Nauti Nights (21 page)

order something to eat.”

“Shove it,” she snapped.

“Don’t tempt me, sugar girl.” Tension fairly snapped through him, he was so damned on edge, so horny

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and pissed off that he didn’t know if he could trust himself to keep his hands off her or not. “Because

shoving it is something I could do real easy right now.”

He watched her eyes widen in shock and surprise before the glitter of anger increased.

“You are not intimidating me, Dawg,” she retorted.

And she looked serious.

Dawg grinned. A slow, easy curve of his lips as he let his hands move to his belt, jerking the slack through his belt loops and pulling at the buckle. Her eyes widened. Her lips parted. Dawg watched as her gaze

jerked to Natches before she grabbed the bags and ran like a rabbit that just caught sight of the wicked wolf.

Natches was chuckling as she sprinted up the curving stairs, never pausing to look back.

“Man, she should have gotten a clue with the smile,” Natches snorted as he turned back, his gaze smug as Dawg readjusted his belt.

Amusement lingered in Natches’s expression, but there was regret lurking in his eyes.

Dawg knew where the regret stemmed from. He wouldn’t be sharing in this relationship between Crista

and Dawg. As fiery, as problematic and irritating as it was shaping up to be, he would be on the outside looking in. And that was a helluva place to be.

Dawg shook his head. “What did you see after we left?”

Natches pushed his fingers through his shoulder length, straight black hair as a grimace contorted his

rough hewn features.

“I saw Johnny. He was watching you and Crista like a beady-eyed little snake from the corner as you

drove off. You could see his brain just calculating ways to use this. The little twit. Other than that, all I saw were the customers from the diner. There were no unknowns.”

No unknowns. No one unfamiliar.

“Where could they have hidden?” Dawg wondered curiously, mentally laying out the area in his head.

“Too many places.” Natches shrugged, mirroring his own thoughts. “Sheriff Mayes is having the Rodeo

impounded, though. He’s investigating the crime.”

Dawg grimaced.

“Uh-huh,” his cousin breathed out sharply. “My opinion of it as well.”

Dawg tightened his lips as he strode over to the fridge and jerked out two bottles of beer. After handing one to Natches, he twisted the cap off his own and took a long, fortifying drink.

“This is turning into a fucking mess,” he bit out. “How the hell did she manage to get herself mixed up in this?”

Natches twisted the cap off his own beer as he shook his head and paced over to the glass sliding doors.

“That’s not all I found out.” Natches turned back to him slowly, his gaze brooding, hooded. “When Crista left here eight years ago, she didn’t just leave with Mark Lessing. Following them was Tyrell Grayson.

Both men were once a part of Alex’s spec op team, though they were discharged a month or so before for

medical reasons. They all moved into Lessing’s apartment on her arrival there, and she lived with them

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the whole time she was there. Rumor has it, both men were her lovers.”

TWELVE

Dawg froze at that information. He remembered Tyrell Grayson, though he had never met Mark Lessing.

Tyrell had been a medic in the small Special Forces team Alex fought with at one time. Leanly muscled,

blond-haired, and charming as hell.

“She had two lovers,” he said quietly.

“That’s the rumor.” Natches shrugged. “I called a friend of mine who lived in Virginia Beach, not too far from where she lived with the two men. He did a little poking around yesterday. Lessing comes from

money, and his position in his father’s law firm obviously pays well. The penthouse apartment he still

owns is supposed to be sweet. Lots of windows and space with a view of the beach. Lessing and Grayson

still share the apartment, but a few of the neighbors say she broke their hearts when she left. My contact there believes differently. He talked to Lessing, posing as a potential employer who had heard about

Crista’s references and her lack of a job. Both men sang her praises and seemed fairly upbeat about her

move.”

She had two lovers. Two men. Ex–Special Forces. Hard men. And yet she had run from him and the fear

that he wanted to share her with his cousins?

It didn’t make sense.

“Any rumors of drugs or illegal activities?” Dawg asked.

“She’s clean as a whistle there.” Natches shook his head.

“But she could have made the right contacts to learn about the missiles and possible movements, as well

as those needed to sell them.” Dawg didn’t want to believe that. He could feel everything inside him

rejecting the idea that Crista could have possibly been involved in that.

“Initial reports say no.” Natches shrugged. “Lessing and Grayson didn’t associate with the military or

former friends. But my contact is checking into it further.”

Dawg felt his jaw tightening with fury.

“See what else you can find out,” he ordered harshly. “And while you’re at it, find out why she left town to begin with. Somehow, I doubt it had anything to do with avoiding a relationship with me.”

Why should it have? She hadn’t worried about moving in with two other men. Why run from him?

“What about the explosive device in that Rodeo, Dawg?” Natches said then. “We have the buyers and

sellers, and not one of them has mentioned her name. Who struck at her, and why?”

Dawg shook his head. That question was still eating away at his brain.

“Whoever made away with the money set her up as well as the buyers and sellers for the missiles.

Whoever the woman was, she knew we’d be there. She knew how to get Crista there. Why would she

want to kill her now? She obviously set Crista up. Why wait till now to get rid of her?”

“Are we certain we got all the players?” Natches asked. “The buyers could have had a man on the outside.

That’s what I would have done.”

“Why try to kill her without trying to find the money first?” Dawg asked. “Better yet, what’s the point in killing her until they get the money?”

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Natches stared back at Dawg silently, his expression still, calm.

“I’ll watch things from the Wet Dreams,” he finally said softly, referring to his own houseboat, the Nauti Wet Dreams. “The Rodeo, I think, was more of a warning. Otherwise, it would have gone up with the first

turn of the key. Someone wants the money, and they’re warning her that they’re not letting it go. We need to go to Cranston, pull him in on this. Show her picture to the players and see how they react.”

