by Lora Leigh
“Hold on, baby,” he groaned. “Ah hell, Kenni. You destroy me.”
The next thrust drove him deeper, harder inside her.
The sudden impalement, a shock to her senses, tore a cry from her lips and the control she’d been holding on to so desperately slipped out of her grip.
She needed him.
All of him.
Kenni whimpered with the loss when he retreated fully once again, but with his return she was waiting for him. Pushing back, taking him deeper, her inner muscles clenched and rippled around him. Tremors of building ecstasy worked up her spine, shuddered through her body. A band of tension began tightening through her womb, lashing at her clit and pushing her closer to the flames waiting to explode around her.
Jazz came over her, the heat and power that was so much a part of him surrounding her. One arm locked around her hips, holding her to him as he began thrusting inside her with a speed that drove her to the breaking point with a suddenness she wasn’t expecting.
Explosions detonated through her senses, waves upon waves of such ecstasy they stole her breath, her reason, and what remained of her woman’s spirit.
Muscles clenched, locked in place. As she shuddered beneath him, each successive detonation was more intense, driving through her. Behind her, Jazz thrust to the hilt, tensing, a groan tearing through him before spilling his release in furious, throbbing spurts that extended and deepened the orgasm rushing through her. Ecstasy raged through her senses, in waves that seemed never ending until she collapsed against the couch beneath him, exhausted.
Above her, Jazz’s breathing was labored, the release he’d found coming only moments after hers. She remembered, distantly, the feel of his flesh throbbing harder, buried to the hilt as he groaned above her. But he hadn’t spilled inside her as he had before.
He’d donned a condom.
Were those tears behind her eyes, threatening to spill? Tightening her throat, she swallowed against them. And why should that bother her anyway?
Before she could let that thought break the fragile control she had over her pain, she was aware of Jazz slowly easing from her, his breathing ragged as he collapsed beside her and drew her to his chest.
And where did they go from here? she wondered.
“Don’t run like that again, Kenni,” he warned her softly, pushing the remnants of pleasure from her senses with the order.
“Or what?” Pushing away from him she sat up, found her clothes lying on the floor, and picked them up wearily.
“You don’t want to know or what. The next time I won’t be nearly as understanding, count on that.” The promise was delivered in a tone that had her swallowing tightly, wariness edging at her senses.
It was a wariness she ignored. She’d gone too far, had walked too close to the darkness to survive.
“I didn’t turn into a china doll overnight and I won’t pretend to be one so you can play the white knight,” she informed him with a bite of anger.
Rising, she drew her clothes on quickly. She felt too vulnerable, too exposed to him now. The lack of clothing as he sprawled just as naked on the couch next to her had her too eager to submit to whatever he wanted.
Submission had never been her thing.
“So I can play the white knight? Where the hell do you come up with these ideas? I never claimed to be a white knight, or to want to be one,” he grunted at the accusation, rising and jerking his clothes from the floor.
She could feel his eyes on her as he dressed as well. Glowering and intense, he wasn’t about to let the subject go and she knew it. And she didn’t think her emotions could deal with it.
She felt too close to an edge she didn’t understand or recognize. An edge where far too many emotions were teetering.
Dressed, she gathered up the leather pack she’d dropped to the floor and forced herself to leave the living room. Striding across the entry and television room to the kitchen, she was very well aware of Jazz following her.
The second she entered the puppies’ territory Squirrel broke away from the others, bounding to her with a cheerful yip and bouncing around her in a bid to convince her to play with him.
Opening the gate, she gave Squirrel a gentle pet before shooing him over to his mother. Closing the gate behind her, Kenni ignored the fact that Jazz had paused at the entrance to the television room. He stopped there, silent, his arms crossed over his chest in an arrogant, demanding stance.
She set down the leather pack she’d collected along with her laptop from beneath the bed, opened the flap securing it, and began pulling free surveillance pictures she’d taken over the years as well as pictures taken in Loudoun after her arrival that matched up to the Kin she’d photographed over the years.
