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He could pick his own jobs. Pick the deranged individuals he wanted to deal with, and maybe take a decent vacation rather than a forced suspension. Usually without pay. And he could kick some ass without getting written up over it later. He’d stopped a rapist, for God’s sake. It wasn’t like he had pulled a piddling teenager off a giggling girlfriend and beaten the shit out of him. Not that the director saw it that way. Hell, now, Director Scarborough was madder than hell that he had to deal with the fallout instead.
And maybe it was him. He knew he had been riding a fine line lately. The cruelty and horror men could inflict upon women were starting to really piss him off. He loved women. Cherished them. Thought there was nothing finer than the female mind and softly scented feminine flesh. They were a wonder. Treasures. They should be worshipped by a male hand for the pleasure they gave, never beaten, raped, or terrorized by diseased minds.
Yeah. Maybe it was time to resign. Before he did the world a favor and killed a few of them.
But first, he would go to North Carolina. Hopefully some of the restlessness would ease there, some of the darkness would find a shimmer of light in Keiley’s presence. At least, that was his hope.
He stared at the darkened ceiling, the image of her flitting through his mind with a smile hot enough to heat the sun a few degrees hotter, and warm enough to ease the ice in his soul whenever he was around her.
She scared the shit out him.
His lips kicked up at the corner at the thought.
Keiley was the one woman he had dared go after, because he knew he could love her. Hell, he did love her. So he had given her to Mac, because he knew Mac would do more than love her.
His past had struck again. The moment he had met Keiley he heard his own screams as his uncle dragged him away from his mother’s dead body. His father lay beside her in his own blood, a suicide-murder that had ended in Jethro losing the only stability in his life. His beautiful, adoring mother.
A week later he had entered his first foster home. His uncle had wiped his hands of him, sneering at the thought of raising his brother and sister-in-law’s child. A child that came with nothing but the ragged clothes on his back.
And then hell had begun. One foster home after another because the angry child he had become was too much for the harried families to handle.
As he grew older, he grew colder. He pushed back that pain and let the ice build. Until Mac.
Hell, it wasn’t even Mac. It was the fact that Mac had dared him to care about the women they shared. He had pushed Jethro, chided him, made him see the joy in sharing a part of himself with those women.
Mac wasn’t a man that ever went into anything half-heartedly. And he hadn’t let Jethro do it, either.
And then Jethro had seen Keiley.
God, he remembered her smile that night. Remembered her eyes. Remembered feeling his heart ache as he gently steered her and Mac toward each other.
Because he knew Mac would love her. He had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that the wild child Keiley kept carefully restrained inside her would call to Mac. That he would cherish her, marry her, and one day perhaps, allow Jethro to share a stolen moment or two within that warmth.
Because Mac knew all the things Jethro had never learned, despite the other man’s attempts to show him how. Mac knew how to capture a woman’s heart. Jethro made them wary.
Mac knew how to show the gentleness inside him, whereas Jethro had never been able to temper the darkness enough to soften his dominance. Mac knew how to soften his dominance, and Jethro only knew how to pull away to hide his.
Mac had learned how to release the gentler emotions that filled him, whereas Jethro feared ever letting them go. At least, alone. Not without something he had come to rely on way too much. He had come to rely on Mac’s ability to soften the fierce adoration he felt for his woman. It wasn’t that Jethro didn’t know how to care. He knew how to care. And he knew how to fear it. Just as he knew how to drive away the women he cared for if Mac didn’t temper that ferocity inside him.
What a pair they had made. Mac indulged his lovers, sometimes to the point that Jethro’s dominance had kept them from walking all over him. And through it all, Mac had watched it with humor and with knowledge.
They had complemented each other, but would they do so again? For a moment, Jethro felt his guts cramp with the hunger and need that tore inside him. A hunger that went deeper and hotter than any he had ever known.
Keiley was his weakness. And hiding that from Mac was going to be hell. If the other man ever learned how much Jethro loved his wife, then there would never be a chance of Jethro touching her. Intimacy was one thing, but he was afraid that if it came to sharing his wife’s emotions, then Mac just might become the selfish, possessive bastard he should have been to begin with.
4
“You snuck out of bed last night,” Keiley said as she set his breakfast and coffee in front of him, her voice questioning.
He should have known that she would wake up when he left the bed; she usually did. Just as he did when she was restless. Sometimes, Mac thought, they were too attuned to each other. Knew each other too well.
It was one of the reasons she was suddenly pushing him, asking questions, her curiosity blooming beneath the sexual needs beginning to rise inside him. Needs he could suppress but couldn’t totally hide.
“I was restless. ”
“You were smoking again. ”
She sat down across from him, sipping at her coffee as Mac lifted his gaze and met her eyes. Damn, he could use a cigarette now.
