light turned green and Cade started driving again.
Grant grazed the backs of his fingers down her arm. “You can try to deny it if you like,” he told her, sounding so freaking reasonable and yet so certain that her simmering anger started to boil.
She didn’t deny it because she couldn’t. Dammit, they were right. She did belong to them. She had for years. Even when she allowed herself to date other men, to have sex with other men, she had still belonged to them. None of those other men had been truly dominant. A couple had thought themselves alpha enough to be, but they had failed. They hadn’t been able to come close to satisfying her, much less the demon she held tightly in check. All because none of those men had been Cade or Grant.
She had trouble pulling her gaze away from Cade as he drove. With his left elbow propped on the driver door panel and his right hand loosely gripping the steering wheel, he exuded the same confidence and control he did with everything else.
“I intend to prosecute Thomas Waverly to the fullest extent of the law.” She saw a muscle in Cade’s jaw twitch, and she knew he was attempting not to smile at her brisk change of subject.
He shook his head. “Thomas Waverly has mental issues. He needs help, not prison bars. He should be in a controlled medical facility where he can be extensively examined and given the treatment he needs. The crimes he allegedly committed were not ones done by a man in a rational, stable state of mind.”
“Allegedly committed?” Justice said, her tone ripe with her disbelief. “He was caught red-handed. Diek, Gunner, and Lucky Rylon had to pull him off Mustang in her own bedroom. A bullet grazed Mustang’s temple, for Pete’s sake. Waverly would have likely shot at her again and connected that time if the Rylon brothers hadn’t rushed in to save her.”
“From what I heard, she was doing a bang-up job of saving herself,” Grant commented.
Justice couldn’t argue with that. She had read the eyewitness accounts of that night and every one of them had painted the picture of Mustang fighting off Thomas Waverly with everything she had in her. The woman had taken Waverly down, struggled for the gun, and nearly disarmed him herself before her men burst into her bedroom.
“Thomas Waverly snapped.” Cade flicked the blinker switch, signaling his intent to turn to the car behind him.
“I’ll say.” Justice let out a humorless laugh as she glanced out the windshield.
Cade pulled the truck into the nearly deserted parking lot of Moonlights, eased into a parking spot, and cut the engine. He rested his wrist on the steering wheel as he turned to meet her gaze. “Seeing Mustang with the Rylon brothers brought back the memories of his childhood, of his mother’s death and the cause. That event so many years ago damaged him.”
“Of course it did. Losing a parent at such a young age would damage anybody.” Justice hadn’t lost her father until she was in her early twenties. She was thirty-one now and his death still hurt. She could only imagine how it would have felt if she had been forced to grow up without him. “That still doesn’t drive most people to the point of attempted murder.”
Cade lifted a shoulder. “He saw Mustang’s relationship with the Rylon brothers as a threat on her life.”
Justice opened her mouth to argue that point. Duh, as if pulling a gun on the woman, firing that gun at her hadn’t been a threat on her life? If the bullet that had grazed Mustang’s temple had been the smallest fraction over, it would have gone through the woman’s head.
Cade lifted a finger to silence her. “The Rylon brothers are dominant, just like the men his mother was involved with. Those men killed his mother. Her death wasn’t intentional by any means, but Waverly didn’t get that. He blamed those men, and somewhere in his irrational mind, he thought the Rylon brothers would do the same to Mustang.”
“He cares about Mustang,”