Crazy Cool (8 page)

“Do you know what this is called?” she asked, obliging him by letting go of the T-shirt and smoothing her hand over the muscle curving over his hip and down to his groin.

“Off limits,” he replied with a grimace, catching her hand before she could go too far.

“I lived in Paris.”

“So you said.” He let go of her and quickly shoved the tail end of his T-shirt back in his pants, only to have her pull it back out.

“And I lived in New York.”

“Come on. Stop it, honey.” He tried to capture her hands again, but this time failed. His T-shirt came free again, and he swore under his breath.

“And I lived in Los Angeles, but I never saw anything like this.” She smoothed her palm across the small of his back, across his tattoo, and all he could think was, if she stuck her hand down his pants, he was not going to be held responsible for the consequences.

“That’s because I didn’t get it in Paris, New York, or Los Angeles.” They reached the elevator, and he hit the call button.

“You didn’t tell me where you done it, or it done . . . had it done.”

“No.” He hadn’t. It had been a hot, lazy summer in New Mexico. The woman he’d gone down there with had been ten years older than he was, an artist, and he’d been her favorite canvas during their whole brief and intensely educational affair.

The old cage elevator finally groaned its way down to a stop. Hawkins reached for the handle to slide open the door, and that’s when she did it, slipped her hand into his pants, beneath his underwear, and down over his hip.

Son of a bitch. He knew what she was doing, tracing the lines of his tattoo, but that was only going to take her someplace she really shouldn’t go, and get both of them in a whole lot of trouble.

“Kat, come on now.” He grabbed for her hand, and she giggled, which was better than her crying. “Okay, babe. Party’s over. Come on.” And when, he wondered, was the last time he’d tried to get a woman’s hand
out
of his pants? Maybe never.

Juggling her and the elevator door, and praying she wouldn’t start crying again, Hawkins managed to ease her down off his shoulder, before she either did him any damage or got him so turned on he wouldn’t care if making love with her was the smart move or not.

The thought no sooner formed in his mind than he froze. Since when had he gone from having sex with her to making love?

Geezus.
He couldn’t be that stupid.

“Don’t kiss me, Christian,” she pleaded, falling against him again and executing a full-frontal, full-court, fulsomely arousing press up the length of his body, the whole thing, from stem to stern.

Against his will and every ounce of his common sense, he looked down at her mouth.

And took a breath.

No, he wasn’t going to kiss her. What he was going to do was get her up to her apartment. Now. With that goal in mind, he hustled her the rest of the way into the elevator and hit the button for the fifth floor.

The elevator started up with a groan and a shimmy. It was a small elevator, unbelievably small, but he did his best to keep to his side and hold her on the other with his palm pressed firmly against her torso in that no-man’s-land between her abdomen and her breasts.

Distance is what he needed, and a little cooling off time. A man had been murdered tonight, and he needed to clear his head and start figuring out why.

The elevator hit a rough spot, and before it shook itself free, she ended up back in his arms.

He didn’t know how. He’d literally been holding her at arm’s length.

“
Please
don’t kiss me,” she whispered, her voice kind of raw and throaty, as if they’d already been kissing the stuffing out of each other for the last couple of hours or so.

Without makeup, her face had lost some of its dramatic contrast, but none of its beauty. Her lashes weren’t so dark. Her lips were a softer shade of pink. He could see a light dusting of freckles across her nose, which made her look younger—a lot younger, closer to eighteen than she had a right to look. Her hair was wild, absolutely wild, as if she’d been dragged across the pillows and rolled over on a mattress, the way a guy might, if he was . . . crazy, or lucky, or simply out of his ever-loving mind.

“Christian.”
She breathed his name, her hands going to the buttons on his shirt and starting to undo them one by one.

He didn’t stop her. He was too busy thinking, remembering, and wondering if she might have learned some voodoo hoodoo over the years, maybe in Paris or something, because he was not his normal, clear-thinking self. He felt a little bewitched, as if he were under some kind of spell. She’d had a margarita, but all he’d had was a beer—and a taste of her mouth, and her in his arms, and yeah, that was probably enough to fuck him up.

