Cody Walker's Woman

Keira carefully backed away to allow him room to clamber out, trying not to brush up against anything that would rustle. Then he took her hand in his and looked down at her. There was barely enough moonlight to see a few feet in any direction, but there was enough light to see his determined expression as he whispered urgently, “Trust me.”

“I will,” she said. She knew it was crazy; they were still in imminent danger. At any minute someone might try to enter the room they’d just left and discover they were gone, and a murderous chase would be on. And she knew absolutely nothing about this man other than the fact he hadn’t raped her when he’d had the chance. But that one fact was enough, and she knew instinctively she could trust him with her life.

“Good,” he said, an unexpected smile slashing across his face. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Chapter 1

Cody Walker sat at his government-issued desk in his office in the agency’s sprawling complex on the northern outskirts of Denver Thursday morning, ostensibly rereading the revised report he’d just printed out to check it for errors before submitting it to his superiors. But instead of reading, he was thinking about the things he hadn’t put into the report.

Like the way Keira had looked at him in the moonlight, her face paper-white beneath a dusting of freckles, so scared and yet so brave, with that mop of red-gold curls no comb could tame. Like the way her brown eyes had met his when he’d told her to trust him and she’d said without hesitation, I will. Like the way her breast had felt beneath his hand when—

With a muttered oath, he cut off the memory. You’ve got no business remembering that, he told himself firmly. The fingers of his right hand brushed over the four barely visible welts on his left check where she’d branded him; the scratches were still there, but after nearly a week they were almost healed. Guess you deserved this after all.

He didn’t hold it against her. Sure, he’d been trying to rescue her, but she couldn’t have known it at the time. She’d fought him like a wildcat, and he respected her for it. Although they looked nothing alike, Keira somehow reminded him of his feisty best friend growing up. Mandy would have done exactly the same thing under the circumstances, he thought with a mixture of admiration and amusement.

Without realizing it, his hand went to the scar on his left shoulder. Beneath his shirt he could feel the raised edges of the healed bullet wound where Mandy had shot him six years ago because she’d thought he was about to kill the man she loved. Mandy hadn’t known the truth then any more than Keira had the other night.

Keira. He’d blown his assignment to hell and gone for her, but he couldn’t have done anything differently. Not and still call himself a man. He couldn’t have left an innocent woman there in that isolated shack in the mountains west of Denver with the incipient terrorist gang members he was meeting with in his undercover persona as an illegal arms dealer. They would have raped her at the very least, and probably would have killed her afterward—they wouldn’t want to leave a witness behind.

He remembered his first sight of her last Friday night when the three men had half dragged, half carried her into the shack where he’d been negotiating with two other gang members. She’d been fighting her captors every step of the way, refusing to surrender to them despite the terror any woman would have felt in that situation, struggling against ravaging hands and lewd suggestions, unwilling to give them the satisfaction of seeing her cry or beg for mercy she had to have known was nonexistent.

His desperate plan had been born in an instant. He’d had leverage because they wanted something from him—Stinger man-portable surface-to-air missiles, Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles and magazines, and other sundry weapons of destruction. And he’d used that leverage to claim “first rights” to Keira, using the coarse language they’d expected in that situation. Then he’d triumphantly claimed his “prize” and dragged her into the other room, and...

Well, that part was in his report, anyway.

He threw the papers on his desk, momentarily disgusted, and swiveled around to stare at the picture on his wall—a large, blown-up reproduction of his rustic cabin and the surrounding woods in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. He wondered why he’d ever left it and the relatively easy job as sheriff back then.