DOMINIC (Dragon Security Book 3)

by Glenna Sinclair

  “I think you like playing games with me. I think you like to keep me in the dark because you get off on the fact that I’m curious at all.”

  “Who’s playing games with whom?” He brushed a piece of hair away from my eyes, his fingers lingering on my cheek. “One minute you hate me and the next you act like a jealous bitch.”

  “You don’t know a bitch if you think—”

  I never got a chance to finish what I was trying to say. He kissed me. Not a subtle, brushing of the lips, but a hard, passionate kiss that threatened to push me back onto the hot burner even as his hand came around my waist and caught me. I could feel his tongue against my lips, could feel him knocking and asking for entrance. And even though I knew I shouldn’t, I opened to him. I pushed myself up on my tiptoes and I kissed him back, my tongue dancing with his before he pushed it out of the way and made an exploration that was more thorough than any I’d experienced in a very long time.

  I slid my hand up over his jaw and felt his muscles moving just under my palm. His hair was too short to bury my fingers in, but I could still hold him close, so much closer, even as my other hand wandered over his waist, sliding under his jacket to touch his denim-covered ass. His body was so tight, his thigh moving between my legs like a tree trunk. He pushed himself so close to me that I could feel the pressure of him against my throbbing clit, my skirt riding up along my legs to give him all the access he could want.As his hand slid over my hip, he gripped my thigh and pulled my leg up against his side.

  I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d wanted to. There was something primitive about the way my body responded to him, something that overrode all the common sense that normally ruled my actions. My fingers curled and buried themselves in his flesh, pulling him close and refusing to let go. However, he clearly wasn’t as lost in the moment as I was.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, letting go of me and stumbling backward. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  He glanced up at something high on the wall, clearing his throat as he stumbled back against the opposite counter. I followed his glance, but I couldn’t see anything. If there was a camera there, it was very small.

  “Enjoy your dinner,” I said.

  I rushed out of the room, grabbing my things and hiding away behind the closed door of my bedroom.

  Fuck him!

  If he didn’t want me, that was his problem. Not mine. I was beautiful. There were dozens of men who’d be willing to share my bed tonight. All I had to do was pick up a phone and call one of them. What did I need him for?

  So why did I feel like he’d just crushed my heart under his heel?

  ***

  I don’t know when I fell asleep. I thought I was never going to sleep. I watched a dozen episodes of Friends on Netflix, so many that my brain was beginning to feel like mush. It was sometime after I switched to cable and the lifetime movie of the week reruns that I finally drifted off, I guess. But I felt like it had only been a few seconds when I felt him shake my shoulder.

  “Don—”

  “Shh,” he said, pressing two fingers to my lips.

  He was shirtless, but he had on a pair of jeans and sneakers. And a gun. He had a gun in his hand.

  He tugged my arm and pulled me out of bed, his arm wrapped around my waist as he led me back down the hall to the living room. We were nearly to the garage and the SUV when I realized he was taking me out of the house wearing nothing but a shirt.

  “Donovan, I don’t have any clothes on.”

  He didn’t respond. He simply pushed me out the garage door and set me unceremoniously in the passenger seat of the SUV. Then he came around and climbed behind the wheel, pulling out of the garage so quickly that he probably left tire marks on the cement floor.

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s a safe house about a mile from here.”

  “Safe house?”

  “There’ll be clothes there.”

  He didn’t say anything else. And I was frightened enough not to ask anything else.

  After a short drive, we pulled into the garage attached to a nondescript house in the middle of a street that sported dozens of nondescript houses. Donovan came around the side of the SUV and helped me out, keeping his arm around my waist as he led the way inside.

  “We’re here,” he said. But it was pretty obvious he wasn’t talking to me.

  The house was about the same size as mine. The kitchen was larger, big enough to sport a small table in the back corner. It was open to the living room, which appeared to be empty from where we were. And there was a small hallway that led to the back of the house, presumably where the bedrooms were.

  Donovan led the way to the living room and directed me to a couch.

  “What’s going on?”

  “One of the motion detectors went off outside your house.”

  “Someone was there?” I asked, starting to stand, but then realizing I really had nowhere to go. I sat back down, searching his face, looking for the fear that would send me into a panic. But he was calm, his eyes gentle as he returned my stare.

  “David has a crew checking it out.”

  “Shouldn’t he call the police?”

  “If they find any evidence that someone was there. He didn’t pick anything up on camera, so it could have been a false alarm.”

  “But you were concerned enough to drag me out of bed and bring me here.”

  “You can never be too cautious in these circumstances.”

  I sat forward and buried my face in my hands. I was fighting back the fear, but this…it seemed to make this whole thing seem a little more real. Before, it was just my dad being overcautious. But now?

  “You should go change,” he said. “There’s women’s clothing in the bedroom at the back.”

  I dragged my fingers through my hair and straightened up. “I’d rather just sit here for a minute.”

  “We’re going to have company very soon. You should probably go change.”

  I stood. “Come with me.”

