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Wicked Lies
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Текст книги "Wicked Lies"


Автор книги: Lora Leigh



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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

CHAPTER 14

Jazz didn’t slam the door closed after entering behind her. He actually closed it so quietly that the snick of the lock had her swinging around in surprise, facing the brooding, heavily lashed glare he directed down at her.

He seemed so much taller when he had that look on his face. The one that indicated he was a hell of a lot angrier than he appeared.

“Do you have death wish?” he asked a little too calmly.

“Not really,” she answered with a shrug as she turned and moved toward the kitchen, ignoring the increasing tension behind her. “Do you?”

She had only a heartbeat’s warning before his fingers locked around her upper arm, swinging her around and lifting her to him.

“I’m beginning to believe that’s exactly what I have,” he growled just before his lips came over hers with a hunger and determination she wouldn’t have expected.

Any resistance she may have had disintegrated as he carried her to the formal living room just off the entry.

Shadowed, the drapes drawn over the large windows, Kenni was only barely aware of the dark shapes of furniture. The wide couch he laid her on was perfect, though. And as his lips continued to ravage hers, he disposed of their clothes quickly and efficiently, dropping them to the floor beside the couch.

Powerful, experienced, his lips moved against hers, parting them and tasting her with his tongue. Like a fire pouring through her senses he burned away any thought of protest. Not that she wanted to protest.

Pleasure raced through her, gathering force and swirling in her senses until nothing else mattered. Until only his touch filled her reality, only his hunger sustained her.

Gripping his shoulders, Kenni lifted closer to him. Had it only been the night before that he had taken her? How had she survived without his touch since?

Her nails bit into his hard flesh, tested its strength as his callused palm gripped her hip, his fingers flexing against her touch-starved flesh. How had she lived without this? Without the hunger that poured over her whenever he touched her?

“Damn, you make me crazy. Fucking insane to have you…” His voice rasped with anger and lust as his lips moved to her neck, his fingers caressing from her hip to her stomach, trailing waves of fiery pleasure in their path.

His touch sensitized her flesh, had her lifting her hips, desperate for more.

“That’s it, baby, come alive for me.” His voice whispered over her as a light nip to her neck sent weakening flashes of sensation straight to the swollen bud of her clit and beyond.

Burying her hands in his hair, her fingers tightened in the strands as erotic, electric sensation pulsed in her vagina. Thighs tightening, hips arching, she moaned, sinking beneath the waves of swirling, aching rapture that pulsed through her nerve endings, building and growing with each touch.

Slick, heated moisture spilled from her vagina, the muscles clenching involuntarily, demanding touch there as well. Demanding the pleasure she knew he could give her. Adrenaline-laced and throbbing in excitement, blood poured through her veins, her heart pumping it through her body furiously as pleasure flooded her system. If the need tearing through her senses didn’t abate soon, how would she survive it?

Fiery sensation wrapped around one hardened nipple then, so sharp, so sweet Kenni cried out, arching closer as Jazz’s lips surrounded it. Drawing on it, suckling it with hungry demand while his palm cupped its mate, his fingers finding the stiff point.

“Oh God, yes. Jazz, please.” It was more than good. It was a blazing path to rapture, to ecstasy. A path she raced along eagerly.

The heated, hungry suction eased. The lash of his tongue became lazy, tormenting licks.

And it wasn’t enough.

Oh God, she needed more.

The callused warmth of his palm rasped against the flesh between her thighs, his fingers parting the swollen, bare folds he found there.

His thumb rolled against the sensitive bud of her clit, the caress causing lashing pinpoints of sensation to spread through her like torturous licks of static electricity.

Digging her heels into the cushions of the couch to lift herself closer, Kenni writhed beneath the caresses. Desperate, so needy, she ached for him. That fiery pleasure-pain, the explosions of rapture. The knowledge that she belonged to him.

“I love touching you,” he murmured against her breast, “especially this pretty flesh.” His fingers tucked into the narrow slit, caressing through it with slow, teasing strokes. “It’s so pretty. All pink slick flesh, your honey clinging to the lips like a heavy, thick dew.” His thumb eased lower, spreading the slick response as more rained from the clenched depths of her vagina.

“Did you really think I would let you run away from me, Kenni?” he crooned as his fingers found the snug entrance he sought and rimmed it gently. “That I would chance losing this?”

His fingers sank inside her before she guessed his intention. Two-wide, penetrating, parting her flesh as her hips arched violently, a moan escaping her lips, her senses shattering.

