Cody Walker's Woman (29 page)

I know,
Cody wanted to say, but he didn’t trust himself to say the words out loud, not when part of him was hating Callahan for being there—well and whole—while Keira...
All she ever wanted was respect,
he reminded himself as another little piece of his heart shredded. Well, she’d earned that respect, and then some, even if it meant...

“No one’s ever done that for me,” Callahan continued. “Not even Mandy. That’s not how I wanted it to go down, not the way I—”

Cody’s harsh laugh cut him off. “Special rule seven,” he said bitterly. “That’s all she said. She was already in shock, but...special rule seven.”

Callahan asked quietly, “What’s that?”

“The agency’s special rule seven—protect civilians at all costs.” Cody’s voice grated on the words and nearly broke at the end, knowing the cost in this case might be Keira’s life. “That means—”

“I know what it means,” Callahan said. “I just never thought of myself as a civilian who needed protection. I was always on the other side, the one doing the protecting.”

Cody shook his head. “Not to Keira. Anyone who doesn’t work for the agency is a civilian.” He thought about it for a moment. “And even if that weren’t the case, she had another reason for walking into that bullet.”

“What’s that?”

“She promised Mandy she wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

Callahan frowned. “When—”

“That morning at my cabin, before McKinnon took your family away. Mandy asked me first. I told her I’d do my best.” His face contracted, the memory painful. “Mandy said that wasn’t good enough. So she asked Keira, and Keira promised.”

“Guts
and
brains,” Callahan replied, respect and admiration evident. “She’s one hell of an agent.”

If only Keira survives to hear those words,
Cody told himself. More than anything he wanted that for her, wanted her to
know.
He turned toward the door to the intensive care unit and stared, as if he could make someone appear there and tell him Keira was going to be okay by sheer force of will. He sensed rather than heard Callahan’s departure. But Callahan returned within a few minutes, saying, “Here, drink this.”

A cup of hot, black coffee was thrust in front of him. Cody didn’t want it. But he knew Callahan was just stubborn enough to stand there forever until Cody took the cup.

He gagged a little as he drank the hot liquid. It wasn’t very good. Wherever Callahan had obtained it, the coffeepot had probably been sitting for a while, and the consistency and taste reflected it. But it was hot. And he was so cold inside. So cold. That hard, cold knot inside him reminded him that he had failed to protect Keira. That was the bottom line. She was his woman, and he hadn’t gotten there in time to save her.

His thoughts turned inward, every detail of every memory of Keira running through his mind; from the moment he’d first seen her, terrified but refusing to surrender, to the moment he’d kissed her and realized the deep core of passion she hid from the world, until the moment they’d wheeled her away in the emergency room, fragile, broken and bleeding.

He had never seen her cry.

That didn’t mean she was cold, emotionless; he knew she cared passionately. It just meant she was tough. Tough enough to stand side by side with him against a world that contained too much evil; tough enough to see that evil, to fight against it and not let it destroy her soul; tough enough to walk in front of a bullet meant for someone else because to her that was her job—protecting others.

That’s why he loved her.

Cody breathed deeply as he finally acknowledged the truth, the answer to questions he hadn’t even known he had. He’d subconsciously fought calling it love, because the only other time he’d loved a woman it had ended in disaster. But he loved Keira. And just as he remembered every moment he’d spent with her, every word she’d ever said to him was imprinted in his heart, especially those two words, “I will.”

“Trust me,” he’d told her that first night, and she’d responded promptly, “I will.” But now he desperately wanted to tell her other things, things he might never have the chance to say.

Love me.

Need me.

Marry me.

And he wanted to hear the same two words from her in reply—
I will.

He couldn’t fathom a world without Keira. He glanced up and caught Callahan watching him, compassion looking out of place on that hard, cold face. But Cody knew that if any man could comprehend the enormity of what he stood to lose, Callahan could, because that’s how he felt about Mandy.

