Sins of the Father
What the fuck was he doing?
He leaned forward, his hands clutching the marble countertop. He was in his bathroom, naked from the waist down. He'd tossed his jeans--stained from her juices and his come--on the floor behind him. He should have tossed them in the laundry, but damned if he didn't want to wear them tomorrow. He'd be wearing them still if he didn't need to go back out to the party and find Henry Darcy.
He knew he should shower, but he wanted to hold on to the scent of her for as long as possible. The feel of her. The memory of how wild she'd been in his arms. How hard she'd rubbed herself against his jeans, then worked her slick, swollen pussy against his bare cock.
He groaned softly, closing his eyes as he let his mind drift back to the way she'd looked, her back arched as she ground herself against him like a wild thing, each gyration forcing his finger deeper into her ass even as the friction against her sensitive clit brought her that much closer to screaming his name.
He'd always wanted her--hell some of his earliest memories were of wanting her. But now that they were together, that desire had changed. It was hard and raw. It was possessive and wild and desperate. He wanted to take her to dark places with him. He wanted her to understand what he needed now--and what he hated himself for needing.
He'd changed in captivity. She'd changed him. The Woman. One of their two kidnappers. The bitch who'd tortured him. Teased him. Tormented him in ways he hadn't understood at fifteen, but that had become a part of his sexual appetites. And Jane--oh, god, Jane--she'd sworn she wanted to go there with him.
Some part of him hadn't really believed her, and he'd intended to start slow. Asking. Explaining. But he'd lost his fucking mind tonight. He'd wanted--and he'd taken.
And fuck if she hadn't matched him. In power. In desire. In need.
Granted, tonight was a relatively tame appetizer--a first step on a wild and wicked journey--but she had been right there with him. More than that, she had loved it. He'd never seen her wetter. Wilder. He'd taken her to a desperate, primal place, and she'd been completely at his mercy.
And oh, the way she'd trusted him ...
He'd bound her wrists. He'd gripped her throat. He'd given her reason to hesitate, to fear. And yet when he looked into her eyes, the trust and love he'd seen there had both melted him and left no doubt that she was his.
Trust.
He winced, looking down so that he didn't have to meet his own eyes in the mirror. She trusted him. And not just in bed, but in everything.
Most of all, she trusted him to keep his promise.
"No more secrets," she'd begged four days ago, when they had finally stopped dancing around their desire and committed to being together for real. "Not between us. Not again. Not ever."
"No more secrets," he'd promised, and at the time, he'd meant it.
Then Liam had called, and Dallas had found himself holding on to the biggest secret of all. Colin. Jane's birth father. A man that Dallas considered a friend and had once thought of as an uncle.
A man who right now was topping Deliverance's list of suspects as the brains behind Dallas and Jane's kidnapping.
Fuck.
For years, Dallas and Deliverance had been on the trail of the six hired men who had physically pulled off the kidnapping. Five had slipped through their fingers--two had died before the team located them, one had killed himself rather than submit to the team's interrogation, and two simply didn't know a goddamn thing. And then a miracle had happened--they'd identified the sixth kidnapper. Silas Ortega.
Capture Ortega and Deliverance could extract the identity of the two people who'd masterminded the kidnapping--the Jailer and the Woman. It had been the first solid lead in years, and Deliverance had gone full force after the man, but they'd been too late--the authorities picked him up first. But before Interpol could get any solid intel, Ortega had killed himself in custody. Or so the story went.
In truth, the masterminds behind Dallas and Jane's kidnapping had arranged a fake suicide--a bold maneuver and one meant to prevent Ortega from offering any evidence about the Sykes kidnapping to the authorities. Dallas didn't have proof of that theory, of course. But that didn't change the fact that he was absolutely certain.
With Ortega dead, Deliverance was left to learn what they could of the man's involvement in the kidnapping by analyzing his property, including a netbook they'd found in his home in Argentina.
And that's when things became truly disturbing. Because even though the hard drive was encrypted, Noah--Deliverance's tech guru--managed to pull out a few bits and pieces. And what he found was Colin's name all over those goddamn files.
Maybe Colin and Ortega had legitimate business. Maybe. And even now the team was looking for more evidence to either inculpate or exonerate Colin. They were all hoping to hell the man was clean. But Dallas couldn't deny the tightness in his gut. A tightness that evidenced his belief that his friend--Jane's birth father--was guilty as shit. That he'd arranged their kidnapping. That he'd held them in a dank, dark basement. That he'd tortured Jane and Dallas for weeks.
To what end? To what goddamn end?
And now Dallas was carrying this secret despite promising Jane there would be no secrets between them. But how could he tell her? How could he dump such a horrible possibility on her unless he was absolutely certain?
He gripped the counter tighter in an effort to stifle the urge to throw something hard and shatter the goddamn mirror. Colin. This likelihood that Colin was involved had been fucking with his head ever since he'd learned about the contents of the netbook's hard drive. He was never far from his memories of the kidnapping, but over the last few days, his dreams had been more feverish, and he'd wake up sweating, his pulse racing. He'd sit up, gasping, as memories of what that fucking bitch had done to him clung to him like grime he couldn't scrub away.
Had Colin known what was happe