by Lora Leigh
The puppy gave a low, saddened little sigh before laying her wrinkled little face against her paws to stare back at Skye with the same confusion and sadness Skye felt herself.
Sliding her hand to the pug’s back, Skye petted her gently before staring up at that ceiling and wondering if sleep would come this morning or if, as she had the last week, she would simply toss, turn, and awaken herself time and again as her fingers found the aroused flesh between her thighs.
This time, she at least had something warm next to her that wouldn’t ask questions. That wouldn’t probe or curse when she didn’t get answers, if the nightmares did by chance invade the daylight.
At least this time, Skye might feel lonelier than ever, but she had company.
That thought had another tear sliding from her closed eyes. She still felt unwanted, though.
*
Logan couldn’t hear the pitiful whines coming from the patio anymore. The scratching against the glass was silenced, and the knowledge that while sleeping on the couch Logan could at least hear if she was in distress was no longer uppermost in his mind.
The little bit of fluff was a replica to one Logan had owned twenty years before, the last gift he’d received from his grandfather before his parents’ deaths.
Logan’s grandparents had given him the pup, a male that time, because he was about to drive them insane.
According to his grandmother, who bred the animals, the pup had cried since the first breath he took. He had been crying when Logan’s grandparents stepped into the house, glared at his father, then turned and looked at Logan with expressions that to this day he couldn’t decipher.
A mix between pain and rage in his grandfather’s gaze and the agony filling Logan’s grandmother’s.
His grandmother, Tandy Rafferty, had stepped slowly to him, the whimpering puppy in her extended hands. Large, wet brown eyes, creamy coat, and a black face. The minute Logan had accepted the tiny bundle he had stopped whining. His wrinkled face had stared up at him as though he was finally where he belonged.
Tandy had turned and left the house immediately without saying a word.
Saul had stared at Logan silently for long moments.
Crouching down, Saul had looked Logan in the eye and said, “Sometimes, there’s a gift waiting for you that you didn’t even know existed. That little baby has cried since the day he was born. Keeping it alive has been a pain in your gram’s rear. He’s yours now. He was meant for you. Take care of him, son.”
A year later he had died in Logan’s arms from a poisoned hamburger he’d found while Logan was at one of the socials the county threw through the summer.
He’d died as Logan and his cousins had stood outside the vet’s door banging and screaming at the man to help.
He’d been home.
He’d opened the door seconds after Jack, as Logan had called him, had taken his last, agonized breath.
Now there was another pup whose whimpering sounds of misery and distress hadn’t stopped since the day Logan had returned home to find her.
She couldn’t be more than ten weeks old. The same age as the pup Tandy Rafferty had brought Logan.
Grimacing, he stalked to the living room, jerked up his cell phone, and made a call.
“What do you want?” Ill-tempered, filled with anger, Saul Rafferty answered the phone on the first ring.
Logan paced back to the kitchen. “Why did you do this, you old bastard,” he snarled. “Come get it.”
Saul grunted. “That little bitch has squalled since it was born. Your grandmother wouldn’t rest until I gave it to you. Now you have it. Shut the fuck up and take care of it.”
“So you can kill another one?”
Silence filled the line for long moments before Saul Rafferty sighed with what seemed like weariness.
“Never turn your back on your food.” His voice dropped, and Logan was certain he only heard that hint of grief in Saul’s tone because he wanted to hear it.
“Fuck you!” Logan snapped.
“That’s the last litter out of My Gal, your gram’s favorite.” Saul ignored the curse. “She was diagnosed with canine cancer last week, only weeks after your gram was. I won’t take it back. She made me give it to you; now you have it.”
“I gave it away,” Logan said with distinct pleasure. “I don’t want a damned thing from either of you.”
Saul snorted. “You’ve given it away six times since I dropped it off and every time it’s been brought back. Stop being so fucking hardheaded. It’s from your gram.”
“And I don’t want a fucking thing from her, either. I’ll drop it off if it comes back here again.”
“Return the little bitch and I’ll slit her throat before your gram sees it. I won’t see her upset.”
“As though anything about me could upset either of you. Other than the fact that I live. That and your inability to steal every fucking thing my mother wanted me to have. I gave every goddamned bit of it away too, Saul. All of it.”
Saul was silent for long moments before he said, “That’s what I would have done, boy. It’s exactly what I would have done.”
The call disconnected.
Standing alone in the kitchen, Logan stared around the darkness, wishing the anger and the grief raging inside him were just because of Rafferty.
Logan just wished he could say it was because a grandmother he’d never known, one who had never wanted him, was dying.
He just wished the rage eating at him could be placed somewhere but where he knew it lay.
In his own aloneness. In the fact that there was something he wanted right now, more than any kid could possibly want a pup.
Because he couldn’t have the pup, or the woman.
As Logan stood in the darkened kitchen, his hands braced on the counter where Skye had just lain, her body spread out for him, willing and heated was the image that played behind his closed lids.
