“I could make her have sex with me,” Ivan offered.
“I can make her have sex with me, too,” Cody countered, angry, “and when she has sex with me she’ll be mine, all mine, no one else can ever touch her, especially you.”
“Ten dollars you can’t get her to do it tonight.”
Cody had been pissed, but he’d been challenged and he’d shaken that asshole’s hand.
For ten fucking dollars.
Now he could never bring himself to imagine being with her; he felt like that moment would be tainted, forever, because he’d shaken his brother’s dirty hand and had boasted that he’d lose his virginity and take Megan’s for ten dollars.
He remembered leading her into the woods and how they began arguing about something. He didn’t remember what, it was so inconsequential. Something about him being too quiet and acting weird, according to her. Apparently he wasn’t good at appeasing perceptive females either, because she said, “You know what, Cody? I don’t feel like walking with you today after all.”
They walked back through the woods back to the house, and that’s when they saw them.
In the living room that adjoined the kitchen.
His parents, in a pool of their own blood. The family cat.
Every living breathing thing in that house had been killed.
And at the ages of sixteen and fourteen, they witnessed their first murder.
One week later, he was taken in by his mother’s Texan relatives, and Cody left town. He thought that he’d died the day he’d seen his parents’ murdered bodies.
But he’d been wrong.
Some part, some small part of him, had been clinging to life. That last part had died the day Megan watched him drive away through that window.
He stopped dreaming. He stopped wanting to live. He stopped thinking. He became an animal. Was labeled aggressive in school. Antisocial. Rebellious, even though he was still naively innocent—every act of vandalism he committed, he later came to clean, every property he damaged in his raging fits would be mended the next day. It was a need to make things right that kept him coming back, and a need to hurt something that made him do something wrong. And it was that need that made him come back to Phoenix, Arizona, to the dry weather, the cacti, the Southwestern flair homes, every year on the anniversary of his parents’ death, and then later, to make a home here. And make things right.
He hadn’t intended to look for Megan, at least, not at first.
He supposed she’d put the past behind her and didn’t need to see his big ugly coyote face every day as reminder. But then he saw her, that day at the cemetery, and when she spotted him across the graves of his parents, he knew she had not forgotten him.
She had not forgotten him, or that night long ago, the one they would never forget.
“No,” she gasped now, and when she squirmed, her ear grazed his groin—more exactly, the muscle awakening there—and Cody bit back a growl as pleasure shot up his spine.
She snuggled with her nose, caressing that aching part of him without knowledge, and it was so unexpected that his grip loosened on the papers he’d been holding. They cascaded to the floor, all at once, in a whisper.
He murmured in a breathless prayer, “God don’t do this to me,” and gave up, dropping his head back and taking a deep breath. He wanted to push her away. No. He wanted to pull her closer. Wrap her legs around him. And make her forget every man but him. Make her forget every pain with the pleasure he could give her.
Before he could control himself, his palm cupped the soft, perfectly round swell of her right breast, just to discover that it fit so right in his … no!! What the hell was the matter with him? He yanked his hand away and, shocked, glanced down: saw that she still had her eyes closed.
The breath shuddered out of him as he eased away from her and set her back on the sofa.
“Banks, Megan … Meg,” he said, his voice laced with warning. “Stop … making noises.”
She did not stir, but parted her lips to let go a sigh. And those lips, holy God, they were so wet and pink.
He growled.
“You better wake up and tell me to get the hell away from you,” he said, his starving eyes fastened on her parted lips. He had wondered many times what they would feel like. Taste like. And then he’d cursed at himself for wanting to know. He’d caused her enough grief. He was cursed.
But now it didn’t matter, it was difficult to feel anything other than hot inside, and itchy in his skin, and hungry. Now he saw her lips and if he did not take them soon, if he did not taste her with his own, he would die all over again like the day he’d been taken away.
He bent over, feeling their breaths mingle, thinking this was so so goddamned wrong, even if Cody wanted her like nobody else in their lives would want her.
With an unsteady hand, he reached out and ran the pad of his thumb across her lower lip, and his heart started to pound as he tested the soft, silken puffiness of that lip.
If only she weren’t so pretty, her lips so soft, so pink …
He lowered his mouth to graze hers, softly, so that she would not wake, murmuring, “This never happened, Meg.”
But it had, it was happening.
Just a graze.
Though he wanted so much more he felt like yelling down the damned hotel until she gave all of herself up to him. Feeling a growl trapped in his throat,
