Deadly Sins (11 page)

She needed the man she had claimed when she had been no more than a teenager. And she needed vengeance for the sister stolen from her.

And Skye promised herself, she might not be able to hold on to the man, but she would have the vengeance.

Daylight was beginning to edge through the curtains now. She’d conquered another night. If she didn’t sleep in darkness, then she found the nightmares didn’t visit.

Skye walked through the house to the back bedroom she’d taken.

The house was far too large for one person, just as the one Logan Callahan owned was.

Four large upstairs bedrooms, plus what was more commonly called an in-law suite at the back of the first floor.

That room worked perfectly for Skye.

The small sitting room, bedroom, and roomy bathroom with its garden tub, full-sized shower, and wide vanity cabinet was the size of her apartment in D.C.

The upstairs rooms were nicer but, still, upstairs, and she’d found herself feeling isolated and too damned alone there.

Moving to the bed, she picked up her gown and robe before heading to the shower. Dawn was already edging across the mountains. It was her bedtime. She hadn’t been able to sleep at night for far too many years. She was too aware that often evil used the cover of night to strike.

By the time she had showered and moved back to the bedroom, the sun was peeking through the opened windows and spreading its warming rays across the bed.

The little bundle of fluff was sitting at Skye’s bedroom door, her low, almost-imperceptible whines breaking her heart.

For over a week she’d watched that baby scratch at Logan’s door and sat on her patio and listened to the dog whine.

Closing the curtains securely, Skye left the bedroom to check the house one last time.

The puppy followed her curiously. She whimpered at the front door as Skye checked it, then followed her up the stairs until she picked her up on the fifth step and just carried her with her. The puppy was too small to try to climb those stairs. Holding the pug close to her chest, Skye checked the windows and the balcony door that led to the balcony straight across from Logan Callahan’s.

There was no sign of him in the bedroom. No sign of him outside.

The puppy whined again.

Shaking her head, Skye moved back downstairs. Giving the puppy a drink of water, she set her on the paper and praised her when she did her business. Giving in to a moment of weakness Skye hoped she wouldn’t regret, she placed the pup in the bed next to her. The pug moved to the middle of the bed, the pillow, then to Skye’s side, and finally found a spot she seemed to be able to live with, if not comfortably, at least quietly.

“What is your story, little girl?” Skye asked as she ran her fingers down the apricot fur of the puppy’s back. “What makes you think you belong over there rather than here?”

Skye had never had a puppy before. It hadn’t been allowed after she’d gone to live with her foster parents, because her foster father had been allergic to both cats and dogs.

Before her foster family …

She stared up at the ceiling for long moments before turning her gaze back to the puppy as she whined once again.

“At least you’re welcome here.” Poor little baby. Skye knew how it felt to be an orphan, to beg to be one place while being forced to live in another.

The puppy gave a low, saddened little sigh before laying her wrinkled little face against her paws to stare back at Skye with the same confusion and sadness Skye felt herself.

Sliding her hand to the pug’s back, Skye petted her gently before staring up at that ceiling and wondering if sleep would come this morning or if, as she had the last week, she would simply toss, turn, and awaken herself time and again as her fingers found the aroused flesh between her thighs.

This time, she at least had something warm next to her that wouldn’t ask questions. That wouldn’t probe or curse when she didn’t get answers, if the nightmares did by chance invade the daylight.

At least this time, Skye might feel lonelier than ever, but she had company.

That thought had another tear sliding from her closed eyes. She still felt unwanted, though.

*   *   *

Logan couldn’t hear the pitiful whines coming from the patio anymore. The scratching against the glass was silenced, and the knowledge that while sleeping on the couch Logan could at least hear if she was in distress was no longer uppermost in his mind.

The little bit of fluff was a replica to one Logan had owned twenty years before, the last gift he’d received from his grandfather before his parents’ deaths.

Logan’s grandparents had given him the pup, a male that time, because he was about to drive them insane.

