Hers to Choose (Cannon Cousins) (15 page)

“But I was a young
arrogant ass in those days. She knew exactly how to control me.” He shook his head.
“All those years, thinking I knew what was going on, thinking how great our
lives were. What a fool.”

His eyes had become wet
and his voice dissolved in his last words. Bryn watched him, almost regretful
to see him come to pieces. Whatever the hell was going on with this guy, he had
a serious problem.

“What’s a man, anyway? I
thought I knew.” His chest heaved in a quiet sob. “I don’t know anything.”

She wanted to comfort
him. How strange that after all this she didn’t have any real emotion about Dan,
except as some kind of play partner, even a friend of some bizarre type, a
friend who had her sympathy. Obviously he’d been betrayed, and she knew how
that felt. She shifted slightly as semen continued to leak out of her ass,
mixing with the juices forced out by the ben
wa
balls. The throbbing in her nipples started to
subside.

He rubbed his hand over
his face and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “So yeah, some issues to
work out. But doable, that’s the thing.” He finished off the whiskey, stroked
her breasts gently for a moment then stalked into the kitchen trailing tobacco
smoke. She could hear the bottle hit the edge of his glass. As he came back to
his chair, his hand slid through her hair and crushed it in his fist.

He hovered over her for a
few seconds. What he wanted to do, she couldn’t guess. Had never in this whole
lawless week been able to anticipate what Dan would do
next.
 
Or Alex for that matter.
She tensed, thinking he might
take her again so intense was the energy still emanating from him. Her body
shivered—if only he would fuck her.

His hand slid down the
side of her neck and pulled her face up. He moved the gag and leaned down,
gently kissing her until her lips trembled and responded, and then his mouth
trailed off across her cheek. He sighed loudly and pulled the gag back into
position.

“See, that’s the thing,”
he said, sitting down rather heavily. His eyes had taken the exact shade of his
pale blue t-shirt. “Your mouth, your body, you can’t resist. You want me. But
then what? Is the next guy going to get the same response?” He leaned forward,
resting his elbows on the table. “How can a man trust any woman?”

Fury swept over her, all
their time together coming down to this ridiculous moral outrage over what,
that she responded to him? Seconds before, he was flattered, said she had
helped him. Was he losing his mind? Her eyes blazed at him and her hands tugged
in the cuffs behind her back.

“Yes, I know—this has
nothing to do with you. I’m sorry you got mixed up in this, Bryn.”  He swallowed
more whiskey and swirled the glass, his eyes fixed on something far away and
again filling with tears. “It was always about her, what she wanted. I worked
my ass off, gave her everything. Nothing was ever good enough.”

Her gaze shifted to the
clock. It was ten past five. Her body sagged with the diminishing effects of
the tequila and exhaustion. He wasn’t even talking about her. Two days of this
rampage, very little sleep. She couldn’t guess what he wanted or what he
needed, and didn’t want to.

He followed her glance,
sighed, and came behind her to release her wrists and then the gag. He helped
her stand and held her in his arms a long time. She relaxed against his chest
and knew he was still crying.

“No need for a cocktail,”
he said finally, stepping back and waving his glass. He grabbed his coat. “I’ll
be back for dinner.”

Before going to the
bathroom, she watched him step off the porch and walk down toward the cabin.
The hot water poured over her, soothing her weary breasts and the battered skin
of her ass and thighs. Gingerly, she explored her asshole, surprised to find no
damage that she could feel. The ben
wa
balls continued their slow stimulation inside her, and on a whim, she directed
the pulse stream toward her tired clit and felt a slow surge of orgasm swell
through her belly and intensify to a devouring finish.

Bryn served dinner dressed in jeans
and a comfortable t-shirt, and Dan seemed to barely notice. Some kind of
threshold had been attained.
Something that had nothing to do
with her.
It slightly surprised her that she had come to know him that
well in spite of his cool distance. With the dishes finished, she paused at the
bedroom door.

