Clint gasped and said, “Just trying to get my dog out from under the truck, man.”
From the corner of her eye, Lizzie noted that the leash was slowly disappearing back under the truck. Crystal reached down to grab it.
“How would you like it if someone dragged you around by the spikes digging into your neck?” As though to demonstrate, Adam shifted his grip so his fingers pointed inward, where they could jab into Clint’s throat, if he were so inclined.
“You’ve got to stop him,” the pregnant girl hissed to Lizzie.
Lizzie agreed but also sensed any interference might push Adam closer to violence. Besides, a man who would get this upset about someone being cruel to a dog couldn’t deliberately harm a human—could he?
Maybe. He’d been trained to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves.
Apparently, Clint believed Adam could, because his voice quavered as he said, “Man, I’m sorry. I’m just trying to toughen him up.”
Lizzie watched Adam almost vibrate with tension as he slowly released the guy and backed away. “Why does a dog need to be toughened up?” he asked. His jaw barely moved, his teeth were so tightly clenched.
Stupidity didn’t scare easily, because Clint said, “He’s a pit bull, man. Born and bred to kick ass. How’s he going to learn to fight if he’s too damned scared to come out from under a stupid truck?”
“You want to train him to fight?”
“Well…yeah.” Clint looked doubtful. “There’s good money in it.”
Adam shot Lizzie a meaningful glance. When he appeared to relax and to speak again, Lizzie knew that he wanted her to go along with him. He nodded, as though in approval. “Have you been dogfighting for a long time?”
Clint looked at his girlfriend, then back at Adam. “Ah, no, actually. My cousin does. Or he did, anyway. He lost his dog a few weeks ago, though. It got beat by some cheating asshole who juices his dogs.”
“People do that? Give them steroids?” Lizzie asked.
“Some do. It’s bad for the dogs, though, so my cousin only fights with clean dogs.”
“Honor among thieves, huh?” Adam chuckled, as though this was amusing.
“What?” Clint didn’t understand the reference.
“Dogfighting is illegal, right?” Adam asked, acting like he thought Clint was cool for wanting to be a dogfighter.
“Yeah, but there’re all kinds of places you can do it around here.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah, no shit.” And good ol’ Clint was back, hitching up his baggy pants, acting like the gangster he aspired to be. “You can win a shit ton of money if you bet on the right dog, even more if you own the dog,” he said, then indicated the leash that Crystal still held next to the food truck. “I was thinking about training Bruce to fight, but he’s a pussy. My cousin’s bitch was tougher than this dog, and she got killed.”
Or left for dead. Was he talking about poor Loretta?
“Oh, man, that sucks,” Adam said, shooting Lizzie a sideways glance that suggested he’d had the same thought.
“Hey, man, if you’re interested, I can call you next time there’s any action. I’ll get my cousin to take us out there.”
“I’d like that,” Adam said. He rattled off his number, which Clint entered into his phone.
Lizzie turned to the mother-to-be, unable to keep silent any longer. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to have a mean dog if you’re going to have a baby?” she asked.
Crystal cradled her belly and said, “Clint says if it’s our dog, it’ll protect the baby.”
Adam put his phone away and shook his head at her comment. “I don’t know much about fighting dogs, but I used to work with military canines, and—”
“No shit? Dude, that’s so cool. Those dogs go after terrorists and don’t let go even if you hurt them.” Clint bobbed his head, since he was clearly the authority.
Adam didn’t dignify that with an answer but continued to address Crystal. “A couple things influence a dog’s behavior—their genetics and what it’s learned. Any dog can be mean if you treat it that way, but I wouldn’t promise that even a really nice dog will never bite. It’s instinct is to protect itself. But some breeds are more about biting and chewing. Not because they’re mean, they just have big jaws with strong muscles that like to clamp down on things. If you train a dog with a bite impulse to fight, it’s more likely to be triggered under the wrong circumstances. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but I sure as hell wouldn’t take a chance.”
It was hard to tell if Clint was taking this in, but Crystal sure was. The dog was still under the truck, and she still held the leash, but she’d moved as far away from the animal as she could get.
“Well, this dog’s obviously no good for fighting,” Clint said, scowling. “Can’t handle fucking fireworks.”
Way to endear yourself to the veteran, Lizzie thought. Point out something he’s got in common with a frightened puppy.
But Adam just nodded and said, “Good point.” He squatted down to look at the little dog, whose curiosity had overcome its fear, and it had stuck its nose from under the truck. “And since you’ve been trying to teach it to fight, it might be unreliable.”
“We’re getting rid of it,” Crystal announced.
“No way, babe. We’ll breed him,” Clint decided.
She opened her mouth to continue the argument but closed it again, apparently deciding to resolve that issue another day.
The dog crept closer and cautiously sniffed Adam’s fingers. Adam carefully reached under, picked the little guy up, and tugged at the prong collar, which jingled around the dog’s neck. “Whatever you decide to do with him, this collar is just going to make him more skittish if you don’t use it right. Why don’t you try keeping the regular collar on for a while, until he’s more confident, and if you decide to keep him, I’ll show you how to use the prongs right, if you need them,” he offered.
