions than was safe for either him or Skye.
He had to clench his hands to keep from jerking her back to him, to keep from throwing them both back into that whirlwind of pleasure and the race to ecstasy.
A siren’s smile tipped her lips again and aroused every self-preservation instinct he possessed that wasn’t already busy keeping his ass alive.
“And you think one night with me would be enough?”
His brow arched as he longed to join in the play, the teasing, sensual challenge.
“I’d make it enough.”
Her laughter was as soft and sensual as the sultry summer night surrounding them.
“One night with me would never be enough, Logan,” she promised him, surprised him. “Because whatever just exploded between us would rock both our worlds to the point that staying away from each other would be like sawing off a limb.”
God, no woman should be so fucking intuitive.
He already knew that. Knew it, and feared it to the depths of his soul.
Adjusting the top of her gown to cover the full, firm globes of her breasts and smoothing her hands down her sides, she looked at him again from the corners of her eyes. “You started this, and you’ve opened a door I don’t think you can close. But you keep lying to yourself if you want to. Because I don’t think it’s something you can deny yourself now. We both want it until we’re ready to beg. But I’m willing to wait until you’ve gotten a clue and figured out how little you actually want a one-night stand.”
He already knew. That was the problem.
Watching her step from beneath the branches of the tree, Logan slowly followed, careful to keep her slight, delicate body sheltered from any prying eyes that might be watching.
“Let me know when you’ve come to your senses.” Turning back to him, her gaze met his, and Logan only barely controlled the flinch.
Now, in the sparse light that fell from the patio, he could see the living, breathing evidence of pure hunger.
It raged in her eyes, at odds with the calm tone of her voice and careful restraint in her body. “And if you wait too long, you may lose far more than you even imagine.”
And he had a damned good imagination.
“Conceited, Skye?” he asked, forcing the mockery into his tone, because he knew it wasn’t conceit. It was pure confidence based on the explosive power of the pleasure that had surged between them.
“Confident,” she echoed his thoughts. “Because I know I’ve never felt pleasure like I just felt in your arms. And I know for a fact you haven’t either.”
His lips quirked knowingly, though that impression of knowing was the biggest lie of his life. “Sure of that, are you?”
A light laugh drifted through the night. “As sure as I’ve ever been of anything.”
Turning on her heel, she moved quickly through the side yard from his patio to her own.
“And take care of that damned puppy,” she called from the door. “I don’t want to have to listen to her cry like that every night. It’s pitiful, Logan.”
His gaze swung to the animal.
Barely more than a handful of fluff and bones, the tiny pup huddled at the patio door, a soft whine filling the night. And breaking Logan’s heart.
Turning away from her tore a piece of his soul out, just as another piece had been ripped from him when he’d been forced to let her go.
The pup was too tiny, too delicate, to defend herself. The little scrap would be too friendly and too eager to please to ever realize the danger she could be in if hell came calling.
He would give her food and water. He’d have his cousin Crowe put a small shelter at the corner of the patio for her and Logan promised himself he would attempt to get the neighbors to take her.
He’d find her a home, because keeping her meant possibly watching her die.
Just as he had before.
Corbin County was his curse, Logan decided. Because it wasn’t just a damned pup he was risking, he was risking the most vital, passionate woman he had ever met.
He never, ever took a lover from Corbin County, not even for one night. And he’d nearly broken that rule with Skye.
And he knew, knew to the soles of his feet, that the killer that stalked them twelve years before was still out there, waiting, watching, and still, he’d touched her. Still he’d let the hunger for her rage inside him.
A monster waited to strike, to torture and kill any woman Logan and his cousins gave so much as an appearance of caring for. He raped and maimed them, found pleasure in watching them die, and now Logan was risking the only woman who had ever made his heart race out of control.
The only woman who had touched him, and made him ready for just one more caress.
Because of that woman, Logan was standing in the darkness, staring around him, and wondering how he could have her and keep her safe from the monster determined to find and kill any woman he could care for. To keep her from attracting the attention of the demon that haunted them.
The demon he and his cousins were determined to find and destroy first.
CHAPTER FOUR
Like Sleeping Beauty she lay in the middle of her bed, her shoulder-length blond hair tangled around her head and fanned out over the pillow she slept on.
