by Amelia Autin
This time his desire didn’t fade. Great, he thought. Now, when it’s too late. Now that she wouldn’t touch you for anything you offered her and would probably scratch your eyes out if you touched her.
He had to explain. He had to find the words...somehow. He headed for the door before he could change his mind. He owed her another apology, and he’d start with that. Not for kissing her—he’d be damned before he’d be sorry for kissing her. But for letting her think he regretted it.
He found her inside, studying the contents of the kitchen cabinet, the nonperishables he kept the cabin stocked with. They hadn’t bothered to bring food with them because he’d told his team the cabin already had enough canned goods to last them several days.
He glanced at Callahan still asleep on the bed. Good, he thought. I don’t need a witness to this. He walked up to Keira, determined she wouldn’t misunderstand this time. He took the can of beef stew out of her hand and placed it on the countertop. “I’m not sorry I kissed you,” he said, softly but firmly.
She didn’t respond, just turned back to the cabinet and brought down another can, green beans this time. He took that can from her, too. “Please, look at me.”
She looked in his general direction, her face that same frozen mask he suddenly realized she hid behind when she was emotionally vulnerable. But her eyes wouldn’t meet his. “Okay,” she said. “You’re not sorry. Point taken, message received.” She didn’t say it, but she didn’t have to—he read her thoughts. We have a job to do, so let’s move on. Then she said something she’d said to him once before. “Forget about it. I have.”
He was damned if he would. And he knew she was lying.
He moved, trapping her against the countertop, and her eyes flared at him as she tilted her head up, finally meeting his eyes. He’d expected anger, but that wasn’t what he saw. He saw the vulnerability she struggled yet failed to hide...and something else. It was the something else that gave him hope. In a breathless voice she asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Kissing you again.” He didn’t give her a chance to escape. This time it wasn’t a kiss of exploration, of discovery, of seduction. It was a kiss designed to apologize, and he put his whole soul into it. All his aching regret for every bruise she wore because of him, all his longing to prove that wasn’t the way he thought of her, joined the pent-up yearning for a woman to care for him as passionately as he would her.
She resisted at first—a token resistance—but then she surrendered...by inches. Desire flooded him as her body softened against his incrementally. Then her hands gripped his shirt, and at that point the kiss changed. The yearning, the aching need rose to the top, and he pulled her closer, wrapping his arms around her as if he could make her his woman that way. As if he could stake his claim to her just by kissing her.
He wanted. Needed. Yearned. His hands clasped her hips and pulled her closer so she couldn’t help but feel his desire. But this wasn’t about sex. Not at all.
He wanted to lay Keira down in a field of grass with a breeze rippling through it, the wide, blue Wyoming sky arching overhead and the sun warming their skin. He wanted to undress her slowly and have her do the same to him, as if they had all the time in the world. He wanted to kiss away every bruise he’d inflicted and swear to her there would never be another. He wanted to stroke her skin, to caress her until she cried his name and pulled him close, needing him as he needed her. He wanted to watch her eyes with their gold-tipped lashes as he came into her, wanted to make her face come alive with the same desire he ached to share with her. And he wanted to lay with her afterward, his head pillowed on her breasts, passion spent but still waiting to reignite.
But all he could do was kiss her. Endlessly.
She pulled away from him so suddenly that at first he tried to force her back into his arms. Then he heard it, too—a loud yawn from the bed in the corner that indicated Callahan was waking up—and he abruptly let her go.
They stared at each other for timeless seconds, their breathing ragged. Cody saw a pulse beating in Keira’s throat, and he longed to put his hand there, knowing the pulse beat for him. But he couldn’t do that to her, not in front of Callahan.
She turned away first, her hands gripping the countertop for a moment before she got herself under control. He watched, amazed at how quickly she transformed from warm, vibrant Keira to cool, collected Special Agent Jones. He didn’t realize he was doing the same thing, that the face he was showing her held nothing of the turmoil inside him.