“I’m going to bed,” she
said. He had already stretched out on the couch wearing nothing but boxers and
socks. Still burning with unsatisfied stimulation, her body responded to his
reclining form. Would he really mind if she went to him and took her pleasure
with his cock? She dismissed the idea almost immediately. Even if he didn’t
mind, it would be completely inappropriate.

His face turned from the
book he was reading and settled on her briefly. “Goodnight, Miss McClure. Sweet
dreams,” he said distantly.

The next day there was none
of his tease after breakfast. He said he was going fishing. She ate lunch,
expecting him to show up, but he didn’t. Obviously, whatever he had gained from
her service, he no longer needed. Her thoughts ran in a loop, trying to figure
out the whole Cannon
cousins
situation and then
chastising herself for wasting her time. It was a puzzle, she realized, and she
did have a part in it, and she didn’t know if that was good or bad.

But Alex was a different
matter. She still wanted him, wanted to know him. Or maybe she enjoyed pain so
much, she simply wanted him because he couldn’t be had. By mid-afternoon, she
had decided that she would get over Dan, wish him well, and set aside the whole
experience with him fairly quickly. She’d have a much harder time forgetting
about Alex.

Her conclusion was
confirmed late in the day when she saw the black Ram ease down the driveway and
park near the house. As Alex walked toward the porch, the movement of his body
impacted her physically. By the time he came through the door, her breath had
caught in her throat, and her pulse thudded in her ears. She had to get
control, she cautioned herself frantically. This man didn’t love her and never
would.

And, wait, damn it,
she
didn’t want him to
.

His
cobalt eyes riveted on her, his face contorting through a mixture of
expressions.
She
wore jeans and a comfortable long sleeved white t-shirt, her unruly hair in a
ponytail. A brilliant smile spread across his face briefly then he quenched it
and cleared his throat.

“Bryn,
er
, Miss McClure.”
He nodded curtly in acknowledgment. “Where’s Dan?”

“You can call me Bryn if
you want. He left after breakfast to fish. I haven’t seen him.”

“No lunch?” His brow
furrowed and looked out the window.

“No, and the schedule he
gave me included cocktails at five, dinner at six.”

He glanced at his watch.
“It’s after five now.”

“Yes,” she said, resting
her hands on her hips. His voice sent chills up her neck, warm and thrilling.
“I don’t know what to do about dinner.”

He eased his arm back
into the jacket and opened the door. “I’ll go down there.”

From the kitchen window,
she watched the truck disappear down the lane to the cabin. It was nearly dark.
Still in gooseflesh from his presence, she turned to the cooking.

***

As he steered the truck toward the
cabin, Alex realized he’d been holding his breath, terrified of what he might
find if Dan’s rage had flashed. For the three days he’d been gone from the
farm, he’d relived the bloody aftermath of Dan’s discovery of Cathleen in bed
with Kelsey Brigham, like a video on constant re-run. Alex hadn’t been able to
get a coherent word out of Cathleen when she called him, except broken
sentences including ‘Dan’ and ‘police’ and ‘killed.’

That night he’d left his
car in the street to run into the high rise, ignoring the likelihood he’d be
towed. Police cars and an ambulance crowded the loading zone, and two officers
waited in the lobby. Shaking, he punched the elevator button repeatedly,
thinking Cathleen had killed Dan. He couldn’t figure out how that had happened.

The front door of Dan’s
condo hung open with another officer and a few curious neighbors standing in
the hallway. Once they cleared him to enter, his first glance found Cathleen
wrapped in a sheet on the living room couch, wailing and reaching out to him.
He’d taken one look at the bitch and left her sniveling. When he saw Dan cuffed
in the hallway with a police officer and a detective standing beside him, his
first reaction was knee-buckling relief. Blood splattered on Dan’s suit pants
and dress shirt. A murderous expression lined his rigid white face.

