Caught (3 page)

 

TWO

“Meg?”

Cody rubbed the tension in the back of his neck as he waited for the microwave to ping, then he scanned the staircase, expecting Megan to appear, her clover-green eyes bright and excited as she came up with an explanation—and it had to be a
good one
—for breaking and entering into his home.

He knew himself well enough to know that he'd glower at her only for a minute—or perhaps a couple of minutes more because, dammit, she could've gotten hurt! Plus where the hell did she learn how to pick locks? Especially his state-of-the-art locks?

Then again, Megan Banks was the kind of woman who always surprised a man, and he knew that even if he glowered for a whole damned hour, as soon as she flashed one of those pearly white smiles, he'd be done for.

Heck, he might as well just give her a key so she could come in and make herself at home whenever she'd like to.
You wish, don't you, asshole? Come home to her for a nice warm meal, a long, wet kiss, and then it's upstairs together to make a couple of babies.

His treacherous blood began to boil at the thought. Yeah, Megan was the kind of girl any man would kill for. Would travel worlds just to be able to come home to. The kind of girl for whom any man would spend a lifetime doing hero work, putting scumbags in jail, just so a girl like her could sleep at night.

The kind of girl Cody would never,
ever
, touch with his callused, bloodied hands.

Since the night of his parents' murder, Cody knew that he would never get married. He would never get the girl, the kids, the dog, or the happily ever after.

He would get the killers.

There were always casualties in a story, and his personal life would be one of them.

It seemed a small sacrifice at the time, in exchange for justice and capturing his parents' murderer. Now, the criminal—his brother—was behind bars, and although he hadn't gotten the death penalty due to his being a minor at the time of the crime, the bastard had gotten life. Which was mighty fine with Cody.

And yet Cody's thirst for justice was still not appeased. He needed new cases, tougher cases, meaner criminals, all to keep his head buried so deep in work, he wouldn't think of what he'd lost in the blink of an eye. With one bad call. One bad day.

He heard footsteps up in his bedroom, and he cocked his head as he pictured Megan coming down the stairs, doing that hip-swing thing she did that drove him crazy. His eyebrows furrowed when she took her goddamned time. What in the hell was she doing up there? Wrestling?

“Megan?” he growled, annoyed.

Ding
.

He ignored the microwave when a thump was followed by an eerie silence, and a chilling premonition slid up the back of his neck. His hackles rose. Legs tensing as his blood began to pump faster through his veins, he yanked his Glock out of its hip holster and climbed the stairs, two at a time, silent as death.

All was quiet upstairs—unnaturally quiet. Not natural, when Megan was around, for things to be still for more than a second.
If she gets hurt
 … He pushed the thought aside, narrowed his eyes and scanned the hallway, dark at this time of night.

A window screeched from the guest bedroom, but it had been the master bedroom where he'd heard the noise, and it was from that direction that he heard a soft moan.

He parted the door and peered into the darkness, gun carefully doing a one-eighty-degree turn. “Megan?”

Again, that damned tickle in the back of his neck. It had happened far too many times to ignore. Something was wrong. Megan wasn't answering.

The moan became louder, as if pained. He hit the light switch and he saw, sprawled over his duvet and pillows, a little bundle of flawless white skin and loose honey-wheat hair.

“Megan?”

He froze one step into his bedroom, and his cock shot up like steel.
Holy Mother of God, I'm not seeing what I'm seeing.

But he was.

Megan. With skin that looked air-brushed and sweet. Hair you could wrap yourself in. Sweet little Megan was in his bed—wearing the cutest, sexiest, out-of-this-world outfit.

His heart pounded as his mouth watered, and for this moment, this one moment, he didn't wonder what she was doing there. It felt like she belonged there, like every time he had dreamed her there had summoned her to do it for real. Make his every wet dream come true.

He pulled his eyes away, off her chest—a chest he wanted to taste with his tongue—no, he didn't just think that, fuck, this was Megan! Meg, dammit, not some bimbo, and he glanced up, swallowing thickly.

His voice came out raspy, and what he said made not one lick of sense. “That's my bed you're in.”

She stared at him with those big, wide, green eyes, and he stared back. No, he wasn't staring, he was
gawking
like a stupid idiot, like a complete moronic idiot with his gun still in his hand, but he couldn't stop. He had worked on his discipline, for twenty years he had worked like a dog to one day be able to forget what the monster inside him was capable of doing, but damned if this girl didn't tempt him.