Movement from the direction of the bed made him look away from Keira and watch Callahan come awake and alert; Cody realized with a jolt just how close he and Keira had been to having a witness to the interlude between them. He suppressed a surge of unreasonable anger at the other man for being there. It’s not Callahan’s fault, he reminded himself. You had no business starting something with Keira you knew damn well you couldn’t finish.
His body didn’t want to hear it. He was still hard and aching, his arousal obvious...and painful. And however much he willed it, he couldn’t make it go away. With a muttered curse under his breath, Cody turned and headed for the back door, the only escape available to him. He slammed out the door, and the cool outside air washed over him as soon as he walked out, a welcome relief to his heated body.
Spring came late to the Big Horn Mountains, although earlier than to the Rocky Mountains in the western part of the state. But Cody had been here when it snowed in July, and it was only the end of May. He breathed deeply and adjusted the fit of his jeans. He tried to drag his mind off thoughts of Keira, needing to regain the control he’d let slip so badly. But it wasn’t easy.
The back door opened behind him, and Cody turned to see Callahan descend the steps, stretching a little to work the kinks out. He looked better than he had before he slept, but nothing would ever make him look anything but what he was—a hard man willing to make the hard sacrifices he’d made in his life. And one of those sacrifices had almost cost him Mandy.
“Get enough sleep?” Cody asked.
“Enough for now. I’ll sleep again tonight.” He rotated one shoulder, then the other. “Anything happen while I was unconscious?”
Cody shook his head. He wasn’t about to tell Callahan anything about kissing Keira, and other than that... “No, but I didn’t tell you something you probably need to know,” he said. “Something that happened in Denver yesterday.” He succinctly relayed the story about being followed, about recognizing the tail as someone who’d been following him even before Callahan’s call.
“Keira said— I’d already thought of it, but she suggested my name might be on the militia’s hit list. That the guy tailing me might be scoping out ways of taking me down, same as you.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Callahan laughed softly. “They love me only a little more than they love you, which is to say—not at all.”
“Yeah.” Cody turned away and stared at the muddy clearing around his cabin, but he wasn’t seeing it; he was seeing the events of long ago. “I thought it was all over six years ago,” he said honestly, “until I got your call.”
“How do you think I feel?” Callahan’s voice was cold. “You think I would ever put Mandy at risk? You think I would have let her get pregnant with one child, much less three, if I thought there was a chance—” He broke off. Out of the corner of his eye, Cody saw the other man clenching and unclenching his right fist.
Cody turned to him and began, “I told Keira—Special Agent Jo—”
Callahan cut him off. “Don’t bother.”
Cody bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Let’s just say that when I’m awake, I’m awake. The yawn was to let you know.”
Cody absorbed that statement in silence. His initial deep embarrassment over having his kiss witnessed by Callahan was overcome by a fierce surge of protectiveness for Keira. He knew he had to explain, or else Callahan might get the wrong idea about her. “It’s not what you think,�
� he said. “It just happened. She’s a fellow agent and a damned good one by all accounts—D’Arcy and McKinnon think the world of her.” He took a quick breath. “There’s nothing between Keira and me. Not the way it might have seemed if you saw us.”
Their eyes met, and Cody was surprised to see not condemnation in Callahan’s face, but understanding. “It happens like that sometimes,” he said softly, nodding. “I knew the first minute I saw Mandy.”
Cody’s immediate response was to deny Callahan’s assertion, but then, unbidden, his thoughts flew to his first sight of Keira, and an intense pride in her rose in him. She wouldn’t beg for mercy. She wouldn’t give those animals the satisfaction of seeing her cry. No, his Keira would die fighting, the same way he would.
He stopped his thoughts in their tracks. His Keira? What the hell was he thinking?
“It’s not what you think,” he repeated, but he wasn’t sure if he was saying it to Callahan or to himself.