Paramedics pushed a
gurney out of Dan’s bedroom, forcing Alex to step back against the wall. From
the chest down, the man was covered in a sheet. A brace had been clamped around
his neck. Blood matted his brown hair and his face looked like raw meat—eyes
swollen and bloodshot, nose crushed sideways, lips pulverized into puffy slabs.
Unrecognizable as the masonry crew chief he knew from so many construction
jobs—he’d only found out who it was when the detective told him.

They held Dan overnight,
long enough for Cathleen to pack a few things and leave. The next morning Alex
stood over her while the locksmith worked on the door.

“Never changed, did you,
Cat? Did you ever love Dan, or was it always about the money?”

She didn’t talk to him as
she hurried to cram more clothes into her bags. Maybe she had been beautiful
once. He’d believed it at the time, young and intrigued by such a stunning
upperclassman. Yes, there had been attraction to her stately form, her dark
magnetism. Like a fine work of art, her allure fascinated and amused him. Naïve
nineteen-year-old that he was, he had followed her around, trying to be subtle.
He figured out most of her class schedule, ended up in strange buildings on
campus that had nothing to offer a freshman. He passed her in hallways where
she stood talking with friends.

He thought she cared,
thought her green eyes gave him a special glance because she wanted him as much
as he wanted her. Maybe she did, at least for a while, when he sat with her in
the student union for lunch, and they talked about the few things they actually
had in common. When she agreed to go out with him, he suffered a thousand
deaths trying to decide how to approach her for a kiss.

As it turned out, she
kissed him, an electrifying moment followed by her invitation to bed. He
floated in a dream state through those next weeks, waking up in the middle of
the night or cutting class to fuck her when she demanded. Incredibly flattered
by her attentions, he memorized her skin, the flavor of her lips, the curve of
her breasts and how they slid under his hands. She taught him what she liked
and he didn’t stint on delivery.

The morning at the
student union when he introduced her to Dan, even when the familiar expression
of her eyes shifted and settled on Dan, it would still be a couple of weeks
before reality began to seep in around the edges. She made it abundantly clear,
finally, when he demanded to know why he couldn’t come over.

It had been Dan to
apologize, never Queen Cathleen, as he later took to calling her. She kept Dan
on a short leash with her incessant demands. Alex watched things flatten out
after they married, Dan spending more time at work, pushing himself and
everyone at the company to greater success, more contracts,
higher
profile, all so he could please Cathleen. Alex had managed to shut her out of
his mind, polite at family gatherings, less and less emotional about how she
had treated him. It had been years since he felt anything but relief she had
snagged Dan instead of him. He didn’t understand what Dan still saw in her.

He had taken his time in
Dan’s condo that morning after she left. He made sure to pack up every piece of
her clothing, shoes,
photographs
. The place looked a
little stark by the time the movers hauled out the last of her things, but he
knew Dan would appreciate having all the reminders gone.

At the jail, he waited in
the small crowded room until Dan appeared, escorted by a uniformed cop. He
waited back at the condo while Dan
showered,
thinking
they would go for breakfast, maybe talk. It was a surprise to see him emerge
dressed and ready for work.

At Dan’s insistence, Alex
had put his ear to the ground. Bit by bit, stories of Cathleen’s slutty
conquests came to light. No one wanted to tell him. Except for one or two, the
stories came from acquaintances or through hearsay, not the men themselves who
had been swept into a half drunken fuck or enticed into something they later
regretted. But everyone knew, men Dan saw every day in meetings, on job sites.
It ate Dan alive, the fear of what he didn’t know dissolving into the
humiliation of knowing after Alex told him.

If all that anger and
hurt hit a boiling point with Bryn, if somehow Dan letting himself interact
with a woman for the first time since Cathleen triggered an explosion—Alex had
hardly slept thinking of what might happen. Yet there Bryn was, all in one
piece and even more beautiful than he remembered. Alex wanted to take her in
his arms, hold her against his chest, never let go. He nearly trembled with the
force of it.