Her fingers fisted at her sides. Waves of ecstasy raced through her with the sudden release exploding through her with the force of a tidal wave.

Jazz caressed the spasming muscles of her inner flesh with the tips of his fingers. They rubbed and explored, turning what should have been a release into a rapid race back to that peak of desperation.

“What are you doing to me?” Hips arched, desperate, Kenni fought against the rising, burning lashes of agonizing need only to lose to the pleasure spearing the tight depths of her clenched vagina.

“That is so beautiful. Watching you come while my fingers bury inside you. Feeling you tighten around me and knowing I can push you back, make you explode all over again,” he groaned as her hips jerked, burying him deeper. “That’s it, baby, lift those pretty hips for me. Fuck my fingers.”

The muscles surrounding his fingers spasmed furiously, flexing in response to the explicit demand.

“Jazz.” The stimulation tore at her senses, wrapped around them and poured fuel on the lust burning inside her.

His fingers flexed again, rasping, caressing, pushing her to another peak until Kenni feared she would never survive intact.

“Are you close, baby?” His lips were at her nipple again, moving against the sensitive peak as her breathing became quicker, harder.

“Don’t stop…” She could feel the rapture tightening in her womb. “Please, please don’t … Oh God, Jazz … No.”

He stopped.

Pulling his fingers free of her he turned her so quickly she barely registered the fact that she was on her knees before he moved behind her. Holding her hips in place Jazz pressed her knees farther apart, the head of his cock pressing against her, opening her.

“Slow and easy,” he demanded, holding her still as she tried to push back, to take him with one of those quick, hard thrusts she knew would push her over the edge instantly. “Let me feel you, baby. Feel your sweet pussy milking me right in.”

A cry escaped her lips, her breath locking in her throat for a second as she felt him pressing inside her.

Pleasure-pain erupted through the tender flesh, wrapped around her clit, and sent furious pulses of building hunger through the responsive depths.

The pleasure was so sharp and sweet she couldn’t imagine never knowing it again as the fiery burn of the penetration attacked tissue unused to possession before him.

Slow and easy, just as he’d threatened. Kenni’s back arched, her vagina clenching violently as she felt her juices spilling with rapid pulses to each fiery stretch of her flesh.

Jazz eased inside her, groaning as she tightened around each inch that burrowed through her flesh. His hips shifted, moved, pushing him deeper. His fingers flexed at her hip, tightened, holding her in place.

Desperate cries spilled from her lips with each hard stroke of his cock inside her, impaling her with a mix of pleasure and pain she found intoxicating. Then he eased back, slow, easy, teasing her with the retreat. Only to return, working her tender flesh open again, penetrating it with a fiery heat that burned through her senses.

She couldn’t bear the pleasure. It tore at her, drove her higher on waves of building heat and shattering ecstasy.

“Hold on, baby,” he groaned. “Ah hell, Kenni. You destroy me.”

The next thrust drove him deeper, harder inside her.

The sudden impalement, a shock to her senses, tore a cry from her lips and the control she’d been holding on to so desperately slipped out of her grip.

She needed him.

All of him.

Kenni whimpered with the loss when he retreated fully once again, but with his return she was waiting for him. Pushing back, taking him deeper, her inner muscles clenched and rippled around him. Tremors of building ecstasy worked up her spine, shuddered through her body. A band of tension began tightening through her womb, lashing at her clit and pushing her closer to the flames waiting to explode around her.

Jazz came over her, the heat and power that was so much a part of him surrounding her. One arm locked around her hips, holding her to him as he began thrusting inside her with a speed that drove her to the breaking point with a suddenness she wasn’t expecting.

Explosions detonated through her senses, waves upon waves of such ecstasy they stole her breath, her reason, and what remained of her woman’s spirit.

Muscles clenched, locked in place. As she shuddered beneath him, each successive detonation was more intense, driving through her. Behind her, Jazz thrust to the hilt, tensing, a groan tearing through him before spilling his release in furious, throbbing spurts that extended and deepened the orgasm rushing through her. Ecstasy raged through her senses, in waves that seemed never ending until she collapsed against the couch beneath him, exhausted.

Above her, Jazz’s breathing was labored, the release he’d found coming only moments after hers. She remembered, distantly, the feel of his flesh throbbing harder, buried to the hilt as he groaned above her. But he hadn’t spilled inside her as he had before.