The pillow beside her was empty but for the wide red silk ribbon tied in a perfectly neat little bow.
Learning how to tie that bow hadn’t been easy.
Just finding the girl hadn’t been, he had to admit. He’d only glimpsed her that night he and his boss had followed Logan to Boulder and kept tabs on his movements. Watching, waiting for him to choose a lover.
She had been just a one-night stand, sadly. This one would only warn the Callahans that the game was on once again and, this time, there were no rules.
Convincing his boss of this hadn’t been easy.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to convince his boss to allow him to handle this himself either.
The bastard liked the game, he decided. He liked experiencing his victims’ fear. He liked the tension and the arousal. He couldn’t figure out why his boss refused to participate in the abduction though. He hadn’t yet figured out why he held himself so aloof.
Pulling a Ziploc bag from his light jacket pocket, he pulled a drug-soaked cloth from it silently before bending and placing it over her mouth and nose.
Her eyes flared open.
He had to smile. She had pretty, pretty hazel eyes. Now he saw what had drawn one of the three men known for his love of exotic beauties.
It was her eyes that were a little odd, that drew attention and made her stand out in a crowd. Eyes that were a mix of amber and brown. They were slightly tilted and had a sexy cast.
Holding the cloth in place, forcing her to breathe in the potent drug, he could feel arousal beginning to burgeon in his jeans.
Well, in Callahan’s jeans. He wanted to chuckle, but he was too busy watching, waiting, then giving a little satisfied sigh as the little beauty went slack beneath his hands.
Excellent. Not a single mistake had been made thus far, just as he had promised.
He was well aware of his employer standing in the shadows behind him, watching, his gaze shuttered and as icy cold as always. He was frozen inside, his employee decided as he pulled the blankets back from Marietta’s body and gazed down at her nakedness with anticipation.
His fingers went to the zipper of his jeans.
“Not yet.” Harsh and unyielding, the sound of his boss’s voice had his jaw clenching in irritation. “Dress her. We have to stay on schedule.”
He nodded rather than speaking, and hid the sneer and anger that burned inside him.
Taking the clothing he had laid out when they had first invaded her bedroom, he took his time dressing her. She had to look as she always did when she went out late. Marietta Tyme took care with her appearance.
She wore her jeans carefully pressed, her shirts in colors that would emphasize the odd swirl of gold and brown in her eyes. It was really a shame that she had to die just because she had been with a Callahan.
But it was the course he’d been hired to take, and he had to admit, he did enjoy inflicting the pain, hearing them cry and beg for mercy. He loved it. But this timid little mouse hadn’t seemed his type. There was very little fight in her. And he’d have thought Logan would enjoy that spark of fire.
He couldn’t rape her here, but Corbin County wasn’t too far away. He could have her soon.
No mistakes, he reminded himself as he bent and pushed her sneakers onto her feet before carefully tying them.
The neighbor across the street stayed awake until dawn watching the late-night skin flicks to be found. The neighbor next to her had a surveillance camera that would only glimpse what he and his boss had planned for it to glimpse.
“Sleeping Beauty,” he whispered again. “Sleep just a little longer for us.”
He ran his palm up her leg to her thigh, then the warmth of her inner folds, shielded by her jeans.
He had made no mistakes, and he wouldn’t make any.
Replacing the drugged cloth in the Baggie, then sliding it back into his pocket, he lifted her to her feet and roused her enough to convince her to attempt a shuffling walk as he kept her tucked to his side.
Moving her to the front door, he glanced back before opening it, checking that the other man had already disappeared as planned.
The boss was gone, out the back door that had been unlocked just as he had known from an earlier visit that it would be.
He’d planned everything to the last detail.
Moving from the house to the large black 250 King Ranch crew cab pickup parked on the street in front of her home, he congratulated himself on a job very well done.
Unlike Thomas Jones twelve years before and Lowry Berry last month, he wouldn’t screw up.
He wouldn’t allow anyone to interfere in what he had been promised once the Callahan cousins were imprisoned or out of Corbin County.
He would have preferred dead, but his boss wasn’t willing to go that route. Yet.