According to his grandmother, who bred the animals, the pup had cried since the first breath he took. He had been crying when Logan’s grandparents stepped into the house, glared at his father, then turned and looked at Logan with expressions that to this day he couldn’t decipher.

A mix between pain and rage in his grandfather’s gaze and the agony filling Logan’s grandmother’s.

His grandmother, Tandy Rafferty, had stepped slowly to him, the whimpering puppy in her extended hands. Large, wet brown eyes, creamy coat, and a black face. The minute Logan had accepted the tiny bundle he had stopped whining. His wrinkled face had stared up at him as though he was finally where he belonged.

Tandy had turned and left the house immediately without saying a word.

Saul had stared at Logan silently for long moments.

Crouching down, Saul had looked Logan in the eye and said, “Sometimes, there’s a gift waiting for you that you didn’t even know existed. That little baby has cried since the day he was born. Keeping it alive has been a pain in your gram’s rear. He’s yours now. He was meant for you. Take care of him, son.”

A year later he had died in Logan’s arms from a poisoned hamburger he’d found while Logan was at one of the socials the county threw through the summer.

He’d died as Logan and his cousins had stood outside the vet’s door banging and screaming at the man to help.

He’d been home.

He’d opened the door seconds after Jack, as Logan had called him, had taken his last, agonized breath.

Now there was another pup whose whimpering sounds of misery and distress hadn’t stopped since the day Logan had returned home to find her.

She couldn’t be more than ten weeks old. The same age as the pup Tandy Rafferty had brought Logan.

Grimacing, he stalked to the living room, jerked up his cell phone, and made a call.

“What do you want?” Ill-tempered, filled with anger, Saul Rafferty answered the phone on the first ring.

Logan paced back to the kitchen. “Why did you do this, you old bastard,” he snarled. “Come get it.”

Saul grunted. “That little bitch has squalled since it was born. Your grandmother wouldn’t rest until I gave it to you. Now you have it. Shut the fuck up and take care of it.”

“So you can kill another one?”

Silence filled the line for long moments before Saul Rafferty sighed with what seemed like weariness.

“Never turn your back on your food.” His voice dropped, and Logan was certain he only heard that hint of grief in Saul’s tone because he wanted to hear it.

“Fuck you!” Logan snapped.

“That’s the last litter out of My Gal, your gram’s favorite.” Saul ignored the curse. “She was diagnosed with canine cancer last week, only weeks after your gram was. I won’t take it back. She made me give it to you; now you have it.”

“I gave it away,” Logan said with distinct pleasure. “I don’t want a damned thing from either of you.”

Saul snorted. “You’ve given it away six times since I dropped it off and every time it’s been brought back. Stop being so fucking hardheaded. It’s from your gram.”

“And I don’t want a fucking thing from her, either. I’ll drop it off if it comes back here again.”

“Return the little bitch and I’ll slit her throat before your gram sees it. I won’t see her upset.”

“As though anything about me could upset either of you. Other than the fact that I live. That and your inability to steal every fucking thing my mother wanted me to have. I gave every goddamned bit of it away too, Saul. All of it.”

Saul was silent for long moments before he said, “That’s what I would have done, boy. It’s exactly what I would have done.”

The call disconnected.

Standing alone in the kitchen, Logan stared around the darkness, wishing the anger and the grief raging inside him were just because of Rafferty.

Logan just wished he could say it was because a grandmother he’d never known, one who had never wanted him, was dying.

He just wished the rage eating at him could be placed somewhere but where he knew it lay.

In his own aloneness. In the fact that there was something he wanted right now, more than any kid could possibly want a pup.

Because he couldn’t have the pup, or the woman.

As Logan stood in the darkened kitchen, his hands braced on the counter where Skye had just lain, her body spread out for him, willing and heated was the image that played behind his closed lids.

What the fuck was he doing? What the fuck was he doing to her as well as himself?

