Nauti Temptress (Nauti 8)

Her gaze met her brother’s—was that disappointment she saw in his eyes? No doubt it was. This was no way to ensure her reputation, her sisters’ and her mother’s, or his.

Adrenaline was still coursing through her veins, the urge, the hunger to fight flooding her system in such excess that when her gaze locked with Brogan’s, it was all she could do not to grab him and stake her claim immediately.

Yet she couldn’t.

Tremors were shaking her from the inside out. It wasn’t right. She had waited all her life for this, for the knowledge that there was a man out there who could ignite these fires inside her, and now she couldn’t have him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking between the two men.

She didn’t even know which of them she was apologizing to: Dawg, for wanting the one man he couldn’t tolerate knowing she was with, or Brogan, the only man her blood raced for, her clit throbbed for.

Or perhaps it was for herself, because she knew it wasn’t the promise she had made Dawg that she was going to end up breaking.

It was the promise she had made to herself.

The promise that at no time would she ever show her brother—the man who had given to her and her family so unselfishly—the least amount of disrespect.

Because she knew the chance of her finding herself in Brogan’s bed was growing by the day.

* * *

What was he doing to his sister?

The agony burning in her eyes, the color of Natches’s and similar to the emotions reflected in their cousin’s gaze during those horrendous years he and Rowdy had been certain he would turn up dead, radiated in her gaze. Her face was stark white, blood staining her lip and cheek, the upper curve of one breast, and across her arm.

As she turned and raced from the crowd staring at her in shock, she made the turn around the bar and disappeared into the back rooms, Dawg blew out a hard breath.

Then he turned on Brogan, stopping the other man when he would have followed her by stepping in front of him.

“You’ve done enough,” he rasped, seeing in Brogan’s gaze the same swirling emotions, needs, and hungers that he had seen in Eve’s. Like Eve’s emerald green, the blue-gray color shifted with emotion and fury and a need Dawg knew went soul-deep. He knew because it was the same lashing emotions that had burned in his eyes when he’d thought he would lose his Christa.

“She needs me. ” The certainty in the other man’s voice only sent rage crashing through him.

“She doesn’t need you,” Dawg retorted furiously. “She doesn’t need a traitor, Campbell. She needs a man with honor. Not one willing to trade his soul and his country for a dollar. ”

It had taken Dawg months to accept that Brogan Campbell was the man described in the reports he’d had pulled up on him. Months of investigation and reaching out to contacts in the highest and lowest levels of the covert world.

Because he’d actually liked him.

Because he remembered the boy Brogan had been when he’d lived in Somerset so many years before, before he joined the Marines, and hadn’t wanted to believe the fires that burned in him had turned so dark.

“You don’t know me, Mackay. ” Brogan was all but nose-to-nose with him. “You don’t know who I am,

what I am, or where my honor lies, and don’t fucking pretend to. ”

He pushed past Dawg, stalking toward the bar before one of the other two men staying at the Mackay Inn stepped in front of him. Jedediah Booker spoke hurriedly, his voice too low for Dawg to catch the words.

Brogan tensed, a curse slipping from his lips before he turned back toward Dawg, then strode past him and headed for the bar’s exit.

Now, what the hell was that all about?

When Dawg would have left himself, Donny along with Eve’s tormentor, Sandi, began to move past him as well.

Dawg stepped into their path.

He knew these two. Donny and Sandi were usually not much trouble. The girl had always had a mouth on her, but never one so vicious as to cause anyone to attack her. And never had he seen Sandi deliberately go after another woman as she had Eve.

“You looking to make enemies, Donny?” he asked the other man carefully as he glanced at Sandi, disgust welling inside him at the memory of what this woman had pushed his sister into.