Dawg had gone after Grael when the other man had sprinted for the shadowed, crated area in the front of the warehouse. Grael had gone after the woman he believed had betrayed him. If Dawg had been a second later, Crista would have died.
No one could possibly know Dawg was involved in this investigation. Other than the task force members, no one else could have known. And they were die-hard agents. It would shock him to his back teeth to find out one of them was a traitor.
But hell, he had been wrong before. And as he said, trust wasn’t one of his virtues. If he even had a virtue. He was a vices type of guy, virtues weren’t his strong point.
The file was empty of any incriminating evidence against Crista, which meant he didn’t have to tell Cranston she was involved. At least, not just yet.
Slapping the file closed on the desk, Dawg rose to his feet and glanced at Natches. His cousin was rising from his own chair and snagged the dark glasses he had left lying on the table.
“Ready to roll?” Natches smirked, his dark, forest green eyes gleaming with amusement.
He knew Crista was waiting for them at the lumber store, safely ensconced in Dawg’s office and going over his paperwork. Her eyes had gleamed in joy the minute she saw the mess his personal office had become over the past year. A man would think she was staring at diamonds rather than the paperwork from hell.
And Natches, being Natches, had found no end of amusement in the sight of Crista’s curvy little ass plopping in Dawg’s oversized chair as she told him, none too politely, to just get the hell out of her way while she organized his mess.
“Do you think I have an office to return to?” Dawg sighed the question in resignation.
“Think smelly candles and vases of flowers.” Natches lifted his head, his nostrils flaring as though testing the air for a sweet scent. “I’m betting vanilla and roses,” he said then, looking back at Dawg.
Hell, if all it took was the scent of vanilla and roses to keep her tight ass out of trouble, then he was all for it. He was to the point that he was ready to pull his hair out. He hadn’t had her in his life forty-eight hours yet, and she already had him on such a tight edge that explosion was imminent.
Explosion of the sexual sort. He was so damned hard he was about to rupture his jeans with his erection. Or choke said erection with the confinement.
He hadn’t had enough of her that morning. Hell, he had a feeling he could take her for hours and still not have enough of her.
As they left the small downstairs office Cranston had taken in the London, Kentucky, courthouse, Dawg stayed carefully on guard for watching eyes. Exiting the lower level, they were able to stay out of the main portion of the courthouse. The other agents used other exits, other hallways.
Paranoia. It had been bred into him by his coldly suspicious parents long before he ever joined the Marines and then the ATF. Even as a kid, too damned young to know what the word meant, he had begun to develop a suspicious nature.
Of course, with two cold, selfish egomaniacs as parents, how could he help it? His mother saw shadows in shadows, and everyone was out to get her. Emotions were her worst enemy, and she had fought against them tirelessly. And his father. Hell, his father had been as much a bastard as Natches’s father was. Sometimes Dawg wondered how Rowdy had hit it so lucky. His father, Ray, had been tough but caring. And Rowdy had never suffered a beating in his life.
Until Dawg was old enough and big enough to fight back, his father had taken great delight in making his son cower.
Dawg hadn’t inherited his father’s habit of striking first, but his mother’s insidious paranoia was a part of him.
So much so that he couldn’t get out of his head the look in Crista’s eyes when he asked her about a pregnancy. For a second, pain and fear and sorrow had flashed in the chocolate orbs. It had been so quick he couldn’t even be certain it had been there. Paranoia or fact?
He shook his head as he and Natches moved toward their Harleys. Dawg pulled his dark glasses from his shirt pocket and placed them on his nose as he stared around the sunlit courthouse parking lot.
“Stop worrying so much,” Natches murmured as they straddled the bikes. “We have any number of reasons for being here.”
Dawg glanced over at him before turning the key and starting the cycle. The rough, dangerous rumble of the motor ignited beneath him. The relaxing sense of freedom it normally gave him was absent now.
He had found a new freedom. A new peace. That of being buried so deep inside Crista that he could feel her heartbeat.
Agonizing arousal clenched his cock and balls at the thought of taking her. The shock and surprise that had at first filled her eyes had been followed closely by desperation, desire, and emotions he didn’t want to even think about. But she had burned him alive.
There had been more pleasure in her arms than he’d had in a lifetime of sexual acts, and that was damned scary.
Because he wasn’t a fool. He knew what they were facing. One little slipup, one agent remembering the wrong thing, and he would be revealed; Crista would be betrayed. And, hell, that would suck. Because there wasn’t a chance he was going to let Homeland Security get their hands on her.
If he was paranoid, then Homeland Security was over the limit. Even Cranston, as much as Dawg liked the special agent in charge of the investigation, was more paranoid than anyone Dawg had known before or since. He would jerk Crista out of Somerset and send her straight to a detention center out of the country. And once there, she would be buried in so much fucking red tape and shadows that he would never find her again.
Once they were far enough from London to find a relatively secure spot to pull into, Dawg and Natches turned their Harleys onto a secluded lane and pulled into the small, deserted clearing hidden from the road.
Cutting the motor, Dawg bit off a curse and stared around the clearing before turning his gaze to Natches.