He’d donned a condom.

Were those tears behind her eyes, threatening to spill? Tightening her throat, she swallowed against them. And why should that bother her anyway?

Before she could let that thought break the fragile control she had over her pain, she was aware of Jazz slowly easing from her, his breathing ragged as he collapsed beside her and drew her to his chest.

And where did they go from here? she wondered.

“Don’t run like that again, Kenni,” he warned her softly, pushing the remnants of pleasure from her senses with the order.

“Or what?” Pushing away from him she sat up, found her clothes lying on the floor, and picked them up wearily.

“You don’t want to know or what. The next time I won’t be nearly as understanding, count on that.” The promise was delivered in a tone that had her swallowing tightly, wariness edging at her senses.

It was a wariness she ignored. She’d gone too far, had walked too close to the darkness to survive.

“I didn’t turn into a china doll overnight and I won’t pretend to be one so you can play the white knight,” she informed him with a bite of anger.

Rising, she drew her clothes on quickly. She felt too vulnerable, too exposed to him now. The lack of clothing as he sprawled just as naked on the couch next to her had her too eager to submit to whatever he wanted.

Submission had never been her thing.

“So I can play the white knight? Where the hell do you come up with these ideas? I never claimed to be a white knight, or to want to be one,” he grunted at the accusation, rising and jerking his clothes from the floor.

She could feel his eyes on her as he dressed as well. Glowering and intense, he wasn’t about to let the subject go and she knew it. And she didn’t think her emotions could deal with it.

She felt too close to an edge she didn’t understand or recognize. An edge where far too many emotions were teetering.

Dressed, she gathered up the leather pack she’d dropped to the floor and forced herself to leave the living room. Striding across the entry and television room to the kitchen, she was very well aware of Jazz following her.

The second she entered the puppies’ territory Squirrel broke away from the others, bounding to her with a cheerful yip and bouncing around her in a bid to convince her to play with him.

Opening the gate, she gave Squirrel a gentle pet before shooing him over to his mother. Closing the gate behind her, Kenni ignored the fact that Jazz had paused at the entrance to the television room. He stopped there, silent, his arms crossed over his chest in an arrogant, demanding stance.

She set down the leather pack she’d collected along with her laptop from beneath the bed, opened the flap securing it, and began pulling free surveillance pictures she’d taken over the years as well as pictures taken in Loudoun after her arrival that matched up to the Kin she’d photographed over the years.

“I need the DVR Zack collected,” she told him as she felt him moving closer. “Will he be here soon?”

She didn’t hear him, but she could feel the tension behind her increasing, indicating he had finally followed her.

“He’ll have it here soon,” he growled, and it was an irritable sound.

She knew what they were doing. Slade and Zack, overbearing and arrogant, would of course try to go through it first to see if they could identify who had broken into the house.

Good luck to them. She doubted they were going to get past the encryption program Gunny had created for their security.

“It won’t do him any good to check it first,” she informed him, still fighting the languor that wanted to overtake her after the incredible pleasure he’d given her. “The encryption program is on my laptop and without the program, cracking it will take him far longer than simply bringing it over here would.”

Gunny had made certain she learned the surveillance program and its encryption. The DVR, laptop, and cameras worked together. Having the DVR was useless without the laptop and its program to decrypt it.

“Have all the bases covered, don’t you, Kenni?” he asked a little too gently. “Hidden clothes and weapons, encrypted cameras and DVRs. Yet you still have no idea who’s trying to kill you. Why’s that?”

She’d known he was going to be pissed and she’d known hard questions would come with her actions. She’d known it like she knew a bee sting stung; she just hadn’t allowed herself to think about it.

“Survival. I was more concerned with hiding for a while longer, I guess,” she finally answered him, trying to contain the emotions her brothers’ presence had tempted free. “If Cord hadn’t gotten so nosy, then I’d still be hiding.”

And watching.

But why hadn’t she done more to find out who had given the order to kill her mother, Gunny, and herself? Sometimes it had felt as though she were just drifting in a sea of questions and fears with no idea how to solve the problem.

“Why do I have a feeling you would have preferred being left alone to do just that?” The accusation struck home. The guilt, the anger, ten years of betrayal. Cousins who had shot her, tried to knife her. Years of running from the very people who should have been protecting her.

Ten years.

Ten years of fear and loss, and did he think that didn’t bother her? That she didn’t realize what had been taken from her?