  His eyes moved slowly over me. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “I don’t want to be alone. What if someone was outside my house? What if they saw us leave, if they followed us?”

  “No one followed us.”

  “You can’t know that for sure.”

  He hesitated, but then he offered me a hand. I took it and let him lead me down the hallway. There were four doors that opened off of the hallway. He stopped at the last and pushed it open, flipping on the light as he stepped inside. It was a large room, made larger by the fact that there were no furnishings. But the closet door was open and there were dozens of clothes hanging there of all different sizes, colors, and styles. It was like a storeroom for a retail store.

  “Take whatever you want,” he said.

  I clung to his hand a moment longer, not so much afraid of letting go as afraid that it might be the last time he would willingly touch me. What if they found the guy after me outside my house tonight? Then he’d be gone, he’d disappear just as I told him to do ten years ago.

  “Kate?”

  I turned into him, sliding my hand over his chest. There was a tattoo on his chest, just above his heart, that I hadn’t seen before. It was small, which was probably why, just two letters and a date.

  I pulled my hand away as if I’d touched it to an open flame.

  “Why do you have that?”

  I felt him stiffen. His hands moved over my upper arms, a sort of caress that did nothing to still the battle that was suddenly going on inside my head.

  My brother’s initials and the date of his death were tattooed on Donovan’s chest. There were no other tattoos, no other marks. Just my brother’s initials and the date of his death.

  There was something wrong about that. Something that spoke to the impact of that event on Donovan that I’d never allowed myself to think about.

  But this was the guy who set up the situation that led to my brother’s death. He was the one who put
into motion a prank that he knew wouldn’t go well, the one who made it look like the most dangerous, most violent boys on campus had done it. He was the one who knew those boys would seek retribution. He knew they would likely show up to the beach party the majority of the graduating class attended that night. He knew my brother was there. Alone. Unprotected.

  He had no right to grieve my brother. He killed him.

  Yet…he’d lost his best friend with the events of that night.

  I stepped back, shaking my head as I did, as though that movement would make my thoughts all line up and make sense. Donovan grabbed my arms again, pulling me around and pressing me up against the wall beside the door.

  He made a little growling sound, like a groan that swallowed something he desperately wanted to say. And then his mouth was on mine, back exactly to the place it’d been when he pulled away from me in the kitchen of my house earlier this evening. I melted against him. I couldn’t help myself. As angry and hurt as I was, his touch just had this power over me that I couldn’t deny.

  Was it wrong to want the man I blamed for my brother’s death?

  I don’t know, but I couldn’t help myself. I ran my hands over his chest before wrapping my arms around his neck, pulling him closer to me, as I hooked one leg over his hip. He slid his hand along that leg, tugging me upward so that I was barely standing on my tiptoes as he held me up with the weight of his body. And then that hand slid further up the back of my thigh until he had my ass in his palm, his fingers seeking places along the edge of my panties that hadn’t been touched in much too long. I shifted my hips, giving him more access, wanting more.

  It was insane. But it was also deeply satisfying to feel his need in the quick hitch of his breath and the intensity of his kiss.

  Then, like before, he suddenly pulled away.

  He stepped back and tugged his cellphone from his back pocket. A look of something like embarrassment slipped over his face as he read whatever the phone was telling him, his gaze shifting to something I couldn’t see high on the wall.

  “You should get dressed,” he said curtly before storming from the room.

  Talk about hot and cold!

  Chapter 10

  At the Compound

  Ash was pulled out of a fairly intense dream by the insistent alarm on his phone. He didn’t even check the screen, just silenced the alarm and tugged on some pants, pulling on a shirt as he headed downstairs.

  “Where is it?” he asked David as he marched toward his workstation.

  “Miss Thompson’s house.”

  “What is it?”

  “Motion detectors went off outside the master bedroom. I’ve already dispatched a team to see what the deal is.”

  Ash knew that David had everything under control. The man rarely ever slept, and when he did, it was usually here in the main house, on the cot they had in the back room for operatives who were unable or unwilling to leave the main house for one reason or another. David had his own house here on the property, one that had been extensively outfitted to accommodate his chair, but he didn’t seem to like his own company all that much. It was one of many changes in his personality that Ash had noticed since the accident that killed their parents.

  Ash grabbed a chair and pulled it up beside David so that he could watch what was happening on his computer screens. David pulled up the feed from each of the cameras positioned in and around Kate Thompson’s house. After a minute or two, they began to catch sight of their operations team. They approached the house with caution, guns drawn, surrounding the outside before the leader looked directly into one of the cameras and held up two fingers. David immediately sent his phone a transmission that informed him that the cameras were not picking up any intruders. If there had been an intruder, David’s message would have told the team leader which camera or cameras had the intruder under surveillance so that the team would know how to proceed.

  The team divided into two, a group of men taking up position outside and another going in through both the back and front doors. Ash and David watched closely as the men moved methodically from room to room. When it was pretty clear that the house was empty, David sent the order for the men to stand down. As they watched, the team leader gave instructions for another search, this one designed to find evidence of what, or who, had caused the motion detectors to go off.

