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.”