She moved, a sinewy undulation like a ribbon being made into a twist, and when she kicked her legs, more of her perfect, nearly-nude body became exposed.

His gun trembled in his hand as he slowly put it back in its holster, but he could not tear his eyes away from that shadowed valley between her legs, a V of curls glistening dark under the sheer leopard print of her panties.

Greedily, he took in the length of her toned thighs, down to her slim, creamy white ankles, and his blood rushed through his veins as he imagined … imagined what it would be like with
her.
With the one woman he'd sworn to himself to never touch.

And the only one you've ever wanted.

She moaned, softly, the sound sexy and making a growl get trapped in his throat as he fisted his hands at his sides and reined himself back, locked his legs in place. And then it finally registered that she did not seem happy, that the moisture shining in her eyes wasn't desire, but tears.

Another muffled sound came, and he noticed her mouth was not moving as she spoke, and she was … struggling in her binds?
Binds?

“What the hell?” He took a step closer and his heart sputtered when he saw the words scrawled on dark red marker on her navel. A name.
His
name all over her perfect skin. One for every year he'd served in jail …

IVAN IVAN IVAN IVAN IVAN IVAN IVAN.

But Ivan was locked up.

Cody had
locked up
his own brother.

The kid he'd protected when he was young.

Against his every raging instinct to protect his own kin, he had trained like a mad man. He'd chased him for years, in his dreams and fantasies, and later, for real, so that he could have the pleasure of finding him, catching him, and locking him in.

And he had.

He had come back to Phoenix, hell on Earth, if you asked him, and he had the bastard convicted for their parents' murder—even though evidence had been scarce, he'd still managed to prove him guilty. And yet now … his name was written on Megan's body. How the fuck was that even possible?

Never, in his life, had he ever felt this all-consuming frustration, except the time he'd seen his parents lying sightless in a pool of their own blood.

His eyes flew up to Megan's tear-filled ones, while an icy rage hardened his veins until the cold of Antarctica would've seemed like a warm summer. “Who did this?” he demanded, pulling—there was no easy way of doing this—at the clear packing tape that covered her mouth.

She gasped for air and Cody yanked out his knife and cut her binds with two swift moves, listening for any strange sounds other than the wild pounding of his own heartbeat and Megan struggling for words.

Instantly his senses became alert, ears, mind, eyes, all over the house, for he could still be there. The bastard could still be in the house. He had an urge to chase him, but first he pulled her up and checked her pulse, and stared into her wide, scared, tear-streaked eyes.

With a quick check he realized she was breathing, gazing up at him with a strange expression of disappointment and fear in her face. When she opened her mouth to speak, he was about to tell her to “save it” when he heard them, footsteps racing down the stairs, and his insides kicked into overdrive.

Fury, red hot and scalding, poured over his veins, and before he knew it he was on his feet, kicking open doors of the other rooms, running down the stairs, outside, gun drawn as he chased—he didn't know who he was chasing, he was chasing something, some bastard he had to catch and beat down to a pulp.

Who? Ivan was in jail—what bastard dared come into his home and leave a message with Megan?
Megan.
His one weakness. The one person in this world who could make Cody forget about justice, the law, and common sense.

In some cases, when a man loves a woman, he takes her in his arms.

But in his case, if he loves a woman, he stays the hell away from her—and that was exactly what Cody had done his whole life.

Megan had seen death at an age when all girls her age only saw balloons and flowers and sun. The killer she saw wore Cody's same goddamned face, which was enough to disgust anyone.

He had spent his life with one mission: to protect her, to keep an eye out for her, to make amends. To make sure that she never again in her life had to see an ounce of injustice go unpunished, never see more darkness than what she'd seen that day with him. He had been her friend because that was all he could be, when many nights he had wondered who was her lover.

He had even prayed that if Megan ever decided to marry some nice respectable guy who added numbers for a living, Cody would be transferred to Timbuktu or some other faraway place where he never had to watch her with him. He had done all this—everything—for her. And some crazed man had touched her, hurt her, in his own home, under his very own nose.

Someone who wants to fuck with your head … who knows how much she means to you …

He pushed the unsettling thought away and after one final scan of the guiet neighborhood, he went back, climbed up the stairs, and yanked out his cell phone in annoyance while it rang its little buzzer off. He picked up with a growl.

“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.