Mandy. Cody spared a moment to think about her, contrasting what he’d felt for her then to what he felt for Keira now. There was no comparison. Losing Mandy to Callahan all those years ago had torn out his heart. But he had survived. Losing Keira would tear out his soul. He would never recover.

“So where’s McKinnon?” Callahan asked, breaking into his thoughts, almost as if he knew what Cody was thinking and wanted to distract him.

“Picking up the pieces,” Cody replied. He laughed humorlessly. “At least that’s what I figure he’s doing—implementing the agency’s special rule eight—when all else fails, pick up the pieces.”

“You mean make them disappear?” That was a side of Callahan that was after Cody’s own heart—he called a spade a spade, and didn’t resort to euphemisms.

“Yeah. That’s exactly what it means.”

“I don’t like it.” Long before Callahan had become the sheriff of Black Rock, long before he’d gone undercover with the New World Militia, he’d been a New York City cop—a good one.

“I don’t either,” Cody admitted.

“So, what are you going to do about it?” There was a challenge in Callahan’s voice.

“Not a hell of a lot I
can
do about it.”

“If that’s the case, seems to me the agency isn’t much better than the organizations we’re after,” Callahan said slowly. “No one should be above the law—not the New World Militia, not NOANC, not Michael Vishenko. And not the agency.”

“So, what are you suggesting?”

Callahan told him, in clipped sentences, and Cody considered it. “It would almost certainly mean the end of my career with the agency,” he said finally. “But—”

Just then the double doors swung open, and a tired-looking man in blue hospital scrubs walked out. Cody’s breathing grew ragged, and his heartbeat kicked into overdrive.

“Are you waiting to hear about Keira Jones?” the surgeon asked. Cody and Callahan were the only ones around, so he had to know...

Cody took a step toward him. “Yes?”

“She’s stable. That’s about all I can tell you at this point. We got her heart started again....” At Cody’s quickly indrawn breath he explained, “It’s a condition called hypovolemic shock—she lost a lot of blood, and the drop in blood pressure caused her heart to stop beating. But we got it going again, we’ve replaced the blood volume she lost, and her blood pressure is up—these are all good things.

“The bullet was a through and through, so it didn’t bounce around inside doing more damage, and we didn’t have to extract it. One lung collapsed, but that’s okay now, too. Our biggest concern at this point is the loss of blood, and whether we were in time to prevent irreversible organ failure. I’m afraid all we can do now is wait and see.”

She’s alive,
a little voice whispered in Cody’s head.
She’s alive!
“Is she conscious? Can I see her?”

“You can see her, subject to certain conditions, but she’s not conscious. We’ve medically induced a coma to help her body deal with the trauma. She won’t be coming out of that for some time.”

“What conditions?”

“We try to keep the ICU—the intensive care unit—as sterile as possible, to minimize the risk of infection to the patient. But we don’t exclude a patient’s loved ones—even though she’s in a coma, she might be able to hear you. We can’t quantify how much that matters in cases like this, but...” The surgeon made a face of frustration. “It
does
help. I’ve seen it myself.”

“I need to see her,” Cody said simply.

The surgeon nodded. “One of the ICU nurses will tell you what you need to do.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, scrubbed and clothed in blue surgical garb, Cody walked into the dimly lit room where Keira lay. A nurse was there in attendance, checking readouts and doing things to various pieces of equipment, some of which Cody vague remembered from his own hospital stay. But he ignored her.

He walked to the bed and gazed down at Keira with love welling inside him. She looked so small and fragile lying there; readout wires attached everywhere, a saline drip connected via a clear plastic tube to her arm, a breathing tube in place. Her chest rose and fell, the movement slow and measured. But she was alive.

They’d washed all the blood away, and she was deathly pale, which made the sprinkling of freckles on her nose and cheeks stand out. Her red-gold curls were subdued beneath a paper cap, and her expressive brown eyes were closed, but she was still his darling. And she was alive.

He started to take her hand but caught himself and asked the ICU nurse, “Can I touch her?”

“So long as you don’t interfere with anything connected to her,” the nurse reassured him in an undertone. “And don’t touch any bandages.”