  “Could have been a raccoon,” David said, punching a few keys on his keyboard to make the camera views go back to their smaller dimensions and other camera feeds and screens of computer code to take their place.

  “Could have been,” Ash said. “Warren says the detectives don’t think Miss Thompson is in any actual danger.”

  “Even though she clearly witnessed a crime.”

  “She doesn’t remember it.”

  “The perp doesn’t know that.”

  Ash had to agree with that. “Poor guy doesn’t know what he’s getting into though. That woman is quite a firecracker.”

  David’s eyebrows rose, as he watched his brother head to the kitchen. “You never said how your discussion with her went.”

  Ash padded into the kitchen and filled a mug with water, needing a little caffeine if he was going to be up all night dealing with this.

  “Coffee?” he called to David.

  “Not that instant crap you drink.”

  Ash just shrugged, popping the mug in the microwave and pulling down the tall, thin canister of instant coffee crystals. It didn’t taste all that bad to him, but to each his own.

  “So spill the beans. What is Donovan’s long lost love like?”

  “Stubborn,” Ash said. “And beautiful. A dangerous combination if there ever was one.”

  “How stubborn?”

  “She refused to cancel some party she’s supposed to go to this weekend.”

  “We’ve had marks do that before.”

  “Yeah, well, they were usually doing it for important reasons. I think she was just doing it because she resented me telling her how much of her privacy and freedom we were going to steal from her.”

  “You do bring out the best in women sometimes.”

  Ash grunted. “Somehow I don’t think it was just me. You should have seen how she reacted to seeing Donovan for the first time after all these years.”

  “Did he ever tell you why she blames him? I mean, it was just a schoolyard fight that went too far, right? How is that Donovan’s fault?”

  Ash thought it was kind of funny that David would be the one to point that out. A strong argument could be made for the fact that the accident that killed their parents was only an accident. The car hit black ice. No one could have predicted that. No one could have prevented it. Yet, because he was driving, David carried around a lifetime of guilt.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it has something to do with why the boys targeted her brother. She seems to think it was because of something Donovan had done. And I think, to a certain degree, he agrees with her.”

  “He shouldn’t. I looked up the case file.”

  “David…”

  “There was nothing illegal about it. The file falls under the public information act.” He typed something into his computer keyboard. “It says that the fight was initiated because one of the perps said something to the victim about his sister.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Witness statement. I guess one of the party goers saw the initial confrontation that took place an hour or so before the actual attack.”

  Curiosity peaked, Ash carried his coffee mug over to David’s workstation and read over his shoulder.

  WITNESS: Joshua was sitting on a blanket on the beach, waiting for his girlfriend to get them some drinks. The boys approached—

  DETECTIVE MORGAN: That would be John Kyle, Reese Connor, and Tony Smith?

  WITNESS: Yes.

  DETECTIVE MORGAN: Continue.

  WITNESS: One of the boys asked where Donovan Pritchard was. Joshua said he was supposed to join them later in the evening. Bu
t he didn’t want there to be any trouble. John said he’d take care of Donovan later. That he had a plan to get back at him. Joshua told him to let it go. At least they would all get their diplomas. Reese agreed with Joshua, telling John that maybe it would be better to let it go. Then Tony said something I couldn’t quite hear. Joshua got up and asked him what he’d said. John laughed and said he just called your sister a slut. Joshua pushed John and told him to watch his mouth. John said that Kate was probably off…I guess I shouldn’t say what he said.

  DETECTIVE MORGAN: It’s fine. Use any language you feel comfortable with.

  WITNESS: Well, he said she was probably off screwing some boy. Not that word, but you know…and then he told Joshua how they saw her slipping out from under the bleachers in the gym a week before school got out. Joshua told him he was a filthy liar and shoved him again. John got mad and shoved Joshua. Then Amanda, Joshua’s girlfriend, walked up and told them to stop. John laughed again, accusing Joshua of hiding behind his girl. Joshua spit on him. I thought John would kill him right there and then, but Reese pulled him back, whispering something in his ear. Then John nodded and walked away without saying anything else.

  “Sounds like it had nothing to do with the prank Donovan pulled.”

  “Prank?” David asked, looking over his shoulder at his brother.

  “Yeah. That’s what Donovan told me started the whole thing. He broke into the football coach’s online dating profile and changed it to make it appear that he was a man looking for other men. Then he posted a link to it on the school website. Didn’t go over well.”

  David laughed. “Sounds like something I might have done. Kudos to Donovan.”

  “Yeah, well, he made it look like these boys did it in the computer lab at the school. They couldn’t be suspended since there were only a few days of school left, so they were banned from walking the stage at the graduation ceremony.”

  “Sucks.”

  “More for the family than the boys, I’m sure. But they were pretty pissed from what Donovan told me. But they’d never done anything like what happened to Joshua, so he had no idea they would go that far.”