Read Cody Walker's Woman for Free Online Page B

had once bluntly told Ryan Callahan, aka Reilly O’Neill, there were other ways of taking David Pennington down...without killing him.
    In the end it hadn’t been possible—he and Callahan had killed Pennington together. Whether Ryan Callahan’s .45 had done the deed or whether it had been the knife Cody had thrown while clinging to the side of a building nearly bleeding to death, neither of them knew, nor cared. They’d both been trying to save Mandy, held hostage by Pennington with a gun to her head and murder in his heart. The fact that Pennington had been the one to end up in the morgue rather than Mandy or Callahan was all they’d cared about in the heat of the moment.
    But that didn’t mean Cody was happy how things had ended, even though Pennington’s death made a lot of good things possible. Cody would have preferred to go by the book: arrest, prosecution and incarceration. Long, long incarceration. It just hadn’t been in the cards that night.
    Deal with it, Callahan had told Cody when Cody had expressed regret about the outcome. Cody could still hear him saying it in that disconcertingly direct way he had. Callahan had been visiting Cody in the hospital while he recovered from the gunshot wound that had nearly taken his life. You can’t ever second-guess yourself, Callahan had advised him. Not if you want to stay alive. If you do, you’ll be frozen with indecision when the chips are down. That’s the quickest way I know to end up dead. Even worse, someone who doesn’t deserve to die might pay the price for your screwup.
    Cody had taken that advice to heart. He’d never allowed himself to second-guess his actions in all the years since. Not until today. Not until he’d seen the bruises he’d inflicted on Keira.
    She doesn’t blame you, he reminded himself. She said it herself—you did what you had to do to save her. But after seeing the bruises on her pale, delicate skin, the reminder was cold comfort.
    * * *
    Cody checked the agency’s intranet listing for McKinnon’s phone number and picked up the phone. Then he changed his mind and looked up another number instead.
    He heard a crisp “Keira Jones” in his ear, but for some reason he couldn’t help remembering those two words she’d spoken to him the night they met— I will. He pushed the memory ruthlessly to one side and told her, “You’re in.”
    “You’re kidding,” she said, and he heard the little edge of excitement she couldn’t suppress in her voice. “I thought you were sure Callahan would refuse.”
    “He’s not unreasonable, just stubborn—I should have remembered that. If you get to know him the way I do, you’ll realize unpredictability could be defined by watching him.”
    “Is he really that good? What I mean is,” she explained, “the way you and Trace and D’Arcy talk about him makes me wonder why he’s not working for the agency.”
    Despite everything Cody was worried about, he laughed. “If you ever meet his wife, you wouldn’t ask that question. Mandy is...” Pictures of Mandy flashed through his mind, from when they’d been toddlers together, through their high school years, to the last time he’d seen her after the birth of her third child, the daughter she and Callahan had been hoping for. “Let’s just say any man married to Mandy could be forgiven for wanting a job that kept him home nights.”
    “I see.”
    There was an odd inflection to the innocuous words. I wonder what that’s about, Cody thought before dismissing it as unimportant and moving on to why he’d originally called her. “Can you and McKinnon meet me down here? I’ve started a list of things we’ll need, but now’s the time for the three of us to make plans. I want to move on this as soon as possible. And there’s something I just learned about that I need to share with the two of you,” he added, knowing he needed to inform them he was being followed.
    “I think Trace went to get coffee, but I’ll round him up and