The Nauti Boys Collection

by Lora Leigh

  And still, something had had almost as profound an effect on Natches as his father had. A woman’s pain. A woman’s scars.

  In that second, he realized that was what pissed him off now. Once again, Natches wasn’t watching his own back. He was more concerned with someone else’s safety, someone Dawg didn’t know and was too damned wary to trust.

  “Natches, stop looking at the fucking water, man. Tell me what the hell is going on. I watched you tonight going over those files. You put something together, and you’re still trying to protect the rest of us. Let us help you. We didn’t take that from you when we were in trouble. Don’t do it to us now.”

  Whatever it was, Natches had figured it out slowly, because he hadn’t hit the roof, he hadn’t dug out his sniper rifle, and Dawg and Rowdy hadn’t heard the rage. Natches was easier to figure out when he hit a hard, fast rage. The slow ones, those were damned scary. And Natches was in a slow-building rage.

  As he stared at Natches, the boat rocked again. Dawg looked up as Rowdy crossed the deck now. Their boats were close enough to jump from one to the other. Rowdy wasn’t being cut out from this late-night conversation and Dawg could tell from Natches’s grimace that he knew it, too.

  “Beer’s in the cooler,” Natches said softly, finishing the one Dawg had handed him. “Get me another while you’re at it.”

  He turned and lobbed the empty bottle into the trash can at the corner of the railing.

  At least Dawg didn’t have to look at those fucking scars anymore. The sight of them just pissed him off, even now, so many years later.

  Rowdy got the beers and moved to them, his expression still as he handed them over.

  “You two going to fight?” he asked, and his gaze narrowed on them. “I’m not up to refereeing tonight, I’ll tell you.”

  Dawg snorted. “No, I’ve just been trying to convince knuckle-head here to tell me what the hell is going on with his woman and that damned Cranston. My neck is starting to itch damned bad. It’s keeping me awake at night.”

  “Natches will tell us when he needs to.” Rowdy shrugged, but Dawg heard the question in his voice as well.

  “Your neck itches,” Natches said then, his voice eerily quiet. “Have you felt the sights between your eyes yet? Playing with you, targeting you, just waiting, because the time isn’t right yet?”

  Dawg froze. His gaze slashed to Rowdy’s and saw the same shock in his face that Dawg felt.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Rowdy snarled.

  Rowdy rarely cursed, Kelly just didn’t like it, and he tried to clean his mouth up. For a Marine, that was some hard shit to do. And the fact that he was slipping told more of his fury than anything else could.

  Natches lifted his head then and stared at the mountains around them. The grief they saw on his face then, the heavy, quiet sorrow had Dawg’s guts cramping with dread. Because he knew. God help him, he was terrified he knew exactly what was getting ready to come out of his cousin’s mouth.

  “It’s Dayle, isn’t it, Natches? That’s who Cranston is after; he’s the one who was helping Johnny. That’s why he’s playing games with you, and with your agent.” In a heartbeat, Dawg knew the truth.

  Natches grimaced, a tight, mocking smile twisting his lips before he tilted the bottle to his lips and drank. In seconds the bottle was empty and crashing into the trash hard enough to rock the can as Dawg and Rowdy flinched.

  Natches stared at the can, wishing he could free enough emotion where his father was concerned to just get mad. Just mad. Just enough to rage at the injustice of life that allowed something as rabid as Dayle Mackay to sire a child.

  But he couldn’t. All he could feel was that cold, hard core of knowledge inside him. The same one he had felt when he realized Johnny Grace was as dangerous as a rattler coiled to strike. His fingers itched to caress his rifle, to take out the threat, to make certain, damned certain the bastard couldn’t strike at Chaya, Rowdy, or Dawg. Or, God forbid, Ray.

  Dayle couldn’t touch his sister, Janey, at least. She was away at college, far, far away; Natches had made damned certain of it.

  “He’s been playing with me,” Natches commented. “Not right now, but often enough. He must have been busy this month, I haven’t felt his gunsights in a while. But right after I terminated Johnny, I felt them. I felt them hard enough that I wondered if he’d finally made his mind up to do it.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?” Rowdy growled, furious. Natches could hear the anger in his tone.

