Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 60360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 302(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 302(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
She was getting closer to drawing him out, pulling more of him to the surface that she suspected was rarely disturbed by even a ripple of emotion. He might have always been this way, for all she knew. Caleb Barnes hadn’t suddenly woken up one day surrounded by impenetrable darkness. He’d been stumbling toward it for years, maybe his whole life, though she didn’t know why. One night wasn’t going to bring him out of it. She sighed, but not in defeat.
Chapter 26
Caleb stood in the darkened kitchen, unsure about what to do. All his years of honing and strengthening his self-control had vaporized in one night, in one instant, when coming up against Izzy’s own iron will. He didn’t understand how it had come to this, but then again he’d lost his mother, lost his job. Maybe he’d always been barreling toward oblivion, his whole life. Wasn’t that the point of disciplining himself? To stave off the inevitable?
But he’d only been able to keep the beast at bay for so long. And of course it had been a woman who’d done him in. A strong, beautiful, warrior woman who hadn’t yet met her match until she’d come up against Caleb’s dark side. He’d destroyed her on his way to finishing himself off. He should’ve walked away from her when they’d first met. He’d known he was flirting with disaster every time he was with her. But he’d been too selfish, too greedy for the sensations she’d provided him to put an end to it. Now he’d ruined his life and the beautiful woman in his bed was a senseless casualty.
He looked around the room that was small, but still larger than the jail cell they would soon put him in. Twenty years was a long time to spend in a cage. Like father, like son, though, he supposed. His eyes came to rest on the .45 lying on the kitchen table. It was his team gun. Shooter, Tex, Hawk, and Easy all had one. Their unit insignia was affixed to the grip. He could imagine Shooter’s face as he visited Caleb in prison, a look of profound and utter disappointment. If he bothered to visit at all.
Caleb’s fingers twitched as he imagined the weight of the gun in his palm, recalled the sharp, insistent sound of racking a bullet into the barrel. He dismissed it, though, tempting as it was. He was a lot of things, but he was not a coward. He wouldn’t take the coward’s way out. He turned and picked up his phone instead.
He still couldn’t call Shooter. He wasn’t quite ready for that. Instead he dialed another familiar number. He waited for the call to connect.
“I need you,” Caleb said into the phone. His voice was hoarse and barely recognizable to himself.
“For what?” Tex asked, rousing more fully. “What happened?”
For a long moment Caleb didn’t answer. He glanced over his shoulder at the closed bedroom door and then shut his eyes.
“Caleb,” Tex prompted. “What happened?”
Caleb swallowed hard and gripped the phone tightly in his hand. “I raped her. I raped Izzy.”
It felt as though it took Tex a long time and a short time to arrive at the house. Caleb could barely recall how long it’d been since he’d hung up the phone. Now the cowboy was looming in his kitchen, watching him carefully.
“Where is she?”
Caleb nodded to the bedroom door. “In there. Asleep.”
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
Caleb rubbed a hand over his face and shook his head. “I can’t. I don’t really know. I told her to back off. I told her that she had to get out of my face. But she wouldn’t listen. She just kept pushing me. I snapped,” he said quietly. “I pushed her on the bed. I held her down. This was never supposed to happen.”
“Did she fight you?”
Caleb glanced back to the door. It was never supposed to be this way. He was never supposed to lose control.
“Caleb.”
Caleb turned back to Tex.
“Did she fight you?”
Caleb shook his head. Izzy hadn’t struggled at all while he was going at her.
“Did she say no? Did she tell you to stop?”
Caleb closed his eyes again. Give me everything.
“She… she said she wanted it.” He glared at Tex. “But she didn’t know what she was asking for! She couldn’t have wanted that.”
He recalled the emotions that had overtaken him. He’d originally intended to scare her into leaving, but she hadn’t backed down. And he’d only meant to push her further away when he’d pinned her down and held his dick at the entrance of her pussy. He’d never intended to hurt her. But the desire to frighten her became dwarfed by the need to own her, possess her completely. It had been overwhelming. He had wanted to be everything to her in that moment, life and death, just as she was to him. He shook himself free of the thought. Izzy was not life and death to him. She could never be. No woman could ever be that important. The destruction that would follow would be too absolute. Feelings like that were a blaze that would consume everything.