“Try that one on someone more gullible,” Callahan advised. “I saw the way you looked at her.” He waited for Cody to accept that brusque statement, then added, “You can fight it all you want. It won’t do you any good, but you can damn well try. I did.”
Cody thought of Mandy, remembering how he’d watched her fall in love with Reilly O’Neill, and remembering also—although he hadn’t acknowledged it at the time—how O’Neill had tried his best to resist her, for her own good. It hadn’t mattered. O’Neill had been just as helpless under Mandy’s spell then as Cody was under Keira’s now.
He remembered other things, as well. How he’d tried to comfort Mandy one terrible New Year’s Day when she was grieving over what she’d thought was the death of this man and the very real loss of the baby she’d been carrying back then. How she’d wept in his arms afterward as if her heart were breaking. How his heart had broken, too.
Then a startling realization swept through him—that memory no longer had the power to devastate him as it once had. Losing Mandy to Callahan was still a bruise on his heart, and always would be. But another emotion, one he recognized but wouldn’t name, surged up in him—and it didn’t have a damn thing to do with Mandy. “But—”
“Just don’t let it get in the way of the job,” Callahan interrupted him. “You can’t fight what you feel. But you can lock it away. I know.”
Cody accepted Callahan’s stricture in silence, knowing the other man was right. Damn him! He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Keira since that first night. He’d tried...and failed to control his growing attraction to her.
But if Callahan, who loved Mandy with a singleness of mind and heart and soul, could walk away from her to protect her, Cody could do the same with Keira. He could lock away his desire, place it where it wouldn’t put her at risk. Because a man whose emotions governed him grew careless of his surroundings, as he’d already proven. And he couldn’t afford to be careless, not where the team—not where Keira—was concerned.
“You’re right,” he told Callahan eventually, although he had to drag the words out. “Thanks.”
The other man shrugged. “I owed you” was all he said.
Cody started to ask for what, and then he remembered. A long drive in the dead of night with this man at his side, and a promise extracted from him against his will. A promise that he’d take care of Mandy if Callahan didn’t survive that night’s deadly encounter with David Pennington. A promise that would have destroyed Cody because he’d known by then that Mandy would never love him, could never love him as she loved Ryan Callahan. But he had promised.
God had been kind—Callahan had survived, and Cody had been spared the cruelest fate a man could face. Even being shot by Mandy wasn’t as bad as what could have happened to him.
And now there was Keira. He realized with a start that he finally understood where Callahan had been coming from when he’d forced that promise from him. Because if anything happened to him, if Keira was in danger and he wasn’t there to rescue her as he had once before...Cody couldn’t even bear to think of it.
Keira thought she was tough, and maybe she was. She could take care of herself under normal circumstances, maybe even under fire—she’d been a marine after all, same as him. But the New World Militia wasn’t a normal circumstance—not by a long shot. And wanting to protect her had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not she could protect herself.
His right hand clenched as coldness descended on him. Anyone who touched Keira was a dead man.
Chapter 9
Keira dumped the contents of three cans of beef stew and two cans of green beans into a large pot, placed it on a burner of the propane stove and watched it as it heated. Most likely the men wouldn’t care she’d combined the cans, and it was faster this way, less to clean up afterward.
But she wasn’t thinking about the food, even as she stirred the pot. She was thinking about Cody. About his kiss. Kisses, she amended. The one outside that had roused her physically so that she hadn’t cared about anything but having him touch her. And the one in here that had roused such powerful emotions it had wreaked havoc on her heart.
Her body still ached with unrequited desire from both kisses. She hadn’t realized a woman could hurt that way, the way a man could. That her body could need fulfillment and release. And she hadn’t realized how deep the well of her own passion was. Cody had done that to her, had awakened desires that didn’t fit with the accusations thrown at her by back-to-back high-school boyfriends—that she was frigid, sexless. Accusations she’d come to believe and accept about herself. Until now.
Cody’s first kiss had awakened her body. His second kiss had awakened her heart. And while the first kiss had taught her what it meant to want a man, strong and virile, to hold her in his arms and ignite the fire, it was the second kiss she would remember forever.