  Natches shrugged. “I know how to give back. I let him feel me for a while.” And it had amused him. Just as he knew it had amused Dayle when Natches felt those sights between his eyes. Once a sniper always a sniper, but once an assassin, a man always knew when it was turning back on him. Dayle amused Natches for the most part with his games. He didn’t know how to target, didn’t know any more than an experienced hunter knew. The wind positioning was never exact. He was always too far off. But he liked to pretend he could kill his son. The mess cook turned gourmet cook who thought he was a general in a revolution. It was so fucking laughable Natches still had trouble believing it.

  Dayle Mackay had the temperament for what he was doing though. He’d learned enough in the Marines to know how to be hard. He’d made connections, and he’d kept those connections. And Natches had known, as he’d read those reports, as he had begun to put the pieces together along with the mental snapshots of the past few events that had tied in. Natches had known.

  “How long have you known who Agent Dane is chasing, Natches?” Dawg asked.

  Natches could feel his anger, too. Protective, that was Dawg. And he knew Dawg would never forget the night Natches hadn’t been able to protect himself. The night he had nearly let his father beat him to death, to protect his sister. And he would have done it again. If Ray hadn’t found a way to make certain Dayle was too scared to leave so much as a bruise on Janey, Natches would have let his father kill him to protect her.

  Because no one in the damned county had the balls to stop it. They were terrified of Dayle Mackay. Bullying, cold, mean to the fucking bone. And a fucking gourmet chef on top of it. It was almost enough to leave a man rolling in laughter at the thought of it. Dayle Mackay could make a meal that would leave a man crying in joy at the taste. And he could beat a man to a bloody pulp with the same cold precision.

  “I knew before she arrived.” Natches finally shrugged. He hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself. He’d refused to even consider the suspicion. But he had known. The day Johnny had died Natches had stared into his father’s eyes across the town square and Dayle had known who had killed Johnny. And Natches had known, in that one instant, who had helped Johnny. Hell, helped him nothing. Johnny hadn’t masterminded that little deal, Dayle Mackay had. And now Natches had to deal with it.

  “Cranston has Chaya playing a smoke game, and I know it. Not enough to cause Dayle to target her, but enough, he’s hoping, to make Dayle mess up just enough to rain down the wrath of Timothy Cranston on him. The wrong phone call. The wrong meeting with the wrong person. Just enough to pull him in on suspicion of terrorist activities.”

  Silence surrounded them. Natches didn’t feel the chill of the night on his skin, he felt the chill of betrayal in his gut. And of fear. Because the one thing he hadn’t considered until tonight, until that bomb had taken the other agent out, he hadn’t considered the risk to Chaya.

  Dayle had no problem whatsoever targeting her. Killing her would kill Natches, and figuring that out wouldn’t take rocket science, especially not after the past few days.

  “I’m moving the boat tomorrow,” he told them then. “I’m going to dock her behind the garage for a while.”

  “The hell you are.” Rowdy faced him, cold, hard. “We stick together, Natches. He’ll expect you to separate yourself from us. We don’t separate.”

  Natches shook his head. “Kelly and Crista …”

  “Are just as fucking innocent in this as that woman you have in
your bedroom now,” Dawg snarled. “I might not like the situation, damn it, but I’ll be damned if you’ll pull away from us like that. There’s safety in numbers, man. And right now, Dayle isn’t going to take that risk here. We’d all know who did it. We know his style and his signature, he can’t take that risk. You make yourself a target, and he can take you out easy.”

  Natches scratched at his cheek and gazed out into the night. That was the only insurance Natches had ever had against his father’s wrath. He’d rubbed Dayle’s nose in it, too. He couldn’t take Natches out without the whole damned town knowing it. And a part of Natches had never really believed his father would try to kill him, until recently.