“What did you find out?”
Natches had talked to the agents last night, subtly questioning them and covering Crista’s ass.
“No one saw anything but me,” he drawled. “I reported that you came in before me, and I borrowed your girlfriend’s car to drive in. I was point, remember? No one can question me, because no one else knows any different.”
Natches had indeed had point outside the front of the warehouse, communicating with the rest of the team that had been in place as the interested parties drove in. He’d announced the arrival of the woman, and in his voice Dawg had heard something the others hadn’t. A warning.
“Watch the front, Dawg,” Natches had drawled. Not because Dawg had been closest, as Cranston had reminded him sharply.
“My mistake,” Natches had murmured into the communications link.
Dawg had known then. Natches didn’t make mistakes, not like that. Whoever the woman was, something was wrong, and Dawg had moved to intercept her.
The agents assigned to this case were wild-eyed and bitter, paranoid and determined. And it didn’
t help one damned bit that Crista so closely resembled the superficial description they had of the woman acting as a contact point between the buyers and sellers.
“If someone set her up, then we need to know why.” If someone set her up. Son of a bitch, he was aching so bad to fuck her that he was trying to find excuses where he knew he should be finding handcuffs instead.
“Someone’s setting you up,” Natches grunted as he stared at Dawg over the rim of his glasses.
“And that’s not a good thing. Who could know you’re on the team?”
Dawg shook his head. “Better yet, who would know to use Crista if they did?”
Natches gave him a long, mocking look then. “Dawg, Cuz, who doesn’t know that Crista Jansen is your weakness? You’ve been dogging her ass like a stray mutt for months now.” Natches smirked at his own puns.
“Ha-ha,” Dawg sneered.
Then he rubbed the back of his neck. Hell, had he been that transparent?
“Even Johnny noticed.” Natches was gleefully snickering now. “And he just can’t understand the attraction, doncha know?”
Dawg grimaced. Johnny Grace. He was a lousy damned excuse for a cousin. When Dawg’s parents had been killed in an auto accident, Johnny’s mother, Dawg’s aunt, had decided to attempt to claim part of the estate Dawg’s parents had left him. Dawg had spent a year protecting the inheritance that amounted to the only damned thing his parents had ever willingly given him.
And there had been Johnny, standing in a court of law, reciting his father’s complaints against Dawg and swearing that his parents had meant to leave the better portion of their estate to his mother.
And through it all, Johnny had sneered and snidely reminded Dawg over and again that his relationship with Dawg’s father had been much deeper than that of his son’s.
Because Johnny was an ass-kissing little bastard that played up to Dawg’s father’s opinion of himself.
“Old man Thompson was by the garage this morning,” Natches said then. “He was bitching about the lights moving back along the mountain last night behind his house. We could check it out again.”
Again. That about summed it the hell up.
Dawg rubbed his hand over his stubbled cheeks before making a mental note to shave before rubbing on Crista again. She had razor burn on her neck that morning after her shower.
“Someone knows something, Dawg,” Natches said softly. “They know enough to throw Crista at you to distract you. Give you someone to suspect.”
Dawg shook his head. “I know better than to be distracted that easily. Besides, we have everything but the money and the woman. How am I a threat to either, as things stand now?”
“This is someone who doesn’t know you heed your common sense when it’s important,” Natches pointed out. “This is someone who only knows the fact that Dawg distrusts everyone but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Which could be just about everyone you’ve met in this country and a dozen others. And it could be someone who is afraid one of the men we captured will talk. If he talks, who says they won’t name Crista?”
Dawg wasn’t known for his trusting nature.
“We’ll let them think they’ve succeeded then.” He smiled slowly, watching as Natches grimaced.
“And Crista has an alibi. You were using her Rodeo; she was at home.”
“Man, I hate that smile.” Natches sighed, resignation glittering in his gaze. “What are you going to do?”
Dawg leaned forward, rested his forearms on the handlebars of the motorcycle, and let his grin widen.
“I’m going to let Crista distract me, of course. Why fight it? And while she’s distracting, I’m going to see who’s watching and what happens later. If she was thrown into my path to catch me off guard, then they threw her in for a reason. Let’s see what they intend to do with it now that they have her there.
And why it’s so damned important that she be there. They couldn’t have expected the raid. So their plans are going to be off balance.”
“They expected her to be arrested, shipped off, and you running at her heels,” Natches bit out.
“Be careful they don’t catch you in that little net, and you and Crista get shipped off together.”
Yeah, that one had occurred to him around midnight.
“I guess I’ll just have to take my chances. Hell, I’ve already broken more laws than I want to think about just getting her out of there. They told us to use initiative, but I don’t think that’s exactly what they were talking about.”
“Sure it was,” Natches drawled. “We knew she wasn’t involved, so we evened the playing field with no fuss and no muss. Its redneck code. That’s what we’ll tell ’em.” The laid-back country-boy drawl wouldn’t fool anyone who happened to know Natches. There was pure bloodthirsty redneck bloodletting in that tone, and it was something Dawg knew he could count on. Natches would watch his back.
