by Lora Leigh
“Get the details we need from the surveillance cameras across from that apartment, and let’s see if we’ve missed anything,” Rowdy told the former special agent. “I want this threat against Lyrica erased immediately. I’ll talk to Natches. Better yet, call everyone together, we’ll just meet at his place.”
If Lyrica ended up hurt because of his cousin’s stupidity, then Dawg just might end up breaking Natches’s face next.
ELEVEN
Natches’s home sat on the banks of Lake Cumberland, a few miles from Dawg’s farm. Whereas Dawg’s two-story farmhouse with its wraparound porch and old-time charm surrounded by flowering bushes and myriad blooms soothed the senses, Natches’s place had a feeling of hidden beauty.
The sprawling single-story home with its dark wood siding was nestled among a variety of evergreen trees and brush—mostly holly and laurel that grew naturally in the area. One would have to look closely if one didn’t know the house sat there.
It wasn’t hidden so much as it was very cleverly disguised, and Natches and his wife, Chaya, preferred it that way.
Lyrica pulled into the driveway beneath a canopy of dense growth and shook her head. She would have smiled, not for the first time, over her cousin’s idiosyncrasies if she wasn’t so upset. Over the years the family had been certain Natches would grow out of his penchant for plants and landscape design that made his home seem to be more a part of the land itself than the building it actually was. He hadn’t grown out of it yet, though.
Stepping from the car and moving along a moss-covered stone path to the backyard, she noticed the blooms that now grew around the wood supports of the back porch.
“Lyrie!” Bliss, Natches and Chaya’s twelve-year-old daughter, bounced out through the kitchen door, her long, ribbon-straight black hair and emerald eyes a perfect match for Natches’s.
Bliss had the dark Mackay looks but the softer turn of her cheek, her eye shape, and the arch of her brows were her mother’s. Still, the girl looked enough like Lyrica that she was often mistaken for her daughter by strangers.
“Hey there.” Bliss threw her arms around Lyrica and gave her a firm hug before the girl jumped back with a wide smile. “Where’s your dad?”
“He’s in the house making Mom give him that look that means he’s about to go hide in his work shed and say bad words again.” Bliss laughed. “He’s so funny.”
“What’s he doing to your mom?” Lyrica smiled as the girl tugged at her hand and drew her inside.
Chaya chose that moment to step into the kitchen, her brown eyes sparkling menacingly as she stalked into the room.
“He’s being himself of course,” Chaya bit out before turning to her daughter. “Your aunts are on their way to pick you up for a while. They’re taking you shopping with them.”
“Uh-oh.” Bliss’s gaze flicked to the doorway her mother had just stepped from. “Dad’s about to get in trouble, huh?”
“Oh, baby, your daddy already crossed that little line.” Her mother smiled tightly as Bliss giggled at the mocking threat in her mother’s voice.
She turned back to Lyrica. “They’ll kiss and make up before I get home. Bet me.”
Lyrica shook her head. “Do I look that easy, kid?”
Bliss shrugged innocently. “Well, since he’s in trouble because he hit some guy over you, I thought I’d give it a try.”
Bliss laughed in delight at the surprise on Lyrica’s face before rushing from the room and calling out to her father in glee.
“Lord, she’s just like her father,” Chaya moaned. “She scares me.”
“When’s she going to go boy crazy so Natches will stop stressing over his cousins’ love lives and stress over his daughter’s upcoming one instead?” Lyrica asked.
Chaya grimaced at the thought of that. “Come on, Lyrica,” she protested. “Let’s not rush the divorce I can feel coming when he completely loses touch with reality. Let him focus on you a while longer.”
“Divorce?” Natches strode into the room, a smile of genuine warmth and playful charm filling his expression as he caught his wife in strong arms and pulled her to him. “Never. I was thinking a deserted island instead. There would be no boys there for Bliss to get crazy over.”
Dressed in jeans and a dark T-shirt, Natches was a mature man. That maturity had placed a few lines and creases along his eyes, a hint of gray at his temples, but other than that, he was still a powerful force.
