Rapture's Edge

And with that, the missing puzzle piece clicked into place.

“He told you it was me,” D said, incredulous. “That son of a bitch told you I killed your father, didn’t he?”

Eliana’s dark eyes flared hot, and two spots of pink appeared high on her cheeks. She sucked in a breath and then shouted, “No one had to tell me anything because I saw it with my own eyes, you bastard! You, the gun, my father lying dead on the floor with a hole in his head!”

She backed a step away, her breath ragged, her legs bent as if she would leap at him at any moment.

D stood ready for her move, every nerve and muscle throbbing with the effort it took to restrain himself from lunging at her, crushing her to his chest, crushing his lips to hers. “You saw nothing,” he said between clenched teeth. “I was holding a gun, that was all. And then you ran away before you let me explain—”

She made the tiniest move, her muscles coiled to spring, and, tired of the cat and mouse and dagger game, he was instantly there to catch her. He reached out and grasped her wrist. With a gasp, she tried to yank free, but his grip was too strong and she dropped the blade. Struggling wildly, she ended up losing her footing and executing an ungainly back flop onto the box spring mattress, where she bounced once, then recovered her equilibrium and kicked out sharply with a leg.

But again he was too fast for her. D caught her ankle in his other hand and wrestled her, bucking and screaming, down to the mattress.

“Murderer!” Eliana shrieked in his face, all pretense of control vanished, wriggling and hissing beneath him like a snake. “Liar! Traitor!”

“Listen to me!” he shouted as she thrashed, spewing obscenities and hitting him with her free hand. She landed a hard punch to the side of his skull, and he grunted as fireworks exploded behind his eye. Damn—she was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked. And vicious as a wildcat, too; she raked her nails down his cheek, and he felt blood, hot and wet, drip from his jaw.

“I’ll kill you!” she screamed. “I swear on my dead father I’ll kill you!”

He dropped his full weight on her chest, pinning her, and then grabbed her other wrist and pushed both her arms to the mattress above her head.

“Dammit, listen!” D shouted, shoving his face right up against hers.

She shrank back into the mattress with a shocked little gasp and froze. Their noses were touching. Their bodies were pressed full together. They stared at each other, eye to eye, breathing hard, muscles rigid.

And then, oh and then…

Second by second, inch by inch, on a deep, cellular level, D became aware of Eliana.

Her breathing, ragged. Her heartbeat, pounding wildly against his chest. The blood rushing through her veins. The heat of her skin. Her body beneath him, soft and warm, overwhelming his senses.

All the little details of her—so vivid in his memory but now here, here—came flooding back to cripple him with a tidal wave of emotion so overpowering he momentarily lost the capacity for speech.

“It wasn’t me,” he finally whispered hoarsely, staring deep into her eyes. “I swear on my life, on the life of my brothers, on everything I hold sacred, it wasn’t me.”

“Who…who was it then?” She was whispering now, too, as though she’d felt the change in him, which she probably had. Her eyes blistered him, and he thought there might have been a tiny, tiny glimmer of hope there.

Constantine. It was on the tip of his tongue, it was right there. He sucked in a breath…

And couldn’t say it. He simply could never turn on his brother whom he’d sworn to protect with his own life, not even to try and convince the woman he loved he wasn’t the murdering bastard she thought him. Caught between love and duty, the agony of divided loyalty was crushing, and it kept him silent.

The little glimmer of hope in her eyes winked out. It was replaced by fury and withering hatred. “You better kill me now, because the minute you let me go I’m going to cut off your balls and make myself a nice new pair of earrings.” She smirked at him. “A very small pair.”

“Dick jokes? Really?” he snapped, feeling as neutered as she threatened him to be. She’d never actually seen his balls, but he didn’t enjoy having his manhood called into question. Perversely, it made him want to strip just to prove her wrong.

“Get off me!”

“I’m not going anywhere until you take that back!”

“Kill me, or get off me!”

“Take it back!”

They glared at each other, neither one blinking. Fuming, she pressed her lips together and a tremor ran through her body. It took several seconds, but she seemed to garner some shred of her abandoned control. Then she said, “If your plan is to smash me to death, it’s working. I can’t breathe.”

“You seem to be doing a fine job of breathing, Ana.” D glanced down to her chest where the top of her breasts swelled invitingly over the scoop neck of her T-shirt. When he glanced back up at her, her face had gone cherry red. She turned her face aside, closed her eyes, and bit her lip.

The heat of her body against his, those beautiful breasts, her teeth sunk into that full lower lip…D couldn’t help himself. An erection sprang to rock-hard life in his pants. Because their bodies were pressed together, chest to crotch, she didn’t miss it.

“Unbelievable,” she said, outraged. “Just…unbelievable.” She squirmed beneath him, trying to get away, but the friction only served to excite him further, and she gasped, feeling him grow even harder.

“You bring the animal out in me, beautiful,” he said gruffly, smiling though he knew he shouldn’t be, elated to be near her. “Always did.”

“I’m going to throw up on you now. Get off me.”

Her look was absolutely murderous—and, he decided, utterly adorable. “Not before you apologize for scratching my face and saying I have a small dick.”

She growled in exasperation and said through gritted teeth, “Small. Balls. Now. Get. Off!”

“Something you need to know first, baby girl,” he said, but she stiffened beneath him as if she’d been slapped.

“NO!” She stared up at him, and her dark eyes blazed cold fire. “You don’t get to call me that! You don’t get to call me nicknames and pretend you care and lie right to my face, not after you used me and took away everything I ever had! You took away my entire life! And I hate you for it! I! HATE! YOU!”

D felt his face harden. “I didn’t take away anything, you gave it away. You ran away without a word, without so much as even a look backward, and I’ve spent the last three years of my life in fucking agony because of it. And your leaving like you did stirred up such an epic shit storm I don’t know how it can be fixed. Maybe it can’t. But I’m the one thing standing between you and certain death right now, and I’m risking my own ass to keep you safe, so you’re going to be nice to me and take it back!”

They glared at each other, stalemate, until finally her lower lip quivered. Unbelievably, impossibly, her eyes filled with tears. “I wish you were dead,” she whispered miserably.

D could endure physical pain of any kind. He could take blows or cuts or falls, he could even take torture. What he couldn’t take was a woman’s tears. Especially his woman’s tears.

Like snow in the sun, his heart melted.

“No, baby girl, you don’t,” he whispered back, looking deep into her eyes. He was certain now beyond a doubt that beneath all that rage and blistering fury and wall of ice she’d erected was a tiny ember of tenderness that still burned just for him. “And I’ll prove it to you.”

He lowered his mouth to hers.

She gasped against his mouth, and he took the opportunity to slide his tongue between her lips. She made a little sound in her throat—horror or outrage, he couldn’t tell—and stiffened to the rigidity of a wooden plank and