“And how did it affect you, Jazz?” she demanded, swinging around and staring back at him in outrage. “You would have still managed to seduce me. I couldn’t have held out for longer and we both know it. What did it matter if it was Annie’s or Kenni’s name you whispered as long as you achieved the end result?”

His jaw hardened, the muscle there ticking like a time bomb waiting to go off.

“You think the only thing that concerns me was whether or not I could get you in my bed? That was never a question, Kenni. I knew damned good and well you were going to end up in my bed. Keeping your ass alive does concern me, though,” he informed her, his voice sharper than normal.

The ominous hardening of his tone had her watching him warily now. It wasn’t just his voice. His expression looked carved from marble. It was his eyes that were truly disconcerting, though. They blazed, the sapphire blue roiling with an emotion she couldn’t quite define.

Perhaps now, that wasn’t all that concerned him. But had she just been some normal, run-of-the-mill kindergarten teacher?

“I think that’s all you wanted from Annie Mayes,” she whispered, rubbing at the chill chasing over her arms now. “What does it matter, Jazz? As you said, what you felt for me then was then. It’s not now. I’m here now.” Waving her hand to the house to indicate his life, she kept her gaze locked with his. “I’m endangering everyone I love, everyone I wanted to keep safe, and you think that doesn’t bother me? That I could ever survive if anything happened to you because of me?” The bitterness she tried to keep banked thickened in her own voice now. “Do you think I ran for eight fucking years just to willingly let you take over and stand in front of me as though I were some simpering child?”

“I never accused you of being a child.” Shooting her a withering look he let his arms drop, his hand lifting to stab a finger furiously in her direction. “But you’ve by God bitten off more than you can chew alone and you’re too damned stubborn to see it.”

Too stubborn to see it? Amazement lashed at her as she threw back her head and placed her hands on her hips, the confrontation she’d been trying to avoid exploding within her.

“Why do you think I stayed hidden?” She clenched her teeth, her lips pulled back in furious contempt. “Why do you think I’ve fought you every damned inch since you learned who I was? Because I knew years ago what I was facing. But I didn’t bite this chunk off, as you so charmingly call it. Someone’s been force-feeding it to me and I’ve chewed it the best friggin’ way possible. And by God I didn’t just hide. I did my best.”

She was yelling by time she finished.

Her temper, always unpredictable and hard to control, suddenly broke free of the restraints she kept on it.

How dare he? How dare he believe that because she hadn’t known how to investigate who wanted her dead, she hadn’t tried? That she hadn’t cared?

“Here.” Twisting around and grabbing the pictures she’d taken over the past two years, matched with those taken in the eight before, she threw them at him. “I matched killers sent after me in the past with faces from the present. Here.” Picking up the flash cards she’d filled with notes, rumors, and gossip, she threw those at him as well. “That’s all I have for two years of investigating the only way I knew how while keeping your fucking ass out of it. Keeping my brothers out of it. Keeping you alive because if I died, then—well hell. Fuck it. You already believed I was dead, what did it fucking matter?”

She was screaming.

She never screamed.

Rage was tearing at her senses.

“Ten years.” She could barely speak now for the rioting fury ripping through every corner of her mind. “Ten years.” A swipe of her arm and the laptop went flying from the table to crash to the floor. “You built my house, my pond, and my gazebo and I didn’t even know.” Holding her arms out toward the windows she fought to breathe, to pull back, to stop the flow of bitter rage. “You gave a dead girl her dream and then you let yourself die with her. Do you think that was what I wanted?”

Swinging to him once again she realized how much that had hurt as well.

“You let yourself die with me,” she repeated. “My brothers get drunk every year on the date of Momma’s funeral and Poppy grieves to the point that he calls Luce by Momma’s name and her daughter by mine. And all that was supposed to make me suddenly stand up and declare to you I lived when I could be dead again in the next second? Oh-fuck-you-yes, I wanted to cause every damned one of you more pain. I wanted you, Slade, Jessie, Zack, and my brothers buried with me the second time around as well. Let’s just make it a fucking party, why don’t we?” Her eyes widened, sarcasm filling the rage. “Oh yeah, right, we’d all be fucking dead. Kinda hard to party then, isn’t it?”

The sob that escaped her lips shocked her, but not enough to still the enraged agony washing through her.

Not that a single damned thing she said was making a difference. He was staring over her shoulder, his expression closed, distant.

“And every word I’m saying is going through one bullheaded ear and out the other,” she flung out contemptuously.