Chaya grimaced and shook her head as her husband placed a loving kiss at her neck. “Natches, sweetheart, are you still trying to fool yourself?”
Wearing loose cotton pants and a white T-shirt, her shoulder-length golden brown hair pulled to the crown of her head in a clip, with wisps falling around her face, Chaya appeared far younger than her husband though Lyrica knew the difference in their ages wasn’t that vast.
Chaya had once confided to Lyrica that Natches had been there the day her first child had died in a fiery blast that terrorists had instigated in the Middle East. If it hadn’t been for him, she would have died that day, too, she had admitted.
In the six years since Lyrica had been a part of their lives, the love and sense of bonding between this couple had never ceased to amaze her. Just as with Dawg and Christa, and Rowdy and Kelly, their commitment to each other had only increased over the years.
They were both nearing fifty, but they hadn’t seemed to age much at all since Lyrica and her sisters had arrived in the county. It was as though their love kept them young, kept them seeing the innocence and beauty in the world.
“Talk to your cousin.” Chaya moved from his arms after giving him a quick, forgiving kiss. “Kelly and Janey are coming to take Bliss shopping with the other girls. Then you and I will talk.”
Natches’s brows lifted and cunning sensuality filled his eyes as he watched his wife leave the room. It was a look he probably had no idea others could see. The look of a man who knew joy, never-ending surprise, and pleasure in the woman he loved.
“For a man who loves his wife so dearly, you have an amazing ability to believe other men have no capacity for the same feelings, Natches.” Crossing her arms over her breasts, Lyrica watched her cousin suspiciously as that cunning sensuality morphed and she caught the slightest glint of calculation before it was quickly hidden.
“I have never said I don’t believe in it,” he retorted as he adopted an expression of such innocence it was almost believable.
Lyrica knew him better than that.
“That look might fool your daughter, but it doesn’t fool me, cuz,” she informed him.
Still, it remained.
“Lyrica, you’re so suspicious.” He sighed.
“Natches,” she drawled with tight mockery, “you’re so full of bullshit.”
He merely grunted at the accusation.
“Why were you and Chaya arguing over me to the point that Chaya’s sending Bliss shopping with Janey and Kelly?” she tried again.
The look he shot her was classic Natches. Playful, charming, with a barely there glint of cunning that locked onto any weakness and used it instinctively. He was a master manipulator, a man with instinctive perception, and a sharp-eyed, merciless sniper. A man who in the past had taken aim between a cousin’s eyes and pulled the trigger.
“Sometimes Bliss only hears part of a conversation . . .”
“Stay away from Graham, Natches.” She didn’t beat around the bush.
She could do that with Rowdy and Dawg, laugh and playfully tease and still get her point across. She knew better than to even attempt it with Natches.
“Then you stay away from him.” Natches dropped the pretense instantly, his emerald green eyes narrowing on her as he hooked his thumbs in the front pockets of his jeans.
Lyrica stared at him in disbelief. “You’re kidding me.”
“No, I’m not kidding you.” At least he wasn’t lying to her. He’d been known to do that.
“Why are you doing this, Natches? Why take a stand like this over s
omething that’s none of your business?” she asked him, confused now.
“Who says it’s none of my business?” A dark frown flitted at his brow. “You’re my business, Lyrica. And Graham Brock’s bad news for you.”
She would have laughed at him if the disbelief hadn’t run so deep.
Her lips thinned. There were very few ways to convince Natches to let something go. He was worse than Dawg. Her threat to move away and let him deal with Dawg’s anger had obviously not worked.
“Natches, stay out of this,” she warned him softly.
“Why should I?” He seemed to be laughing at her, albeit silently.
“Because if you don’t, then I’ll be too concerned you’ll hurt him, and I’ll give up on the one man I can’t seem to stay away from.” It was the truth. Stark. Simple.
“So why would I bother to back off if it’s working?”