At first she had tasted his contrition, but that hadn’t lasted long. Then she’d tasted his desire, and it was a potent aphrodisiac, taking her places she’d never dreamed of going. When Cody had kissed her, she’d had a vision of the two of them in the middle of nowhere, nothing but the blue sky above them. Then his golden head blotting out the sun, his vivid blue eyes alight with passion.
When he’d pulled her hips into his and she’d felt him against her softness, she had suddenly wanted to lie down with him looming over her, his lean, muscled body taut against hers. She had wanted to slide her hands across those muscles and make him tremble as he made her tremble. And she had wanted—needed—him inside her, driving for release, both his and hers.
Not sex. Any man could have given her that. She wanted Cody—his smile that melted her heart, as well as his passion that melted the ice. She wanted him to fill the emptiness inside, a place she hadn’t even known existed until he showed her what need was. She’d been that close to completely losing control, not caring where they were or who else was around. Then Ryan Callahan’s yawn had impinged on her consciousness, and she’d been shocked...and dismayed at herself.
Cody hadn’t wanted to let her go. She hugged that knowledge to herself with a secret smile. He’d resisted her first attempt to free herself, not realizing why she was trying to put distance between them. And then...when she was finally free, his face had momentarily told her all the things she wanted him to say before he shut himself down the same way she’d done. But she still wanted him. Even though she’d regained control over her treacherous body’s actions, the need Cody had engendered in her was still achingly alive.
The stew was hot; Keira turned off the flame and checked the cabinet for dishes. She found a couple of mismatched plates, three chipped bowls and a half dozen coffee mugs. She smiled. Someone must love coffee. It was a little thing, but she added it to her store of knowledge of Cody, which was growing hourly.
She already knew a lot about him, for a man she’d only met for the first time a week ago. Some of what she knew she owed to Trace. She’d tried to word her questions as they’d driven together in the wee hours of this morning so he would think
she was only interested in learning what she could about the New World Militia, but she hadn’t fooled him. Her partner knew her too well, and he had been unexpectedly forthcoming.
Trace hadn’t asked, and she hadn’t volunteered, why she also wanted to know whatever he could tell her about Cody from a personal perspective. Now she listed the things she knew about him in her head.
He was thirty-seven. Trace had given her that little tidbit along with the information that Cody had gone to work for the DEA after leaving Black Rock. That was a thankless job, she knew. Like trying to empty an ocean with a thimble. A couple of her friends from the Marine Corps had gone to work for the DEA when they got out. Neither man had lasted a year. She wondered how long Cody had lasted there. Trace hadn’t known and couldn’t tell her.
He’d been in the Marine Corps, too, like her brothers, like her partner. And like her. Semper Fidelis. People who hadn’t been in the Corps didn’t realize the bond it created—“Corps and Country” wasn’t a meaningless phrase. Not to a marine. Dedication and loyalty meant something.
He carried a knife in addition to his service weapon. She’d seen him use it that first night to pry open the warped window. He didn’t get that from the Corps. As she had the first night, after she’d realized he was an agent, she wondered if he wore the knife everywhere or just when he was on assignment.
He had a good sense of humor and could laugh at himself. That was always a good sign. And he refused to take credit for someone else’s accomplishments, even minimizing his own contributions. Hadn’t D’Arcy said Cody was involved in bringing down the New World Militia, along with Callahan? And hadn’t Cody dismissed his part as relatively unimportant? But Trace had told her enough this morning to know Callahan couldn’t have done the job on his own—Cody had played a crucial role.
He also had a very strict moral code and held himself to a higher standard than most men. Despite everything she said, he still blamed himself for hurting her the night he’d rescued her. And at the same time he’d sacrificed his covert op—who knew how many hours had been invested in it—to save her, a stranger. That was part of his moral code, too, special rule seven notwithstanding.