His left hand enfolded Keira’s left hand, the only part of her he dared touch as he stood by her bedside. There were so many things he wanted to say, all the things he’d thought of while he’d been waiting to hear if she’d survived—
love me, need me, marry me.
All the things to which he desperately wanted to hear her say, “I will” in response—but the presence of the nurse inhibited him.

Instead he squeezed Keira’s hand and said, “I’m here.” She didn’t respond, but he hadn’t expected her to. The fingers of his right hand brushed gently against her cheek. She never stirred, but her skin was warm to the touch. That meant she was alive.

He glanced at her right chest and shoulder swathed in bandages, and relived in slow motion the moment that would haunt him forever. Keira stepping in front of Callahan, firing her weapon. His own anguished cry of rage and denial. The bullet slamming into Keira, spinning her around and knocking her to the ground. Callahan firing his Smith & Wesson. And he, emptying his Glock’s thirty-three-round clip with deadly intent and even deadlier accuracy.

The veneer of civilization had vanished in that instant; he had wanted nothing more than to obliterate the men who had shot his woman. It was primitive, visceral. It was nothing like when he’d helped kill Pennington, the only other time he’d ever taken a human life. He’d known as he fired tonight he was too late to protect Keira; but he could avenge her. And he did.

Now as he stood watching each breath Keira drew he accepted that he was only human after all. His conscience troubled him, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
Deal with it,
he told his conscience, remembering another time and another place, and Callahan telling him the same thing.
Deal with it.

Not every man would understand what had driven him tonight, but Callahan would. Cody drew a small measure of comfort from that knowledge. He felt a kinship with the other man, almost as if they were brothers. Maybe, in a sense, they were. They both knew what it was like to love a woman to the edge of death...and beyond. And each of them had been willing to kill or die to keep his woman safe. The only difference was Callahan had saved Mandy every time. Cody had saved Keira twice, but...

Don’t let her die,
he prayed.
Not now.

“Stay with me,” he whispered, his hand tightening around Keira’s, and in his heart he heard the echo of her words from that very first night, “I will.”

Other words crowded his throat as he realized he’d never said he loved her. Even when he’d told her he wanted all of her, even when he’d told her that he needed her trust in every way there was, somehow he’d never been able to get the words out. Each time he’d started to admit it to her and to himself, he’d drawn back.

You were afraid.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Yes, he’d been afraid. He’d made love to her, and the beauty of that one night and her priceless gift to him he would take to his grave. He’d told her she was his woman, and he’d meant it, then and now. He’d even told her he wanted nothing less than her heart, mind, body and soul. But he’d never said...

“I love you, Keira,” he whispered, squeezing her hand.

Had she known what was in his heart? When she’d told him, “I love you, Cody,” had she known even then he loved her, too? God, he hoped so. Somehow it seemed important that deep inside her she knew how much he loved and needed her. That she remembered it in the recesses of her soul, so that wherever she was, wherever she went, she carried that knowledge with her.

And that the knowledge would bring her back to him.

“Stay with me,” he whispered again. He bent down and brushed her cheek with his lips, and when he straightened he had to blink several times to clear his vision.

* * *

He was still there twenty-four hours later. He’d dozed fitfully in the chair beside her bed, but he refused to leave or even to relinquish the left hand lying so still and white against the sheet for more than a couple of minutes. When his own arm turned numb, he switched positions and switched arms, but he refused to break the connection.

It was almost as if he could somehow transmit his own breath, his own blood, his own strength into her body by holding her and never letting go. “Stay with me,” he whispered time and again. And throughout the endless night and the following day she did, her quiet breathing reassuring him that she was still alive.

He was still there when they came the next morning to tell him she would live.

Chapter 23

C
ody stood in D’Arcy’s office. “I can’t go along with it,” he said steadfastly. “It’s not right. You know it and I know it. I’ll do whatever I have to do to stop you from applying special rule eight in this case. Even if means the end of my career here.”