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Keira carefully backed away to allow hi that would rustle Then he took her hand in his and looked down at her There was barely enough ht to see a few feet in any direction, but there was enough light to see his deterently, “Trust me”

“I will,” she said She kneas crazy; they were still in iht try to enter the rooone, and aabout this man other than the fact he hadn’t raped her when he’d had the chance But that one fact was enough, and she knew instinctively she could trust him with her life

“Good,” he said, an unexpected set the hell out of here”

Chapter 1

Cody Walker sat at his govern co, ostensibly rereading the revised report he’d just printed out to check it for errors before sub, he was thinking about the things he hadn’t put into the report

Like the way Keira had looked at hi of freckles, so scared and yet so brave, with that old curls no comb could tame Like the way her brown eyes had met his when he’d told her to trust him and she’d said without hesitation, I will Like the way her breast had felt beneath his hand when—

With a ot no business reht hand brushed over the four barely visible welts on his left check where she’d branded him; the scratches were still there, but after nearly a week they were almost healed Guess you deserved this after all

He didn’t hold it against her Sure, he’d been trying to rescue her, but she couldn’t have known it at the tiht hih they looked nothing alike, Keira so up Mandy would have done exactly the saht with a mixture of admiration and amusement

Without realizing it, his hand went to the scar on his left shoulder Beneath his shirt he could feel the raised edges of the healed bullet wound where Mandy had shot hiht he was about to kill the man she loved Mandy hadn’t known the truth then any ht

Keira He’d blown his assignone for her, but he couldn’t have done anything differently Not and still call himself a man He couldn’t have left an innocent woman there in that isolated shack in thewith in his undercover persona as an illegal arms dealer They would have raped her at the very least, and probably would have killed her afterward—they wouldn’t want to leave a witness behind

He reht when the three ed, half carried her into the shack where he’d been negotiating with two other gangher captors every step of the way, refusing to surrender to them despite the terror any woainst ravaging hands and lewd suggestions, unwilling to give the for mercy she had to have knoas nonexistent

His desperate plan had been born in an instant He’d had leverage because they wanted soer man-portable surface-to-air azines, and other sundry weapons of destruction And he’d used that leverage to claie they’d expected in that situation Then he’d triued her into the other room, and

Well, that part was in his report, anyway

He threw the papers on his desk, usted, and swiveled around to stare at the picture on his wall—a large, blown-up reproduction of his rustic cabin and the surrounding woods in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyo He wondered why he’d ever left it and the relatively easy job as sheriff back then