  Hell, he should just pack himself and Chaya up and leave. Making a life somewhere else wouldn’t be that damned hard. Except there was no way in hell she would go for it. She was an agent, and she didn’t break her word, she wouldn’t betray DHS that way. She would resign, and that was a given once this assignment was finished, if they survived it.

  “Have you discussed any of this with Chaya yet?” Rowdy asked.

  Natches shook his head. He had only let himself believe it tonight. “She’s sleeping.”

  She was curled in his bed, safe and warm for the moment, where he needed her to be always. Safe and warm, and sheltering his child under her heart.

  “She’s pregnant.” He let the words slip past his lips.

  He knew she was pregnant. He could feel it clear to his soul. The moment she told him she wasn’t protected, that knowledge had slammed clear to his gut.

  Silence again. Rowdy’s eyes widened and Dawg’s seemed to bug out.

  “She’s what?” Dawg wheezed. “What the hell? She’s not been back here long enough, unless …” He let it trail off.

  “It’s mine.” His child. Boy or girl, it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter. “She won’t admit it, but I know she is, Dawg. The first time, she wasn’t protected and I didn’t give a damn.” But now, fear sliced inside him. His baby rested inside her, barely more than an instinct, and already that child was in danger. “I haven’t given a damn since.”

  “Damn,” Rowdy breathed out roughly. “Okay, another reason why you don’t go running off solo. Your ass is staying here. And so is hers.”

  “You’re risking your lives,” Natches told them both. “Kelly and Crista need you two. This is my fight.”

  “He wants me to kick his ass,” Dawg snapped.

  “No, he wants a cold bath tonight, and I might oblige him by tipping his ass over that rail and into the lake,” Rowdy said with a healthy dose of disgust. “Get over yourself, Natches. Later today, we tackle Cranston. That little bastard has gone too far this time. He should have contacted us to start with.”

  “He did.”

  Dawg and Rowdy stared back at him in surprise. “When?”

  “The anonymous call the night Chaya came into town. I finally recognized the voice despite his attempts to disguise it. It was Cranston. That was his warning.”

  “Then he needs to brush up on his social-fucking-skills.” Dawg’s smile was one of those nerve-racking curves that always denoted trouble. “And I’ll just enlighten him on that little tidbit when we get hold of him.”

  Natches stared at Rowdy, then at Dawg, and shook his head. He hadn’t wanted them involved, but hadn’t they always been? Dayle would never be satisfied if he managed to take Natches out, because he hated his nephews with the same consuming fury that he hated his son. And his brother Ray? His hatred for Ray ran so strong and so deep that Natches had worried for years that Dayle would strike back at him.

  “We meet back here in the morning, then tomorrow night,” Rowdy told them both as he moved to the rail of the boat. “We hash this out then and figure things out. And we do this together.” He stared back at Natches, his gaze hard, determined.

  Natches nodded. There wasn’t a chance they would let him do it alone, he knew.

  He watched as his cousins, his family, jumped from his boat to Dawg’s. Dawg headed inside while Rowdy made the jump to his own houseboat, his shadow barely visible even under the clear sky and nearly full moon.

  He stared up at that moon, and before he headed back inside to Chaya, he whispered another prayer. This one for protection. God, don’t let him lose Chaya, because he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would never survive it.

  Chaya smiled as she felt Natches move silently beside her in the big bed, then gave a little shiver as his cool body curled around her.

  “You’re cold,” she murmured, not quite awake, not quite asleep, but content to drift where she was, content and peaceful.

  “You gonna get me warm.” His voice washed through her, just a little rough, tinged with masculine amusement.

  “Hmm.” She shifted against him, her legs rubbing against his hair-roughened ones as a sense of completeness began to make itself known.

  She shouldn’t feel comfortable. She shouldn’t feel like she was home in his arms, because she hadn’t known what home felt like until Natches.

  “I’m really cold,” he murmured, rolling her to her back as her lashes lifted and she stared into his shadowed face, glimpsed his quick smile.

  She loved his smile, though she hadn’t seen it nearly enough since coming to Somerset. She wanted to see it every second of her day, she realized. A smile on his lips and in his eyes.

