Page 34 of Dark ’N’ Deadly

“Are you gonna do it again?” Jesse didn’t bother to hide his sneer.

“No.” That didn’t mean he didn’t want to. Christ, the way she’d felt in his arms, with her perfect little body plastered to his, and her lips tasting like honey, and roses, and peaches. All it had taken was a few seconds, and he’d grown a boner the size of a Louisville Slugger.

Tiger surged his chest against the side of the mattress, pushing his head closer to Jesse’s hand.

“You promise?” The kid’s face was brimming with such hopefulness, it became screamingly apparent that extracting that promise from him was important in a way that went well beyond the typical brother-looking-out-for-his-sister concern.

“What’s really going on here? You’re more than just a little pissed that I kissed your sister.” Crickets. “Talk to me.”

Jesse narrowed his eyes. “Do you really care about her, or are you just tryin’ to get into her pants?”

Definitely the first. Maybe the second, but that wasn’t going to happen. Ever. “I care about both of you.” And it didn’t matter that he hadn’t gotten into her pants. Whatever she’d been wearing was so damned thin, she might as well have been naked, because he’d felt nearly everything.

It wasn’t humanly possible for her to miss my ginormous boner.

“Bullshit.” Jesse crossed his arms and leaned back against the pillow. “You need us for your investigation. You’re only bein’ nice to us to keep us around.”

Eric dragged a hand through his hair. The movement caught Tiger’s eye, and his dog sat with a huff, swinging his dark gaze from him to Jesse. Even Tiger could sense the brewing tension in the air.

“It’s true, I do need you, but I also knew your sister before I ever met you. We were…” They hadn’t been anything, not really, and when this was over, he’d never see her again. The realization twisted his guts into a goddamned pretzel.

“Were what?” Jesse eyed him speculatively.

“Nothing. We were nothing.” Again, he was hit with a wave of regret that stabbed him to the bone. This was getting them nowhere. “What’s really bugging you, that I kissed her, that you think I’m using you, or something else?”

Jesse seemed to ponder that question for a moment. “I only just found her again. She’s all I got, and I don’t wanna lose her.”

“What do you mean, you only just found her again?”

The kid’s shoulders slumped. “I haven’t seen or talked to her since she ran away. We emailed some, and she always sent me money, but I haven’t spoken to her since she left Alabama. Right before her eighteenth birthday.”

“Jesus.” That had to be ten years ago. He hadn’t realized Tess had been on her own for that long. “Why not?”

The kid’s tone turned acidic. “My asshole stepfather.”

“What about him?” He had a bad feeling about this.

“He treated her like garbage. Did she tell you he yanked her out of high school when she was fifteen?”

“That’s not even legal. Why’d he do that?”

“So she could cook and clean and do whatever else he told her to do?”

Eric gritted his teeth. “What else did he tell her to do?”

“He told her that on her eighteenth birthday, he’d give her to his best friend. That’s why she left the night before her birthday.”

“Give her to his best friend?” Eric couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was child slavery. And rape. The idea of anyone hurting Tess, let alone—

Finishing his thought made him want to kill someone.

“Yeah, give her,” Jesse confirmed. “That guy used to slobber after her every time he came to the house. Lucky for Tess, my stepfather had some kind of twisted, fucked-up sense of morality and wouldn’t turn her over ’til she was eighteen.”

“Fucked up” didn’t begin to cover it.

Eric ran a hand over his stubbled jaw. He’d killed before, but never for personal reasons. Always for the job. Right now, if Tess’s stepfather and this other POS were standing in front of him, he’d break their necks with his bare hands.

Gradually, he forced himself to unclench his hands that he only now realized he’d been clenching into tight fists. He never would have guessed for one second that Tess had lived through that kind of childhood trauma. She was so bubbly and vibrant and brimming chock full of all that life-force stuff she believed in. That’s when it hit him. She used yoga, and Zen, and chi, and everything else he’d made fun of to make her emotionally strong. To help her get past the ugliness of what she’d lived through. His respect for her hadn’t been anywhere close to the gutter before, but now it zoomed into the stratosphere. She really was an amazing woman. He’d always known there was so much more to her than what people saw on the outside.