She stared at him with those big, wide, green eyes, and he stared back. No, he wasn’t staring, he was gawking like a stupid idiot, like a complete moronic idiot with his gun still in his hand, but he couldn’t stop. He had worked on his discipline, for twenty years he had worked like a dog to one day be able to forget what the monster inside him was capable of doing, but damned if this girl didn’t tempt him.
She moved, a sinewy undulation like a ribbon being made into a twist, and when she kicked her legs, more of her perfect, nearly-nude body became exposed.
His gun trembled in his hand as he slowly put it back in its holster, but he could not tear his eyes away from that shadowed valley between her legs, a V of curls glistening dark under the sheer leopard print of her panties.
Greedily, he took in the length of her toned thighs, down to her slim, creamy white ankles, and his blood rushed through his veins as he imagined … imagined what it would be like with her. With the one woman he’d sworn to himself to never touch.
And the only one you’ve ever wanted.
She moaned, softly, the sound sexy and making a growl get trapped in his throat as he fisted his hands at his sides and reined himself back, locked his legs in place. And then it finally registered that she did not seem happy, that the moisture shining in her eyes wasn’t desire, but tears.
Another muffled sound came, and he noticed her mouth was not moving as she spoke, and she was … struggling in her binds? Binds?
“What the hell?” He took a step closer and his heart sputtered when he saw the words scrawled on dark red marker on her navel. A name. His name all over her perfect skin. One for every year he’d served in jail …
IVAN IVAN IVAN IVAN IVAN IVAN IVAN.
But Ivan was locked up.
Cody had locked up his own brother.
The kid he’d protected when he was young.
Against his every raging instinct to protect his own kin, he had trained like a mad man. He’d chased him for years, in his dreams and fantasies, and later, for real, so that he could have the pleasure of finding him, catching him, and locking him in.
And he had.
He had come back to Phoenix, hell on Earth, if you asked him, and he had the bastard convicted for their parents’ murder—even though evidence had been scarce, he’d still managed to prove him guilty. And yet now … his name was written on Megan’s body. How the fuck was that even possible?
Never, in his life, had he ever felt this all-consuming frustration, except the time he’d seen his parents lying sightless in a pool of their own blood.
His eyes flew up to Megan’s tear-filled ones, while an icy rage hardened his veins until the cold of Antarctica would’ve seemed like a warm summer. “Who did this?” he demanded, pulling—there was no easy way of doing this—at the clear packing tape that covered her mouth.
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 fe
et, 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.