Crazy Hot (12 page)

C
HAPTER

12

W
E CAN'T STAY
here all night,” Regan said, sounding incredibly put out by the whole situation and still furiously angry with him.

Quinn didn't blame her, and, no, they couldn't stay parked on this nowhere dirt road under the pine trees all night. He had to stop at Steele Street and then take her to Boulder, where Kid would take over keeping her safe. If everything went according to plan, Roper would have his dinosaur bones back by midnight, and the heat would be off the McKinneys. She could go back to her nice, quiet life, and he could go back to looking for the Pentagon's guns, feeling like he'd just been hit by a cyclone.

Regan McKinney, good God. How in the world had his day come down to arguing in a car with Regan McKinney? And really being hot under the collar about it?

He let out his own to-hell-and-back sigh and cut his gaze across the Camaro.

“You're wrong,” he said, because he believed it. He'd been sitting there thinking it all through, and she was wrong. “I do know you.”

He might have been pissed off about the wedding, and freaked out by whom she'd married, but he hadn't risked ending up in the state pen for someone he didn't know.

He might not know the circumstances of her life, or whether or not she liked a
venti
soy chai latte or a fucking double-shot cappuccino.

But he knew her.

“No, you don't,” she said in her high-handed tone.

“An eye for an eye,” he said.

“What?” She turned and stared at him.

“An eye for an eye,” he repeated, reaching for the ignition. “He stole something from me, so I stole something from him.”

With a twist of the key, Jeanette roared back to life, the growl starting deep in the engine block and rumbling through the headers.

She instinctively clutched the door handle even though her gaze stayed riveted on him. He was pretty sure Scott Hanson had never stolen so much as a penny piece of bubble gum in his whole life, which left only one thing for her to think he was talking about: her.

“That's . . . that's crazy.”

He couldn't argue the point. Stealing the car had been crazy as hell, almost as crazy as giving it back, almost as crazy as caring enough to take the risk in the first place.

“The Mustang was never the same, after it was returned. Wh-what did you do to it?”

“I fixed it up for him.”

“Fixed it up?” Her voice rose on a doubtful note. “It wasn't even drivable after it showed back up in our driveway.”

“I drove it,” he contradicted her. “I drove it a lot. Made about twelve grand racing it around and up at Bandimere that year.” Which had covered his costs and then some. Then he'd given it back. Taken the Mustang up to Boulder one morning about two
A
.
M
. and parked it in Dr. and Mrs. Hanson's driveway.

She was right. The whole thing had been crazy. Going to so much trouble, all over a girl he hadn't seen since she'd been fifteen.

He hadn't seen her that night either, though there had been lights coming on in their house and every other house on the street as he and Rivera had roared off in Rivera's supercharged Chevy. There was nothing like 375 horses and a set of tuned headers to wake up a neighborhood at two o'clock in the morning.

“Scott's mechanic said it was dangerous to drive the way it had been altered.”

“And I bet he offered to buy it and take it off your hands,” Quinn said matter-of-factly. He knew mechanics, and there wasn't a gearhead in the world who wouldn't have salivated over the 466-cubic-inch 385-series block he'd dropped into the Mustang along with a Holley Dominator carb and a Hurst shifter.
Altered
didn't begin to cover what he'd done to that car. He'd out-and-out fucked with it, turned a classic pony into a street monster.

Yeah, it had been a lot of engine to handle, but mostly it had been too much engine for old Professor Hanson to handle—and that had been the point, the whole muscle-car metaphor taken to a new low. Not enough balls to drive the car, Prof? Then not enough balls to fuck the girl.

Quinn had wanted to fuck her. He'd wanted to make love to her. He'd wanted to roll over in his bed—just once, please, God—and have her lying next to him, all soft and blond and reaching for him. He'd wanted to take her dirty and take her sweet, take her any way he could get her and every way he could dream up—and in those four years between sixteen and twenty, he'd dreamed up plenty of ways and gotten off on every one.

And now she was here with him, and it was all coming back, how much he'd wanted her.

Hell, he still wanted her, bad, especially since she'd melted all over him back in Jake's parking lot. He wouldn't have given good odds on reality holding up to his fantasies, but the sweetness of her mouth and having her amazing body laminated up against his had definitely blown some of his fuses.

“Well, yes, the mechanic did want to buy the car, but Scott . . . Scott—” She stopped abruptly on an indrawn breath, then turned away, facing the side window.

He eyed her from across the front seat. Scott had what? he wondered. He knew for a fact that the professor hadn't totaled the car and died in a flaming ball of fire. Professor Hanson was still listed as faculty at the university. Maybe he'd only crashed, maybe just broken both his legs and been crippled for life.

“Scott what?” he asked aloud. Hell, he had enough sins and misdemeanors on his conscience without adding getting her husband hurt.

“I can't believe you stole his car,” she said, her voice shaking again. “I really can't believe you stole his car because of me.”

In the next second, she pushed on the handle and swung the door open, scrambling outside before he could grab her.

Shit. He jerked on the parking brake and leaped out his own side, ready to give chase.

But she hadn't gone far enough to need chasing. She was only a few feet away, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other covering her face in what he now recognized as the Regan McKinney classic pose of distress. He figured he ought to be ashamed of himself, and he was. They said no bad deed went unpunished, and eleven years after he'd stolen Scott Hanson's Mustang, the chickens had finally come home to roost. And after what had to be six of the most hellacious hours of her life, he was afraid he might have finally made her cry.