He knew people, he thought as he helped Marietta from the porch to the sidewalk, then down the flight of cement steps to the passenger side of the truck. He knew people well, and he knew the thought of killing his enemies was constantly in his boss’ mind.
He hoped his boss let him help.
He wanted to help.
He would make certain it hurt them really bad.
Until then, he had Marietta. And before long, he would have another; he knew he would. He had the three picked out. The lovers Logan had taken, the whores who had been willing to settle for a one-night stand rather than holding out for a commitment.
Strapping the nearly unconscious woman into the passenger seat, he touched her cheek gently before closing the door and loping around the vehicle to the driver’s seat.
Ah yes, he was being watched.
Clete Olen was standing in his window across the street, obviously watching closely.
He ignored him.
Witnesses. There were several neighbors watching from their shadowed porches. After all, it was a nice summer night and this was one of the safer neighborhoods.
Pulling into the street, he chuckled at the thought of it.
The Neighborhood Watch hadn’t helped Marietta much. This was the last time they would see her, and they didn’t even know it.
He wondered if Logan Callahan even had a clue that the lovers he had tried so hard over the past six months to slip out with weren’t hidden after all.
He knew each one of them, where to find them, and exactly how to strike.
Now he just had to be patient.
Hours later
Her screams echoed through the dreamscape of a forested night, filled with agony and rage as they penetrated his senses. Logan could feel the terror as it tore through him, the knowledge of what he was hearing and whose screams it was.
It was a dream. The same dream. And he couldn’t escape it.
The knowledge that he would never be able to save her was replayed through his soul, nearly breaking it now as it had then.
Because he couldn’t save her.
No one could save her.
Jaymi.
His cousin’s lover.
His friend.
Logan could feel his feet pounding across the uneven terrain as he, Rafer, and Crowe fought to reach her, though a part of him knew they would never get there in time. Fate had already delivered the deadly stroke of destruction and now all that was left of it was the memories and the nightmares.
Blood raced through his veins, pounded through his heart, and adrenaline poured into his system as rage began to eat at his senses.
The sound of her agony penetrated the darkness. He could hear Rafer curse ahead of him, the sound of his voice broken, enraged. Logan couldn’t hear Crowe, but then he and Rafer never heard Crowe. Their cousin was as silent as the night itself, bearing down and promising death.
Twelve-year-o
ld memories surged through Logan’s sleeping mind, bathing the night in a bloody hue. Time seemed to be locked in slow motion as blood spilled from the deep, gashing wound the monster had sliced into Jaymi’s side.
She wasn’t crying, though. Instead, she was looking over Rafer’s shoulder, whispering, “Tye’s come for me, Rafe. He’s here. Tye’s here.”
Her deceased husband.
In her pain and fear it was the man she had cherished above all others whom she had conjured up to take her from the reality she was suffering.
Rafer was screaming as he fought to hold the wound closed, to push her blood back inside her body, begging her to hold on.
Begging her not to leave him.
After all, who else would ever accept him as she had? Who else would look beyond the ravages of the cousins’ past and see more than three cursed young men?
As Logan crashed through the night after Crowe and the serial killer who had made Jaymi his sixth victim, he could feel the sorrow, the grief, and the horrifying knowledge of what this night could bring creeping through him.
Each of the six women who had been killed throughout the summer had been tied to the cousins. Each of them had either slept with one of them or was sleeping with one of them at the time of her death.
Logan had lost two past lovers, Crowe had lost three, and now Rafer had lost the woman who had helped him find a measure of peace in the past year.
As Logan reached Crowe, crouched in the dirt next to a mountain trail, his cousin’s hands and face stained with blood, he drew to a stop. Chest heaving for breath, failure thick in his senses, he watched the tears that welled in Crowe’s eyes as he lifted them to him.
“Damn. Damn. He got away.” Crowe’s breaths heaved as harshly as Logan’s now while his voice filled with pain. “Fuck him. Damn him, he got away.”
Logan stared at his cousin’s hands as he turned them up. They both stared at the blood before Crowe lifted his face to Logan, a tight, savage smile contorting his expression. “He’s carrying my fucking knife buried in his gut,” Crowe snarled. “He won’t live much longer.”
Jagged blade, sharp and deadly, Crowe’s knife was meant to kill, and he had ensured that it had served its purpose.