“No, he’s trying to figure out how he’s going to save his own ass now that I know exactly what he’s been hiding from us.” The voice was steel-hard but vibrating with such agony, it dug hollow furrows of pain straight through her heart. “Turn around, let me see your eyes. You wouldn’t let me see them earlier.”

Kenni froze.

She could feel the blood leave her face as Jazz’s gaze moved to hers, regret and resignation filling it as he stared down at her with a gentleness she simply couldn’t comprehend.

“You should have known better than to try to fool your brothers, Kenni. They knew you far too well,” he told her with weary resignation. “I think that’s something we both forgot somehow.”

She had forgotten.

She’d forgotten it wasn’t possible for her to lie to her brothers in any way. Even by avoidance.

Her stomach began cramping with panic, a useless feeling she told herself. Panic wasn’t going to aid her in any way.

Shooting Jazz a look that promised retaliation, Kenni turned slowly to meet the gazes of the three men she’d known not to reveal herself to.

“They’ll just ground you for a few years. Well, a few decades maybe,” Jazz murmured behind her. “They’ll actually kill me.”

He was kidding, right?

Her heart was ready to jump out of her chest, her stomach roiling and threatening to push its way past her throat, and he wanted to make jokes?

“Kenni…” Sawyer whispered her name, desperate, disbelieving, as she stared at the floor and tried to tell herself there had to be a way to salvage the situation. To continue to hide.

“It doesn’t surprise me that you can’t look at us,” Deacon said contemptuously. “Hell, there’s no way you’re Kenni. She knew how to face her own stupidity. And even she would have known how fucking stupid it was to try to hide from us, right here in Loudoun.” He turned to Jazz then. “And you have the nerve to help her attempt it? Are you fucking crazy?”

She almost winced at the contempt in her brother’s voice.

“Anything’s possible, though I did advise her against it,” Jazz stated, his tone bland as Kenni felt him lean against the kitchen door frame. “You know how damned stubborn she can be.”

“She’s right here!” The insult had her gaze lifting for one second, just long enough for the eldest, Cord to catch it, and hold it.

She was right there, and now there was no hiding from the brothers she’d adored as a teenager, and missed dreadfully in the past ten years.

Deep, heavy grooves of grief were dug into Cord’s face, the emerald hue of his eyes dark, stark with pain.

“Why?” Quiet, vibrating with such agonizing disbelief, the single question stripped her bare. “Why, Kenni?”

He looked broken. He sounded broken and it was killing her.

To her soul, that one word laid her open, exposing emotions she hadn’t dared face, hadn’t dared to allow free.

“Why?” Lifting her chin, she faced him squarely now. The time to hide from these men was at an end now. If they were her enemies, if even one of them was an enemy, then it would be the end of her. Because she’d spent ten years determined to keep them out of the path of whatever madman haunted her life and destroyed her mother.

“Why?” She met him now as a woman, not the child she had been or the teenager he needed her to be once again. “Because I couldn’t allow even one of you to be taken from me as well. I wouldn’t have survived it.”

“You call that an excuse? A fucking reason?” Cord snarled, the veins in his neck standing out in stark relief.

“I don’t need an excuse or a reason—you taught me that, Cord,” she retorted calmly, keeping a tight grip on her emotions, on the memories fighting to pour free, the rage, the agony of being separated from her family.

“Like hell…”

“Family,” she told him softly. “They were hunting me, not you, or Deacon, or Sawyer. Me. Had I called you, who would have fought with you that you could trust besides Deacon and Sawyer, Slade, Jazz, and Zack? Six of you against an unknown number of Kin? Against a faceless, nameless enemy?” She shook her head slowly. “I didn’t need a reason or an excuse,” she repeated. “I wouldn’t be the reason any of you died.”

Silence filled the kitchen for long moments before a bark of laughter, filled with sarcastic disbelief, broke the tension.

Sawyer stepped forward, shaking his head, the shaggy dark blond of his hair brushing against his neck as he stared back at her as though he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“Fucking superhero now, are you?” Deacon bit out furiously. “Son of a bitch, I wish I’d listened to Dad when you were younger and agreed to send you to a fucking convent.”

Kenni blinked back at him before narrowing her eyes, cocking her hip and placing her hand negligently on the curve. “I never imagined I was a superhero, Deacon, but I never let myself believe that the three of you were, either. But I might start wondering why I’ve missed you so damned much if you keep up with the insults.”

