Heather's Gift Read online

  The women were crying out, the redhead was pulling at Sam’s arm, watching the street nervously as the sound of sirens was heard. The demon refused to listen for long seconds. He said something to Tate, a snarl twisting his lips a second before he tossed him to the sidewalk like the garbage he was. Tate could do no more than scramble away before the sheriff’s car rounded the street.

  And in watching the spectacle, an idea began to form. It wouldn’t be hard to do. Sam was furious, and everyone knew his temper, his possessive instincts. It would work. The Defiler would be destroyed and sent away, and the women would once again be pure and untarnished. The other two men, though just as guilty, would wilt away without the one they fought so hard to protect. Sam was the catalyst, the Defiler, the Demon. And he must be destroyed.

  Chapter Four

  “Dammit, Sam, what were you trying to accomplish today?” Heather stalked into Sam’s bedroom after finally finding a free moment to berate him for his violence on a public street. She came to an abrupt stop.

  Maybe she should have knocked, she thought, then kicked herself. Hell no, that would have been an even bigger mistake. Any chance to catch Sam August in the nude was worth taking. The man was a work of art. That was all there was to it.

  Sam turned away from the dresser he had been searching through. Her mouth dried out, then watered as she glimpsed the hard, dusky-tanned body. There were no white strips, and she would be damned if there was any indication that he used a tanning bed. He was like an Indian. Dark, hard flesh and even harder muscle beneath. Muscle that rippled and tempted, and made her long to run her hands over them.

  Her eyes dropped to his hips. She couldn’t help it. She watched him come fully, gloriously erect in a matter of seconds. It was like a hard, thick stalk rising from between his thighs. The head was broad, plum-shaped and tempting, thickly veined and just plain thick. The sight of it made her very aware of her own femininity, the need to feel him pushing inside her, taking her, fucking her with hard, pounding strokes.

  “Hell, Heather, why not just barge right in,” he growled as he pulled a pair of sweat pants from his dresser and jerked them on over his long, well-muscled legs.

  “Do you keep a hard-on?” she asked him, fighting to control her breathing and her regret as he covered the sight of it.

  He muttered something under his breath that she couldn’t catch, but it sounded smart enough to piss her off. He flashed her a dark look. “What are you chewing my ass about now?”

  She slammed the door, propping her hands on her hips as she watched him in irritation.

  “I wasn’t,” she bit out. “But now that you mention it…”

  “Forget I mentioned it,” he grunted, exasperation filling his voice.

  “Today? In town?” she reminded him, ignoring the suggestion. “What the hell were you doing, trying to kill that bastard on the street? Do you want to go to jail? You will, you know, if he presses charges.”

  She watched as his jaw bunched, fury coursing over his expression as his eyes darkened with it.

  “Let him,” he grunted. “Because when I get out, I’ll be in the mood to kill. He’ll make a handy subject for the exercise.” Her look of disapproval had him shaking his head in irritation. “Don’t worry, Heather. Tate doesn’t want to mess with me and he knows it.”

  The tone of voice, the hard expression, showed the man carefully concealed beneath the laughing exterior. Rick and Tara thought Cade was the one to watch out for, but Heather had always known that Sam’s lazy, laughing exterior held a core of hard, cold steel.

  “Sam, that’s not the point.” She shook her head furiously. “Dammit to hell, we were there for a reason and you know it. If you keep jumping out of the shadows, we’re never going to draw that damned stalker out so our men can get a look at him.”

  A week of shopping, dressing in the finest clothes and playing debutante was getting on all their nerves. Marly and Sarah were chafing at the constant window shopping, and Cade and Brock were so damned nervous letting them go alone that they were like cats in a roomful of rockers.

  “Heather, I will not stand by and let some bastard abuse you, Sarah or Marly. What in the hell makes you think that’s ever going to happen?” He turned on her incredulously. “Did you think I was just going to stand there and let him kick the hell out of you?”

  What made her think he would do anything sensible at this point? He hadn’t in all the time she had known him.

