Page 63 of Deceit & Desire

I choked, staring up at him in wordless, breathless horror as his hands tightened around my neck and he kept raging at me.

“She told me that if I was going to keep her a dirty little secret, she’d just have to move on with somebody who wouldn’t feel the need to hide her, and just about any other cowboy in the world would do.”

I clawed at his hands again, desperate for relief, but he pressed on, oblivious to me clawing at him.

“But no… she had to pick that high and mighty asshole who thinks he’s better than everyone else just because he works harder and he nailed the boss’s daughter.”

I coughed and tried to suck in a breath, but it was impossible with his hands wrapped around my throat.

Cody leaned close to my face, his voice a feral growl. “Kissing him… choosing him… that was the last goddamn straw. She didn’t give me a choice!”

My vision blurred, black dots dancing in the corners of my eyes as I struggled against him. My mind raced, desperate for something, anything, to break his grip. The weight of him pressing me down was suffocating, but I refused to give in. Not here. Not now.

I kicked out with my legs, my boot catching his shin, and he yelped, his grip loosening just enough for me to suck in a ragged breath. With every ounce of strength I had left, I brought my knee up sharply, slamming it into his stomach. Cody doubled over, cursing, and I shoved him off me, scrambling to my feet.

“Missy didn’t deserve what you did to her,” I spat, my voice hoarse but defiant. “You think you didn’t have a choice? You’re wrong. You had a choice, and you chose to kill her.”

He staggered back, clutching his stomach, his face a mask of fury and regret.

“You don’t understand!” he shouted, his voice cracking again. “She—she would’ve ruined everything!”

“Everything,” I echoed bitterly, backing toward the door, trying to put distance between us. “All you cared about was your reputation. Your friendships. Your family. But what about Missy’s life? What about the fact that you stole it from her?”

Cody’s eyes darted wildly, his panic rising as he realized how much he’d said. I took another half step back, and my back hit the barn wall. My heart sank. He came at me again, his face a mask of cold fury.

“I’ve spent the last ten years covering my tracks, and I’m not about to slip now. Coming here and confronting me all by yourself was really fucking stupid, you know that?”

He pinned me to the barn wall, his hands closing around my neck again, harder and more secure this time, using the barn wall as leverage to help him cut off my air supply. The edges of my vision turned black as he got right up in my face and kept right on talking.

“But I’m grateful to you for being such an arrogant, high-handed bitch. You’ve just made it easier for me to eliminate you as part of the problem. All I have to do after that is find a way to hang this whole mess on Roman and I’m free. Knowing he’ll rot in jail for what I did is just a bonus.”

His face was twisted into an almost inhumanly gleeful snarl by the time he finished. I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought he was harmless, even for a second.

I prayed that my phone was still recording, still gathering evidence. Prayed that Roman and Landon wouldn’t arrive too late to stop this and save my damn fool life. My head pounded, my pulse roared in my ears, and the whole world faded into an eerie, cold black abyss right in front of my eyes.

Chapter25

Didn’t Sign Up for This

PLAYLIST: “WAY DOWN WE GO” BY KALEO

RICK

The sharp crashof crates hitting the ground snapped me out of my half-doze, followed by the sound of Roman’s frantic shouting. The noise cut through the quiet of the bunkhouse like a blade, slicing into my chest.

The hairs on the back of my neck prickled as I swung my legs over the side of the bunk, my feet hitting the cold floor. This wasn’t just the horses acting up. Not tonight.

My gut twisted into a cold knot of dread as I grabbed my boots and shoved them on. My hands shook harder than I liked to admit, but I pushed the feeling down. No time for that now. By the time I threw open the door and stepped outside, the crisp night air hit me like a slap to the face, sharp and biting against my skin.

The ranch, normally so quiet at this hour, was alive with chaos. Landon’s patrol SUV sat parked near the barn, its blue-and-red lights cutting across the yard in jolting flashes that made everything feel wrong. My heart rate spiked, my pulse shuddering and thrumming in time with the strobing blue and red lights. Roman’s truck sat idling nearby, its headlights spilling jagged beams across the gravel and barn walls, turning shadows into monsters.

And then I saw him.

Cody Jacobson, the lazy pretty boy among the wranglers at the ranch who got by mostly on his easygoing charm and good humor, was trying to slip away into the night. Something about his hunched-over, creeping posture set off all kinds of alarm bells in my head. The slippery bastard was hunched low, moving fast toward the trees like he thought he could disappear into the dark before anyone noticed. His movements were sharp, erratic, filled with the kind of desperation that stood out like a flare.

Why me?The frustrated thought rolled through my chest like a riptide.Why’d I have to be the one who walked out of the bunkhouse and saw him? Why couldn’t it be literally anyone else who stepped out into this surreal scenario and noticed him trying to get away? Problem is, I definitely noticed, and I can’t just let him slip away into the night.

“Damn it,” I hissed, already on the move. My boots crunched against the gravel as I broke into a sprint, aiming straight for him, my pulse hammering in my ears.

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