AllFreeNovel
Share Us
To just doingthingsto her. With her.
To devouring her. Just having her to himself for hours and hours and hours and devouring her.
Dusty. Devouring Dusty.Doing things to Dusty. ToDusty.
That was just crazy.
A man just didn’t think of his sister’s bestest friend like that. He just didn’t.
He hadneverthought about Dusty like this before. He’d have punched any other guy in the world for having that exact thought about her. But as she stared up at him, it struck him that that was exactly what Ben wanted to do to her now.Right now.
Just take her back to his lair and love her until that sadness in her eyes disappeared forever.
6
US Marshal Sean Suttonwas a little more than irritable now. Fred Brown had called him when Sean was less than a mile away from Fred’s house. Told him they couldn’t meet today, after all. That LaDonna and the girls were home. Fred never wanted to meet with Sean when the four girls were around.
Too much of a chance they could overhear. Learn the family’ssecrets.
Never mind that Sean had driven throughtwo statesto get there and it was getting late.
Just so Fred could avoid telling the girls the truth again. Sean had been intending to give the man an update on where the Browns stood in the program and to share what he had learned recently. Discuss possibilities with Fred on what it could mean for his family.
Sean had never agreed with Fred and LaDonna’s decision not to tell their four daughters where they had come from. Why they moved so frequently. Why they had to be so careful all the time.
What they had lost.
Telling a mother she couldn’t openly grieve her lost children was abhorrent to Sean. He adored his three sons and saw them as often as he could. He traveled extensively as a witness inspector, of course, but when he could be with his boys, he was. Never would he let anything happen to his sons.
Nor would he keep these kinds of secrets from them. At least not when they were adults. Fred and LaDonna’s girls were adults now. The youngest had turned nineteen four months ago. They should have thechoiceabout how they lived their lives. Who theywere.
Fred had taken that from them. Sean understood theoretically that it was for their safety, but he did not agree with the way Fred had handled raising his daughters. Not one bit. Maybe it had been grief causing the older man to tighten his hold on the four girls, keeping them close and protected. Isolated.
Tooisolated, even for necessity.
It was remarkable the girls had turned out as well-adjusted as they had. They were all as beautiful as their mother. Kind, intelligent, compassionate, beautiful girls. A little naive and incredibly sheltered, of course. But they were wonderful young women.
Sean would be proud to call any one of them his daughter. Yet Fred seemed so much more concerned with controlling them, that he was missing who they had become.
Or what theyneedednow.
Sean’s job was to keep the Browns safe. That wasit.Not to tell Fred Brown how to raise his four daughters—or deal with them now. To meet with them the required once per year, to address any problems and make certain the Browns were following protocol. Some in the program didn’t follow the rules. They either had to be relocated, or were removed from the program when it became a problem.
No one who followed protocol had ever been killed. It was those whodidn’tfollow the rules, or who went back, that faced trouble.
Fred and LaDonna had moved six times now. Not out of necessity, in Sean’s opinion. But out of paranoia. Maybe even restlessness.
Many in the program hated it. Hated cutting off the ties to their past, hated being stuck in careers they might not have actually chosen for themselves. Hated the secrecy and the fear. Sean made a point of checking on the Browns three or four times a year. Even if just a telephone call.
For LaDonna mostly.
He recognized the fear in that woman’s beautiful eyes every time he saw her. The pain. The hurt. The growing fears as her daughters prepared for the next stage in their lives.
It had surprised Sean that their eldest daughter hadn’t left the nest already. Dylan and Fred, especially, clashed and butted heads. Dylan was twenty-two, almost twenty-three, now. Well old enough to be out on her own.
Hell, she was old enough to be married with a couple of children now, too. Sometimes, that didn’t seem possible.
Sean suspected she’d stayed for her mother, for her sisters. Dylan seemed to think it was her job to take care of all of them. Sometimes, LaDonna just couldn’t handle the day-to-day oflife. Dylan would step in—take care of her family, then. Fred had practically brainwashed those girls into thinking they had to stay close to one another. No matter what.