He wasn’t a stupid man, though. Tension filled his shoulders, his expression veiled as he watched her carefully.
“Because then I’ll have given up not because the man isn’t in my best interests or because it’s my choice; I’ll have done it because it’s your choice. I’ll never stop resenting you for it and once I’ve accepted that’s how it will end, then I have to accept that it doesn’t matter who I love, because you’ll always stand between us. Why should I bother to love then? Why should I bother to care that whoever I sleep with cares for me in turn?”
“Stop trying to snow me, Lyrie. You might say that, you might mean it right now, but you’re too damned stubborn to actually do it.”
“Natches, at this point, I’m struggling to decide for myself if Graham Brock is something I want or merely something I’ve been fascinated with for years. Don’t turn the question into a quest to prove to myself and to you that you have no control over me, or a lesson in the fact that you can control me by hurting someone I care about. You wouldn’t like either outcome, and neither would I.”
Unlike her sisters, she believed in facing Dawg, Natches, and Rowdy in ways they understood rather than from a stance of pure stubbornness. She loved them, very much respected them, but she knew that if given the chance, they would wrap her and her sisters in cotton batting and do whatever they thought necessary to avoid ever seeing them hurt. And they’d never realize how the total sterility of such a life would destroy them.
“How much do you expect me to let him destroy you?” he growled, anger beating just beneath the surface. “I know things about him that you don’t, Lyrica. Things that would hurt you if you ever learned the truth of it.”
“You’ll tell me that, but I know you—you will never tell me what those things are, will you, Natches?”
His expression was the only answer she needed.
“Until you can tell me, then let’s drop all the dark hints as to the man he is, was, or could be.” She sighed wearily. “He saved my life. And I know he tries to be a good man. No matter what kind of man he may be, he’s a good man.”
“He’s a dangerous man!” he snapped. “He may have saved your life, but he could also end up getting you killed.”
“And how many times was Kelly warned of that where the Mackays were concerned?” she argued bitterly. “Or Christa? You forget, Natches, I know your pasts, I know the men you were before you fell in love, and I know how dangerous the three of you were. What if Chaya had walked away from you because of Johnny?”
He’d killed Johnny Grace. The cousin he’d been raised with, the one who had attempted to kill Christa and would have killed Dawg. Natches had put his rifle sights between the man’s eyes and he’d felt no remorse pulling the trigger.
“Look at your past, at Dawg’s and Rowdy’s, and tell me that you didn’t deserve to be loved.”
“Hell no, we didn’t deserve it. Not then we didn’t,” he growled back at her. “And what we have wasn’t handed to us, either, Lyrica. We had to change to be able to have the hearts we share, and if Graham Brock thinks he can have you without facing one of us, then he can think again.” He moved to her quickly, gripped her shoulders, and stared down at her with the merciless lack of remorse she imagined was in his eyes when he killed his cousin. “I love you, girl. I see you and I see the child that owns every beat of my heart. The one I’d go into hell fighting for, and I’ll be damned if I’ll betray my instincts on this. If I do, I may as well tell every man who ever meets her that would hurt her to go ahead and do just that. Graham knows the score, and I have no doubt if I beat the hell out of him, you’ll hate me. For a while. But at least you’ll by god hate me with a whole, beating heart rather than half a one or, god forbid, from a casket. Remember that one.”
With that he turned and moved quickly from the room, his footsteps heavy, his warning ringing in her head.
“No one said a Mackay was easy to talk to.”
Lyrica swung around to face Rowdy as he stepped through the back door, his handsome face creased in concern as he stared at her quietly.
Rubbing at the chill that raced over her arms, she stared back at the cousin they always said was the logical one. The one who could be reasoned with. Today, none of them knew the meaning of the word “reason.”
“He’s irrational,” she whispered, shaking her head. “All of you are.”
His lips quirked into a gentle, understanding smile.
“Not irrational, simply determined to protect family.” Moving to the counter, he poured a cup of coffee from the heated coffeepot and sipped at it before leaning against the counter and watching her with the solemn concern he seemed to approach every problem with.
