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?”
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.
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.
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.
Dawg had never been jealous about another woman. Never possessive. That possessiveness had every cell in her body hypersensitive and screaming for his touch.
Her clit was swollen, the folds surrounding it heated and wet. She stared at him, mesmerized, watching as his hand went to the wide leather belt cinching his waist, seeing as though in slow motion the loosening of the leather, the way he left it hanging to jerk the snap of his jeans free.
“What are you doing?” The words rose unbidden. He was furious with her; she could see it.
Furious and aroused and so possessive she could see the emotions blazing in his eyes.
“You agreed.” His lips twisted, lost their flat, furious line, only to appear fuller, almost swollen, hungry.
The metamorphosis was hypnotizing. Watching anger fall beneath hunger, suspicion beneath possessiveness, and need overtaking his expression.
“You agreed,” he repeated as he toed his boots off and tossed them aside, “to sleep with me. To fuck with me.”
She flinched at the sound of his voice, not his words. It was rough, guttural, filled with lust. And it struck a chord inside her own sensuality that had her womb clenching violently.
“That’s my shirt,” he rasped when she continued to stare back at him. “Take it off!”
Crista shook her head slowly, watching as he advanced on her, as muscles rippled across his chest and shoulders, along his tight abs.
Below, pressing hard and tight against his jeans, his rampant erection demanded freedom.
She knew what Dawg was like when hunger beat him. She had seen him drunk and aroused but never sober and hungry. Not like this. Powerful, intent, focused only on the lust burning inside him.
Burning inside her.
Even before, the one night she had spent in his bed, she hadn’t known the powerful draw he could be. Tanned and hard, strong and dominant. The determination glowing in his eyes was like chains, holding her still, silent, as he advanced on her.
Her head tilted back as he came within inches of her, her gaze locked with his as his hand lifted, thumb and forefinger gripping the material between her breasts.
“Eight years it’s tormented me,” he murmured, his voice a dark velvet rasp over her senses.
“Dreaming of it. Aching for it to the point that some nights, I couldn’t even touch another woman because I ached for you to the point of pain.”
He couldn’t have ached more than she had. Couldn’t have known the brutality of remembering a touch that ruined her for any other.
“But you still took them,” she whispered hoarsely, trying to fight past the thickening eroticism building between them. “Alone. And with your cousins.”
“And you went to another man.” His lips drew back from his teeth in a hard snarl. “Two men.”
He moved closer, pressing her against the dresser behind her as she caught her breath at the savage lust rising between them now. “Did they hold you? Did my name scream in your head each time they touched you, as yours screamed in mine?”
“Don’t.” Show no weakness. She had learned that so many years ago. Show no weakness, never let him see the hunger or the need that ripped through her.
And yet she was showing exactly that.
Her hands gripped the edge of the dresser behind her as she strained away from him, knowing she couldn’t fight the hunger if he didn’t stop touching her.
And he wouldn’t stop. His hands gripped her waist, lifted her to the top of the dresser, then slid to her knees to draw them slowly apart.
“Dawg. Dawg, you don’t want to do this.” She was panting, certain she couldn’t breathe through this. He was stealing the oxygen between them, making it thick and heavy with lust.
“I don’t want to do it?” He drew the shirt up her waist, pulling it over her breasts, then forcing her arms up to tug it free of her body.
The cool air of the air conditioner washed over her nipples, sending a talon of sensation raking down her spine.
When he tossed the shirt aside, he didn’t release her wrists. They were bound in one large hand, stretched above her head, lifting her breasts high as he stared at her.
“I should have tied you to my bed that night,” he whispered hoarsely. “I would have kept you with me, rather than allowing you to escape.”