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“He’s suspicious. ” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t want him to know I broke my promise to him, Brogan. Until I decide what’s more important, how my brother feels or what you want from me, then I can’t keep doing this. ”
Crossing his arms over his chest, he frowned down at her. “Have you asked me what I want from you, Eve?” Hell, no, she hadn’t. But she didn’t have a problem making decisions about what he wanted from her without his input, it seemed.
“I’m not ready to know,” she admitted, and that only pissed him off further. “But I do know that Dawg has never asked me or my sisters and mother for anything. Not a damned thing, Brogan, for taking us in and securing our lives and our futures. Everything we have and everything we are, we owe to him. And all he’s ever asked is that I stay away from you until you can prove you’re not the man his contacts say you are. ”
There, it was all out in the open now.
His jaw clenched in anger as he glared back at her, wondering whether she believed the rumors or believed in herself and her instincts.
“And what kind of man do his contacts report I am?” he asked carefully.
“That you’ve betrayed your country,” she whispered, her expression so filled with hunger, need, and pain that she tempted him to paddle her ass and show her what she could believe in.
“Do you think I betrayed my country?”
It wouldn’t matter about the reports or what she believed. He was going to have her. Tonight had proven to him that without his protection right now, certain people would consider her fair game simply because it was known he was interested. Donny and Sandi had made the first strike, but Brogan knew his interest in her was well known. If the men he was searching for suspected he was a government agent, then it could be much worse.
Even more important, he had to get this operation behind them so he could find the time and the space he needed to figure out what she was to him as well.
“It doesn’t matter what I think, Brogan,” she whispered. “It’s what Dawg thinks he knows. ”
“And you always obey your brother?” He knew he wasn’t being fair to her, but by God, she was his. She was going to have to make a choice, and she was going to have to make it soon.
“It’s not that simple. ”
“I’m making it that simple,” he growled as she turned and jerked the bedroom door open.
“That doesn’t mean I’ll follow along,” she retorted, the emerald of her eyes lighting with an inner flame that only made his dick harder. Only made him want her beneath him more.
He wasn’t going to argue this with her five minutes after her brother had left. No doubt Dawg had already suspected he was there, and he’d said just what he’d known he needed to. His object was to keep Eve from sleeping with Brogan, and tonight he’d achieved his objective.
“We’ll discuss this. Soon,” he warned her, stomping to the patio door.
Eve stared up at him, seeing the promise in his eyes and almost shivering at the latent dominance and pure demand in his look.
Her lips parted to argue, to inform him that they’d discuss it when she was ready, when a sudden, horrified scream pierced the house.
The layout of the house put the kitchen directly across from her and Brogan, on the other side of the house. There were two halls leading from the kitchen to each wing. The shortest distance to the kitchen was the narrow hall just outside Brogan’s room that opened directly into the kitchen.
Before the scream was silenced, she and Brogan both were running.
He made damned sure she didn’t get ahead of him as they turned into the hall, knowing there would be no room for her to do so once they reached the narrow passageway, she noticed.
They had no more turned into the hall than another scream shattered the silence of the night, and the sounds of her sisters yelling through the house could be heard.
Terror pierced Eve’s mind as they shot into the kitchen and raced for the open back door. She was terrified of what they would find, knowing her mother was not a woman who frightened easily.
As they pushed out the door to the back porch, Eve came to a hard, sudden stop.
Her eyes widened, horror filling her as she felt her stomach pitch at the sight.
The back part of the wooden porch that surrounded the house was covered in blood, entrails, and body parts of the dozen or more fat rabbits her mother bred and used for the dinner table.
As with the chickens in the chicken house that provided eggs and meat, the turkeys and occasional duck her mother raised, and the deer she convinced Dawg to take her hunting for each year, Mercedes Mackay was known for her fresh meats, like venison during holidays and special occasions.
The rabbits represented five years’ work with only a few of the plump animals actually making it to the dinner table.
Mercedes and Eve had raised the four babies she’d bought, and from there began breeding them. Now they were gone in the most horrific manner that Eve could have imagined.
