“Brogan’s not white trash, Eve,” Sandi continued behind her.
“You should know, Sandi.” What the hell was it going to take to get rid of this woman?
“At least I didn’t sell myself to some rich pervert, like your mother did,” Sandi stated, disgust heavy in her voice as Eve started to step up from the main floor to the bar area.
Oh, that was it.
Eve swung around so fast, so furiously that Sandi nearly ran into her. The other woman had to back up quickly, nearly tipping and falling on the stilts she called shoes.
“What did you just say to me?” Eve demanded, the anger she had been fighting to keep a rein on all night breaking free.
“Oh, you heard me.” Sandi sneered as Eve glimpsed Brogan rising to his feet, his expression suspicious as his gaze locked on her and Sandi. “I might be white trash, but you and your family are nothing but low-class whores.”
“Like your opinion matters,” Eve mocked.
She wasn’t going to resort to violence. There were other ways to finish this, later. Clenching her teeth, she moved to turn away, determined to wait, to bide her time.
This wasn’t the place for a confrontation, even for her mother’s sake.
Sandi suddenly reached out, gripping her arm as Eve tried to walk away. Eve felt the other woman’s nails dig into her arm, breaking skin. A haze of fury rose in her mind, obliterating common sense. The dull ache throbbing at both temples was forgotten as the blood began to rush to her head, fueling the fury rising inside her.
“You might carry the Mackay name, but you’re still a no-name little bastard with a tramp for a mother. Brogan doesn’t need the likes of you, bitch. You’re not part of his world, and he has no desire to be part of yours.”
Eve jerked her arm back, feeling the raking talons of the other woman’s nails in a distant, hazy part of her consciousness.
Others were watching. She could feel their eyes, their judgment.
She wasn’t going to do this here. She hadn’t fought in years. She had promised her momma she wouldn’t fight unless she had no other choice.
“Get out of my way,” she rasped, the need to fight throbbing in her voice. “Or I promise you’ll regret it.”
“Gonna sic Dawg on me, are you?” Sandi laughed insultingly. “He’s so pussy-whipped now he can’t find his ass from a hole in the ground, let alone drag his fist out of his wife’s snatch. He can’t help you.”
Oh, God, the other woman was asking for it. She was begging for it.
Why, oh, why had she made that promise to her momma that she wouldn’t fight unless she had to? Was she crazy?
She thought she’d try one more time. “Dawg taught me to swat overblown barflies all by my lonesome. If you don’t stop fucking buzzing at me, then you’re going to find out exactly how he taught me to do it.”
As she saw Brogan and Dawg, followed by John, converging on them, she turned to move away again. God, when had Dawg gotten there?
Eve started to turn, Sandi’s arm went back, then flew forward, and she backhanded Eve with enough force to throw her into a customer’s back and nearly slam his head to the table.
Eve felt her lip split, but not with a sense of pain.
A haze of red descended over her vision as adrenaline crashed through her with a force she had never felt before. Before she could consider her actions, Eve turned, her fist jabbing into Sandi’s face.
Right between the eyes.
As the other woman went backward, Eve was on her. She followed her to the floor, her knee slamming into the other woman’s chest, holding her in place as she wrapped one hand around her throat and squeezed.
“Stay still, bitch!” she snarled when Sandi went to claw at her face.
To reinforce the order, Eve tightened her hold on the other woman’s neck, her fingers digging into Sandi’s windpipe and not letting up until she dropped her hands.
“Insult my mother, my sisters, my brother, or my cousins again—touch me again, bitch, and I’ll break your fucking nose. Then I’ll damned well ensure those lovely dentures you have screwed into your head require major surgery to repair. Are we clear?”
She could feel the crowd around them.
She could hear them.
Distantly.
She could hear Dawg and Brogan yelling at her. They were cursing, trying to get through the crowd to her, just as the bouncers were.
She was finished with the little piece of trash, though.
Jumping back in a smooth, well-practiced move she still worked at often, Eve landed on her feet just as Dawg and Brogan broke through the crowd across from her.
Her gaze met her brother’s—was that disappointment she saw in his eyes? No doubt it was. This was no way to ensure her reputation, her sisters’ and her mother’s, or his.
Adrenaline was still coursing through her veins, the urge, the hunger to fight flooding her system in such excess that when her gaze locked with Brogan’s, it was all she could do not to grab him and stake her claim immediately.
Yet she couldn’t.
Tremors were shaking her from the inside out. It wasn’t right. She had waited all her life for this, for the knowledge that there was a man out there who could ignite these fires inside her, and now she couldn’t have him.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking between the two men.
She didn’t even know which of them she was apologizing to: Dawg, for wanting the one man he couldn’t tolerate knowing she was with, or Brogan, the only man her blood raced for, her clit throbbed for.
Or perhaps it was for herself, because she knew it wasn’t the promise she had made Dawg that she was going to end up breaking.
It was the promise she had made to herself.
The promise that at no time would she ever show her brother—the man who had given to her and her family so unselfishly—the least amount of disrespect.
Because she knew the chance of her finding herself in Brogan’s bed was growing by the day.
* * *
What was he doing to his sister?