  She let her hands slide up the arms braced on each side of her body, until they curved around his neck. She was ready for his kiss when it came, and he had no right to claim being cold, he was an inferno, heated and hungry.

  His kiss sank into her, his lips slanting across hers as he moved over her, sliding between her thighs and nestling the head of his erection against the slick folds of her sex.

  “You feel warm now, Natches,” she whispered, feeling the need beginning to grow inside her again.

  As he slid inside her, thick and hard, her breath caught in her throat and her back arched, taking more of him, taking him deeper and fighting to hold him tighter. Though she was stretched so tight around him that a thought couldn’t have slid between his flesh and hers.

  “Downright hot now.” His breathing was rough, his hands demanding, gentle, as he stroked her body, his head bending until his lips and tongue could play over her nipple.

  “Yeah, you feel kinda hot,” she gasped, then moaned as he suckled her deep and thrust heavily inside her. “Oh God, Natches, what are you doing to me?”

  But she knew what he was doing to her. Binding her so tight to him that there was no way to escape, no way to protect herself.

  “Loving you,” he murmured against her nipple before kissing it softly and turning to the other tight peak. “Can’t you feel me loving you, Chay?”

  She could. Thrusting, sliding so deep and warm inside her, like a dream. He was taking her like a slow, lazy dream, making every stroke memorable, every touch burning inside her heart.

  “Keep loving me.” She almost sobbed the plea, and she bit his shoulder as he raked his teeth over her nipple, sending sensation after sensation shooting clear to her womb. “Don’t stop, Natches. Don’t stop loving me.”

  “Not gonna happen,” he groaned. “Always love you.”

  And she had known it, just as she had known she felt the same. She mouthed the words against his arm, felt him nip the curve of her breast, and the pleasure began to spiral. His thrusts became harder, deeper. They stroked, penetrated, and filled her with ecstasy as she flew in his arms.

  Her hips lifted, her legs wrapping around his hips as she held on for the ride of her life. Each time with Natches was better than the last. Each touch, each kiss, each heated thrust inside her body bound her more tightly to him. And when she exploded, felt him explode and felt their release mingling, she knew his intentions of binding her even closer would only give them more to share. There was no way of binding her closer; he already was her soul.

  Each spurt of silky release flowing into her had her crying out though. Her name on his lips, his na
me sobbing from hers as he finally collapsed against her and rolled to his side.

  He still held her. He didn’t let her go, just tucked her closer to him and let their breaths ease as drowsiness stole over her again.

  “I love you.” She whispered the words to herself.

  Or so she thought. Natches felt his heart expand, nearly tearing from his chest at the sleepy, almost unconscious words.

  I love you. Such a simple statement. Yet, those three little words embedded inside him and filled him with determination. He wasn’t going to lose her. He’d kill again first, and just as with Johnny, he would never regret it.

  SIXTEEN

  Timothy Cranston, a.k.a. the rabid leprechaun of DHS, strode into Natches’s houseboat as though he owned it. He was followed by the other five agents assigned to the Somerset case, and they looked harried, sleepless, and concerned.

  Behind them strode Sheriff Mayes, and he looked ready to explode with fury. His golden brown eyes were sizzling with anger and his tall, hard body was tense with the effort at maintaining self-control.

  “What happened?” Chaya stood from her seat at the table, her eyes going from Timothy to the sheriff.

  “Someone tried to kill Rogue Walker last night.” Zeke’s voice grated with fury. “And they almost succeeded.”

  “Damn!” Chaya turned away, scrambling through the files laid out in front of her, looking for information. “Rogue didn’t know anything. She would have told me if she did.”

  “Maybe she just didn’t know she knew anything,” Natches suggested as he propped himself against the edge of the table and sipped at the coffee cup he held.

  His green eyes were like flints of ice as he watched Timothy. “Isn’t that how it usually works, Timothy? It’s what a person isn’t aware they know that always trips them up. Or what someone suspects they know?”

  “Rogue knew something,” Timothy growled. “She rides with that damned group of troublemakers on a regular basis. Several of them were tied to Grace and Bedsford.”