“You liked him?”
She laughed without humor. “I think I would have liked any guy that wasn’t one of the brothers.”
Any guy who’d been nice. “I can understand that.”
She twisted her mouth with rueful contempt. “I was so pathetically desperate...” The words trailed off and she straightened again. “He was kissing me, both of us mostly submerged in the water, and then Carver applauded on the shore and I looked up and everyone was standing there, some of them confused, some full of pity. Others, Carver and Gene’s friends, laughed until they couldn’t stand up straight. The boy who’d been kissing me like he actually liked me just waded out and I was left there in the lake.”
Alone.
Denver took two big steps that put him directly in front of her, caging her in.
She held up a hand, maybe to deny the need for comfort. Maybe to block him from getting too close. He stepped into it until her palm flattened on his chest. He put his hand over hers and his forehead to the top of her bowed head.
And he struggled. With himself, with what he wanted from her.
How he wanted to find the miserable fucks and tear them apart.
“After that,” she whispered, “I just refused to speak to boys, and I didn’t make friends with girls. Because I stopped participating, Carver was forced to give up that particular game.”
That game—but had he found other games to play? Denver wanted to know everything, especially whether or not the brothers had ever physically hurt her. But she’d spent enough time reciting bad memories.
A deep breath lifted her breasts against his ribcage. She shifted, slowly raised her face and looked at him. “It wasn’t until that day at the lake that I realized why Carver did the things he did.”
Hands shaking from several emotions, but mostly debilitating fury and a staggering tenderness, Denver cupped her head. “Why?”
“He said he didn’t want to share.”
“With you?”
She shook her head. “He didn’t want to share...me.”
CHAPTER NINE
AN AWFUL EXPRESSION fell over Denver’s face. She’d seen him fight, but she’d never been up close when he went into battle mode—as he did now. He looked ruthless. The hardness in his golden hunter’s gaze, the flexing of steel muscles, might have unsettled someone else.
Before this moment, she’d touched him because it gave her comfort. Now she touched him to offer it, smoothing a hand over the tension in his chest, up to those bulging biceps and hard-set shoulders. “Carver said it was seeing me in the wet T-shirt that did it. His way of blaming me. But later, when I thought about it, I knew he’d been thinking along those lines for a while.”
Eyes narrowed and jaw tight, Denver growled, “He touched you?”
He’d done so much worse than that. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block it out. “He never raped me.” Not for lack of trying. Her words sounded like gravel, and she hoped Denver attributed it to lingering sickness instead of deep-rooted fear and revulsion.
“That’s not what I asked you.”
She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, when it mattered far too much. “He liked to manhandle me. They all three found one reason or another to yank me around, shove me. They threatened plenty, but they never outright hit me.”
He breathed harder and his eye flinched. “That sounds pretty awful for a young girl.”
Too awful to bear—especially when she knew it was leading up to worse. “After that day at the lake, everything changed. It’s like they were no longer rough just to be mean. It was more about...”
Denver waited, and under her palm she felt the strong thumping of his heart.
“About getting their hands on me.”
Though anger came through in the tightening of his muscles, his tone emerged as calm and controlled as ever. “Did you tell anyone?”
This particular calm, she realized, had a definite chill to it. “Being a ward of the state meant we got occasional checkups. Janet and Gary kept the boys in check.” For the most part. Going on tiptoes, she brushed her lips over his collarbone. “And they kept me in check.”
His big hands wrapped around her upper arms. “Meaning they didn’t let you talk?”
Concentrating on Denver’s appeal made talking about the past easier. “They told me what would happen if I did.”
Tone deadly, he whispered, “Tell me.”
There’d be no point. “You can already imagine.”
Disgust knotted his jaw. “Janet and Gary are the parents?”