“I need the DVR Zack collected,” she told him as she felt him moving closer. “Will he be here soon?”
She didn’t hear him, but she could feel the tension behind her increasing, indicating he had finally followed her.
“He’ll have it here soon,” he growled, and it was an irritable sound.
She knew what they were doing. Slade and Zack, overbearing and arrogant, would of course try to go through it first to see if they could identify who had broken into the house.
Good luck to them. She doubted they were going to get past the encryption program Gunny had created for their security.
“It won’t do him any good to check it first,” she informed him, still fighting the languor that wanted to overtake her after the incredible pleasure he’d given her. “The encryption program is on my laptop and without the program, cracking it will take him far longer than simply bringing it over here would.”
Gunny had made certain she learned the surveillance program and its encryption. The DVR, laptop, and cameras worked together. Having the DVR was useless without the laptop and its program to decrypt it.
“Have all the bases covered, don’t you, Kenni?” he asked a little too gently. “Hidden clothes and weapons, encrypted cameras and DVRs. Yet you still have no idea who’s trying to kill you. Why’s that?”
She’d known he was going to be pissed and she’d known hard questions would come with her actions. She’d known it like she knew a bee sting stung; she just hadn’t allowed herself to think about it.
“Survival. I was more concerned with hiding for a while longer, I guess,” she finally answered him, trying to contain the emotions her brothers’ presence had tempted free. “If Cord hadn’t gotten so nosy, then I’d still be hiding.”
And watching.
But why hadn’t she done more to find out who had given the order to kill her mother, Gunny, and herself? Sometimes it had felt as though she were just drifting in a sea of questions and fears with no idea how to solve the problem.
“Why do I have a feeling you would have preferred being left alone to do just that?” The accusation struck home. The guilt, the anger, ten years of betrayal. Cousins who had shot her, tried to knife her. Years of running from the very people who should have been protecting her.
Ten years.
Ten years of fear and loss, and did he think that didn’t bother her? That she didn’t realize what had been taken from her?
“And how did it affect you, Jazz?” she demanded, swinging around and staring back at him in outrage. “You would have still managed to seduce me. I couldn’t have held out for longer and we both know it. What did it matter if it was Annie’s or Kenni’s name you whispered as long as you achieved the end result?”
His jaw hardened, the muscle there ticking like a time bomb waiting to go off.
“You think the only thing that concerns me was whether or not I could get you in my bed? That was never a question, Kenni. I knew damned good and well you were going to end up in my bed. Keeping your ass alive does concern me, though,” he informed her, his voice sharper than normal.
The ominous hardening of his tone had her watching him warily now. It wasn’t just his voice. His expression looked carved from marble. It was his eyes that were truly discon
certing, though. They blazed, the sapphire blue roiling with an emotion she couldn’t quite define.
Perhaps now, that wasn’t all that concerned him. But had she just been some normal, run-of-the-mill kindergarten teacher?
“I think that’s all you wanted from Annie Mayes,” she whispered, rubbing at the chill chasing over her arms now. “What does it matter, Jazz? As you said, what you felt for me then was then. It’s not now. I’m here now.” Waving her hand to the house to indicate his life, she kept her gaze locked with his. “I’m endangering everyone I love, everyone I wanted to keep safe, and you think that doesn’t bother me? That I could ever survive if anything happened to you because of me?” The bitterness she tried to keep banked thickened in her own voice now. “Do you think I ran for eight fucking years just to willingly let you take over and stand in front of me as though I were some simpering child?”
“I never accused you of being a child.” Shooting her a withering look he let his arms drop, his hand lifting to stab a finger furiously in her direction. “But you’ve by God bitten off more than you can chew alone and you’re too damned stubborn to see it.”
Too stubborn to see it? Amazement lashed at her as she threw back her head and placed her hands on her hips, the confrontation she’d been trying to avoid exploding within her.