All because a long time ago she had stripped him bare, cut him to the quick, and left him. Not one word had she spoken to him after his arrest. Not one.

He’d sat there in court and listened to her testimony, watched her be so careful, watched her watching him, and he’d felt like he was seeing the whole thing from under a hundred feet of water, with no air and no light. The weight of what had been happening to him had been crushing.

And her mother. He’d felt the heat of that woman’s hatred searing the skin off his bones and then charring what was left. Her fury had been a palpable presence in the courtroom, another entity he’d had to fight against to try and stay alive—and then he’d died anyway. That first night in Canon City, when the doors on his cell clanged shut and the catcalls started, he knew he’d gone straight to hell.

All because he’d made love to the prom queen.

She was pulling the rest of his T-shirt out of his pants and unbuttoning his cuffs, pushing his dress shirt off his shoulders. She was gone, over the edge, and a part of him wanted to just go over the edge with her. If he hadn’t gotten busted, maybe they’d still be together. Maybe she would have still been his, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she was drunk. He could have made love to her just because she was sweet and hungry and needed him.

Needed him inside her.

Needed him to anchor her world.

She still looked like the Katya he’d known. She still smelled like her, and felt like her, and tasted like her, and God knew she still had the same mind-blowing effect on him.

But she wasn’t the same, and neither was he, and he’d learned his lesson the hard way, the hardest way, and he knew better than to kiss her.

He moved his hand up to cup her cheek and smooth his fingers over her skin.

Hell, they wouldn’t have still been together. They wouldn’t have survived her mother, not this long. They probably wouldn’t have lasted until Labor Day.

Yeah, he knew better than to kiss her, but he did it anyway—just let go of every freaking thing he’d believed in for thirteen years, tilted her face toward his, and brought his mouth down to hers.

Heat, as pure and simple as anything he’d planned, washed through him. He groaned with the pleasure of it, gave himself over to it. Her skin was damp, and he was breaking out in a sweat, and he suddenly knew it didn’t matter that she was drunk and he was crazy.
In vino veritas
—in wine is truth. She wanted him, and deep, deep down inside, in a dark place where he’d locked, bolted, and chained the door and thrown away the key, he’d never stopped wanting her.

One of her hands slid through his hair, across the nape of his neck and up toward the top of his skull, holding him for her kiss. His brain was fogging. Her mouth was wet. He reached for her leg and drew it up around his waist, pushing up her dress, getting her closer, reveling in the silken softness of her thigh beneath his fingers. Her other hand was sliding under his waistband, heading south, driving him wild, and he knew—he knew she was going to take him in her hand, stroke him, get him even harder than he already was, and he was going to let her. Oh, man, was he going to let her.

At least that was his plan, until the elevator rattled to a bone-jarring halt and light flooded into the cage.

He froze, the hair on the back of his neck rising. There hadn’t been any lights on anywhere in the building when they’d entered.

Well, he
did
have a gun in his pocket—along with everything else. The trick would be using it, if he needed it, because Katya hadn’t noticed that their situation had changed.

“Christian,”
she moaned, her hand sliding the last few inches home.

He grabbed for her—too late.
Geezus
. Her palm was so soft, her fingers so delicate, her leg wrapping around his waist, her hand doing the same to his cock—and he was dying . . .
dying
. . . but he still slid the hand that wasn’t holding her into his pocket for the Glock 9mm.

“If you like,” a man drawled, “I can just shoot you now and put you out of your misery.” The voice was unmistakable: Dylan.

Hell, he wanted to thrust into her hand so badly he couldn’t breathe, but he’d be damned if he would do it in front of an audience.

“K-Katya?” Another man’s voice entered the fray, sounding breathlessly shocked—and that would be Alex Zheng, the secretary. He didn’t even have to turn around and look.

“Kat,” he whispered against her lips, trying not to move too much for fear of what he might do, trying to extricate himself from her sweet grip, trying to find his brains, which he’d probably left in Roxanne, or maybe back at the Botanic Gardens. “Katya, honey. We have to stop.”