  “I would have handled it,” she snarled.

  “Yeah, I saw that,” he snapped. “The bastard kicked you, Heather. Look at the fucking bruise on your leg. Stop chewing my ass for trying to stop him.”

  She didn’t have to look at it, she felt it. But she wasn’t a fool. She had known it was coming, and had known how it would appear to anyone who saw it.

  “I didn’t need your protection,” she bit out. “We had a plan, Sam…”

  “It was a stupid plan,” he growled as he threw himself down on the bed, watching her through heavy lidded, suddenly sensual eyes. What was it about the August men that any kind of confrontation with women produced this reaction? No, she took that back as her heart leaped. They only reacted that way with “their” women.

  “Come over here.” He patted the mattress. “I’ll see if I can’t find something else for you to chew on.”

  She frowned as she glanced at the door, then back to Sam. “I’m on duty. Tara would kick my ass. Besides, I’m tired of playing with you. You’re nothing but a tease.”

  His teasing had her in such a heightened state of arousal that she was about to drive herself and the other bodyguards crazy with her mercurial moods. He may be treating her like his lover now, but she knew damned good and well that he wasn’t about to fuck her.

  “Lock the door. Let me kiss that boo boo on your leg better.” He tempted her with a soft, seductive growl.

  Heather bit her lip as she glanced at the door again. Tara was like a damned bear with a sore paw lately. If she caught Heather playing when she should be working there would be hell to pay. And Tara would know if she was playing. Every time Sam touched her, aroused her, only to leave her aching, her temper became so testy that it was becoming a running joke within the group assigned to the ranch.

  “Come on, I dare you.” Soft, teasing, he urged her to join his naughtiness. “Come here, baby, let me kiss your boo boo all better.” The words were childish, the voice and the expression were pure sin. He tempted her when she knew better.

  “Not a chance, Sam,” she bit out. “You’re all talk, and no action.”

  The air seemed to thicken with her challenge.

  He frowned. “It’s not nice to call me a tease, Heather.”

  She crossed her arms over her breasts. “Are you denying it, Sam?”

  He shrugged, his glance brooding, brimming with intensity, both sexual and anger. “I’m trying to protect you, Heather.”

  She shook her head, a sense of hopelessness spreading over her.

  “Find someone else to play with, Sam,” she snapped out, seeing the surprise, then the heat that spread over his face. “I’m tired of it. And if you can manage it, next time we’re trying to draw that bastard out, let us do our jobs instead of jumping in. I didn’t rip Tate’s head off for a reason. You should have had enough sense to know that.”

  She turned and slammed out of the bedroom, anger and arousal mixing inside her system until she felt like a volcano ready to blow. She moved to her own room and slammed the door close. She twisted the lock furiously, then moved to the door that connected to Sam’s room. She twisted that lock as well.

  It was a Pocket Rocket moment, she thought as she jerked her dresser drawer open and retrieved the small, battery operated clitoral vibrator. Before the arousal drove her crazy, before she begged him to fuck her. She needed relief, weak though it might be without his touch. She needed the strength and heat of his body. And she needed it now.

  She removed her panties and the light summer dress before kicki
ng her shoes off by the bed and laying across it as she whimpered in agony. Her pussy was pulsing, clenching. Sam was making her crazy.

  She twisted the control on the little external vibrator, moving it slowly over the bare lips of her pussy as her fingers moved to the sensitive opening of her vagina. She was too hot, too desperate to go slowly. She plunged two fingers as deep inside her hot cunt as they would go as she moved the vibrator to the side of her clit.

  Her hips jerked, her strangled moan tearing from her throat as she worked her fingers through the thick cream of her inner juices. She imagined Sam, his fingers working inside her, his tongue on her clit, his breath hot and hard as he licked her, sucked her clit into his mouth or pushed his tongue deep inside her pussy.

  Her fingers spread the natural lubrication of her body back, along the puckered opening of her anus. She couldn’t stop her moan of need as the third finger gently pierced her anal opening.

