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“We’re not just waiting; we’re watching,” he finally stated, his expression hardening just enough to warn her that she was going to hear something she didn’t want to hear.
“What are you watching?”
“Your room.” Jed paced to the television, retrieved the remote, and hit the power button.
Watching the screen, she was surprised as he reached behind the unit, and a second later, the split view of the screen showed both her bedroom as well as her sitting room.
“Brogan had the cameras installed just after he started sleeping with Eve,” he revealed. “He was afraid his or Dawg’s enemies would attempt to strike out at her, or take her from him. There were cameras in her room, and GPS on her car and her cell phone.”
The cameras had been there since before Brogan and Eve moved from the inn? And they were still there?
“I was supposed to move them,” he told her. “And I was going to until I learned you were taking her room after she moved in with Brogan.”
“So you’ve watched me when I didn’t know you were?”
Controlling her? Maneuvering her?
Was he so much different than she had begun to believe he was?
“Only once or twice.” Broad shoulders shrugged as he watched her carefully. “The night you were packing to leave for New York.”
Holding the towel close to her breasts, she sat up, watching the view on the television, wondering what she should feel.
Was the need to deny that he would do such a thing to control her normal? Was she simply trying to make excuses for him?
“Why?” she whispered. “Why were you watching me?”
He rubbed at the back of his neck, frustration tightening his face. “I worried about you. I wanted to see you. Hell, Piper, you’ve made me fucking crazy since I’ve moved in here, as you’ve tempted me, then run from me. There were days I wasn’t certain I could keep from playing the caveman I knew you were waiting for me to reveal lurking inside me.”
Biting her lip, she glanced to the screen again.
“So why show me now?”
“Because I don’t want any secrets at all between us any longer,” he stated. “Not secrets like this.” Flipping his hand toward the screen, he moved to the dresser and pulled his clothes from the chair next to the bed as she watched, then began dressing angrily.
“I don’t want to take your fucking freedom,” he growled at her as he shoved the white-and-gray-striped shirt into the waistband of his jeans and quickly buckled his belt. “I don’t want to control what you think or feel or what you do.” Glaring at her, he sat down in the chair next to the bed and pulled on dark leather boots. “I just want you.”
He just wanted her?
“And now you’ve had me,” she said, feeling kind of hollow inside. “Did you change your mind about wanting to control me and my life?”
Had she made a mistake? The one mistake she had sworn she would never make—had she fallen in love with a man unable to resist the urge to completely take her life over?
The look he shot her was one of such scorn that anger immediately flared inside her.
What the hell did he expect her to think?
Stomping to the end of the bed, where he’d laid the clothes he’d collected from her room earlier, Piper pulled on her own jeans, soft cotton tank camisole, socks, and sneakers.
“Maybe I should just return to my room.” She felt a bit hollow inside now, as though some part of her had just been cruelly ripped from her chest.
He wasn’t saying he loved her. He wasn’t mentioning caring for her. There was no hint of commitment or anything other than the fact that he had been watching her and she had driven him crazy.
“What the hell do you want from me?” she asked as she finished dressing and turned back to him, aching inside with the knowledge that she could be losing what she hadn’t even known she’d so desperately needed.
“I want you to stop being frightened of me, to start with,” he demanded.
“Then don’t pull this crap on me.” Turning on him fully, her arms propped on her hips, Piper confronted him as she had never confronted her brother. “For God’s sake, Jed, I never knew wh
