Into the Fire - Anne Stuart [93]
He never should have told him about Jamie. But hell, he was seventeen and stoned out of his mind, and Nate was a master at getting useful information out of people.
He’d expected Nate to be furious, elder-brother protective when he found out Dillon had a wicked case of the hots for his then-fifteen-year-old cousin. Instead he’d been amused. And had taken to throwing them together, flaunting Jamie at Dillon’s hungry eyes.
How many times had he kicked himself for that night? He’d known how Jamie felt about him—he knew the signs of a crush. He was a bad boy—a good-looking, fuck-it-all rebel—and girls loved him. It wasn’t a surprise that Jamie would look at him surreptitiously, her gray eyes wide with virginal desire.
He’d been an idiot not to take her. Nate had thrown them together, and even if Dillon distrusted his motives, it still meant he could have had Jamie. And God knows, he’d wanted her so much it made him shake.
And he still did.
But he’d decided to be noble. She needed a jock, someone headed for Harvard. She needed her own kind, and he’d handed her over to a rapist.
And even worse, he’d seen the look of satisfaction in Nate’s eyes when he’d taken his shattered cousin away.
He’d paid for that mistake. Not for beating Paul to a pulp, but for thinking Nate could be trusted. Nate had been the one to suggest Paul would be a good match for Jamie at her first wild party. That he’d look out for her. But Nate knew human nature better than any other human being on this earth, and knew exactly what kind of a bastard he had Dillon hand Jamie over to.
He hadn’t been able to get out on bail, and the trial had gone quickly. In the end Nate had paid for a lawyer for him. He’d ended up with eighteen months, with time served taken into account, and he’d made it through. The only thing the lawyer couldn’t fix was the felony conviction—the Jameson family was too powerful in Marshfield, Rhode Island, for that to happen.
Hell, it didn’t matter. He didn’t give a shit about voting, and he’d own a gun whether he was allowed to or not. He was off probation, self-employed, and he really didn’t give a shit whether or not he could ever go into the army. What was past was past.
Except the past wasn’t gone at all.
It was waiting for him.
He remembered the party at Dizzy’s just after he got out of jail. Everyone was drunk out of their minds, high on any chemical they could find, and by the small hours of the morning most people had paired up. He’d been too drunk and too apathetic to take advantage of the various offers sent his way, and he’d passed out on the sofa. When he woke up, a couple of hours later, half the people in the room were asleep, the other half were fucking.
Which didn’t bother him—nobody seemed to have trouble with inhibitions, and he figured if they didn’t care, neither did he. Until his gaze focused, and he saw Nate in a far corner, banging some girl from the back. Which would have been fine, except that while he humped her he was staring directly at Dillon, a fixed expression on his face.
After that Dillon began to notice small things. How Nate always tried to entice him into a threesome with whatever girl he was with at the time. The possessive attitude when other people were around. Ending up with a night at the Dungeon, when everyone had fallen asleep, and Dillon had come out of a drunken stupor to find Nate in bed with him, curled up tight, with one hand on his crotch, jerking himself off with the other.
He hadn’t freaked. He’d simply pulled away, rolled out of bed. He had an erection himself—no wonder when an anonymous hand had been stroking him in his sleep—but Nate could see it, and he redoubled his efforts, his eyes burning into Dillon’s as he brought himself off.
Dillon shook his head slowly. “No, man. I love you like a brother, but…no.”
He turned around and walked out. It was midsummer, and he was barefoot and still half out of it. He was afraid Nate would