  She remembered the one time Sam had touched her there. The one time his mouth had moved over her sensitive pussy, his fingers invading it as one hard, long finger pushed into her anus.

  Invaded from both ends, her body shook. Her eyes were tightly closed, her body shuddering as she worked her fingers inside her, driving her pleasure higher, deeper. The strong vibration of the powerful little device at her clit made her release come hard and fast.

  She bit her lip, moaning, her hips thrusting convulsively on her fingers as the pleasure tore through her, exploding through her clit, her hungry pussy and echoing along her body.

  Heather didn’t bother to try to breathe through the little explosion. She let it tear through her, carry her along until her clit protested the strong stimulation of the battery-operated device. She eased it from her as she pulled her fingers free of her twin entrances. Her body still tingled, and though the worst of the extreme arousal had eased, she was by no means satisfied.

  She stared up at the ceiling, ignoring her tears, and cursed fate and reality. In her dreams it was Sam taking her, yet it seemed the reality of it would never come to pass.

  * * * * *

  Sam stared at the ceiling, arousal and anger moving through his system as he fought to ignore the erection tormenting him. Damn. This wasn’t working out. Heather in the house all day, tempting him, her smile and her laughter teasing him in ways that stretched his self-control to its limits.

  He remembered finding her the night of the attack. Unconscious, naked, blood staining her thighs from the slashes made across her mound. One had come dangerously close to her tender clitoris. Thin, shallow, but devastating all the same.

  His hand lowered, tucking beneath the waistband of his sweatpants, gripping his cock. He could feel his own scars. Razor thin, but even now, twelve years later, easily felt. They crisscrossed the head, the shaft, his scrotum. A madman’s brand. A madman’s revenge.

  He closed his eyes, the misty nightmare visions silhouetting behind the closed lids as his heart rate increased and his stomach tightened with tension. The memories were there, so close…

  The jarring ring of the phone beside him jerked him from the forming visions of the past. With a curse on his lips, her rolled over and jerked the phone from its base.

  “What?” he snarled.

  “You like fucking your brothers, August?” Mark Tate’s voice came through the line. Breathless, almost frightened as he spoke. “You have two hours to show up at my place, or I send these pictures I have to every newspaper and law enforcement agency in the country. Interesting pictures of a dead man.”

  Sam stilled. A haze of pain and white-hot fury swelled in his gut.

  “You’re a dead man,” he whispered.

  The line disconnected.

  Chapter Five

  There was blood everywhere. Like his worst nightmare come to life. The stench of death was like a blow to his chest, taking his breath, stealing the very air from his lungs. Sam could do nothing but stare in horror. Mark Tate was laid out in the small dingy living room of his mobile home, his body beaten nearly to a bloody pulp. It was Mark, he knew it was, but the features were nearly indistinguishable, his limbs were contorted, bits of flesh and blood splattered walls and furniture alike.

  Sam shook his head, fighting for breath. He had seen such brutality before, and felt the violence of it searing his system. He shook, fevered and yet chilled as memory and reality collided, and for a moment, the scene was overlapped by that of another.

  I killed him, Sam, Cade screamed furiously through his mind, his expression savage, commanding. Do you hear me? He’s dead. I killed him.

  Blood had stained them both, the room in his memories reeking of filth and agony, and the bone-chilling scent of death. Just as it did here.

  I killed him, Sam. Cade’s voice echoed around him again.

  But Sam had wanted to kill him. Wanted to kill so bad, even now, twelve years later, he dreamed of it. He felt bones cracking beneath his pummeling fists, blood spraying, a gasp of death in his ears.

  He shook his head, blinking. But he couldn’t make himself move. All he could do was stand there, the door opened behind him, staring at the bloody body and the mark of a painful death. This horror of this death didn’t lay on his conscience, yet the previous one did.

  “Sam, back away from the door.” The authoritative, cold voice of the sheriff shocked him back to reality.

  Sam froze, fear flashing through his mind for a moment. His fists clenched, his mind switching into a primal survival response before he was able to overcome it.

