His concentration was out of whack and her nearness wasn’t helping. Every damned second he remembered her: tied in his bed, with those beautiful breasts, that perfect skin.
Was she the kind of woman who enjoyed being tied up, under other circumstances? Did those moans she let out sound the same, when she emitted them with pleasure? His cock pushed up so hard into his pants he could barely sit straight.
Okay, so she didn’t want to go over to Zach’s, but he didn’t want to bring her along on his hunt either. Bringing her along was wrong on so many levels he wasn’t even going to get into them. And yet: Another man might do a better job keeping his hands off her, but no one would give his life for hers the way Cody would.
“Cody? It really was him, wasn’t it?”
Cody shot her a sidelong glance, wanting to deny that the man who’d tied her to the bed had any links to him. Wanting to deny that he had shared a womb, a childhood, shared a family name, with that man.
He couldn’t. And found himself nodding grimly. “In all probability, yes, it was him.”
He saw her fear, her uncertainty, drain the color from her normally rosy skin. She could’ve been sedated if the cloth had a hallucinogen, which meant she could’ve seen all kinds of things that weren’t real, and all kinds that were. She had had nightmares about him for years.
Every night when she closed her eyes, she told him, she saw Ivan. It killed him that he wasn’t there to comfort her; he almost sickly wished she’d have those nightmares again so he could be there, coo her back to sleep, hold her for security, make love to make her forget.
That she would see that criminal’s face, that he would be the first thing a woman like her thought about when she woke up, and the last thing in her mind when she went to sleep, enraged and obsessed him. It was unfair, and it made him angry to the point it pissed him off to even think it might be jealousy, even though he didn’t want it to be.
“You know what he’s after, right?” He swerved to the right and pushed the pedal, ramming the car deeper into traffic.
Her curls bounced as she shook her head. “After all this time? I don’t know.” Turning in her seat, she reached out and ran her hand over his arm—a touch, then gone. He felt it everywhere. In his chest, his stomach, his balls. He wanted to hold on to her, pull that hand back, put it everywhere at once. “Tell me,” she urged softly.
Cody laughed a dark, humorless laugh. Tell her? What? That he was a monster? That at night he imagined he rutted with her until they both passed out? That her most insignificant touch or smile aroused the socks off him … or that it was his fault?
There was so much she didn’t know.
How both Nordstroms had had crushes on her. How both would stare at her, fantasize about her. How Cody and Ivan had made a brother’s bet, that whoever took her virginity would keep her.
The next day, Cody had made a move, certain this was one bet he couldn’t bear to lose. He’d bragged to Ivan, “She’s agreed to go for a walk with me after school, so I?
??m going to win.”
And Ivan hadn’t liked it. “Yeah?” he’d said. “If you take something I love away from me, I’m going to take something you love away, too.”
Cody hadn’t listened, hadn’t cared about his brother’s threats. All he’d cared about was winning, winning her, making sure she would be his and not his brother’s. He’d been determined to claim her. Being a teenaged idiot, he’d had raging hormones twenty-four hours of the day and he’d planned to expend them all inside of her that afternoon during their picnic in the woods.
Never mind he hadn’t gone through with it, had changed his mind and led her back home to walk in on that nightmare of a scene. Never mind that after the murder he could never bring himself to touch her, take her, like he once dreamed of.
But they hadn’t, and now they never would. They weren’t minors anymore, but Megan Banks was more unreachable to him than ever.
If Cody touched Megan, it meant Ivan won. It meant that motherfucker knew Cody’s weakness and had made him go caveman on the one woman he cared about.
No. He’d never touch her. Ever.
Which was why his life sucked like blue balls.
If given a choice to be born again, in all likelihood Cody would say no just to keep his brother from coming into the world along with him. But then who would watch over Megan?
“Meg,” he said, softly. “He’s after you.”
FOUR
“Why are we here?”
Meg glanced around the abandoned front yard of what used to be the Nordstroms’ old home, her skin crawling as Cody kicked the front door open.
“Detour,” he said, and crooked his finger so that she followed.
At her refusal to be dumped at Zach and Paige’s home, Cody had driven all night, stopped by his office for paperwork, coffee at midnight, and in between errands, Meg had dozed on and off.