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“No more games.” Ragged, torn, he whispered the words against her ear as he let his head lower further against her. “No more games, baby. I love you. I love you clear to my soul and beyond, Sheila. Oh God, baby.” His hands stroked over her, and he found himself terrified that feeling her alive and breathing against him was only a dream. “Sweet, sweet Sheila. How I love you.”
“What? Casey. What?” She forced him to pull back, to lift his head as she stared back at him blinking, her gaze confused, filled with disbelief. “Me?” She shook her head, clearly confused. “But why?”
He touched her face, desperate to feel her warmth, to feel her alive. “Why do I love you?” he laughed raggedly, cherishing her tears, her confusion, even her disbelief. Cherishing her and the fact that he could hold her, that she was in his arms where he intended to keep her. Safe, as he intended to ensure she stayed. “Because you make me warm in a place where I think I’ve been cold all my life, Sheila. Because the first day I saw you, I began to live. God help me, Sheila, because you’re my fucking life and I think I died listening to that bastard try to kill you.”
He framed her face with one hand, his thumb brushing over her tear-drenched lips as they parted in shock—and was that hope in her gaze?
“You love me?” Her hand gripped his wrist. “You love me?”
“With everything in my soul.”
Her lips trembled. The scratches on her face still seeped blood, tears still filled her eyes, and she was the most beautiful thing in the world to him.
“I’ve always loved you,” she whispered. “I thought I’d never see you again, Casey,” she suddenly sobbed. “I thought I’d never get to tell you I love you. That I didn’t understand, until I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, that the only reason was because you loved me.” Her breathing hitched as his lips touched her. “I wanted to tell you, and then there was glass exploding around me.”
He laid his finger against her lips. The horror of hearing that gunshot would live in his nightmares the rest of his life.
“I have you,” he swore. “I have you, Sheila, and I’ll never let you go. That son of a bitch will never get the chance to touch you again.”
Because Casey was determined to kill him.
His lips touched hers. Tears, a hint of blood, and the overwhelming knowledge of love filled his senses as her lips parted for him, her hands moving to his neck, his hair, as her lips met his.
“I love you,” he swore again before he kissed her deeply, licked her, tasted her. He let the knowledge that she was alive seep inside him. Let the truth of it wrap around him.
Because Casey knew he couldn’t have survived otherwise.
chapter 13
one week later
ross mason was led from his hotel room in Corpus Christi in handcuffs.
Once, years before, he might have been a handsome man, the man Sheila Rutledge had believed she loved, though it was rather doubtful.
A weak chin, plain brown eyes, shaggy hair, and a plump midsection—it was hard to imagine he had ever drawn the gaze of a woman as lovely as Miss Rutledge.
Though, perhaps her once-deep shyness and the loss of her mother had caused her to look beyond the surface to that weakness beneath and unconsciously believe he would be the one who would not leave her, would not betray her.
That had nothing to do with looks. Betrayal came in all shapes, sizes, races, and creeds. Betrayal came when one least expected it, when one could be destroyed by it the most.
It was a lesson that only the strong survived.
Miss Rutledge had survived that lesson and lived to find a man who might or might not know honor. Who seemed to understand it, live by it.
There was no doubt now Nick Casey wasn’t Beauregard Fredrico.
Beau knew nothing of trust, honor, or true love. He knew nothing of holding a woman tight or of risking his own life to save hers, as Nick Casey had done.
No, Nick was not Beau.
The call had not been made before Ross Mason had been revealed as the attempted murderer of the young and lovely Miss Rutledge. There had been no reinforcements called out, no waiting army of loyal men willing to give their lives for the one their fathers had pledged to defend. And those sons would readily pick up arms now and travel across the seas if it meant the heir to the past would return and retake the legacy that had been meant to be his.
The past was truly dead and gone, though. There was no way to convince those men that there was no way to resurrect that past, that glory, or that wealth.
Not that the Fredricos had understood the business anyway.
Giovanni Fredrico, once known as Gio the Giant, hadn’t ruled the families as he should have. There had been no blood shed for infractions, just as the whores had not been punished when they fell in love and defected, and the drug dealers had not been murdered, painfully, when they stole the product that was the lifeblood of the organization that had once ruled with a steel fist.