“Why do you think I stayed hidden?” She clenched her teeth, her lips pulled back in furious contempt. “Why do you think I’ve fought you every damned inch since you learned who I was? Because I knew years ago what I was facing. But I didn’t bite this chunk off, as you so charmingly call it. Someone’s been force-feeding it to me and I’ve chewed it the best friggin’ way possible. And by God I didn’t just hide. I did my best.”
She was yelling by time she finished.
Her temper, always unpredictable and hard to control, suddenly broke free of the restraints she kept on it.
How dare he? How dare he believe that because she hadn’t known how to investigate who wanted her dead, she hadn’t tried? That she hadn’t cared?
“Here.” Twisting around and grabbing the pictures she’d taken over the past two years, matched with those taken in the eight before, she threw them at him. “I matched killers sent after me in the past with faces from the present. Here.” Picking up the flash cards she’d filled with notes, rumors, and gossip, she threw those at him as well. “That’s all I have for two years of investigating the only way I knew how while keeping your fucking ass out of it. Keeping my brothers out of it. Keeping you alive because if I died, then—well hell. Fuck it. You already believed I was dead, what did it fucking matter?”
She was screaming.
She never screamed.
Rage was tearing at her senses.
“Ten years.” She could barely speak now for the rioting fury ripping through every corner of her mind. “Ten years.” A swipe of her arm and the laptop went flying from the table to crash to the floor. “You built my house, my pond, and my gazebo and I didn’t even know.” Holding her arms out toward the windows she fought to breathe, to pull back, to stop the flow of bitter rage. “You gave a dead girl her dream and then you let yourself die with her. Do you think that was what I wanted?”
Swinging to him once again she realized how much that had hurt as well.
“You let yourself die with me,” she repeated. “My brothers get drunk every year on the date of Momma’s funeral and Poppy grieves to the point that he calls Luce by Momma’s name and her daughter by mine. And all that was supposed to make me suddenly stand up and declare to you I lived when I could be dead again in the next second? Oh-fuck-you-yes, I wanted to cause every damned one of you more pain. I wanted you, Slade, Jessie, Zack, and my brothers buried with me the second time around as well. Let’s just make it a fucking party, why don’t we?” Her eyes widened, sarcasm filling the rage. “Oh yeah, right, we’d all be fucking dead. Kinda hard to party then, isn’t it?”
The sob that escaped her lips shocked her, but not enough to still the enraged agony washing through her.
Not that a single damned thing she said was making a difference. He was staring over her shoulder, his expression closed, distant.
“And every word I’m saying is going through one bullheaded ear and out the other,” she flung out contemptuously.
“No, he’s trying to figure out how he’s going to save his own ass now that I know exactly what he’s been hiding from us.” The voice was steel-hard but vibrating with such agony, it dug hollow furrows of pain straight through her heart. “Turn around, let me see your eyes. You wouldn’t let me see them earlier.”
Kenni froze.
She could feel the blood leave her face as Jazz’s gaze moved to hers, regret and resignation filling it as he stared down at her with a gentleness she simply couldn’t comprehend.
“You should have known better than to try to fool your brothers, Kenni. They knew you far too well,” he told her with weary resignation. “I think that’s something we both forgot somehow.”
She had forgotten.
She’d forgotten it wasn’t possible for her to lie to her brothers in any way. Even by avoidance.
Her stomach began cramping with panic, a useless feeling she told herself. Panic wasn’t going to aid her in any way.
Shooting Jazz a look that promised retaliation, Kenni turned slowly to meet the gazes of the three men she’d known not to reveal herself to.
“They’ll just ground you for a few years. Well, a few decades maybe,” Jazz murmured behind her. “They’ll actually kill me.”
He was kidding, right?
Her heart was ready to jump out of her chest, her stomach roiling and threatening to push its way past her throat, and he wanted to make jokes?
