#2 Dangerous Games (2 page)

MORGANNA AT TWENTY-ONE

Being alone sucked. Morganna stared around the living room of the house she had once shared with her parents and her brother. Her .parents were dead, her brother was gone more often than he was home, and one day he wouldn't be here at all.

Her best friend, Raven, spent most of her evenings and nights studying the graphic design she had grown so adept at, and Morganna was stuck in an office job she hated.

And she was alone. Because she didn't have the common sense to let go of a dream and a man who
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didn't want her.

She walked through the living room, moving to the shelf of pictures she kept and the memories they brought.

Clint was in most of them. With her, her brother, and her parents. Handsome. Tough. Hard. Clint had always been harder than he should have been, tougher than anyone else around him. And he had ruined her heart for any other man.

But she was still alone.

Tucked between two of the pictures were the pamphlets she had kept from the Academy. The Law Enforcement Academy was accepting applicants.

She had meant to discuss it with Reno when he was home the week before, but the stay had been a brief one, and he had been exhausted. He had slept the two days he had been home, only to have to leave again.

She laid her head against the shelf and closed her eyes. He would worry if he knew anyway. And Clint, jerk that he was, would do everything to stop her. And he could stop her. He had connections in Atlanta, connections she couldn't afford to let him use. As long as no one knew she was Reno Chavez's sister, then there wasn't a chance of anyone saying anything to Clint. And what were the chances that the guys at the Academy would really care to call Reno and let him know jack? Especially if his name wasn't on her list of contacts.

She tapped her nail against the papers.

She was bored and she was alone. She wanted more than a secretarial job going nowhere and a silent house every night. Like Reno, she wanted to make a difference. She wanted more than to keep dreaming of something that didn't exist.

She sighed wearily. Restlessly. She was tired of just being Reno's sister. Or Clint McIntyre's responsibility when Reno wasn't around. She was tired of being put on a shelf and taken down to perform when they decided to visit.

She was strong enough to be who and what she wanted to be. And she didn't want to wait for Clint any longer.

She pulled the papers from the shelf, shoved them in her purse, and grabbed her car keys. She wasn't waiting any longer.

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FIVE YEARS LATER

CLINT STOOD IN THE SHADOWS of one of his favorite clubs, his eyes narrowed on the dance floor. He liked Diva's for a variety of reasons. The music was a mix of tracks. A little hard rock, a little Goth, a little pure fun. The women were the same mix, but he had found they all went for one thing in particular. The darker edge of sex. The dominance games, the harder, powerful sensations to be found with a man willing to push their limits. He hadn't expected to find Morganna here.

The music playing now, he imagined, was meant to be pure fun. It should have been causing a riot.

A mix of fury, disbelief, and wild hunger filled him as he watched the witchy little woman on the dance floor strut some daring stuff. She had his body tense, his cock engorged. A man only thought about one thing when he watched a woman dance like that, and it wasn't how concerned he should be with her safety. A man thought about sex when he watched her, and when he watched her dancing like a wanton, the need for sex overrode all else.

The song was a fast-paced rock version of a messed-up line dance, he guessed. The dance floor was packed with women and a few men, laughingly following the singer's direction. Hell if he had ever heard of the guy. Casper? Clint shook his head in disgust. Diva's had an interesting mix of music some nights.

The point being to get the women on the dance floor. On display.

This music wasn't his thing, but Morganna was.

Unfortunately.

There she was, dressed in a little hip-hugger girls'-school skirt that barely covered her curvy little ass.

Her ass nothing, the top of the skirt barely kept her decent. He swore if it dipped just a breath, then there would be no secrets left to bare between those pretty, shapely thighs.

The white tank top she wore might at first thought have been considered demure. On the rack it might have been decent. On Morganna, it was a crime. It barely reached her belly button, flashing an indecent amount of skin, not to mention that damned gold belly ring he didn't know she had. When the hell had she had her belly button pierced? Raven hadn't said anything about that, and his sister was usually a font of information where Morganna was concerned.

The top was thin; thankfully, it looked like she might be wearing a bra. He couldn't be sure from this distance. She wore a pair of black-and-white girl's shoes on her dainty feet but a pair of over-the-knee white stockings on her sexy legs. Those stockings were going to be the death of him. He could see her stretched out on his bed, her hands tied to the headboard with the silky hose while he stretched between her thighs and drove her crazy with his mouth. The image almost had him panting in anticipation. Oh yeah, he knew exactly how to use those stockings.

Long, long, nut-brown hair rippled down her back as she tilted her hips forward, placed one dainty foot in front of her, and shook her ass in a move that had a cold sweat popping up on his brow. His dick was ecstatic. If she could dance like that, then those sweet hips moving, rotating, thrusting, would play hell on a man's sanity in the bed.

And to top the entire outfit off was a thin black leather collar buckled around her neck.

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Sweet God have mercy, Clint prayed silently as he watched her, his eyes narrowed, his muscles tense.

And the truly frightening part was that she was actually having fun. He could see it in her face, in her exotically tilted laughing gray eyes. In the way she moved.

If she put half as much effort into fucking a man as she did into driving them crazy on that dance floor, then Clint was in trouble. Deep/deep doo-doo, as his dad once used to say.

As the song came to an end, she shook her head, causing that long skein of hair to ripple and sway again as the leather-clad man beside her lifted her in his arms and swung her around with a laugh.

If his hand had slipped down so much as a thought farther than it had toward her shapely ass, then he would have gone on the endangered-species list. Because Clint knew he would have tried to kill him.

She patted the man's shoulder, making a laughing comment as she turned away and headed back to the crowded table she had been sitting at. The chairs were taken, but rather than taking the offer one of the men made as he patted his knee, her hip bumped at one of the women, who moved over a few scant inches on her own, allowing Morganna to perch on the edge.

