Wicked Lies

by Lora Leigh

  He would have been waiting for her. To court her, he’d said. The quaint, old-fashioned term would have been amusing in other circumstances. But it hadn’t been amusing when Jazz had told her he’d wanted to court her.

  He hadn’t said he wanted to fuck her or tie her to him, or any of the other phrases that would have denoted simple lust as she would have expected.

  He’d wanted to court her. Take her for a drive. Call on her.

  The ache that wounded her heart at the thought of what she’d lost went far deeper than she’d imagined it could. Past her soul, past the very depths of her woman’s spirit and beyond. She felt forever injured at the knowledge of what her life could have been.

  Because he’d loved her.

  He hadn’t seen it in those terms.

  He said he hadn’t wanted to chance some dumb ass stealing her from him if he waited.

  He would have courted her until she was eighteen, then they would have married. And she would have been a virgin on her wedding night.

  The look on his face when he told her about the visit to her father had assured her of that. Pop would have made that clear. He’d have insisted on it. Jazz had been twenty-three—too old, Pop would have thought, for his innocent daughter. But something Jazz had said or done that day had convinced him to give his permission for the courtship. To take the chance that a young man as wild as Jazz would have kept his word.

  Only one thing could have tipped the scales in Jazz’s favor. Pop would have had to be convinced Jazz loved her. Otherwise, he would have barred Jazz from her until she was twenty-one at the youngest, and her brothers would have made the rule stick.

  A shudder tore through her. Even after all these years she couldn’t imagine her father or brothers attempting to hurt her, either.

  They ruled the Kin. They gave the orders and they were highly possessive of that ability. They would never countenance even the suggestion that another do so.

  Pop had loved her. He had to have.

  He had slipped her candy when she was little and Grandmother Maddox had forbidden it. Momma had laughed at the rule, but she didn’t slip Kenni the good stuff. That had been Pop. Chocolate bars, chocolate milk, and decadent candies whenever he went into Nashville.

  He’d been firm, but he’d loved her. That had to have been love in his eyes when he watched her momma, too. And when Kenni would run to him and throw her arms around him for a hug, he’d always wrapped his around her and hugged her like he was terrified he would break her.

  And her brothers?

  Jazz …

  She’d lost them all.

  The sob that tore from her shocked her. The ragged, lost sound was one she hadn’t heard in so long she barely recognized it.

  A cry.

  She hadn’t cried in seven years, and God help her if the tears she’d held inside broke free now they would never stop.

  “Poppy, hold me now!” Pushing past her father’s office door by the simple means of rushing around the two men posted to keep others out, she’d invaded the meeting he was in and rushed to his desk. “Please, Poppy, I hurt me. I hurt me.”

  Stopping, she pointed to the skinned knee, lips trembling, tears spilling from her eyes as she stared up at her surprised poppy.

  “I hurt me, Poppy,” she told him again, breath hitching. “And Cord won’t let me play on the swing no more, ’cause I hurt me.”

  He’d swept her into his arms, but not to rush her from the meeting. No, he’d sent the men to wait for him in another room while he cleaned her knee, put the pretty princess Band-Aids on it, then smacked a kiss to it to make it get better faster. And when Cord had entered the office Poppy had told him firmly to take his Kenni outside and let her swing. “Sometimes a princess has to skin her knee, son,” he’d told her concerned brother. “It’s the only way she’ll learn how not to break it later.”

  She couldn’t keep doing this to herself.

  She couldn’t let herself remember how her life had been before her mother’s death. She had to remember what it had been like after. Cousins hunting her, mercilessly tracking her down only to shoot at her—and more than once the bullets had actually struck her.

  They were men she’d been raised knowing. Friends of her brothers, close confidants to them. Men she would have trusted with her life before the night three of them had killed her mother and tried to kill her.

  They weren’t playing.

  They weren’t pretending.

  They would have killed her. And she still didn’t know why.

  She didn’t know why …

  What had she done? What had her mother done?

  What crime could they have committed to cause an order to go out to hurt them?

  Another of those dry, horrible-sounding cries tore from her chest again as she gripped the towel wrapped around her and sank to the floor. Wrapping her arms around her knees Kenni buried her head against them as she fought back the tears, fought back the agonizing howls of loss that wanted to escape. The screams of injustice, of ten years running away only to find herself back where she began and being forced to see everything she’d lost.

  Everything she’d ever loved.

  She’d lost everything.

  Even the man she hadn’t known loved her.

  CHAPTER 11

  How long she sat in the bathroom floor, drawn into herself, Kenni wasn’t certain. The waves of pain sweeping through her seemed never ending, ripping through her soul with a power she’d never before experienced.

  There was no relief from the emotions breaking free inside her. Her eyes burned, her throat ached, and a band of agony tightened further around her chest.

  It hurt to just breathe.

  “Kenni…?”

  The sound of Jazz’s voice, soft, so very gentle, had her freezing. Tightening her fingers in her hair, she tried to tell herself it was okay. It really was. She wasn’t crying. He wouldn’t walk away from her and leave her to hurt alone.