The agony burning in her eyes, the color of Natches’s and similar to the emotions reflected in their cousin’s gaze during those horrendous years he and Rowdy had been certain he would turn up dead, radiated in her gaze. Her face was stark white, blood staining her lip and cheek, the upper curve of one breast, and across her arm.
As she turned and raced from the crowd staring at her in shock, she made the turn around the bar and disappeared into the back rooms, Dawg blew out a hard breath.
Then he turned on Brogan, stopping the other man when he would have followed her by stepping in front of him.
“You’ve done enough,” he rasped, seeing in Brogan’s gaze the same swirling emotions, needs, and hungers that he had seen in Eve’s. Like Eve’s emerald green, the blue-gray color shifted with emotion and fury and a need Dawg knew went soul-deep. He knew because it was the same lashing emotions that had burned in his eyes when he’d thought he would lose his Christa.
“She needs me.” The certainty in the other man’s voice only sent rage crashing through him.
“She doesn’t need you,” Dawg retorted furiously. “She doesn’t need a traitor, Campbell. She needs a man with honor. Not one willing to trade his soul and his country for a dollar.”
It had taken Dawg months to accept that Brogan Campbell was the man described in the reports he’d had pulled up on him. Months of investigation and reaching out to contacts in the highest and lowest levels of the covert world.
Because he’d actually liked him.
Because he remembered the boy Brogan had been when he’d lived in Somerset so many years before, before he joined the Marines, and hadn’t wanted to believe the fires that burned in him had turned so dark.
“You don’t know me, Mackay.” Brogan was all but nose-to-nose with him. “You don’t know who I am, what I am, or where my honor lies, and don’t fucking pretend to.”
He pushed past Dawg, stalking toward the bar before one of the other two men staying at the Mackay Inn stepped in front of him. Jedediah Booker spoke hurriedly, his voice too low for Dawg to catch the words.
Brogan tensed, a curse slipping from his lips before he turned back toward Dawg, then strode past him and headed for the bar’s exit.
Now, what the hell was that all about?
When Dawg would have left himself, Donny along with Eve’s tormentor, Sandi, began to move past him as well.
Dawg stepped into their path.
He knew these two. Donny and Sandi were usually not much trouble. The girl had always had a mouth on her, but never one so vicious as to cause anyone to attack her. And never had he seen Sandi deliberately go after another woman as she had Eve.
“You looking to make enemies, Donny?” he asked the other man carefully as he glanced at Sandi, disgust welling inside him at the memory of what this woman had pushed his sister into.
“You know I’m not, Dawg.” Donny sighed, shaking his head in regret. “This was just a misunderstanding, man.”
“I see her around my sister again and you’ll pay for it,” Dawg informed him. “And you know I can do it, Donny. That is, if I can beat Natches to it.”
Donny definitely looked worried now, while Sandi paled fearfully.
Natches’s name was synonymous with the bogeyman since the day he had been forced to kill his own cousin Johnny Grace nearly eight years before.
“I told you, I don’t want Mackays for enemies,” Donny repeated as he pulled at the loose neckline of his T-shirt as though it were choking him.
Sneering at the two in disgust, Dawg pushed past them and moved to the bar, intending on following Eve. Instead, he was brought to a stop as John stepped from behind the bar before he could reach it.
“Sierra’s talking to her,” John told him, his voice low. “I’ll make sure she gets home tonight. Sometimes, as my wife says, a woman just needs another woman to talk to.”
There was no loosening the muscles at the back of his neck, but Dawg tried. Reaching around to rub at his nape in frustration, he blew out a hard breath.
“Call me if she needs me,” he finally said in irritation before shaking his head helplessly. “Hell, John. How do you survive hurting a sister?”
Because he had hurt her, and he knew it. By making her swear to go against her own instincts and stay away from Brogan, he had a feeling he’d hurt her more than he suspected.
“You let them forgive you and you go on.” John finally smiled back at him in compassion. “That’s all you really can do.”
Clapping him on the shoulder, John turned and went back behind the bar to give the bartenders a hand.
Let her forgive him?
He turned and headed to the exit. He would love to let her forgive him. Unfortunately, he wasn’t so certain he deserved it.
FIVE
John’s wife, Sierra, was striding furiously through the hall leading to the bar as Eve pushed through it, intent on collecting her purse and leaving. Sierra must have left the bar while she was at the table with the bachelorettes.
Before Sandi had made a fool of her.
Eve didn’t want to cry. She hated crying. But as Sierra stopped several feet ahead of her and stared back at her in disbelief, she could feel her throat tightening with the hated dampness.
“I’m sorry, Sierra,” she whispered, pushing her hands into the pockets of her jeans as she blinked quickly to hold the moisture back. “I’m just getting my purse. I promise not to try to return.”
She knew the rules.
As she had stared into Dawg’s eyes after jumping back from where she’d held Sandi to the floor, shame had surged through her.
She hadn’t thought about the rules on fighting then. Not until she’d seen Sierra and the fury glittering in her brown eyes.
Shame burned like a cinder in her chest.
When there was a fight anywhere on bar property, then both fighters were banned. The rule made sense. She really could have walked away, but once Sandi had dared to not just insult her mother, but to also use that sissy-bitch move and backhand her, it had been over with.