She gasped for air and Cody yanked out his knife and cut her binds with two swift moves, listening for any strange sounds other than the wild pounding of his own heartbeat and Megan struggling for words.
Instantly his senses became alert, ears, mind, eyes, all over the house, for he could still be there. The bastard could still be in the house. He had an urge to chase him, but first he pulled her up and checked her pulse, and stared into her wide, scared, tear-streaked eyes.
With a quick check he realized she was breathing, gazing up at him with a strange expression of disappointment and fear in her face. When she opened her mouth to speak, he was about to tell her to “save it” when he heard them, footsteps racing down the stairs, and his insides kicked into overdrive.
Fury, red hot and scalding, poured over his veins, and before he knew it he was on his feet, kicking open doors of the other rooms, running down the stairs, outside, gun drawn as he chased—he didn’t know who he was chasing, he was chasing something, some bastard he had to catch and beat down to a pulp.
Who? Ivan was in jail—what bastard dared come into his home and leave a message with Megan? Megan. His one weakness. The one person in this world who could make Cody forget about justice, the law, and common sense.
In some cases, when a man loves a woman, he takes her in his arms.
But in his case, if he loves a woman, he stays the hell away from her—and that was exactly what Cody had done his whole life.
Megan had seen death at an age when all girls her age only saw balloons and flowers and sun. The killer she saw wore Cody’s same goddamned face, which was enough to disgust anyone.
He had spent his life with one mission: to protect her, to keep an eye out for her, to make amends. To make sure that she never again in her life had to see an ounce of injustice go unpunished, never see more darkness than what she’d seen that day with him. He had been her friend because that was all he could be, when many nights he had wondered who was her lover.
He had even prayed that if Megan ever decided to marry some nice respectable guy who added numbers for a living, Cody would be transferred to Timbuktu or some other faraway place where he never had to watch her with him. He had done all this—everything—for her. And some crazed man had touched her, hurt her, in his own home, under his very own nose.
Someone who wants to fuck with your head … who knows how much she means to you …
He pushed the unsettling thought away and after one final scan of the guiet neighborhood, he went back, climbed up the stairs, and yanked out his cell phone in annoyance while it rang its little buzzer off. He picked up with a growl.
“Nordstrom, bad news.” His partner, Zach. Like he ever called with good news.
“What is it?” he said in exasperation, storming back into his room. “I’m kind of busy here, man.”
He glanced at Megan across the room, on the floor now, shivering, beautiful, vulnerable, and he wanted to howl at the moon, a call to all the desert wolves to come out and have this perpetrator for dinner.
“You’re not going to like it when I tell you he’s escaped,” Zach warned in his ear.
Nordstrom’s entire frame tensed. “Excuse me?”
“Ivan.” The word came out like a death sentence, and then came the hammer: “He’s out.”
THREE
Megan tried to get dressed for the third time, but her fingers were cramped, and she couldn’t seem to make them work.
She felt like she was wafting in a dream, but not her sexy, delicious, making-love-to-Cody dream, but one where a bad man came in and … what had he done to her?
She glanced down at her body, swallowed back the bile when she read the message he’d written on her skin. She wadded the sleeve of her coat and spat on it, then gritted her teeth from the effort it took to try to erase the words.
Still unable to resume her normal pattern of breathing, she didn’t hear Cody’s footsteps until he was back in the room, standing at the door with a wild look in his eyes.
Her heart could not handle much more of this, but even now, it responded to his utter virility by giving a vigorous kick. He stood there, all ripped, marked, and pissed, and she realized in the working part of her brain that she had never seen him so enraged. He might not be pacing, or ranting, but that was not how Cody raged. No. Control was his weapon, and he never lost it.
Jaw so tight she feared it would crack under the pressure, he surveyed the room as though for clues. His eyes glimmered murder.
“I’m okay,” she said softly as soon as he pushed his cell phone back into his suit pocket.
His striking blue eyes settled on her. Time stopped as he searched her face, the muscles of his temples slowly working. Her heart stuttered when he then began his inspection of her body.
With soul-searing slowness, narrowed blue eyes trailed, totally unreadable, down the length of her almost naked form then dragged back to meet her startled stare. Their gazes held for a long, electric moment, and Cody’s eyes flashed so bright, the light was almost unholy.
What did she see there? Was it … God, was it hunger?
Feeling avalanches in her
