âNow, will you make love to me?â
Heâd love nothing better. But he was still worried about her emotional scars. Heâd never dealt with anything like that before.
âWilla, are you sure youâre ready for this? Do you need more time to trust me?â
Her gaze narrowed in irritation. He laughed reluctantly. Although the notion of her tearing his clothes off didnât sound half-bad.
âRefill?â he asked her. Now that the moment was upon him, he had no idea how to proceed with her. Yet another first for him. He pressed a full glass into her hand and nudged the bottom of it toward her mouth.
âA little liquid relaxation first, Mr Dawson?â
âSomething like that.â She was so damned open and forthright. It was disconcerting. Most women were so busy maneuvering into his pants by this point they werenât stopping to talk about his tactics to achieve the same.
âI have faith in you, Gabe.â
And there it was. That damned trust of hers. What if he let her down? If she freaked out in the middle of sex and he did the wrong thing? Fear gripped his chest in sharp talons.
âNow what?â she asked.
Now what, indeed.
Vengeance in Texas: Where heroes are made.
CINDY DEES started flying airplanes while sitting in her dadâs lap at the age of three and got a pilotâs license before she got a driverâs license. At age fifteen, she dropped out of high school and left the horse farm in Michigan, where she grew up, to attend the University of Michigan. After earning a degree in Russian and East European studies, she joined the US Air Force and became the youngest female pilot in its history. She flew supersonic jets, VIP airlift and the C-5 Galaxy, the worldâs largest airplane. During her military career, she traveled to forty countries on five continents, was detained by the KGB and East German secret police, got shot at, flew in the first Gulf War and amassed a lifetimeâs worth of war stories.
Her hobbies include medieval reenacting, professional Middle Eastern dancing and Japanese gardening.
This RITA® Award-winning authorâs first book was published in 2002 and since then she has published more than twenty-five bestselling and award-winning novels. She loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at www.cindydees.com.
ââ¦We commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the groundâearth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dustâ¦â
The preacherâs voice droned on, but Willa Merrisâs heart hurt too much for her to hear the rest. Her father, Senator John Merris, was dead. Truly gone. Murdered. And even though his body had been discovered nearly two weeks ago, the finality of it had waited until this exact moment to slam into her like a ton of bricks.
Despair weighed on her until she could hardly breathe. What were she and her mother going to do? He had always been the center of their universe, the two of them pale moons orbiting his brilliant life.
A thud startled her. Her mother had just tossed a tightly balled clod of red Texas clay on top of the casket. The dirt in her own hand was cold and moist, squishing out of her clenched fist. Blinded by tears, Willa tossed her clod of dirt into the hole that contained her fatherâs mortal remains.
She shuddered as dozens of other mourners stepped forward to toss handfuls of dirt on her fatherâs grave. Some of them appeared genuinely sad, but the majority ranged from indifferent to covertly satisfied to bury the bastard. She had no illusions that her father had been a saint. Far from it. Heâd been a mean man in a mean businessâtwo mean businessesâa wildcat oilman carving a fortune out of the oil sands of West Texas, and a United States senator, brawling in the halls of Congress.
A comforting arm slipped around her shoulders. She leaned into the embrace for a moment, but then caught a whiff of the aftershave and stiffened. No. Surely not. Horror flowed through her. That, and sheer, frozen terror. She glanced up at the sympathetic face of James Ward, the son of her fatherâs longtime business partner.
âGet away from me this second,â she cried. âDonât touch me!â
The people around her jolted, shocked by her outburst. She slipped out from under Wardâs arm as he stared at her, dumbfounded. Right. Like he didnât know exactly what she was talking about.
Flashes of his big hands tearing her clothes⦠viciously slapping the fight out of her⦠shoving her to the floor of her living room⦠and, oh, God, the pain of his big body slamming into hers over and over. His grunts⦠the maniacal gleam in his glittering blue eyes⦠the humiliation and utter degradation of it.
Sheâd wanted to die. Right there where heâd left her on the floor like some piece of tossed-off garbage. Sheâd wished desperately to disappear, to just cease to exist. But no such luck. Instead, her father had checked out of his mortal coil and left behind the mess of his life for her to unravel in addition to hers.