Hell, they should never have started. Not this, with the two of them backed up against the elevator wall, with her clothes going up and his coming off. It was crazy. His shirt was only half on, his pants unzipped, and he didn’t have a clue how she’d worked so fast.

“No,” she moaned. “It’s been so long, and no one has ever . . .” Her mouth slid over his, her tongue getting him wet, her teeth taking a gentle nip. “No one like you.”

He didn’t need to know that—honestly.

“You look like hell, and I’ve got a plane to catch. The—uh—elevator looks a little full. We’ll take the stairs and meet you on the fifth floor,” Dylan spoke up again.

Hawkins leaned on the fifth-floor button and felt the old elevator restart its ascent. When it had changed direction and gone back down to the gallery, he didn’t have a clue. Probably somewhere between when she’d unbuttoned his last button and he’d completely lost his mind.

C
HAPTER

9

T
HINGS COULD HAVE
been worse. Hawkins knew it. He just didn’t feel it. No, he felt like things were as bad as they could get. Not only had he completely lost his mind, there had been witnesses.

Fuck. He’d given up disintegrating in public after his first three months in prison, and if he sometimes had a hard night to get through, he got through it alone and in private.

Then along comes Katya Dekker, and inside of two hours, he’s practically banging her in an elevator in front of her roommate—and Dylan, who had warned him.

He never ignored Dylan’s warnings. Never. They’d saved his life too many times, but he’d thought he’d had this situation covered. At the gardens, he would have bet Roxanne’s pink slip against him getting within twenty feet of Bad Luck, let alone getting between her legs.

He straightened her dress one more time, trying to cover her up. It was hopeless. The damn thing was hanging by a thread, and two safety pins were not enough to remedy the problem. He’d taken his damp, wadded-up shirt completely off as the elevator had slowly ground its way up to the fifth floor; out of necessity, he’d let her keep his coat, which left him in a T-shirt and left her way too busy running her fingers up and down his arms.

“The first boy I ever made love with was arrested,” she said, her index finger following a path of ink from just below his wrist to his elbow.

“Yeah, I heard.” He finished buckling his belt. Damn, she really had moved fast.

“He looked a lot like you.”

No kidding, he thought.

He dragged his hands back through his hair, trying to smooth it all into place. The way she’d been working him over, he probably looked like he was the one who’d been rolled across a mattress.

He looked at the top of the elevator door. The thing was slower than molasses in winter. The number three had been lit up forever, making him wonder if the damn thing even went to the fifth floor, or if it just spent a few minutes shaking and shimmying at three before dropping back down.

Finally the four lit up, then the five, and her apartment started coming into view, starting as a band of light at the top of the cage that slowly got broader and broader.

Color was his first impression. Neither she nor Alex Zheng was afraid of color, and possibly, in this instance, a little fear might not have been a bad thing.

The first wall he saw was brick, painted yellow with red and orange flames tinged with white, blue, and green roiling across it. The back wall was graffiti heaven, its big, fat, blue letters proclaiming
JULIO RULES
against a purple background.
KING JULIO
was written in huge white letters rimmed in gold across the loft’s twelve-foot-high ceiling, the letters looking like clouds in a pale blue sky.

“Who’s Julio?” he asked.

She fell against him, her mouth curving into a grin. “Suzi Toussi’s latest boyfriend. He’s very-very-very, but not so cute as you.” He was glad to hear Julio was Suzi’s idea of a good time and not Bad Luck’s.

He held on to Kat, keeping her from sliding down his body, the direction she seemed inclined to want to go. He didn’t know what to make of her comment. “Cute” was not a word people used to describe him.

“Son of a bitch,” now, he heard that pretty often. “Mean motherfucker” tended to come to people’s minds in certain parts of town and in certain parts of the world, especially if the people concerned happened to be on his shit list. It was usually a pretty long list, full of bad guys the Department of Defense wanted taken down.

Taking down bad guys, that’s what he did. He did not get taken down himself—at least not until about three minutes ago. If it hadn’t been for Dylan and Alex Zheng showing up . . .