He’d stared into her eyes and seen something he’d never believed he would see, something he sure as hell hadn’t expected.

He’d seen a woman he finally wished he could share the future with.

A woman who wanted him more than anything at that moment.

Until he’d tasted the burning response of her need and turned her away, not fully satisfied. Aching. Dreams in her eyes.

Before he could stop himself he turned, his fist flying out and cracking into the wall behind him.

“Goddamn it!” The words burst from his lips as he punched through the drywall, fury mixed with a hunger he knew was going to destroy him erupting inside him.

His hands buried in his hair then, pushing the strands back from his face as he grimaced at the feel of slick warmth against his knuckles where he’d busted them open.

This had to be over soon. It had to be finished before he made himself crazy, because with God as his witness, he knew his self-control where she was concerned was eroding fast.

He was going to have her. And like she said, once would never be enough.

*   *   *

She’d been a fighter after all.

Pulling the black truck into the shelter of trees that bordered a shallow creek, he slid it into park before taking a deep breath.

He was sated, for the moment.

Physically, sexually sated.

The need to inflict pain, to feel the fear that raced through a delicate, weaker body, to see the blood flowing and feel the clench of rejection as he raped and tortured was now fulfilled.

For the moment.

Sliding his gloved hands from the steering wheel, he opened the door before stepping slowly from the truck.

His boss hadn’t made this trick with him.

He’d helped though, at first.

He grinned as he walked to the back of the truck.

Finally, after only a few hours, even his boss hadn’t had the stomach for the pain he could inflict.

Even that old bastard hadn’t been able to hold up against her screams, her agony, and her pleas. He’d had to walk away.

Strange, how men such as that couldn’t stomach the actions they condoned, even requested.

But after the son of a bitch had left, she’d screamed harder, begged until her voice broke and only croaks of agony were emitted.

It was over then.

Once they broke their voices, the only satisfaction left was to watch the blood flow. To run his tongue over each slice as he fucked the lust out of his system.

Finally, he just slit her throat.

She might have been breathing through the last few hours, but she hadn’t been there.

She’d stared sightlessly up at the ceiling of the basement, her gaze distant and even the terrified, pain-filled croaks hadn’t been there.

She’d lasted two days and it had been damned good. Better than he’d ever imagined she would be.

Sighing deeply at the thought, he lowered the tailgate, grabbled the end of the tarp, then pulled the body slowly from the bed.

He’d bleached her from head to toe, inside and out, under her fingernails, her toenails, and everything in-between.

There wasn’t even a speck of dust on her body. She was as clean as a surgical table with nothing to link her to anyone.

Carrying the broken body to the edge of the creek, he laid it down before gripping the tarp and quickly flipping her body from it.

She’d be found here quick enough.

Rolling the slick material up, he moved several yards from it, pulled one of the gloves from his latex-covered hand, and dropped it behind a tree.

Moving against a thorny bush, he laid a torn piece of denim on one of the thorns, careful to make it look as though the material had ripped from the jeans against the bush.

The pants were Logan Callahan’s, as was the glove. Both had his sweat on them, and nothing more.

He’d been careful to make certain he’d shaved his legs clean and wore specially coated long underwear beneath the pants to ensure no other DNA or material was left behind.

One down.

This would incriminate Callahan as nothing else could. Prison was in that boy’s future, he’d just made sure of it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The tension between Logan and Skye was growing thicker by the day, Logan admitted five days later, and they weren’t even coming in contact as often as they had before. They’d watched each other across the expanse of the side yard. From the upstairs master bedroom as she too checked the windows each night.

He almost grinned. He saw her more now, he thought, than at any other time since she had moved into the house. And he was growing hornier by the day, which he hadn’t thought possible. If he didn’t lose the hard-on torturing the hell out of him, then he was going to have a permanent indent from his zipper pressed into the thick shaft.

The night before, he’d walked naked into the living room and pretended she wasn’t staring from the living room across from him.