“Kenni…” Sawyer whispered her name, desperate, disbelieving, as she stared at the floor and tried to tell herself there had to be a way to salvage the situation. To continue to hide.
“It doesn’t surprise me that you can’t look at us,” Deacon said contemptuously. “Hell, there’s no way you’re Kenni. She knew how to face her own stupidity. And even she would have known how fucking stupid it was to try to hide from us, right here in Loudoun.” He turned to Jazz then. “And you have the nerve to help her attempt it? Are you fucking crazy?”
She almost winced at the contempt in her brother’s voice.
“Anything’s possible, though I did advise her against it,” Jazz stated, his tone bland as Kenni felt him lean against the kitchen door frame. “You know how damned stubborn she can be.”
“She’s right here!” The insult had her gaze lifting for one second, just long enough for the eldest, Cord to catch it, and hold it.
She was right there, and now there was no hiding from the brothers she’d adored as a teenager, and missed dreadfully in the past ten years.
Deep, heavy grooves of grief were dug into Cord’s face, the emerald hue of his eyes dark, stark with pain.
“Why?” Quiet, vibrating with such agonizing disbelief, the single question stripped her bare. “Why, Kenni?”
He looked broken. He sounded broken and it was killing her.
To her soul, that one word laid her open, exposing emotions she hadn’t dared face, hadn’t dared to allow free.
“Why?” Lifting her chin, she faced him squarely now. The time to hide from these men was at an end now. If they were her enemies, if even one of them was an enemy, then it would be the end of her. Because she’d spent ten years determined to keep them out of the path of whatever madman haunted her life and destroyed her mother.
“Why?” She met him now as a woman, not the child she had been or the teenager he needed her to be once again. “Because I couldn’t allow even one of you to be taken from me as well. I wouldn’t have survived it.”
“You call that an excuse? A fucking reason?” Cord snarled, the veins in his neck standing out in stark relief.
“I don’t need an excuse or a reason—you taught me that, Cord,” she retorted calmly, keeping a tight grip on her emotions, o
n the memories fighting to pour free, the rage, the agony of being separated from her family.
“Like hell…”
“Family,” she told him softly. “They were hunting me, not you, or Deacon, or Sawyer. Me. Had I called you, who would have fought with you that you could trust besides Deacon and Sawyer, Slade, Jazz, and Zack? Six of you against an unknown number of Kin? Against a faceless, nameless enemy?” She shook her head slowly. “I didn’t need a reason or an excuse,” she repeated. “I wouldn’t be the reason any of you died.”
Silence filled the kitchen for long moments before a bark of laughter, filled with sarcastic disbelief, broke the tension.
Sawyer stepped forward, shaking his head, the shaggy dark blond of his hair brushing against his neck as he stared back at her as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“Fucking superhero now, are you?” Deacon bit out furiously. “Son of a bitch, I wish I’d listened to Dad when you were younger and agreed to send you to a fucking convent.”
Kenni blinked back at him before narrowing her eyes, cocking her hip and placing her hand negligently on the curve. “I never imagined I was a superhero, Deacon, but I never let myself believe that the three of you were, either. But I might start wondering why I’ve missed you so damned much if you keep up with the insults.”
That was a horrible lie. There was nothing he could do to change how desperately she’d missed him or the others.
“My charming personality and the fact that I won’t lie to you like that asshole behind you obviously has. Trust me, Kenni, not contacting us was really bad for his health.” His chin jutted out pugnaciously, his lips thinning as the muscle at the side of his jaw ticked warningly.
“Lied to me about what, Deacon?” she questioned him in amazement. “Sorry, but I won’t give you an excuse to hit him. Jazz hasn’t lied to me about anything.”
“He convinced you not to tell us you were alive,” Deacon rasped. “Someone fucking convinced you not to let us know you were alive, or in Loudoun.” Taking a step closer, his fingers curling into fists, his gaze locked with Jazz’s. “Who else would have done so?”