God, if she were drunk, he might have actually started pouring his heart out to her, and wouldn’t that have been awful?

French-girl voodoo, that had to be it.

Now all he needed was the antidote.

The elevator lurched to a stop, and when he glanced through the cage, he got exactly what he needed: the look on Dylan’s face.

His boss was holding a manila envelope in one hand and a tiara in a plastic bag in the other, looking at a photograph he’d obviously pulled out of the envelope. The expression on his face was one of pure, cold fury.

Standing next to Dylan, also looking at the photo, Alex Zheng had gone white, no mean feat for a half-Asian guy. His hand was up near his throat in a purely feminine gesture of distress—which pretty much clinched Hawkins’s gay theory for him.

Both men looked up as he slid open the elevator door. Alex Zheng’s gaze went quickly over him and Katya, then came back to the tattoos on his arms. If possible, he turned even paler.

“Alex. Oh, Alex,” Katya crooned, holding on to Hawkins as she stumbled off the elevator and into the apartment. “Did you see the fireworks? Are you okay? I’ve been so . . . so
worried
about you.”

She reached for him, and he stepped forward to take her hand, which made a very cozy threesome, because she didn’t let go of Hawkins.

“I’m fine, luv. I—”

“You won’t
believe
who I ran into,” she said, cutting him off with a breathless exclamation.

“Christian Hawkins,” he said. His voice sounded a little strangled, as if he’d said “an ax murderer from Hoboken.”

“Christian Hawkins! Can you believe it?”

Alex Zheng looked like he believed it all too well, as if it were his worst nightmare coming to life.

Hawkins knew exactly how he felt.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“More bad news,” Dylan said grimly, walking toward the elevator and extending both the photograph and the envelope. “This and the tiara were waiting for us when we opened the apartment door. There’s a piece of material in the bottom of the envelope. It looks like another part of her prom dress.”

Hawkins took the photograph and the envelope, while still holding Kat up—or holding her at bay. It was hard to tell the difference. She was plastered against him, her hand running over the small of his back and occasionally dipping toward his waistband—which he kept putting a halt to as best he could—and she was still talking to Alex Zheng and holding on to his hand, and Hawkins wished they could all just spread out a little, let everybody get a little air.

“My
tiara
?” Kat gasped, letting go of Alex’s hand to reach for the bag Dylan was holding. “Ohmygosh.”

Dylan carefully held it out of the way, not letting her touch it. “I’m sorry, Ms. Dekker, but this is official evidence right now. I’m sure it will be returned to you later.”

“Official evidence for—for what?” she asked.

“For Ted Garraty’s m—” Alex started, then saw the look Hawkins was giving him and shut up.

At least the guy had
some
brains. Katya did not need to know Garraty had been murdered—not while she was too drunk to handle the information.

And she shouldn’t have been in the same building with that damn tiara, let alone the same room. According to the testimony given at Hawkins’s trial, it had gotten lost in the alley when the boys were chasing her, and it hadn’t been seen since. He knew for a fact that she hadn’t been wearing it when she’d gotten into his car.

He’d known they’d all been lying, the bastards, and as far as he was concerned, the tiara narrowed down his list of suspects pretty damn succinctly.

Hawkins glanced down at the picture, an eight-by-ten full-color glossy—and turned to stone.

“Where did this come from?”

“It was inside the apartment door when we came in,” Dylan said. “And to answer your next question, I have no idea when it was delivered, except sometime after four o’clock, when Ms. Dekker and Mr. Zheng left the apartment to go to the Botanic Gardens.”

Hawkins stared down at the photograph, not believing what he was seeing, even though it was right there in his hand. The photo was thirteen years old, yet the rage he felt looking at it was as immediate as if the violation had occurred only moments ago.

He looked at the tiara in Dylan’s hand. “Are you sure that’s hers?” His throat was so fucking tight, he could hardly breathe, hardly speak.

“Y-yes,” Alex answered, a blush creeping into his cheeks. “Triple fleur-de-lis with pink rhinestones, except for the one clear stone on the middle fleur-de-lis, which is obviously a mistake.” At Hawkins’s questioning look, he added, “I’ve been over the facts of the Traynor case many times.”

