He told himself not to touch her. That she would probably pull away if he tried to hold her, comfort her, but the next thing he knew he was easing her against his chest, her arms were around his waist, her head tucked beneath his chin. He felt a faint tremor move through her body as she fought to hold back tears.
“It’s okay, baby, don’t cry. I wanted you, too. So much.” He kissed the top of her head, felt fine strands of red-gold hair against his cheek. He wanted to say that if it were anyone’s fault, it was Ray Cummings. But he didn’t want the specter of Cummings’s past deeds anywhere near her.
“I shouldn’t have done it. I knew better. I just...I wanted to feel normal again.” She shook her head. “At least now I know the truth.” She turned and started walking.
“Jessie, honey...”
But Jessie just kept walking. Disappearing into the bedroom, she firmly closed the door.
The sound was like a gunshot straight to the heart.
Jessie lay awake in the darkness. She had taken a risk tonight and she had failed. She brushed a humiliated tear from her cheek. In a way, it was worth it. Because now she knew for sure that she would never be a normal woman again. She wanted Bran Garrett with a soul-deep hunger unlike anything she had ever known. If her body couldn’t convince her mind to accept him as a lover, no other man stood a chance.
She rolled onto her side and looked at the red numbers on the digital clock. Nearly 3:00 a.m. She needed to get some sleep, but every time she started to drift off, she remembered the heat in Bran’s amazing blue eyes, remembered the way he had looked at her, as if she were the only woman in the world.
She remembered the exact taste of his kiss, the soft-firm feel of his lips melding with hers, the warmth of his tall, hard body. She remembered the touch of his big hand caressing her breast, his thumb sliding over her nipple.
Yearning arose, swift and unrelenting, coming from somewhere deep inside her. She didn’t understand it, couldn’t figure out how she could experience such intense sexual desire and not be able to act on it.
In time, she would learn to accept things as they were, to deal with the reality—just as she’d dealt with the trauma of surviving three days with Ray Cummings.
Instead of thinking of him, she fixed her thoughts on Brandon and eventually fell into a deep, drugging sleep. It was late morning when she emerged from the bedroom in skinny jeans and a forest green cable-knit sweater to find him working on his laptop at the dining table.
She looked like crap and she knew it. She was beyond embarrassed about what had happened last night, and yet, as she watched him, a curl of heat tugged low in her belly. It seemed none of the lust she’d felt for him had disappeared.
“Good morning.” Determined to brazen it out, she walked toward him. “What are you working on?”
Bran leaned back in his chair. With the scruff of beard along his jaw and those amazing blue eyes, he looked like every woman’s fantasy, especially hers.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “So I guess we aren’t talking about last night.”
Warm color rose in her cheeks. “No.”
Bran made no comment. She couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed. She wandered over and poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot on the counter and took a sip. “So where are we in the investigation?”
He straightened in his chair. “I’ve been going over some of the things we’ve found so far, and I’ve come up with a theory.”
Picking up his cell, he brought up a photo he had taken of the tat on Digger Graves’s neck and held it out to her. “Shamrock with a 666 inside. You were right about it being a prison tat.”
“Really?” She moved close enough to see. “Have you figured out which gang?”
“Aryan Brotherhood. One thing we know, stealing those weapons took a helluva lot of planning. Everything from computer hacking to murder—if you’re right about your father, and I think there’s a good chance you are.”
She ignored the ache of grief that moved through her.
“Money seems to be the common denominator,” Bran continued. “The one thing necessary to make everything work.”
“I see what you mean. They needed an initial investment of capital in order to get everything done.”
“Exactly. Even if they were expecting a big payoff from the sale of the weapons, somebody put up a lot of cash in advance. The driver of the truck had to be paid. Someone deposited a hundred grand into a phony offshore account in your father’s name. And if my theory’s correct, there were others.”
“Someone in the prison kitchen was paid to put something in my father’s food to make him sick. Someone in the ambulance or at the hospital was paid to administer the lethal drug that caused his heart attack.”
“The question is, how would you find enough people willing to do that kind of dirty work and keep their mouths shut?”
Her mind spun. She thought of the tattoo and the obvious answer hit her. “They all share some kind of bond. In this case they’re all in the same gang.”
He nodded. “That’s right. Maybe not all, but a lot of them. Aryan Brotherhood has members in the army stockade where they were holding your dad, as well as people on the outside. Gang members, former gang members, they all live by the same rules. Number one being, if you talk you wind up dead.”