“I don’t trust Cranston that far,” Dawg muttered.

“You don’t trust anyone that far, but Cranston has a good grasp of how things work. We don’t tell him

Crista was at the warehouse. We explain about the Rodeo, our suspicions that Crista might resemble the

money-girl, and go from there.”

“And if they identify Crista?” Dawg asked dangerously. “Cranston could decide to go with what he can

arrest and forget the rest.”

Natches shook his head. “He’s too good for that, Dawg. He’ll want to use it, and we can use the team this way. Let’s see how it works. What do we have to lose? We’re her alibi, remember? Who can fight it?”

The shower shut off upstairs. Dawg turned his head and gave the stairs a long, hard look.

“Talk to Cranston,” he said. “We’ll see where it goes.”

He was walking a damned tightrope, and he knew it. If the players arrested at the warehouse the other

night identified Crista as their go-between, then all the suspicion would fall on Crista.

“Cranston’s smarter than to believe it would be this easy,” Natches assured him as he headed for the door.

“I’ll head in first thing in the morning to talk to him. I’ll flash the pictures to our boys in the cells and see what we get. We could get lucky, and they won’t recognize her.”

Dawg grunted at that. “Don’t bet on it.”

He let Natches out of the houseboat and locked the door behind him before resetting the alarms and

heading for the stairs.

Crista was up there. Showered, soft, and warm. And he hoped ready to give him the answers he needed.

Because the thought of her living with one man had rage eating into his soul. Surprisingly, the thought of her living with two men, sharing in a relationship that his women had always shared with him and his

cousins, was like an acid to his soul.

Because Dawg couldn’t imagine sharing her, not eight years ago and definitely not now.

He headed to the stairs, moving up them with slow anticipation as his body tightened with the thought of her wearing the clothes he had bought her, the lacy panties he had picked out or the brief pajamas he had imagined seeing her in. The image was tightening through him with the same force as the knowledge of

her lovers.

Her lovers.

God help him if that was what she needed now. Once, the thought of sharing her with his cousins would

have had his cock pounding in glee. Now, he had to shake back the jealousy, fight to hold back his outrage that she would leave him for not just one man but two.

She had taken from others what she had refused to consider taking from him? He had always thought she

had run because of his reputation, because of her fear of the ménages. To find out she had run straight into another one had his temper riding a thin, sharp line.

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When he entered the upper-level bedroom, he came to a hard stop.

She was sitting on the bed, wearing one of his large shirts rather than her new pj’s, slowly spreading some kind of lotion over her legs, which looked silky, rounded, and too damned tempting to believe.

For a moment, memory flashed through his head. Those silky legs spread, his mouth buried between

them. His senses erupted with the remembered taste of silky, sweet feminine cream and hot, rich, satiny

flesh. He could remember being as drunk on her as he was on the whiskey, as her fingers clenched in his

hair and she whispered. His teeth clenched. She was a vocal lover. Begging, pleading, urging him on.

She set aside the lotion, her hands gripping the shirt where it covered her abdomen and glancing down at it as she rose nervously to her feet.

Oh, baby, it would pay for you to be nervous, he thought with a mix of lust and anger. Because there were so many wild, wicked things he intended to do with that hot little body.

“You have lousy taste in pajamas.” She finally glared up at him. “There’s not enough material to them to cover a postage stamp, let alone me.”

He glanced over at the chair where some of the articles lay. The snug boy short panties and camisole tops would have covered more flesh than he liked, actually.

It wasn’t the pajamas he wanted to discuss, though.

“Tell me something, Crista.” He began unbuttoning his shirt. “When did you intend to tell me that you

didn’t have just one lover but two? Lessing and his friend Ty Grayson?”

Her gaze flickered, her eyes narrowing back at him as the buttons released from his shirt and his flesh

sensitized with the need to touch her.

Then, a slender brow arched tauntingly. “Why would I tell you anything, Dawg? It was none of your

business. And that’s beside the fact that they weren’t my lovers. I simply lived with them.”

“You slept with them,” he snarled. “You admitted to sleeping with Lessing.”

She shrugged. “I slept with them occasionally.”

“Both of them?”

Her arms crossed over her breasts then. “Both of them,” she agreed.

“At the same fucking time?”

Her lips thinned, irritation sparkling in her eyes then. “At the same time.”

Crista had never considered herself to be the type of woman who walked heedlessly into danger, but she

admitted to herself that right now, that was exactly what she was doing.

She would have thought that suspecting she had two lovers would have pleased him. She had expected

him to suggest blackmailing her to sleep with Natches as well. Instead, he seemed angry.

“You ran away from me, by your own words, because I said I wanted to share you with Rowdy and

Natches, yet you leave my bed and move in with two other men?” Incredulity filled his voice, causing it to rise as she stared back at him in surprise.

“What I did after I left you is none of your business.” She stepped back as he threw his shirt to the side of the room.

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He looked enraged. Dark brows were lowered heavily over brilliant, light green eyes that seemed to glow

in his dark face. His lips were a flat, thin line, his shoulders bunched with tension.

He wasn’t frightening; he was sexy. He should have been frightening. Instead, she could feel a sense of

overwhelming eroticism, anticipation. She should have been enraged, at least as angry as he was. But she was seeing so much emotion in his face, something besides the mocking amusement or cynical awareness

he normally displayed.

He was—jealous.

Dawg, jealous?

She felt her breasts become more sensitive, her nipples beading impossibly harder against the material of the T-shirt that she wore, and it made no sense. He had no reason to be jealous; she didn’t want him to be jealous. But he was.