Caught

“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 tummy, Megan licked her lips and refused to be the first to look away. Impossible, but Cody was looking at her as if—as if he were imagining—

No.

Whatever emotion glowed in his eyes, it was swiftly concealed, tightening the muscles of his face. Cody seemed to recall who she was, and what had happened here this evening.

“I want to know,” he said in the lowest, most threatening voice ever, “why a puke slime of a bastard had you tied up to my bed, why you didn’t seem to be wearing any clothing save for—” in three seconds he’d covered the space to her, and in one more, he was raising her lonely little coat up to his line of vision—“this one coat, and I really, really want to know who that bastard was and what he has to do with my sick ass of a brother!”

She blinked. Her head must have gotten banged, because Cody Nordstrom never lost his cool. Never, ever. But now he didn’t sound all that much in control. He didn’t sound like a detective, asking cool questions. He sounded almost, almost, like a jealous husband.

Not the smartest thing, she knew, but it turned her on. It really turned her on, the way he was on the verge of losing control. Nordstrom was a master of appearances, of control, always outwardly cool, outwardly composed, but now—her nipples pricked in excitement and even though it wasn’t the moment, her body didn’t care.

After being so scared, her hormones were raging, she was on overdrive, over-sensitized. The place between her legs clenched with wanting. The adrenaline coursing through her veins seemed to have summoned other hormones into play, and she was aching everywhere. She wanted to be touched. Held.

Suddenly sexual frustration and fear needed some outlet, and she trembled with the need for release.

Seething with another kind of tumultuous energy, Cody set her coat on the bed, opened his chest of drawers, and yanked out a folded white shirt. Immediately he brought it to her, lowering his voice as he offered it for her to wear. “Did you see his face?”

“He was wearing some kind of hood,” she murmured, cradling his shirt to her chest, trying not to think of how good it smelled.

Cody glanced over at the window and restlessly plunged a hand through his blond hair. He wiped the back of his mouth and then yanked open the closet door, inspecting for differences inside.

“Perp was hiding here when you came in?”

She nodded.