What the fuck was he doing? What the fuck was he doing to her as well as himself?
He’d stared into her eyes and seen something he’d never believed he would see, something he sure as hell hadn’t expected.
He’d seen a woman he finally wished he could share the future with.
A woman who wanted him more than anything at that moment.
Until he’d tasted the burning response of her need and turned her away, not fully satisfied. Aching. Dreams in her eyes.
Before he could stop himself he turned, his fist flying out and cracking into the wall behind him.
“Goddamn it!” The words burst from his lips as he punched through the drywall, fury mixed with a hunger he knew was going to destroy him erupting inside him.
His hands buried in his hair then, pushing the strands back from his face as he grimaced at the feel of slick warmth against his knuckles where he’d busted them open.
This had to be over soon. It had to be finished before he made himself crazy, because with God as his witness, he knew his self-control where she was concerned was eroding fast.
He was going to have her. And like she said, once would never be enough.
*
She’d been a fighter after all.
Pulling the black truck into the shelter of trees that bordered a shallow creek, he slid it into park before taking a deep breath.
He was sated, for the moment.
Physically, sexually sated.
The need to inflict pain, to feel the fear that raced through a delicate, weaker body, to see the blood flowing and feel the clench of rejection as he raped and tortured was now fulfilled.
For the moment.
Sliding his gloved hands from the steering wheel, he opened the door before stepping slowly from the truck.
His boss hadn’t made this trick with him.
He’d helped though, at first.
He grinned as he walked to the back of the truck.
Finally, after only a few hours, even his boss hadn’t had the stomach for the pain he could inflict.
E
ven that old bastard hadn’t been able to hold up against her screams, her agony, and her pleas. He’d had to walk away.
Strange, how men such as that couldn’t stomach the actions they condoned, even requested.
But after the son of a bitch had left, she’d screamed harder, begged until her voice broke and only croaks of agony were emitted.
It was over then.
Once they broke their voices, the only satisfaction left was to watch the blood flow. To run his tongue over each slice as he fucked the lust out of his system.
Finally, he just slit her throat.
She might have been breathing through the last few hours, but she hadn’t been there.
She’d stared sightlessly up at the ceiling of the basement, her gaze distant and even the terrified, pain-filled croaks hadn’t been there.
She’d lasted two days and it had been damned good. Better than he’d ever imagined she would be.
Sighing deeply at the thought, he lowered the tailgate, grabbled the end of the tarp, then pulled the body slowly from the bed.
He’d bleached her from head to toe, inside and out, under her fingernails, her toenails, and everything in-between.
There wasn’t even a speck of dust on her body. She was as clean as a surgical table with nothing to link her to anyone.
Carrying the broken body to the edge of the creek, he laid it down before gripping the tarp and quickly flipping her body from it.
She’d be found here quick enough.
Rolling the slick material up, he moved several yards from it, pulled one of the gloves from his latex-covered hand, and dropped it behind a tree.
Moving against a thorny bush, he laid a torn piece of denim on one of the thorns, careful to make it look as though the material had ripped from the jeans against the bush.
The pants were Logan Callahan’s, as was the glove. Both had his sweat on them, and nothing more.
He’d been careful to make certain he’d shaved his legs clean and wore specially coated long underwear beneath the pants to ensure no other DNA or material was left behind.
One down.
This would incriminate Callahan as nothing else could. Prison was in that boy’s future, he’d just made sure of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The tension between Logan and Skye was growing thicker by the day, Logan admitted five days later, and they weren’t even coming in contact as often as they had before. They’d watched each other across the expanse of the side yard. From the upstairs master bedroom as she too checked the windows each night.
He almost grinned. He saw her more now, he thought, than at any other time since she had moved into the house. And he was growing hornier by the day, which he hadn’t thought possible. If he didn’t lose the hard-on torturing the hell out of him, then he was going to have a permanent indent from his zipper pressed into the thick shaft.
The night before, he’d walked naked into the living room and pretended she wasn’t staring from the living room across from him.
Then, before she went to bed this morning? The little wench. If she’d been naked it wouldn’t have aroused him more. Dressed in a black floor-length, flowing gown and a see-through black chiffon robe with just the slightest little train behind it, she’d blown his fucking mind.
That was the romance in her.
Fuck him six ways from Sunday but that romance had never been the turn-on that it was now. With this woman.
He’d known it was there. He’d seen it in the softness of her eyes every time he looked into them. He’d felt it in her kiss and in the innocence of her response when she’d come in his arms.
But son of a bitch! God have mercy on his black soul!
She’d looked like a damned fairy princess or something and his dick had responded with an iron hardness that had been damned uncomfortable. All he wanted to do in that moment was replace the innocence with pure sensual, sexual knowledge.
With a temptress’s heat.
A lush, sexual goddess who knew how to make him insane and used it ruthlessly.
But even in her innocence she was already doing that.
At times, he found himself actually having fun with the teasing games they were playing.