  “Sam, I have you covered.”

  Sam glanced back slowly, feeling his face pale. He hadn’t even heard the vehicles drive up, hadn’t seen the flashing lights that blinded him now, nor heard any sirens if they had been blaring. But they were there now. Three sheriff’s units, five men with weapons aimed at his back.

  He turned around slowly, careful to keep his hands in clear view. Son of a bitch, he could feel the panic starting to overwhelm him. There was a dead man in the trailer behind him. A man he had sworn to kill just earlier that day. A man everyone knew he detested. His hands trembled. Damn.

  “Josh, I just got here.” He swallowed past the tight lump in his throat and fought the insidious voice that warned him no one would believe him. He looked at his hands. They were clean. Scratched but not bloody, and the scratches were already healing. “There’s no blood on my hands, Josh. I just got here.”

  Joshua Martinez stood coldly firm, the police issue pistol aimed at his heart. Sam felt the cold bite of reality and the knowledge that, for now, he could do nothing but sweat it out.

  “Step down, Sam,” Josh advised him, his voice echoing with menace. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Sam took a deep, hard breath. God help him, he didn’t know if he could let Josh cuff him, he only prayed he wouldn’t. He stepped down slowly, fighting a horror he had sworn he would never visit again.

  He followed Josh’s orders explicitly, leaning against the sheriff’s car while they searched him for weapons, answering Josh’s short questions in a deceptively calm voice. He was anything but calm.

  “I’m not going to cuff you, Sam,” Josh said quietly as he backed away. “I have to take you in though. Are you going to come easy?”

  Sam swallowed tightly, nodding with a brief movement of his head.

  “I’ll call Cade…”

  “No,” Sam bit out. “I didn’t do it, Josh. Don’t upset the family. You go in that trailer and all you’ll find are my prints at the door and on the light. I just got here. I swear it, man. No sense in upsetting family.”

  No sense in making the nightmares worse.

  Josh opened the door. Sam steeled himself as he glimpsed the steel cage he was being forced to willingly step into. He did so, his mind screaming out at him to run, to hide, to escape the cage. His fists clenched and his breath became strangled. Stepping into the back of the sheriff’s cruiser wasn’t the hardest decision he had ever made in his life, but it ranked in the top ten.

&n
bsp; The door slammed shut behind him. He breathed out roughly, closing his eyes in an attempt to shut out the reality he was being locked into. He shut out the sounds around him, the flashing lights and the knowledge of what could be coming. Instead, he thought of her. Heather.

  She would be sleeping peacefully at the ranch house, her long red hair haloed around her head, her soft face flushed and too damned innocent. Was she wearing another of those sexy little nighties he had caught her in the other night, he wondered. Sure she was, he convinced himself. Silk, of course…maybe that green one. The silk and lace teddy that made her look so damned pretty. Her eyes, sparkling like emeralds and tempting him, her smile honeyed, promising the sweetest secrets.

  Dear God, he should have never left tonight. Should have ignored Tate when he called earlier instead of leaving the house like a fool and charging over here. This wasn’t one of the smartest moves he had ever made in his life.

  He hadn’t been gone long, he assured himself. He had talked to Cade and Rick before leaving the house, though they had been unaware where he was going. He had come straight over here, hadn’t stopped anywhere. He wiped his hands over his face, disgusted with the fine, cold sweat he wiped from his forehead.

  God, this couldn’t be happening.

  Heather. Her name was a mantra, whispering through his mind. Silken skin, and hot kisses; something else denied him. He grimaced. Something he denied himself.

  “Sam?” Josh opened the driver’s seat door and slid into the cruiser. “I’ve got to take you in, buddy.” He turned, staring through the cage, his brown eyes somber. “It’s going to take a while to dust for prints and the like. It’s an unholy mess in there.”

  “Josh.” Sam flinched at the graveled sound of his own voice. “I didn’t do it. Just let me go home. I’ll be there if you need me. I promise.”