Crazy Cool (4 page)

He was going to start by questioning her about what had happened at the Gardens, find out if she knew anything. He’d go easy on her, though. If Dylan wanted to get tough with her, that was Dylan’s call. Hawkins just didn’t want her falling apart on his watch. That’s what had gotten him into trouble at nineteen—into trouble and into her bed—holding her together when she’d fallen apart. He’d had a reputation even back then for being damn near invincible, but she’d broken him with one soft, shuddering sigh, looking up at him with her green eyes swimming in tears.

He’d never in his life seen anything like her, and he sure as hell had never held anything like her. The girls he’d known, well, they’d been different. Some sweet, some not, some good, some real bad, but no out-and-out fluff balls. That’s what had caught his attention in the first place.

He’d been cruising in the 350 Malibu that Sparky Klimaszewski had asked him to pick up out in the suburbs. He’d cased the car for a week, then on Friday night had J.T. take him out to Lakewood and drop him off. After they’d boosted the car, J.T. had gone straight back to Sparky’s, but the 350 was hot, and Hawkins had driven it around LoDo a bit. Going by the old chop shop on Steele Street where they’d all gotten busted two years earlier had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. The shop had been shut down tight, with bits of police tape still hanging off the doors and a big
FOR RENT
sign posted in the window. Four blocks down from the shop was where he’d noticed a fight going on in the parking lot at Seventeenth and Wazee.

Normally, he would have kept on driving. But he’d caught sight of something bright in the middle of all those guys pushing and shoving each other around in the parking lot. A moment later, a girl had broken free from the crowd, running like a track star and making for the street. She’d been wearing the most amazing dress, yards and yards of shimmering pink and white material, the skirts fisted in her hands, her back bare except for two tiny straps running from the front, her hair bright blond, a look of sheer terror on her face.

Hawkins had jammed the Malibu into reverse so fast the shifter had almost come off in his hand. The engine had screamed as he’d buried the gas pedal in the floorboards and taken off backward to pick her up, or at least give the assholes chasing her something to think about so she could make her getaway. A couple of the guys must have actually been track stars, though, because before the girl even got close to the street, they’d headed her off and run her into the alley.

Fuck,
he’d thought, his heart racing. They were going to gang-bang Tinkerbell.

He’d kept going, tires squealing and smoking, running the Malibu the wrong way on a one-way street. He knew where the alley emptied out, and in seconds he was there, throwing the Chevy into Park and jumping out of the car. A cloud of smoke had billowed over him, and he remembered thinking Sparky was going to have his ass for running the tires off the car.

He’d caught the girl almost instantly upon entering the alley. Either she hadn’t seen him or she hadn’t had the sense to avoid him, because she’d run right into his arms—and stayed there, clinging to him.

It wasn’t exactly what he’d expected her to do, but he didn’t second-guess his luck.

“Get in the car, princess,” he’d said fast and low, putting her behind him.

It wasn’t until she stepped away that he realized his hand was wet where he’d been holding her—wet with her blood.

Things changed for him then. It was a shift inside himself, a subtle but profound shift from pulse-pounding excitement fueled by fear into utter, no-way-am-I-going-to-die-here calm.

There were eight guys in the alley with him, but three of them must have already decided they didn’t have the stomach for more trouble and were heading back out the other end. That left five—all of them wearing tuxedos, Hawkins had noted somewhere in the back of his mind—and two of those were backing off, too.

That left three.

“Who cut her?” he asked, and watched as two sets of eyes landed on a dark-haired kid who looked like he’d gotten into something a little more mind-altering than his daddy’s liquor cabinet. When Hawkins checked, the stoner, indeed, was holding a knife in his hand.

Hawkins had a knife in his hand, too, but he didn’t think the other guys knew it—not yet.

And they might have pushed him into using it, if he hadn’t heard a car door shut behind him. The fairy princess had actually gotten into his car. It surprised him—and suddenly there was no contest about where he wanted to be and what he needed to do. Slicing the bow ties and cummerbunds off the bad boys in the alley would have to wait.