“Sure, man, that would be cool.”
Adam unclipped the leash from the prong collar then reattached it to the leather collar also around the dog’s neck. With a final pat, he put the dog on the ground. “Oh. And if you decide you’re not keeping him? Give me a call.”
Lizzie’s heart flipped upside down and inside out.
“Hey, you two have a good night, okay?” Adam told them. His stride was loose limbed and casual as they walked away, but Lizzie could feel every ounce of rage that still radiated from his pores.
* * *
Adam didn’t pay attention to where he was going. He just held Lizzie’s hand and walked, leading her away from that jackass and his future spawn. He had to get away before he lost his shit completely. He’d almost taken Clint’s head off when he saw the little jerk trying to drag the terrified dog from beneath the truck—especially when that was exactly where Adam would have liked to be, too.
“I should have taken that dog away from him,” he said now, stopping abruptly. Lizzie’s forward momentum made her bump into his shoulder, and he automatically put his other hand out to keep her from falling. He released her, then paced a few steps before stopping to say, “I’m going to go back and get it.”
“You can’t do that,” she said.
“I can do that. I can go back, find that idiot, take the dog, and—”
Lizzie walked toward him. “And what? Get arrested? Then he’ll still have the dog, and you’ll be in jail. What good will that do?” Her fingers, soft but firm on his forearm, cut through the haze. “You did the right thing.”
“What? I almost killed him.” He was contradicting himself—he still wanted to go back, knock Clint on his ass, and take the poor dog to safety.
Lizzie’s smile was a little crooked when she said, “Well, maybe your method was a little extreme, but you got his attention.”
“I wanted to kill him.”
“But you didn’t, did you?”
No. But the shit in my head…in my heart…
“You didn’t hurt him,” she repeated, taking his hand again.
How could she smile at him like that? And look at him with those big, soul-probing eyes? She now knew for certain that he was a basket case, and now he had even more proof he should stay on the ranch and away from actual people.
Always the mind reader, she said, “If you weren’t here, God only knows what might have happened. He could have really hurt that poor dog. But you let him save face, gave him some good information, and we learned something about what happened to Loretta. We can update the sheriff with that, right?”
Maybe. Adam was so damned confused. He knew wrong when he saw it—abusing a dog was wrong—but how did he know what was right? The rules out here in the world were different. Too many shades of gray. “I don’t know, Lizzie. I really don’t know.” Had he ever felt so hopeless?
How did he expect to hold it together long enough to make sure Emma and Granddad were okay when he couldn’t handle simple human interactions? He’d even taken on more: Jake and Talbott, and all these dogs. He was supposed to be tying up loose ends, not creating more. And Lizzie was still here, by his side. Caring about him, for Christ’s sake. There had to be something wrong with her.
Maybe he should just cut bait now. Leave tomorrow—no, tonight. Drive to the coast, walk out into the water until it was over his head and he couldn’t come back to screw up anything else.
“Sit down.”
“What?” He looked around. They’d walked a couple of blocks away from the center of town, past the Feed and Seed, and now stood by a picnic table in front of the completely dark Dairy Queen. Why is it closed on a Saturday night? he wondered absently. Oh yeah. The thing in the square. There had been an ice cream booth there.
He let her push him back so his ass landed on the edge of the table, but his feet remained on the ground. She wedged into the space between his knees and put her hands on his chest.
“Do you think I’m a good person?” she asked.
“Of course.” She was the best person he knew, in spite of her poor taste in men.
“Then will you trust me when I tell you that what happened tonight is okay?”
“I don’t—I don’t think I can.” What was wrong with him was deep inside, part of his structure. Like a dog that needed to bite things, his nature was hard-wired, and no amount of deep breathing or imagining his happy place or dog cuddling would fix him.
“Do you talk to anyone about this stuff?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand what she meant. “Yeah. I see a shrink at the VA every few weeks.”
She blinked.
“What? You thought I’d say I was too manly for that shit?”
“I…I don’t know what I thought.”
“I don’t know if it’s helping,” he admitted.
“Do you talk to Jake and Marcus? They went through the same things you did. They understand.”
“Only because the shit they went through was my fault. I fucked up, and they got blown up.”
“What? It’s not your fault.”
“Yeah, it is. It was my mistake that got us blown up. It’s my fault Jake can’t think and Talbott’s going to be paralyzed before he’s forty. And it’s my fault Celeste Garcia’s kids don’t have a father.”
“Oh, Adam—” She put her hand against his jaw, the firm warmth of her skin a sharp contrast to the ice in his heart. He jerked away.
“Don’t. I’m going to tell you what happened, and then you can tell me it’s all okay, it was an accident, and blah blah blah.”
She pressed her lips together, swallowing whatever goody-two-shoes protest she was going to make.
“We were following up on some intelligence about a guy who was making bombs. A really bad son of a bitch. I’d been out with Tank for three days, working with some SEALs who were looking for an arms dealer, and we were both exhausted. Dehydrated. Worn out. But this intel was ripe, and our commander was hot to chase it down, so I ignored everything I knew about taking care of my dog and agreed to go along.”
