Page 131 of Hold Me Until Morning

A wave of brutality undulated beneath his flesh.

Reaching out, I touched the hollow beneath his eye, running my fingertips over the fierceness that blazed. “And I’m afraid neither of us really know what he’s capable of.”

Cody took my hand that was tracing his face and pressed my palm to his lips, golden eyes flared beneath the dull, muted light. “We’ll find a way. I promise you.”

“I’m trying…trying to figure out how to do this right. Without putting my family in danger. He made me sign these papers…” My throat closed off with a breath of hate. “Papers that look like I’m a part of things. Papers that look like I involved my father and his ranch. I think it was Pruitt’s way of assuring himself that I would never leave.”

An old kind of foreboding rushed through Cody’s fierce features.

One second later, he solidified, a resolution building like bricks. He shifted and pressed his palm to my cheek. “How could anyone ever fucking believe that you would do something wrong, Hailey? It’ll come out. The truth.”

As if the heaviness was no longer in the room, he squeezed my hip with his big hand. “You wait right there.”

He pushed to standing, and I watched him waltz across my room and flick on the light to the bathroom.

Buck naked.

That was all it took for the reservations that kept trying to resurface to be obliterated.

For the guilt and the worry to fade away in the recesses of my room, disappearing into the vapor of this dream—this fantasy—I was momentarily living in.

The man was nothing but a heaping stack of muscle and brawn and this unfound beauty that could never have been expected.

He trembled the ground below him.

An earthquake that rattled me to the core.

His back rippled with strength, his shoulders so wide I wasn’t sure how he didn’t have to angle to the side to make it through the bathroom doorway.

The globes of his perfect, round ass flexed with each step he took.

My stomach knitted in a knot of greed.

I had to press a pillow against my mouth to stop the needy sound from escaping.

Of course, Cody had to go and catch it, and he was smirking in that way he loved to do as he glanced back. “Are you ogling me, Shortcake?”

“Who me? No, never.” How I’d gone from drowning in his intensity to giggling, I didn’t know.

Apparently, he’d driven me to delirium.

His amusement grew as he turned around and stretched himself out across the doorway, hands going to either side of the frame as he leaned my direction, no shame as he put himself on display.

God, the man was full of himself.

I was going to have to give him a pass. He’d earned that arrogance.

Every rugged, brutal inch of him was immaculate.

“No fibbing, darlin’. You think I can’t feel those eyes on me? Not that you’re going to find me complaining.”

“Do you think I could look anywhere else?” I gave up on the teasing and welcomed the wash of need that swelled from the secret place I’d kept for him. “I can’t think straight when I’m looking at you. And seeing you like this…”

I trailed off, not sure how to admit the way he made me feel but knowing I needed to touch him again.

A growl got free of his vibrating chest. “You should really stop looking at me that way, Shortcake.”

“What am I looking at you like?”