“Touch her again, and there won’t be enough of you left to put in a box.” The words were fair warning in his book. Then it had occurred to him that any one of those penguin-suited guys could be packing a piece and might be wired enough to use it.

So he’d backed toward the car, keeping them all in sight, not realizing he’d just prophesied his own doom. Later, in prison, he’d had plenty of time to mull those words over in his mind, the sheer hubris of them. Yeah, sure, he’d been so fucking tough.

Tough enough that when one of the boys had come after him, Hawkins
had
cut him, just a little, a lightning-quick slash up his chest, enough to cut his shirt, just enough to draw a little blood and seal his fate.

The boy had fallen back into the arms of his stoned friend and the third boy, and Hawkins had leaped into the car with Tinkerbell and taken off for the wildest ride of his life.

C
HAPTER

5

R
OXANNE.

Katya blew out a short breath and glanced sideways, then looked over her shoulder, checking out the backseat. She was sitting alone in the car, while Doc Blake and Hawkins stood in the alley, talking in a pool of light cast by a street lamp and the clinic’s open door.

Hawkins had named his set of wheels, and he called her Roxanne.

The name fit.

She was a Roxanne. Big, green, and mean, hot under the hood, and all pitch-black leather on the inside.

“How’s Roxanne?” Doc had asked him, after they’d finished up in the examination room.

“Running low elevens,” Hawkins had answered. “Skeeter ported and polished her heads, and we’ve got damn near perfect flow. We’re going to blow Quinn’s new Camaro off the track, if he and Regan ever come back from their honeymoon.”

Ah, Katya had thought. They were talking about the car, the rocket he’d launched out of the Botanic Gardens parking lot.

The Botanic Gardens, where her beautiful Oleg Henri was probably in ruins.
Who in the world would blow up a charity art auction,
she wondered,
and with fireworks of all things?
Some neo-Nazi, antienvironment, orchid-hating group of radicals who’d decided to move onto the world stage by destroying botanical art?

It didn’t make sense. No matter how many times she’d asked herself the same questions in the last half hour, she wasn’t even close to coming up with an answer.

She didn’t know if her insurance would cover an act of environmental terrorism. If it had been negligence on the part of the Botanic Gardens, some mistake with the fireworks, she and the other gallery owners could sue. She certainly hadn’t been told or warned about a fireworks display—not that she thought suing the Botanic Gardens would be good for business. In fact, the whole thing was one big public-relations disaster.

God, she hoped no one had been hurt. That’s what bothered her the most. There had been a lot of people milling about the stage area, though none as close as she had been, and she hadn’t been seriously hurt. A little singed in spots, and scraped up, but not really hurt.

She needed to call Alex and make sure he was okay, but she hadn’t seen a phone in the back rooms at Doc’s, and her cell phone was still in her purse back at the Gardens.

Hawkins had a phone. She’d seen him using it while Doc cleaned her face, and as soon as he got in the car, she was going to ask to borrow it.

He’d said he was working for the Department of Defense, not her mother, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow her mother had made a horrible mistake and accidentally hired Christian Hawkins as a bodyguard, and then by some horrible coincidence, he’d been forced to leap into action—which, admittedly, he’d done very well.

Exceptionally well. She’d barely landed on the ground before he’d been on top of her, shielding her from danger—which seemed to be his specialty.

Of course, if she remembered correctly, her specialty was ruining his life.

Swearing softly under her breath, she brought her hand up to cover her face.

She was in trouble. Oh, man, was she in trouble, but she wasn’t going to give in to panic. Later, she could panic, but not while she was sitting in his car.

Lowering her hand, she took a deep breath and another look around. The alley where he’d parked emptied out on Seventeenth Street. Her gallery was on Seventeenth Street in LoDo, a couple of miles west, just up from Union Station, which didn’t mean diddly-squat, because she wasn’t going to leap out of the car and escape, bust out, make a break for it. If it had been anyone but Hawkins, she might have walked away, but she wasn’t going to walk away from him. She couldn’t.