Obviously, though how anyone besides an eighteen-year-old prom queen and her mother could see the one clear stone among all the pink sparkle and shine was beyond Hawkins.

“Can I see?” Katya asked, clinging to him with one arm while raising herself on tiptoe to look at the photograph.

“No,” he said, holding the picture out of the way. She didn’t need to know about this, either, not while she was drunk.

“I’d say we’ve narrowed down our list of suspects for tonight’s party at the Gardens,” Dylan said with typical understatement.

One of the Prom King Murder boys,
Hawkins silently agreed.
One of those lying bastards
. The pieces of her dress and the tiara all pointed that way. He forced his gaze back to the photograph and knew why Alex Zheng was blushing. If he hadn’t been so furious, he might have blushed, too.

Geezus.
There it all was in full color, him under her dress, a cotton summer thing with little straps, little buttons, little flowers, and a few rows of dainty white lace. He was doing God knew exactly what under that dress, and if there was any doubt, all a person had to do was look at her face.

She was in rapture, her mouth open, her neck arched, her fists clenched into the rows of lace—with her legs over his shoulders. Eighteen years old and getting ready to give it all up for him. He remembered. He remembered everything.

As for him, well, you couldn’t see that much of him, except for his bare ass, one of his arms, and his back, and that’s about all it took to make a positive identification. No wonder Alex had known who he was the instant he’d stepped off the elevator. Without his dress shirt covering his tattoos, there was no mistaking him.

Hawkins opened the envelope up wider. “You look in here?” he asked Dylan. Katya was chattering away to her secretary again.

“No. I pretty much got the general idea from just the one photo. Figured you could take it from there.”

Dylan was nothing if not discreet, which had saved both their lives more times than Hawkins could count. He pulled the stack of pictures partway out of the envelope and quickly went through them.

It only got worse. One of those friggin’ prom boys had been pretty busy with a camera. All he had to do was find out which one and do what he did best—take the son of a bitch down.

“What’s wrong with her?” Alex interjected during a lull in Katya’s breathless monologue about the tiara and the fireworks, and the fireworks and the tiara.

“She had one too many margaritas.” Hawkins shoved all the photographs back into the envelope, not bothering to elaborate that just one margarita had been too much.

“No, I’ve—I’ve seen her drunk,” the secretary begged to differ, “I’ve just never seen her like . . . like this.” He made a small, helpless gesture.

“Why don’t you take her into her bedroom,” Hawkins suggested, peeling her off his body and handing her over to Alex. “Get her something to wear.”

He wasn’t going to leave her in the apartment, especially now, with some wacko breaking in and leaving his sordid calling card, but he could use a breather, a chance to clear the air and get his head screwed back on straight.

His coat fell open during the transfer, and there she was for all the world to see, practically half naked with her clothes falling off.

Alex quickly wrapped his arm around her waist, holding her up. “What happened to her dress?” he asked, a definite edge coming into his voice.

“It tore, Alex, the new one I bought in L.A., but I was able to pin it together,” Katya answered, twisting to one side. “See? Two pins.”

“It tore during the explosion at the Gardens, when she fell,” Hawkins added some explanation. “All I’ve been trying to do is keep her in one piece. It’s all I’m going to do.”

From the look Alex gave him, his line was obviously a little hard to swallow after the way she’d been all over him, and honestly, he’d be the first to admit that if she came on to him sober the way she was coming on to him drunk, he was going to take her up on her offer. He was no saint, and kissing her had done nothing but whet his appetite for more. As a matter of fact, kissing her had put a real edge on his appetite. They were both adults now. He could handle it, handle her—and she could handle him any way she wanted.

But Alex Zheng didn’t need to know any more than what he’d already seen in the elevator.

As for himself, he’d seen plenty, too. Enough to change his plans for the night.

“I think we can all agree that it isn’t safe for Ms. Dekker to stay here. If you could put a few things together for her, I’m sure she would appreciate it,” Hawkins said, keeping his voice cool, calm, and professional.