AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dawg shut back the rage and the fear that he had somehow hurt her and she wasn’t admitting it. No doubt, this changed things. Son of a bitch, he couldn’t blame her for staying as far away from him as possible all these years. But that didn’t mean he was willing to let her go.
He would have been inclined to doubt that he could forget a night with her, but there were too many dreams, too many indications that she was right.
He had taken her virginity. He had taken her without consideration of her innocence, her youth.
He had taken an eighteen-year-old virgin to his bed and done things that even mature women would blink at being asked to do.
He cleaned up the glass from the broken bottle carefully, aware of her watching him now with quiet concern. Fuck that; he didn’t need her concern. He wanted her. He wanted her hot and wild, all that hunger and passion he had glimpsed in her burning for him.
She would have loved him, he thought, to have followed him into his bed all those years ago. It made him cringe, wondering what he had done to her, how he must have hurt her to make her run before he even awakened.
And he deserved it even less now than he had eight years ago.
“This deal. It involves us only,” he told her as he threw the glass in the garbage and kept his back to her. “No one else. ”
When she didn’t speak, he turned and stared back at her.
What the hell had been wrong with him the night he had taken her? He had known that Crista wasn’t the sharing kind. She was a one-man woman, just like Kelly.
“Why can’t you just let me go? You owe me that, Dawg. ”
Yeah, he owed her. If his dreams were anything close to what had actually happened, then he owed her a hell of a lot more than he could ever repay.
“You owe me as well,” he told her coolly. “All I have are fragmented dreams that drive me fucking crazy. Whatever we started eight years ago, we’ll finish this summer. One way or the other. ”
Nothing on earth could convince him to let her out of his sight now. Possessiveness, desire, and emotions he hadn’t felt in so many years he barely remembered them rose to the surface of his consciousness. Emotions he felt in those dreams. Something softer, more tender, and yet a thousand times hotter than lust alone. He wouldn’t call it love; he had assured himself years ago that love didn’t exist. Besides, this went deeper than anything he had heard love described as.
“Just like that. ” Bitterness curled at her lips. “As though the fact that I don’t want to finish anything doesn’t matter. ”
“It wouldn’t be blackmail if it did. ” He shrugged, fighting back the guilt he could feel building in his gut. “If you wanted to pay the price, then it wouldn’t be such a dirty word, would it?”
She stared at him with big dark eyes filled with hurt and made him wish he were someone other than who he was.
“Tell me something,” he asked her then. “That night we had, did you at least enjoy it?”
Her gaze flickered away as sharp heat filled her face.
“That’s not the point. ”
“If my dreams are anything to go by, you were just as hot for it as I was. Tell me I’m wrong, Crista. Tell me you hated i
t. ”
He moved toward her then, watching as her head snapped back and her eyes tracked his progress across the room.
She didn’t retreat; she couldn’t be frightened of him. She stared back at him defiantly, her hands clenched at her sides, her expression mutinous.
She wanted to say she hated it, but she couldn’t. She hadn’t been able to lie worth a damn when she was younger, and she couldn’t do it now.
“It was hot, wasn’t it, Crista?” He stopped within inches of her, his hand cupping her arm, smoothing down it to her wrist before he lifted her hand to his shoulder and gripped her waist. “So hot we burned down the night. That’s what I dream. That you’re wet and wild, screwing me with the same crazy lust I’m screwing you with. ”
Her face flamed brighter.
“And you slipped out on me that morning, didn’t you? Just ran away, like the scared little girl you were. ”
Her eyes flashed with anger.
“I’m not a plaything for the Nauti Boys. Not then and not now. ”