Then, he would glance across the yard, wouldn’t see her, and the disappointment, the loneliness, would grip him again.
Son of a bitch, he wished Rafer and Crowe would track down whoever had hired the bastard who had attacked Rafer’s fiancée, Cami, last month.
As Rafer and Crowe worked their end, Logan had been attempting to work his during the day, but his excursions into town weren’t too successful.
It didn’t matter where he went or who he tried to talk to, he was still watched with wariness, suspicion, and even fear. He wondered if threatening a few would work.
Sighing, he leaned against the door frame again, his gaze narrowing on the shadowed house across the side yard before a frustrated curse slipped past his lips.
This was it.
The minute he saw her moving around, he was going over there. He would explain what he could. Attempt to make her understand the threat, the danger, she could face if she dropped his guard and let her into his bed.
He’d have to make her understand what losing the sight of her, the knowledge of the life that glowed in her eyes, would do to him.
It would destroy him.
The teasing, the sense of waiting, it was going to have to stop. His attention was becoming too divided by the woman he couldn’t keep his hands off.
So much for all those years of training the government had paid so much money for.
It could work if injected with truth serum or if any number of other agents designed to compromise him or his strength. But he’d be damned if he could work past the thought of the pain he’d put in her eyes that last night.
It was after two in the afternoon, and still he hadn’t seen Skye or the pup venture through the house. But then, he hadn’t really expected Skye to.
He never saw her in the morning. Once the sun rose, the house became still and quiet until late in the afternoon. She slept through the day in the small in-law suite that had been built onto the house by a previous renter.
Logan hadn’t been so sure about the addition when he’d agreed to it; now he almost wished he hadn’t allowed it, despite the additional rent he was able to charge for the place. Because he couldn’t stare into the windows of that suite. It was on the other side of the house, away from his own.
Where he couldn’t see Skye, where he couldn’t watch her, get to know her at least through her habits.
He knew from her rental application that her employer was listed as a major software firm, her job title that of editor for instruction and design manuals.
It sounded damned boring to him and not really a job he could imagine she would have subjected herself to.
Pushing away from the patio doors at the sound of the doorbell ringing, Logan grimaced and made his way from the room, despite his reluctance to answer the door.
He should ignore it.
He didn’t want company, and he sure as hell had no intentions of putting up with it. For twenty years the good citizens of Sweetrock, and of Rafferty Lane in particular, had ignored the injustices against the Callahan cousins and watched as they were disowned, participated in snubbing them, and refused to testify to the fact that Mina Rafferty Callahan had cherished her only child as well as her husband.
Moving down the stairs, Logan raked his fingers through his hair and grimaced at the memories of the past. Memories he simply didn’t want to revisit yet had no choice now that he was back in the house where he’d spent the first eleven years of his life.
Pulling the door open, he stared at his visitors coolly despite the small tingle of warning that came to life just beneath the skin at the back of his neck.
“Archer, can I help you?” Logan leaned against the door frame and crossed his arms over his chest as he noticed the neighbors gathered on the porches and in their yards al
ong the street.
Another day in Sweetrock, he thought furiously as he turned his gaze back to the sheriff and the stranger standing still, watchful, and armed behind him.
Archer pulled the dun-colored hat from his head before raking his fingers through his dark hair in a gesture of frustration.
“Logan, this is Detective Ian Staton from Boulder. We need to talk to you.”
Dark-haired, his craggy features set and stone-hard, the detective watched Logan from icy, hard blue eyes. Jeans and a cotton shirt, a casual sports jacket that hid the shoulder holster Logan detected beneath it, and well-worn leather boots on his feet.
“Now, Logan.”
There was something about the demand that grated on his senses and had the small hairs at the back of his neck tingling in warning.
Logan stared back at them coolly. “So talk.”
“Privately, if you don’t mind,” the sheriff sighed. “You don’t want this here in front of your neighbors.”
Logan narrowed his gaze warningly at the sheriff. “Crowe and Rafer okay? Cami?” His gaze shifted to the detective.
“As far as I know.” Archer nodded. “This isn’t about them.”
Logan stared at the family standing on their porch across the street.
Mr. Williams, his wife, Nila, and their four children were staring back at Logan as though he had killed their dog. Williams had his brawny arms crossed over his chest, his rounded belly curving out beneath them.
“Fuck it.” Stepping back, Logan let the two men into the house. “Want some coffee?”
“If you don’t mind.” There was an edge of relief in the sheriff’s voice.
“We really need to get this taken care of, Sheriff,” the detective demanded, his tone harsh. “Coffee wasn’t part of the agenda.”
“Then pencil it in, dammit,” Archer ordered, his tone harsh. “I told you, you’ll handle this my way.”
Judging by the look on Archer’s face, he was pretty damned sure he didn’t want to know.
Logan led the way to the kitchen, put the coffee on, then as the dark liquid ran into the pot turned back to the two men.
Archer was keeping a careful distance between them and him, assuring Logan that his cousins might be fine, but someone wasn’t.
