“You had money. I know who your father is.” He shook his head, a sharp burst of laughter escaping his lips. “Did you have fun that summer, pretending to be a cocktail waitress and slumming with Jackson and me? Fucking both of us while you turned the men who loved you against each other?”
“This isn’t about you,” she said with a sob, sending the tears in her eyes spilling down her cheeks. “Or Jackson. Or me. Or the ugliness in the past. This is about a smart, sweet, amazing little boy who loves and needs his mother. You can’t take me away from him. You can’t, Clay, or you’ll be as terrible a person as I was back then.”
His eyes flashed with cold rage, but Harley couldn’t seem to stop words from streaming out of her mouth.
“No, you’ll be worse,” she said, sniffing hard. “Because you weren’t raised by a mother who couldn’t stand the sight of you and a father who encouraged you to be a vicious piece of shit. You had parents who loved you and laughed with you and told you how wonderful you were. You were whole to start with, Clay, you didn’t have to learn—”
Before she realized he was moving, he was on the bed, looming over her with his hand around her neck.
“And then you destroyed me!” he shouted, the hatred in his eyes making her tears flow faster as his grip tightened, wrenching a gagging sound from her throat. “You killed the person I was, you poisonous cunt! You are toxic and if you think I’m going to let you so much as speak to Jasper through the bars of a prison cell, you’re out of your fucking mind.”
Harley squirmed beneath him, her body writhing as her vision grayed around the edges and the backs of her eyes began to pulse.
Years ago, she could never have imagined herself and Clay in a position like this. No matter how angry he might have been, Clay wasn’t the kind of person to take out his rage on another person, especially a woman tied to a bed, helpless to defend herself. But he wasn’t that man anymore. He was a monster, a monster she had created and now he was back from the dead, crawled out of his grave to take retribution.
They said karma was a bitch, but at that moment Harley knew karma was a devil with the face of the man you loved, slowly choking the life from your body as the world went dark.
Chapter Six
Clay
Clay forced his hand from Harley’s throat and stumbled away from the bed, his arms shaking at his sides.
What the fuck?
What the fuck had he almost done?
He’d brought Harley here to force her to tell him where Jasper was and facilitate the handoff between whoever had the boy and Clay’s people. This wasn’t about hurting her—at least not any more than he had to—let alone killing her.
But hearing the self-righteous note in her voice and seeing her cry as if she were the one who deserved pity and compassion, he’d just…lost it.
She was still breathing—she was unconscious, but he could see her chest rising and falling—but if he had kept his hand at her throat for another minute, maybe two…
However long he’d had left before he strangled a woman to death with his bare hands, it had been too fucking close. He never should have let himself lose control. He had to get out of here, away from her, and pull his shit together. As much as he hated to admit it, she was right—if he stooped to her level, he would be no better than she was.
Grabbing his hat off the dining table in the corner, he pushed through the screen door and out into the increasingly hot morning. Shoving the hat on his head—no need to make it easy for any drones cruising the area to see his face; he would have his ass handed to him if his superiors learned he was here without permission—he headed for the trees behind the officer bungalows.
Once he was in the shade, concealed by the thick leaves of the rainforest that covered most of this island, he braced his hands against a thick, softly peeling trunk and dropped his head. He closed his eyes but opened them again almost immediately. When he closed his eyes, all he saw was Harley’s tear-stained face and the way the veins had stood out on her forehead just before she’d lost consciousness.
He had killed before—in combat and in more shadowy ways in his work for the CIA—but those people had been strangers. Strangers who had signed up to fight for an opposing military force, or who had a dossier of crimes a mile long. He had never killed someone he knew personally, let alone someone he’d fucked so many times he could still remember the little sounds she made when she was about to go over, her pussy squeezing his cock until he thought he’d die from how right it felt to be inside of her.
You didn’t fuck her; you made love to her.
You made love to her and asked her to marry you, and if that truck hadn’t come out of nowhere, she would have been your wife.
Clay pulled in a deep breath and let it out through clenched teeth, hating how wild he still felt. He couldn’t dwell on the way things had been with Harley—how she could make him laugh until his stomach cramped, or the way her smell had swirled around him as they moved together, making love all night with the windows open and the sea breeze blowing across their sweat-slick skin.
She still smelled the same. Even with the sour scent of sweat and fear rising from her body, he could catch the notes of citrus, sea salt, and eternal summer lingering in her hair. For a moment, when he’d been holding the glass for her to drink and the breeze had blown through the window, the smell of her had tugged at something low in his body.
He hadn’t gotten hard, but he’d definitely gotten thicker. And that was enough to scare the shit out of him.
He couldn’t believe she still had the power to make him respond. After all he’d been through, after all the pain and rage and having six years with his son stolen away from him, he should be immune. But he wasn’t. He still wanted her as much as he hated her. He could still look at her long legs and imagine them wrapped around him while he sank into her softness.
But it would be different now. Now, he wouldn’t make love to her. Now, he would get off on taking something she didn’t care to give, from taking what he wanted and not giving a shit if it brought her pain.
In fact, pain would be good. He wanted her to hurt.
He had never touched a woman in anger and until this moment the thought of taking a woman against her will had sickened him. Rape was for useless, pathetic bullies who needed to violate weaker people in order to feel powerful. But the thought of Harley beneath him, tears streaming down her cheeks as he fucked her hard enough to make her breasts bounce wildly on her chest didn’t repulse him. It made his balls tighten and heat spread through his pelvis.
Before he could push the sickening mental image from his mind he was rock hard, his cock straining the khaki shorts he’d changed into on the ferry.
With a groan, Clay turned and leaned back against the tree, staring up at the tiny black birds dancing through the canopy. He tried to clear his mind of the twisted shit—to think of how physically exhausted he was after almost twenty-four hours without sleep or how many things could go wrong before he had Jasper in a plane with him headed back to Maryland—but his thoughts were a pit bull straining against a leash.
They kept coming back to Harley, to her smell and her arms bound to the headboard and how much he wanted to rip the filmy white shirt she was wearing in two and get his mouth on her tits.