“I can get from point A to point B without assistance,” she said and pushed his hand away.
“Why are you so afraid?” he asked, his voice low.
“I’m not. Just because I don’t like to be mauled, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me.”
“A good story but I’m not buying.”
“Fine. Because I wasn’t selling.”
They wove through the crowd. Quinn couldn’t keep from grinning. D.J. sure as hell wouldn’t make it easy, but when he finally won her, it was going to be worth all the effort. He had a feeling he’d never met anyone like her before and was unlikely to do so in the future.
He supposed there were men who would see D.J. as a woman to be tamed, but not him. He liked her feisty and difficult. He wanted her strong enough to stand up for herself and comfortable telling him to go to hell if that was where she thought he should be.
The game room was huge, with a pool table in the center, and three full-size video games set up along the far wall. A big fireplace stood in a corner. They had the space to themselves.
D.J. pulled the cover off the table and folded it. Quinn pulled balls out of pockets and set them on the table.
“I haven’t played in a while,” he said. “I’d like to take some practice shots.”
“No problem.” She leaned against the table and smiled. “What are we playing for?”
“Is everything a competition with you?”
“Pretty much.”
“What if two people happen to have a mutual goal?” he asked.
She shrugged. “How often does that happen in life?”
“What about at work?”
“Okay. There, but almost nowhere else.”
“I can think of a couple of places.”
She sighed heavily. “Is everything about sex with you?”
He grinned. “Pretty much.”
The corner of her mouth twitched and he knew she’d recognized her own words tossed back at her.
“We could play for money,” she said.
“Not interesting enough. What about articles of clothing?”
D.J. shook her head. “There are children in the house.”
“I’ll take my winnings on account. Time and place for collection to be detailed later.”
“What makes you so sure you’ll win?”
He waited until she was looking at him before answering. “I always win.”
“So do I.”
“Then that will make the game more challenging for both of us.”
He thought she might protest or call him names. Instead she shrugged. He wondered if that was because she was so confident of her abilities or because she didn’t mind losing.
He wanted it to be the latter. He wanted to know that she felt the tension between them as much as he did. He wanted her to want him. Something – some secret from her past – made her wary. He could accept that. He was willing to wait until she trusted him, and he would do what was necessary to earn that trust.
He took a few practice shots. His work might be intense, but there were also long hours of waiting. He’d spent a large percentage of them playing pool with his men. The rhythm of the game came back to him, and when they tossed for the break, he was confident he was going to kick butt.
D.J. won the toss and went first. As she bent over the table, he admired the lines of her strong, lean body. Just looking at her legs, at the curve of her hips and rear made him ache. He wanted to go up behind her and press himself into her. He wanted to run his hands down her back to her waist, then circle around front until he cupped her breasts. He wanted to turn her, kiss her, touch her, taste her. Take her.
He wanted her wet, willing and screaming his name. And if he acted on any of his fantasies, he was likely to get a black eye.
She called the ball and pocket, then took her shot. The ball dropped neatly into place. She lined up her second shot. With her head down, her long hair flowed over her arm. He watched the play of light on the wavy strands.
“Why do you wear it long?” he asked when she’d sunk the second ball and straightened.
“What?”
He moved close and touched her hair. “It’s beautiful, but why haven’t you cut it?”
D.J. told herself to move out of reach. She hated people pawing her. The thing was, having Quinn twist a strand of her hair around his finger didn’t really feel all that bad. Sure he was close, but not in an aggressive, macho way.
“My mother had long hair,” she said before she realized she actually intended to tell him the truth. Or at least a part of it. “When I was little, she used to brush my hair for hours, and then I would brush hers. We used to try different kinds of braids and ribbons and promise each other we’d never cut our hair short.”
Quinn listened intently. His dark gaze never left her face.
“So it’s worth the risk?” he asked quietly.
She nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. Long hair was a risk. It could be grabbed, pulled, used against her.
“I wear it braided and pinned up to my head on assignments,” she told him. It wasn’t enough, but it was as much as she could do.
“Did you ever cut it?”
She nodded. “Once. I felt like I’d lost her.”
The confession surprised her. She’d never told anyone that before. The realization made her nervous, but not nearly as much as the low-grade wanting she felt deep inside. She’d been waiting to see Quinn from the second she’d awakened that morning. Anticipation had slowed time to a crawl and when she’d tried to distract herself, nothing had worked.
She’d imagined what he would look like and how he would smile at her. She’d changed her clothes three times before heading over to Rebecca’s. She felt giddy and foolish and tingly. Things she never allowed herself to feel.
He laced his fingers through her hair, then twisted the long strands around his hand. The action pulled slightly. Not enough to cause her pain. Another woman might not have even noticed, but D.J. did. Her senses went on alert, even as her muscles tensed.
The world blurred slightly in warning, then she was no longer in the spacious, well-lit, rec room. Instead she was a child of nine or ten. She could feel the close confines of the small space she’d squeezed into in an effort to escape. But her mother wasn’t so lucky. Even as D.J. closed her eyes she could hear the screams, the pleading.
Her father had grabbed her mother by the hair. D.J. didn’t remember what her mother had done that was so wrong. She could only feel her father’s drunken rage. The sounds were so sharp. Her mother’s voice, her father’s breathing. The slick slide of the metal knife against the edge of the counter.
They’d been out of sight then, and D.J. had only been able to listen to the thunks of the blade against the cutting board. She’d heard her mother’s gasps, her father’s admonition to stop misbehaving. His claims that this was all her fault.