He remembered the dust, the heat, the smell of that dark little house. Cooking odors, sewage, and something worse. Something evil.
“I took Tank in there, and he sniffed around but couldn’t find anything. He sniffed the hell out of everything but didn’t alert. He was supposed to lie down and stare at whatever he finds. But he didn’t. I let the rest of the team come in, and when we went to bust in the door down the hall, the whole damned place blew up.”
“Why is that your fault?” Lizzie asked.
She was so damned naive.
“Because if I’d kept my dog back and taken an extra day, he would have been sharp. He wouldn’t have missed that trigger.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. Tank was the best explosives detector in the army, and I let ambition and enthusiasm distract me from being careful.”
“So if you hadn’t gone, those guys—the insurgents—they probably would have gotten away. And they would have hurt lots of other innocent people.”
“You don’t know that,” he threw her words back at her, but she caught them easily.
“Nope. I don’t. But I do know this: You did the best you could with the information you had. Your motives were pure.”
“Motives don’t matter for shit. I got a good man and my dog killed, and I ruined the lives of at least two other men. I’m never going to know how to do the right thing. I never have.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” she said, moving forward, wrapping her arms around his neck. He resisted her, drawing his head back because he wanted so desperately to bury his face in her shoulder. “The only thing I think you ever did wrong was push me away when I wanted you to make love to me twelve years ago. Let’s see if you can’t remedy that, and we’ll worry about the rest of your character defects later.”
That sounded good. So damned good. To lose himself in her sweet body for a while. But he didn’t deserve it. And she deserved better.
In spite of his hesitation, Lizzie pressed her lips against his and nipped at his mouth until he gave in with a groan.
Chapter 22
Lizzie pressed her lips to Adam’s, softly, then more firmly. When he finally kissed her back, he was kissing her. His tongue tasted of lemonade and mint as it toyed with hers, stroking, sliding.
One of his big hands went around her waist while the other cupped the back of her head, angling her for kisses along her jaw, to her neck, which he nuzzled, driving her out of her mind with the need for more. More of his touch, more of his kiss, more of his hard body.
She may have whimpered, because he drew back and looked into her face with a shadowed, unreadable gaze. He was going to turn away from her. Again. He was going to kiss her gently, pull away, and say this wasn’t a good idea.
But this time, she wasn’t a simpering sixteen-year-old virgin. This time, she was—
He pulled her closer while rising to his feet, so their bodies were aligned, and she felt his chest against hers, his pelvis, and—Whoa.
“This is too…out in the open,” he growled. “I want…more.”
She laughed. “Me too.”
Wordlessly, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and guided her to the side of the building, into dark shadows that would conceal them from any passerby. She slid her arm around his waist as though it was meant to be there, his warm muscles flexing under her hand.
Nothing else existed for her in that moment but Adam. The sound of his breathing, the smell of his skin, the feel of him moving next to her…and his taste as he paused to kiss her again.
They reached the deepest shadows before he stopped and pressed her against the wall with his body and moved his hands over her. He palmed both of her breasts, and she
nearly collapsed from the sheer pleasure of feeling his hands against her nipples, even through the fabric of her dress.
She was restless, though. Her feet moved apart, and one of his thighs slid between hers, pressing hard muscle against her core. She wiggled, and he chuckled softly but didn’t move his hands from their exploration of her curves—from the outside of her dress.
She almost sobbed. “Don’t make me beg, damn it.”
For a moment, she thought she’d ruined things, because he froze at her words. But instead of coming up with some noble excuse, he laughed. “Yes, ma’am.” Then, more seriously, “Lizzie, you deserve to get everything you want. You should never have to beg.”
“I want you. I’ll beg later, if that sort of thing works for you, but right now? Right now, I want you to touch me. Right here, right now, right next to the Dairy Queen drive-through window.”
He chuckled, and his head dropped to her shoulder. He took a deep breath. Then, looking straight at her, he said, “Undo your dress.”
Staring right back at him, she reached one hand behind her neck and tugged at the tie holding up the top. When it went slack, her breasts were still covered, but the fabric was looser, and he tugged it down. She hissed when the warm night air hit her swollen nipples, and again when he bent to take one in his mouth.
Her hands were in his hair then, on his shoulders, his back, everywhere she could reach. “Oh please, oh please,” she repeated, needing more.
“I wanna take my time with you, I really do,” he murmured between kisses and licks against her skin. “But I also said I didn’t want you to beg, right?”
“Yes, you did,” she agreed.
With a reluctant-sounding sigh—but a sideways grin—Adam straightened and yanked her skirt up. He ran one hand between her thighs and up, stopping when he got to the fabric between her legs. His rough fingers stroked over the silky material, then under it, slipping easily through her folds.
“Oh yeah,” he muttered. “Yeah.”
“Uh-huh,” she answered, her voice rising, because he was stroking her right where she needed him. She was wound so tightly, she was afraid she might spin off into the stratosphere before she even got to touch him.
Big Chance Cowboy Page 19
