“The point is,” she goes on, glaring when she thinks I’m going to interrupt, “one day this Chad prick invites me to a barbecue, only when I get there there’s no barbecue. There’s just a dead pig in a dress with my name written across its corpse in blood. And a bunch of asshole jocks and cheerleaders laughing at me.”
Savage vengeance floods into me.
“Give me his surname,” I snap. “Give me his surname and I’ll track him down and—”
“No, he’s dead,” she sighs. “He OD’d last summer, I heard. This isn’t about him. The point is I’ve been tricked before. They were calling me a fat ugly pig and I’ve never had any evidence in my life that that’s not true, okay? So for you to say all this to me, all this crazy stuff, surely you can see it just seems like another cruel trick?”
I move closer to her and kneel down, looking her in the eye and placing my hand on her shoulder. The way she shivers drives protective fury into me, as though she’s shivering out of fear, as though she thinks I’m just like the monster from her high school.
“When I first saw you, I knew I wanted you,” I tell her. “I know how that sounds. Fucking hell, Dallas, I never expected to feel this way. I can’t explain it. Maybe if I was a superstitious man, I’d call it fate. I don’t know what it is. All I know is I can’t stop thinking about you. I want– no need – to put a child inside of you. That’s what my body is telling me, every second of every minute of every hour of every fucking day. And the fact that you’re a virgin and have been treated like crap by people who don’t deserve you anyway … fuck, this might sound callous, but that’s to my benefit. Because it means I can own you. I can claim you. You’re one-hundred percent mine.”
She shakes her head slowly. “This is so crazy,” she whispers. “I should tell you to get the hell out of here. I should tell you you’re crazy and need to have your head examined, shouldn’t I? But the thing is, the really crazy thing is, I think I might feel the same.”
I grunt huskily, moving closer to her, smoothing one hand up her thigh and the other down her shoulder toward her breast.
“You want it too?” I growl.
“Yes,” she whispers. “But please don’t trick me. This is just insane. An hour ago I was lying in bed thinking about how you’d never want me. And now—this. The gift. This closeness. What we did in that bed.”
What we did in that bed.
“You’re so gorgeously fucking innocent, aren’t you?” I smirk.
“Hey.” She pouts. “I might be a virgin, but that doesn’t mean I’m little miss goodie two shoes.”
“No?” I say, sliding my hand further and further up her leg, her dress bunching near the hips. I move my hand to her skin, feeling how hot she is, how alive, how ready. “How about we prove that?”
“Don’t you feel guilty?” she asks, her voice low, as though part of her doesn’t want to ask the question.
She’s talking about Gabriel.
“Yes,” I tell her. “But I also can’t care. Because if I don’t claim you, I’ll go insane. I need you. That’s the truth. I’m tired of ignoring it or trying to fight it. I haven’t even been able to sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I think of you.”
“Me too,” she whispers. “God, this is just crazy.”
“I don’t care,” I growl. “Crazy or not, it feels right.”
I push aside her dress and move my hand to her bare pussy, ready to feel her luscious wetness again, her body eager even if her virgin mind is trying to hold her back. But her body knows what to do, and soon we’ll be—
Poppet’s bark tears through the moment, causing Dallas to spring to her feet. I jump up with her and we both walk into the hallway, following the noise of the dog. Something in Dallas’s demeanor pricks at my instincts, and I always listen to my instincts.
Poppet is at the elevator, hackles up, tail up, ears pricked. She barks loudly at the closed metal doors, forepaws clawing against the floor in anticipation.
“Does she usually bark when Gabriel returns home?” I ask.
“No,” Dallas murmurs. “I don’t know how, but she usually knows it’s him.”
She turns to me, face stricken, pulse visibly thundering in her throat.
“You don’t think it’s the Irish, do you?” she asks, fear distorting her voice.
Then I hear it, quiet from all the way up here but audible.
Gunshots, down in the garage.
Somebody’s shooting.
And then a scream, muffled by the dozens of floors between us and the garage. But unmistakably a scream.
Chapter Twelve
Dallas
This has got to be a dream.
Or a nightmare.
One moment Dom and I are bonding. Unbelievably, amazingly, we’ve forged a connection that still seems to be coated in a layer of unreality to me. And the next Dom is reaching into his jacket pocket and taking out a gun, aiming it at the door.
“Take Poppet to your room,” he says, his voice that of the mob boss, the voice of a man who expects to be obeyed immediately.
But I just stand there, rooted, the unusual terror of the moment gripping me in its hands as Poppet barks loudly at the door, and Dom’s gaze whips to me, his eyebrows furrowed, tension making the muscled tendons on his neck stand up.
“Dallas,” he snaps. “Get your dog and yourself to