He’d gone back to drinking then, and had eventually passed out. D.J. remembered crawling out of her hiding space and finding her mother sitting at the kitchen table. Long, dark hair covered the cheap flooring. Her mother’s hair had been hacked off unevenly. There were a few streaks of blood on her neck where the knife had cut through skin.
Her mother had never said anything about that night, nor had she tried to grow her hair back. But she’d continued to brush her daughter’s hair, to braid it and tie it up in ribbons.
“D.J.?”
The light touch on her arm brought her back to the present with a stomach-clenching jolt of fear. She swung, prepared to take on her attacker, only to find herself staring at Quinn.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked quietly.
Talk about it? No. Not even a little.
“I’m fine,” she told him. “Just lost in thought.”
She thought he might call her on the lie, but he didn’t. Still shaking a little from the flashback, she lined up her next shot and missed.
Quinn took over the table. She stayed back, watching his smooth, easy movements. When he sent the third straight ball tumbling neatly into the pocket, she got the feeling she’d been had.
“Let me guess,” she said. “You’ve been hustling since you were a kid?”
“No. I learned in the military.”
“You’re good.”
“Thanks.”
He flashed her a grin that made her toes curl. The reaction was so unexpected, she nearly tumbled over in surprise. More to distract herself than because she wanted information, she started asking questions.
“So what was life like back in those football-star days?”
“Pretty typical small-town stuff. In Texas, high school football is practically a religion. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to play. I did okay in school, drove too fast, chased girls. The usual.”
His growing up hadn’t been anything like her world. “You close to your folks?”
“To my mom. I never got along with the old man.” He straightened. “Whatever I did wasn’t good enough. I spent the first fourteen years of my life trying to figure out why he didn’t love me and the next fourteen trying not to care.”
“I don’t understand.”
Quinn shook his head. “Neither did I, until a couple of weeks ago. Apparently he and my mom couldn’t have kids and he was the problem. There weren’t much in the way of infertility treatments thirty-plus years ago. So he convinced her to find a guy who looked like him and get pregnant. She did and he accepted Gage as the son he never had.”
D.J. hadn’t thought much about how the Reynolds brothers had come to be related to the Haynes brothers. “Earl Haynes just happened to be in town?”
“Up in Dallas at a convention. My mom went back the following year to see him. She not only found out Earl wasn’t the man she thought, she ended up pregnant a second time. Her husband wasn’t willing to overlook the infidelity. Eventually he forgave her, but he never forgave me.”
“Because you were a constant reminder.”
“Something like that.” He shrugged. “We never talked about it. He just made my life hell.”
“Does knowing the reason make a difference?”
“I thought it would, but no.”
D.J. could understand that. Knowing why something happened didn’t always make the situation any easier to deal with. She understood everything about her past, and the knowledge was less than useless.
She couldn’t see Quinn’s pain, but she felt it. Oddly enough, it was something they had in common.
“My dad was a bastard, too,” she told him. “Big, mean. Scary. He’s the main reason I like to be in control all the time.”
Confessions weren’t her style and this one made her more uneasy than most. She braced herself for questions, or for him to tell her that she wasn’t in control. Instead, he nodded.
“Makes sense.”
He turned back to the game and continued to play perfectly. When he dropped the eight ball in the center pocket; he winked at her.
“That’s gonna cost you a shirt, Daisy Jane.”
“I was thinking of something more like a sock.”
“It’s my victory. I get to pick the item. Quit arguing or I’ll make it your panties.”
She reached for the rack, determined to win the second game. He broke, then promptly missed the first shot. She had a feeling he was giving her a break, but she wasn’t about to complain. Not when she wanted to kick his butt and make claims on his underwear.
“When did you start learning martial arts?” he asked as she nailed her first shot.
“In high school. I worked all summer to pay for the lessons.”
“I still say you would have been a terrific cheerleader.”
“Oh, please. I wasn’t interested in prancing around and showing off for boys.”
“Some of the squads are very athletic.”
She lined up the next shot. “That’s true. If it had been something like that, I would have. But at my high school the girls were into looking good, not competing. I ran track.”
“No archery or fencing?”
She glanced at him, but his expression was innocent enough. “It wasn’t offered.”
“How old were you when you earned your first black belt?”
“Seventeen.”
She still remembered her pride. How she’d felt strong and safe for the first time in years.
“Did you have a boyfriend?”
She straightened. “Think about it, Quinn,” she said. “I ran track, I had a black belt. What do you think?”
He walked toward her. “That you scared the boys away.”
“Most of them.”
He stopped next to her. “When they got too close, did you beat them up?”
She knew he was teasing and wanted to smile, but the memory of those days only made her sad. She’d never fit in. No one could understand what drove her to always want to be stronger, faster, better. She’d started to learn how to protect herself, but she’d never been able to escape being lonely.
“I didn’t have to,” she told him. “They never got that close.”
He set his cue on the table and rested his hands on her waist. “Too bad. They should have called your bluff. Look at all they missed out on.”
She didn’t know what to respond to first. His closeness? She told herself to step away, but she couldn’t seem to move. His comments about the past? She hadn’t been bluffing. Her toughness had been as real as she could make it. As for missing out...did Quinn really think that? Somehow she’d always assumed the boys were never all that interested. If she wasn’t girly and instantly willing, she wasn’t worth the trouble.