She crossed her legs as she leaned forward, listening to something the heavily Goth-dressed woman beside her was relating with an animated wave of her hands.

Clint wiped the sweat from his brow and took a deep, steadying breath. He felt as though he had run a marathon. His heart was pounding in his chest, blood pooling between his thighs, torturing his cock. And it was all Morganna's fault.

He glared back at her, not even bothering to rein in the crash of male irritation the thought brought. What the hell was she doing here? The women who came to Diva's knew the score, knew what they wanted, but even more, they knew what the men wanted. Sex. Wild, often extreme, sometimes not so sober, sex.

He shifted his shoulders, flexing the muscles in an effort to relax, at least marginally, to find the strength to pull his eyes from the sight of the leather-clad man who had embraced her moments ago, bending close to her, his hand lying intimately on her shoulder.

Clint had been standing there for over an hour, hiding in the dark corner, watching her, trying to watch those around her.

He had come there to find a woman to help relieve the dark restlessness growing in his gut since he had been home. And he had found the woman. Despite the objections his conscience threw out at him and against all common sense, he was going to take her.

From all appearances she knew the crowd she was running with well, which meant she had progressed past fairy tales and daydreams and into reality. He could fuck her and walk away, just as he had with every other woman he had taken to his bed. There would be no tears, no recriminations, no dreams of happily ever after.

Did she have a lover? He watched the men who seemed to flock around her like wolves. She wore a collar around her neck with no adornments, no leash. It meant here, within Diva's, she was unclaimed.

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No other Dom held her loyalty and no Dom could be penalized with the loss of membership by disappearing with her.

Clint watched the men around her. That didn't mean she didn't have a lover. Not that he cared at the moment. Not that he would care later.

She didn't seem to pay attention to one man more than the other, and as she ordered a drink from the waitress, Clint could have sworn he caught a glimpse of weariness in Morganna's face.

He grimaced at his overactive imagination. Morganna had been a social butterfly even before she came of age. She was one of those women perfectly at home in the middle of a crowd, finding her sense of purpose in the number of so-called friends she could gather around her at any one time. It shouldn't have surprised him that she had stepped into this lifestyle. The fact that it did caused a moment's worry.

It was driving him crazy, watching the men who were drawn to her like flies to honey, their hands touching her bare shoulder, her. satiny arm, trying to feel that ribbon of silk she called her hair.

For eight years he had fought to stay away from her, to keep from sinking into that sweet, curvy body and destroying both of them. The two years before she turned eighteen didn't count. Seeing her as a woman and reacting to her as a woman, as he had just after she turned eighteen, were two different things.

He had convinced himself she was innocent, too soft for his sexuality, too gentle for a dead-end relationship. Because Clint had learned years ago, at the brutality of his father's fists and his mother's faithlessness, that happy ever afters just didn't exist.

And he didn't want to hurt Morganna. He had no desire to break her tender heart or to see her soft gray eyes fill with tears. But if she was here, enmeshed in the seedy sexuality of the club scene, then she surely knew the score.

He could have her. Just once. Maybe twice. And he could walk away without risking his soul.

He set his jaw in determination as he straightened from the wall and began moving toward her. The crowd parted before him. In a room of male Dom wannabes, Clint knew he stood out in the crowd. He wasn't a wannabe. He was strong enough to take what he wanted and make it stick. The crowd here knew him, understood him.

He shrugged away the feminine hands that reached out as he passed by them. Women he had known in the past or those who had wanted a ride. He knew them, too. They craved the adventure, the excitement, the dark, carnal excesses that could only be found with a certain type man. He had a reputation for being just such a man. As Morganna was soon to find out.

MORGANNA STILLED HER IMPATIENCE, THE instinctive

irritation at having so many people around her, so many men trying to touch. You'd think they'd never touched a woman before. Sweaty hands running over her hair, her arm, and even worse were the ones who thought they could start at her knee and she would never notice their hands attempting to slide to her
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thigh and beyond.

Twits. She gripped the wrist of yet another, glancing up at him as she attempted a polite smile.

"I just washed," she informed him with what she hoped was a decent facsimile of a smile.

A husky chuckle sounded in her ear before the bozo gripped the curve of her shoulder and arm and squeezed intimately. As though she knew him.

Thankfully, the waitress chose that moment to arrive with their drinks, forcing him to move.

Twit.

Morganna took the soda she had ordered, sipping at it gratefully as the band shot into a dark, primal number that sent the energy level in the room pulsing. Lowering her glass but keeping it in her hand, she stared around casually, paying particular attention to the tables around them.

She couldn't see her mark. She had glimpsed him earlier as he made his way across the room, a short Latino in black leather, his hand casually gripping a short dog chain. She knew what he was looking for.

A woman who would allow him to leash her, to dominate her. He was also suspected to be one of the men involved in the drugging and kidnapping of six women who had turned up dead in the area. The new date rape drug was rumored to be under strict control until the suppliers could determine its worth on the streets. It was making them a fortune in the pornographic rape videos they were making; that was a certainty.

Morganna suspected this man was the supplier whom the two men Joe Merino and his teams had arrested last week had refused to name. Adonis Santos had also been arrested last week when Morganna witnessed him tapping the powdered drug into a young woman's drink as two of his friends kept her occupied. The arrests of the three men had

been a major .break in the case Morganna had been assigned to in her first assignment with the Atlanta division of the DEA.

"Hey, Morg, we need to hit this song." Jenna Lancaster, a secretary, from the office Morganna worked at, bounded from her seat when another teeth-jarring set began.