What she was going to do was apologize to him, so help her God, and try to ease the weight of her guilt a little, before it crushed her where it had lain so heavy on her chest for thirteen years. Apologies were kind of her forte, her trump card, her secret way out of all sorts of sticky social situations, and she’d never been in a stickier social situation or owed anyone an apology more than she owed him. Getting the words out could only help her breathe a little easier here tonight. Then, when they got to her gallery, she would thank him at the door, lock herself inside, and just give herself over to panic while she waited for Alex.

She was
not
putting herself in his custody and just disappearing with him, no matter who he worked for or how many paintings had gone up in flames and fireworks. She and Hawkins had disappeared together once before, for a month in a two-room suite at the Brown Palace Hotel, living on room service, sleeping late, and partying even later. He’d shown her places in Denver she’d never known existed.

It had been the wildest time of her life. She still daydreamed about it sometimes, about him, though she was pretty sure tonight’s events were going to blow those fond moments of idle introspection straight to hell. He’d been a great fantasy, all hormones and heartbreak, and she’d been so crazy in love with him. Insane, really, her mother had been so kind to point out. Unbelievably, irresponsibly insane to throw her whole life away, right into the gutter, the
very gutter,
by taking up with a street thug. It was more than her mother could bear—and this from a woman who bore the weight of the Free World on her shoulders every single day of her life, a woman who was
proud
to do so, a woman who had fought long and hard for the
privilege
of bearing the weight of the Free World.

Pride.
Now there was a word. Didn’t Katya have even an ounce of pride? A shred? Hadn’t she learned anything from her parents? Especially her mother?

Well, yes, she had, but it was all kind of hard to put into words. So she’d bitten her tongue and weathered the awful storm, and been sent to Paris—as far away from Denver and drug murders and car thieves as her mother could get her.

And now she was back, right smack dab in the middle of a full-blown disaster, the whole damn night about as bad as it could get.

Her gaze inadvertently went to the two men in the alley, and she swore softly under her breath, reconsidering her last thought. The night could easily get worse—much worse.

Hawkins hadn’t changed, not nearly enough to suit her. It was all too easy to look at him and still see the nineteen-year-old avenging angel who had appeared from out of nowhere and saved her. Except now he was an avenging angel in an expensively tailored suit with an unnerving quietness about him—a beautiful angel, his face more angles than curves, his silky dark hair brushing the collar of his shirt. He was broader through the shoulders than he’d been as a teenager, possibly taller, still lean, but more solid.

She’d felt safe in his arms, but then she’d always felt safe in his arms, from the very first time he’d held her until the last—which was as far as she needed to go with that train of thought. He was a stranger now, and she didn’t need her mother to tell her that’s exactly what he should remain.

Still, she was as curious about him as she’d ever been. She should ask Alex to do a background check on him. Sometimes her secretary amazed her with the kind of connections he’d forged as an L.A. cop. Alex could find out all about Christian Hawkins, if she wanted him to—unearth his secrets and his sins and hand them all over to her in a sealed manila envelope.

It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had somebody dig through his life. Of course, Alex was bound to do a better job than the private investigator she’d hired years ago, who’d taken a whole lot of her money to tell her Christian Hawkins still lived in Denver and sold cars for a living.

At the time, she’d just opened her new gallery in L.A. and felt like she’d finally left her past behind, overcome it and gotten on with her life—and she’d needed to know he’d done the same. He’d already been pardoned, but she’d needed to know he was okay. The information the investigator had come up with had fit, so she’d paid the price and let it go.

But he was no car salesman.

Light from the doorway spilled over his face, contouring his features with shadows, the square angle of his jaw, harder than she remembered, the straight dark lines of his brows, the seriousness of his gaze—and the world’s most amazing mouth. Or so it had seemed thirteen years ago, when she’d been very young and naive.

It had taken him less than a week in the Brown Palace to change the naive part.

God, what she hadn’t known.

A blush stole up her cheeks, and she had to admit that besides being half scared, half guilt-ridden, and half worried sick about what had happened at the Gardens, she should probably be at least half embarrassed to see him again.