  “Look at me, darlin’,” he ordered, his large hands framing the sides of her head to lift it, to reveal her face as he stared down at her, his expression gentling. “What’s wrong, Kenni?”

  How could she tell him? How could she describe the agony racking her? The knowledge she’d lost his heart before she even knew she had it? The realization that even after all these years, she still had no idea how to save herself?

  And the pain was destroying her.

  She knew men didn’t handle tears well, and God help her, she couldn’t bear it if he walked away from her because of them.

  “I’m not crying,” she whispered, hoping the lack of moisture would convince him.

  She refused to let herself cry.

  His expression immediately turned brooding and dark. He frowned down at her, those sapphire eyes darkening as heavy, inky lashes surrounded the most outrageous blue she’d ever seen for eyes.

  “Maybe you should cry, Kenni.” The heavy sigh came as his arms went around her back and beneath her knees. A heartbeat later he straightened, holding her close to his chest and moving into the bedroom.

  “Big girls don’t cry,” she whispered, repeating Gunny’s words as Jazz sat down in the large chair a few feet from the bed. “When it can’t be fixed, tears won’t help. If it can be fixed, tears aren’t needed. Right?”

  He stilled against her so completely for a second that he didn’t even breathe.

  “God, Kenni.” Pressing her head to his chest a second later, his arms tightened around her, holding her to him as a feeling of complete security washed over her.

  She could feel his heart beneath her ear, the bare flesh of his chest warming the side of her face.

  “All I wanted to do was come home.” She remembered that, remembered all the silent tears she’d cried those first two years. “But every time we stopped long enough to try to figure out how I could do that, they found us.” Her fingers tightened on his lower arm. “And I always knew who they were.” Faces flashed across her memory. “Men I was raised with, Ja
zz. Men who were trying to kill me.”

  “Your uncle killed them all?” he asked, his fingers stroking over the side of her head. “He wasn’t able to question them?”

  Gunny didn’t question, he interrogated with merciless determination.

  “Sure he did.” She shuddered, remembering the one time she’d watched one of those interrogations. “They said they were following Maddox orders.”

  She’d never been able to completely believe it. The fear that drove her, the will to survive and make someone pay for her mother’s death had kept her from contacting her family. It had kept her from contacting anyone tied to the Maddox clan.

  Especially Jazz. If she’d been wrong, if her brothers were involved and he’d died, the added grief would have done what the Kin had been trying to do. It would have killed her.

  “I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt, Kenni,” he whispered. “Because if anything happened to you, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. But for the record, there’s no way in fucking way in hell your brothers are involved in this.”

  This time, he didn’t mention her father. The exclusion would have been deliberate. For some reason, between his last defense of them and now, he wasn’t so certain of her father.

  Poppy … A dry sob hitched her breath at the thought.

  The weary resignation in his voice was another burden on her shoulders. He believed in her brothers, trusted them, and that was something Jazz didn’t do easily.

  “Tell me, Kenni,” he asked as the throttled sound of the sob escaped. “How long has it been since you cried?”

  What did it matter? How long since she’d lived, or how long since she’d had a single second of peace? Those questions made far more sense.

  “Why?” Why would he care? Hell, what did it matter?

  “Curiosity,” he answered smoothly. “Not many women I know that don’t cry.”

  How long had it been?

  Frowning, she watched, kneading the hard biceps in front of her face with subtle strokes of her fingertips while the muscle flexed beneath her touch.

  “My eighteenth birthday,” she finally answered. “Tom and Jason Keye caught me just outside Dallas, heading to meet with Gunny. They were going to rape me before carrying out their orders. They laughed and called me a crybaby. I realized Gunny had been right, tears didn’t help.”

  Seconds later they were dead before Kenni realized the sounds she’d heard were Gunny’s rifle.

  “Tom and Jason,” he murmured softly, but the tension in his voice was an indication of the fury he was burying for the moment. “We heard they’d moved to California.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, though the acknowledgment was a bit absent.

  It had taken a minute for her to realize she was naked, and all that separated her from the heavy erection beneath her rear was the towel she’d had wrapped around her earlier. Because Jazz was naked as well.

  He’d showered. Damp hair and shower-fresh flesh caressed her senses as his fingers trailed from the side of her head to her neck. Tilting her head up, Kenni stared into the somber, darkening depths of his sapphire eyes.

  How would she be able to bear it when her time with him was over? When he was no longer touching her, when the chance to be touched by him was over?

  She hadn’t known how much she needed him until he’d pushed his way into her life and gave a damn that it appeared she might be in trouble because the identity she was using was false.

  “I told myself for years I couldn’t have felt for you what I knew I felt that summer,” she whispered painfully. “That sixteen was too young to know what love was, and it wasn’t as if you’d even brushed my lips with yours let alone actually kissed me. But every time I considered a lover, or the possibility of leaving America entirely to escape, you stood in my way, Jazz. The thought of never seeing you again was so abhorrent I couldn’t consider it.”

  Those long, inky-black lashes lowered over the brilliant blue of his eyes as his expression softened into lines of pure male sexual hunger.