That was a horrible lie. There was nothing he could do to change how desperately she’d missed him or the others.

“My charming personality and the fact that I won’t lie to you like that asshole behind you obviously has. Trust me, Kenni, not contacting us was really bad for his health.” His chin jutted out pugnaciously, his lips thinning as the muscle at the side of his jaw ticked warningly.

“Lied to me about what, Deacon?” she questioned him in amazement. “Sorry, but I won’t give you an excuse to hit him. Jazz hasn’t lied to me about anything.”

“He convinced you not to tell us you were alive,” Deacon rasped. “Someone fucking convinced you not to let us know you were alive, or in Loudoun.” Taking a step closer, his fingers curling into fists, his gaze locked with Jazz’s. “Who else would have done so?”

“Kin.”

Three pairs of differing shades of emerald turned on her with such intensity, it felt cutting. The sensation was distinctly uncomfortable.

She turned her gaze to Cord. She hated seeing the pain in his eyes increase, the grief and rage that hollowed his already savagely hewn expression.

“Kin,” Cord repeated softly before breathing out heavily, rubbing at the back of his neck, and running his hand along the side of his face. “Fuck!”

The expletive didn’t come close to expressing everything she knew that answer represented to him.

“Kin break into the house in town then?” Sawyer questioned, dragging her gaze back to him.

“I’m not sure yet.” Turning, she stared at the mess she’d made during her confrontation with Jazz. She’d made a hell of a mess. “I’m waiting for Slade and Zack to realize they might need me to break the encryption on the DVR. The programs on my computer. Once I view the video I’ll know more.”

Cord moved slowly, heavily, to where the pictures littered the hard floor and stooped to pick a few up, studying them intently.

Many of the pictures were six to eight years old. She’d begun taking them with disposable cameras until Gunny had managed to procure a real one with a zoom lens.

“Kin.” Holding one particular picture, he lifted his gaze to her. “David Mobley and Aaron Blake.”

“Gunny killed Aaron, but David managed to get away. I have another picture of him in there somewhere. One I took last year at the school. I believe his youngest enters third grade this fall.”

He nodded. “I’m her godfather.”

She hadn’t known that, but it didn’t surprise her. David had been close to the family since they were children. A distant cousin, his father best friends from childhood with their father.

Slowly, Cord gathered the pictures together from the floor, straightened them, seemingly paying little attention to the individuals in them, but she knew him better than that. His memory was exceptional. He’d be able to name every person he saw in them years later.

“You can’t strike at them, Cord,” she told him softly when he straightened and set the stack of pictures on the table.

He stared at the stack of photos, his fingertips stroking over the table next to them for long moments.

“Dad threw this table out of the house just after the funeral,” he said softly, still stroking the wood before he lifted his gaze to her once again. “Did you know it was the same kitchen set?”

She hadn’t.

Swinging around she stared at Jazz where he leaned against the door frame, his arms crossed over his chest.

“You have a big mouth, Maddox,” he growled.

Cord nodded to that as well. Lifting his hand he rubbed at the side of his face again, his expression so heavy Kenni’s heart clenched in pain for him, as well as herself.

“I’m sorry, Kenni,” he whispered, his gaze meeting hers squarely, the regret so heavy in his eyes she could only stare back at him silently. “I failed you.”

“No, Cord…”

“You were seen the night of the fire escaping with a marine, still in uniform. An old homeless soldier saw you running and heard the gunshot that put a bullet in your shoulder, he said.”

“Yes,” she affirmed tightly.

“We looked for you,” Deacon snapped, dragging her gaze to him. “For almost eight years, Kenni, we searched for you.”

“I found out about our uncle Charles—Gunny, you called him.” Cord’s voice didn’t change, but his expression grew heavier. “We met a few friends who were searching for him. They lost him in Chicago.”

“He’s dead,” she said, answering the question in Cord’s voice. “He sent me to collect a vehicle we were going to use to leave town. He was supposed to meet with someone who could tell him who was giving the orders and sending men out to kill me. When he didn’t show up at the meeting place, I went back to the warehouse.” Jazz moved then, shifting from the door frame, his arms coming around her comfortingly. A move that brought a glare to each of her brothers’ faces. “I only found his blood…” Gripping Jazz’s forearms tightly she broke off, her lips trembling despite her dry eyes. “I’d taken several pictures over that week of men that resembled those I’d known in Loudoun. I matched a couple once I arrived.”


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