Cody Walker's Woman

He could hear Keira saying, The reference to Julius Caesar could mean anything—the Ides of March, Marc Antony, the Roman Legions, crossing the Rubicon. Even the month of July or William Shakespeare.... Did he say anything else?

Then as if Callahan were standing right next to him, he could hear the deep voice saying, One other word at the very end, but I couldn’t really understand him.... It sounded something like center or centaur, but I can’t swear to it.

Roman Legions. Center. “That’s it!” Excitement building, he leaned down over Keira’s shoulders and typed C-e-n-t-u-r-i-o-n. Pennington’s code name for him.

“And we’re in!” Keira exulted as the screen opened into a standard computer desktop. She looked up at Cody, admiration glowing in her face. She turned back to the computer screen, running the mouse pointer over the icons scattered across the desktop. Cody recognized links to the names of many of the most popular online video games, but Keira kept going. Then the mouse pointer stopped abruptly at a link near the bottom right of the screen.

Veni, Vidi, Vici.

“It’s an online video game,” Cody whispered, stunned.

“I know,” Keira said, but so low he had to strain to hear her. “It came to me in my dream last night.”

He frowned. “But you never said that this morning....”

Keira kept her head down, staring at the computer screen. “I might have been wrong,” she said in an undertone. “I didn’t want...” She drew a sharp breath. “Actually, when I was researching a link between the Praetor Corporation and that phrase two weeks ago, I came across a few references to an online video game by that name,” she confessed, as if she’d failed him somehow. “I just didn’t make the connection until last night.”

Cody reached down and turned her face so she had to look at him. “Don’t,” he said. “We’re a team. Don’t hold back when you have an idea just because you might be wrong. Hell, I’m wrong half the time myself,” he said, exaggerating to make his point.

She hesitated, then said, “You’re right. I should have trusted that you and Callahan wouldn’t hold it against me if my theory proved wrong.”

Cody realized Keira hadn’t included McKinnon in that statement, and another surge of jealousy rose in him. Apparently she trusted her partner more than she trusted him...and that bothered him. A lot. A hell of a lot more than just a lot, he acknowledged, trying to squelch his unreasonable jealousy of McKinnon. In some ways Keira still didn’t trust him, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it...not here...not now.

Chapter 19

They drove in silence to Callahan’s house with Tressler’s computer stowed in the back of the truck, the tonneau cover safely concealing it from curious eyes. Cody wondered what Keira was thinking but couldn’t bring himself to ask—he was still coming to terms with the wound she’d dealt him without realizing it. Keira’s lack of unquestioning belief sliced into Cody’s psyche in a way he hadn’t thought possible. “Trust me,” he’d told her that first night, and she’d answered, “I will.”

She trusted him with her body. Every step of the way in their one night together she had demonstrated her implicit faith that he would cherish the gift of her body in a way she had done with no other man.

She trusted him with her heart. That incandescent moment when she had cradled his face with her hands and whispered, “I love you, Cody,” would warm him until the day he died.

But she didn’t trust him the way he yearned for her to do—with every fiber of her being. McKinnon was more important to her than Cody was where her work was concerned. And her work was her life. Trust me in that, too, he wanted to plead, but he knew faith and reliance couldn’t be won that way—not with words. They had to be given freely; they had to come from the soul. And in her soul she didn’t trust him completely...not yet.

Just before the driveway leading to Callahan’s house, Cody noticed another car parked down a little way on the side of the road. It wasn’t the same one that had followed the four of them earlier, but it was too far away for him to make out the license plate or see if there was anyone in the car.