Yes, that was a lovely mix: fear, guilt, worry, and mortification.

She watched him step off Doc’s back stoop and head toward the car, and thanked God she wasn’t eighteen years old anymore.

He slid in behind the steering wheel and glanced in her direction.

“How’s your headache?” he asked.

“Better. Thank you.”

“Doc said he gave you aspirin.”

“Two, and an ibuprofen.” Oh, this was perfect, so polite. She could do polite all night long. It was right up there with apologies on her list of social survival skills.

“He’s gotten pretty conservative in his old age. If you’d like something stronger, I’ll get it for you.”

“No. Thank you. I’m fine.” And she was fine, practically. Her headache had eased half a degree from wretched, and she’d gotten her panic down from a wailing screech to a low, manageable hum. Christian Hawkins was polite, and she was fine, and everything was perfect except for whatever the hell had happened at the art auction, and the fact that for some reason two men possibly—or improbably—from the Department of Defense had been at the party, and one of them—unbelievably—was a car thief she’d once been in love with, who had gone to prison for the murder of her ex-boyfriend.

“Great. I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he said.

Well, gee. It didn’t get any more polite than that.

Taking another deep, calming breath, she readied herself to say something sincerely remorseful, something tinged with years of hard-won wisdom about the regretful failings of youth—and, so help her God, she would have gotten it all out, if he hadn’t started his monster muscle car and forced a quick shift in her priorities. She grabbed for the door with one hand and the seat with her other and held on for dear life.

H
AWKINS
slanted her another glance and noticed her white-knuckled grip on the door handle. He didn’t blame her for it. They’d had a wild ride from the Botanic Gardens—not that he had any regrets. Given Dylan’s news, they hadn’t moved any faster than necessary.

“I talked with my partner while you were with Doc, and he cleared me for taking you home. He and your secretary are going to meet us at the gallery.” That should make her feel safer, knowing she was only minutes away from a reunion with her dweeb boyfriend.

“Alex is all right, then?” She turned sideways in her seat, a concerned look on her face. “He wasn’t hurt?”

“He’s fine, very worried about you.”

Relief instantly softened her features, though she didn’t loosen her grip on the car. “He’s the world’s worst worrier, such a fussbudget. Of course, that’s what makes him great at his job.”

Fussbudget? That didn’t sound like a boyfriend. It sounded like a roommate.

“Did you tell him I was okay?” she asked.

“My partner did,” he assured her. A roommate as gay as he dressed, he decided, giving her a discreet once-over. No sane straight man could share her bathroom on a platonic basis—and that was pure experience speaking. Living with her for a month in the Brown Palace had been his own personal, excellent adventure into the never-never land of girls and girl stuff. He’d loved all of it: silk demibras hanging from the towel rack, hand-washed underwear, eight kinds of lotion, necklaces draped over the mirror, a perfume for every mood, sex in the shower, the whole sensory experience intensified by the warm humidity and small space of the bathroom. The only place he’d liked better was the bed with the window open and a summer night breeze blowing over their bare skin.

Admittedly, he’d had kind of a one-track mind at nineteen, but he didn’t now, and all his other tracks were telling him to get off that one track—get off it, and stay off it.

He cleared his throat. “Only one person was injured at the Gardens.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. Dead was about as injured as a person could get.

“Who?”

“I don’t have a name yet,” he said, sliding Roxanne into reverse. “Did you know anybody at the auction?”

“A few people. It was a society event, and I . . .” Her voice trailed off, but, yeah, he knew why she would know a few people in the Denver Social Register. More than a few.

“Who was there that you knew?”

She thought for a second, but just a second. “Well, you, of course.”

Of course, he silently repeated, and wondered why her inclusion of him among people she would admit to knowing gave him even a hint of satisfaction.

“And Vickie Martin,” she continued. “We were debs together. She was there with her third husband, whom I hadn’t met before, and Brenda Kaplan was there, and her mother, Mary Anne Parfitt, and Ted Garra—”