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“You didn’t have to kill Johnny. You could have wounded him and left enough to question. ”
Zeke’s accusation didn’t sit well with Natches, no more than his response had. That killing Johnny had been better than sex. Hell, killing that little bastard had set up a sickness in his gut that he couldn’t seem to get rid of. Not regret. There was no regret. It was Johnny or Crista, and Crista had been innocent. No, it was something else, something Natches hadn’t known since he had taken a bead on Nassar Mallah, the traitor that had kidnapped Chaya in Iraq, and blew his damned head off. It was a knowledge that he was truly becoming a killer.
Didn’t matter the why of it, didn’t matter that it was monsters he was killing. What made him sick to his soul was that he no longer felt regret. He hadn’t regretted Nassar, and he hadn’t felt any regret over killing family.
He was afraid he was turning into the same sick bastard his father was, and that terrified him. It terrified him almost as much as the knowledge that through the day, something had shifted inside him where Chaya was concerned.
He wasn’t letting her walk away again. Not without having her. Not without fucking this hunger in his gut out of his system so he could survive the next time she decided to run out on him.
It was time to do something about her.
Natches drove through the darkened streets of Somerset, made a left onto the interstate and headed to the hotel Chaya was checked into.
Tonight, he wouldn’t be staring into her darkened window, wondering why the hell she was there. Tonight, he would find out exactly why she was there, and what she wanted in Somerset. He could guess until hell froze over, but if Timothy Cranston was heading this little operation that was obviously being conducted in his town, then God only knew exactly what was going on.
At least it had nothing more to do with the Mackays. Or not his end of the Mackays. He’d held back the past week, watched, gathered his own information. Had he learned this operation targeted his family, then he wouldn’t have hesitated to snatch Chaya and make damned sure Cranston understood it wasn’t happening.
Rowdy, Dawg, Kelly, Crista, his uncle Ray, and his sister. They were his family, and he’d not allow pain to touch them any more than it already had. The information he had attained so far assured him the Mackays weren’t targeted. Anyone else was fair game, and he was willing to help.
And he couldn’t stay away from her much longer. He’d never been able to stay away from her for long.
As he drove toward the hotel the memory of her rescue whispered through his mind. She’d been hurt, abused, and terrorized, and married. And when she had learned her husband had been the reason for her capture and torture, she had cried in Natches’s arms, while in the hospital in which she had been recovering. And she had begged him to help her.
He forced those memories back. He hadn’t cared that she was married even before they learned her husband was a traitor. She was his; it was simple. Then he had learned it wasn’t that simple.
She’d walked away from him. Disappeared as though she had never existed, and for years he hadn’t known where she was or how to find her. Until she’d arrived in Somerset on the operation to locate the missiles.
And what the fuck had she done when that mission was over? Run. She had run from him again without looking back, without acknowledging a damned thing that had happened in that fucking desert.
And he had let her go.
He pulled into the hotel parking lot and spotted her immediately where she stood, propped against the trunk of the rented sedan.
Her arms were crossed over the light blazer. She wore another silky top beneath it. Those short little thin-strapped tops were making him crazy. Jeans hugged her legs; the top of them rose barely to her hip bones, where the top she wore beneath the dark blazer barely met the band. And she wore boots. It was one of the first things he noticed last year; she wore leather boots. He surely did like a woman who wore boots. And boots on Chaya looked damned good.
He pulled up beside her, then he reached over and unlatched the door before swinging it open.
“Get in. ” He didn’t ask. He’d gone too far to ask. He could feel the dominance, the possessiveness rising inside him, fighting against the restraint he was attempting to maintain.
She slid warily into the jeep and closed the door behind her before hastily locking her seat belt.
“Where are we going?” Her voice was soft, just a bit nervous, reminding him of that hidden hole and the darkness and the intimacy that had wrapped around them.
“Someplace where we can talk. ”
Where they could talk. Chaya stared out the windshield as Natches drove, his command of the vehicle confident, but obviously restrained. She could feel the fine thread of tension moving through him, the obvious control he was exerting over it.
And she knew what he was like when that control slipped. When the restrained man became the dominant lover. When he became a force she couldn’t deny.
“What do we need to talk about, Natches?” she finally asked as he turned onto the main road and headed in the opposite direction of the marina.
“We’re not going to the boat?” The Nauti Dreams had been his home last year.
“Winter’s coming on. ” His voice was as frosty as that season. “I moved out to the apartment over the garage last year anyway. Damned lake is getting too busy. ”
There was leashed anger in his voice, a temper she didn’t want to chance right now. She had heard of his dangerous temper, the cold, lashing rage he could project, but she had never experienced it herself.
Chaya couldn’t imagine where she had found the courage tonight to actually get into the jeep with him. At one time she was known to have nerves of steel. Now she could feel the wariness moving through her. Not fear, but something female, something that recognized Natches as perhaps more man than she could handle.