  Beneath her hand his chest rose and fell harder, his breathing speeding up, just as his heartbeat did. Cupping her cheek with his hand, he slid his thumb sensually over her lower lip.

  “Hell, I built your fucking house, Kenni,” he growled, not so much angry as perhaps exasperated. “Not to mention that friggin’ gazebo with a bed in it like you wanted. And not a single damned woman has shared either with me. I think that pretty much proves I was damned serious.”

  As he’d said earlier, he was serious then. That didn’t mean he was nearly as serious now. But Kenni had realized she didn’t really care which club she had to join, she wanted more of Jazz. Desperately. Now.

  She closed her eyes, barely holding back a moan when the fingers buried in her hair tugged her head to the side. His lips settled just beneath her ear, against the line of her jaw. The flesh there sizzled with pleasure as sensitive nerve endings caught the sensation and sent it racing across her body.

  Involuntary shivers ran up her spine while a breathless moan escaped her lips. God, she ached for him, needed him. It wasn’t just the pleasure, it was the sense of finally being where she was supposed to be, if only for a little while.

  She should be resisting this need, pulling back, reminding herself of the danger, something other than closing her eyes and reveling in the sensations. Because God knew, she would pay for this later. For every second of pleasure he gave her, Kenni had no doubt the pain would be worse in the not-too-distant future.

  His teeth scraped against her neck, his tongue following as it flickered over her already sensitized flesh. It was like wildfire exploded through her senses, drenching her in the most incredible warmth.

  “Like that, do you?” he muttered, his voice thicker, grating with hunger. “I love that little sound you make as your breath catches, but let’s see if I can do something to warrant a moan. Just a little one, if you can. If I deserve it.”

  As he spoke, his head moved lower to the bend of her neck. There his teeth gripped the flesh for just a second, raked over it, then burned a path to the rise of her breasts as the arm behind her levered her back. As he licked over the hard tip of her nipple with slow, hungry strokes, each rasping caress sent forked trails of blistering sensation straight to her womb.

  Moaning, arching into his hold, she tried to press closer, to feel more.

  She needed to feel more.

  Then his lips were on hers. Slanting over them, his tongue pressing between them as he began to sip from her kiss, to feed her the heady pleasure of his hunger as spiraling need stripped her to nothing but sensation.

  And Jazz made damned certain there was plenty of sensation.

  His lips moved over hers, rubbing against them, slipping between them, branding her with the hunger she could feel in each hungry kiss.

  His fingers found the hard point of her nipple, gripped it, rolling it between his fingers and exerting exquisite pressure against the nerve-ridden flesh.

  Sensation erupted in the hard tip, flashed through her body, clashing in her lower stomach.

  Kenni was only barely aware of her hips moving. Each jagged burst of sensation erupting through her, obliterating more of the common sense she knew she was supposed to have. It was there, somewhere, just waiting for Jazz to let it come out and let her see the folly of her actions. It had to be.

  Until then, she wanted to sink into the white-hot pleasure. She wanted to live within the heat wrapped around her, she wanted to burn in his touch.

  She wanted to touch. If he would just release her wrists.

  A cry, muted and hoarse, tore from her throat to fill their kiss as his fingers gripped her nipple again, tugged, pressed, and had flames searing a path to her womb.

  Oh God, she needed. She needed Jazz …

  * * *

  His need for her, the overriding hunger and overwhelming drive to possess every part of her, was only growing stronger. Not by the day, by the minute. By every shattered look of longing, every p
ain-ridden gleam of love he glimpsed in her eyes when she looked at him, and every soft, whispered sigh of desire whenever he touched her.

  Everything about her—her scent, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, shy smiles and hungry looks—only made him want to tie her tighter to him.

  She was destroying him and she didn’t even know it.

  Trailing his lips from hers to caress the line of her jaw again, Jazz had to force himself not to turn her to him, to slide beneath her slender thighs and have her ride him as he stared into those beautiful dark-emerald eyes.

  “Jazz, wait … please.” Breathless, rough with desire, her voice had a groan tearing from his chest.

  Wait?

  She had to be joking.

  Lifting his head enough to stare into her flushed, sensual features, he knew the wait was going be very short indeed.

  “I want to touch you now,” she whispered, staring up at him with such somber need that she broke his heart. “I want to give you pleasure, too.”

  There wasn’t a chance he could bear it. She would have him insane in minutes. But her hunger for it filled her face, her eyes. She needed, for whatever reason, to steal the last vestige of sanity he possessed.

  “Good God,” he whispered as she slid from his lap. “And here I thought I’d have some control this time.”

  “Control is highly overrated.” Rolling to her side she stared down at him, her expression heavy with feminine need.

  “I’m not entirely certain this is one of those situations,” he told her, though he was definitely curious over what she had planned.

  No doubt she had every intention of driving him crazy.

  How much could a little innocent like her know, though? Surely he had the self-control to endure whatever she dished out.

  Or so he thought.

  What he forgot to take into account was his reaction to her and the effect she had on him whenever she was near, let alone touching him.

  She kissed him like a woman desperate to build memories, to fill as much of her soul as possible with sensation and warmth.