“How can you agree with this, Rowdy? It’s wrong.”
He turned to face her slowly.
Sunlight slanted through the window at his back, striking at his black hair and his forest green eyes, warming the white short-sleeved shirt he wore tucked into belted jeans.
“Whether or not I agree with him is beside the point.” He shrugged. “I understand how he feels, though.”
“Am I wrong, Rowdy?” The logical one, Rowdy rarely let his own personal opinion of someone cloud his actions. “Do I see a good man where something else exists?”
“I believe Graham’s a good man, Lyrica,” he finally said. “I believe he’s an honorable man. But a man’s lust is rarely driven by his honor. And a man like Graham has buried the kind of vulnerability that would let him love a good woman, so deep he doesn’t even believe it exists anymore. The question then becomes, does he want you enough to revive it? Because that’s the only way he’ll have you without all three of us coming down on him like a nuclear explosion the first time someone calls you one of his bimbos.”
She flinched at the reminder that she and Kye weren’t the only ones who noticed the women, or the type of women, Graham went through so casually.
Maybe she did need to move just far enough away that the Mackays couldn’t oversee every move she made or every man she became interested in.
“You know, if you were like your sisters, dating regularly, doing all the crazy shit they’ve gotten into over the years, maybe Natches wouldn’t be so extreme,” he told her gently. “But you don’t. You sneak in a party here and there, knowing you’re going to be dragged out, but that’s about it. It’s never serious for you. And Graham Brock is the only man you’ve ever focused on. That scares us. Because we know Graham, and we know that even good men are capable of bad things.”
“And all three of you evidently lost touch with reality a long damned time ago,” she told him roughly. “My life or who I sleep with is nobody’s damned business.”
His face hardened. “And that’s where you’re wrong. You’re a Mackay, Lyrica. Whether you like it or not you’ll always be a Mackay. And trust me, trouble and Mackays go hand in hand, to the point that we’ll never, at any time, turn our backs if you’re getting involved with a man who has the same ability to find danger as we’ve always had. If you want to have a nice, quiet, sane affair then find a nice, quiet, sane man to have it with and I promise you, I’ll stand in
front of Dawg and Natches myself to make certain you can have it in peace.”
An instant, instinctive response came over her. Her lips thinned; her eyes narrowed.
“Why, Rowdy,” she drawled, “where would the fun be in that?”
Turning on her heel, she pulled the back door open and stalked from the house, outrage trembling through her body. Her cousin watched her with thoughtful focus until she disappeared.
Rowdy listened, heard her Jeep start and, seconds later, pull from the drive.
He snagged another coffee cup from the cabinet and poured it full before lifting it and carrying it with his own to the breakfast table that sat on the other end of the kitchen.
Natches didn’t disappoint him. He was there within seconds of Rowdy taking his seat, from where he watched nature at its finest just outside the window as a doe and her spotted fawn bounded through the forest.
“She’s too damned stubborn,” Natches growled as he jerked a chair out and straddled it furiously. “If we’re not careful, she could end up devastated.”
Rowdy turned and gave his cousin a firm look. “Keep Trudy retired.”
Trudy was Natches’s modified rifle, the same one he’d used to kill the cousin who’d threatened them all. With the additional threat Lyrica was facing, Natches may not keep his promise to keep his first instincts in check.
“I’ll let Trudy sleep,” Natches assured him with a grin. “For now.”
Rowdy breathed out at the statement, relieved, then turned at the sound of the door opening again.
Dawg stepped inside, a scowl on his face as he tromped over to the coffeepot and poured his own mug.
None of them mentioned the fact that no one knocked before entering the house. They did that at one another’s homes, just as their wives did. They were home, no matter which house they sat in, and that was how they liked it. Sometimes, it was as though they were triplets rather than first cousins.
Rowdy watched both of them with narrowed eyes. “I’m going to assume Graham Brock made the same visit to you two that he made to me this morning?”