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“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.