She looked very small, standing in a pool of moonlight and shadows with Douglas firs towering up on both sides. The road he'd followed into the trees had petered out into little more than an overgrown track, and farther up, he could tell even that disappeared beneath a covering of pine needles. They were definitely on a road going nowhere.

“I'm sorry,” he said, approaching her. “I'm sorry about the car. Are you okay?” God, he seemed to be asking her that a lot today.

The night was growing cooler. A mountain wind blew through the trees, soughing through leaves and pine boughs, while Jeanette rumbled softly in the background.

Then he heard her laugh, a short, breathless sound of disbelief, but definitely more of a laugh than a sob.

“You stole Scott's Mustang.” She suddenly turned and looked at him, dropping her hand to her side. “You turned it into one of your muscle cars. Drove it around for the better part of a year. Raced it at Bandimere Speedway, for the love of God. And then just dropped it off in the driveway in the middle of the night?”

Yeah, that pretty much summed up the whole episode.

“Because of me?”

Before he could say anything, she threw her hands up and stalked back to the car. She didn't get inside, though. She sat back against Jeanette's hood, her arms crossed over her chest, and stared at him with an utterly perplexed gaze, her eyebrows furrowed above her dark gray eyes.

“He had everybody looking for that car, every cop on the Front Range, and you drove it around right under his nose without getting caught?” She let out another disbelieving laugh. “What are you, the Shadow or something?”

“No,” he said, walking over to her. She was a little jumpy, and if she got it in her head to dash off again, he wanted to be ready to catch her. “I'm just careful, maybe a little lucky. So what did Scott do with the Mustang?” He really did want to know. After all these years, and despite thinking Scott Hanson had been nothing but a dirty old man for marrying a nineteen-year-old girl, he hated to think the guy had gotten himself hurt driving the car.

She gave her head a short shake. “In the end, he did sell it. He didn't want to, but he couldn't even get the damn thing out of the driveway without killing half the neighbors.” Her hand came back up to cover her face on a soft curse. “He always said I'd ruined his life, and you . . . you just had to go and prove him right.”

Now they were getting somewhere, he thought, though he didn't think much of where they were going.

“Nineteen-year-old girls don't ruin forty-year-old men's lives,” he told her flat out. “Forty-year-old men do that all on their own.”

She shook her head behind her hand. “He was only thirty-eight.”

“Twice your age.”

She looked up. “Which still doesn't explain why you stole his car. Why you really stole his car.”

Why he'd really stolen her husband's car? He wasn't sure he could explain it any more than he had. He'd been twenty years old, with a sappy, romantic dream in his heart and a chip on his shoulder—and she'd been in the middle of all of it.

“Knee-jerk reaction,” he offered. “I've stolen a lot of cars.”

“How many?” The wind picked up, dropping the temperature another few degrees, and he saw her shiver.

“Close to a hundred, I suppose,” he said, shrugging out of his denim shirt and closing the final distance between them.

“And you never got caught?”

“Just the once,” he reminded her with a brief grin, putting his shirt around her shoulders. He straightened the front to cover her better, then didn't let go.

Her gaze slid away from his, her mouth tightening, and she started to push by him, but he still didn't let go of her. He didn't dare.

Damn it.

“Hanson got to sleep with you, and I didn't,” he said, his own jaw a little tight. “So I stole his car.” It was as blunt a confession as he'd ever made to anyone, and there wasn't a damn thing about making it that made him happy.

She went very still between him and the Camaro, her head still down. All he could see was her hair and ponytail and the bright flash of her yellow shirt in the opening of his denim shirt.

“You were jealous?”

To put it mildly. “Yes.”

They were very close, her head barely reaching his shoulders, his shirt falling almost to her knees. He could feel every breath she took, feel the hesitation in her.

“You never even spoke to me that summer.”

“Yeah.” He knew it, and in about thirty more seconds, he was going to start feeling like a real idiot. He'd fallen hopelessly in love with her at sixteen, and for all his cool and street bravado, hadn't had the guts even to say hello. Even in retrospect, it was an unnerving assessment. “Look, I'm sorry if stealing the car made anything hard for you, if it made your life difficult.”

“He was pretty upset,” she admitted.

“The Mustang was the last car I ever stole.” He just wanted her to know. “And it sure as hell was the only one I ever gave back.”

“Guilty conscience?” She looked up, her eyes meeting his. Her expression was unreadable, part wariness, maybe, part curiosity, but her mouth looked soft in the moonlight, and it struck him how very, very easy it would be to kiss her again.

“A little,” he confessed, “and a little bit just growing up.” There was more, but he wasn't about to tell her that making love with the flag girl up at Bandimere in the backseat had sort of cured him of his sexual obsession with the Mustang and her. After he'd smoked the competition in a 10.7-second quarter-mile run, he and the girl had spent half the night in the car, steaming up the windows. By the time they were done, he was done with the car. The girl's name had been Lindsay, and she'd been beautiful, blond, and stacked. In the darkened backseat of the Mustang she'd looked just enough like Regan to suit his needs. And if she hadn't been using him as much as he'd been using her, he might have felt guilty about never calling her.

“Scott would be the first to say you'd gotten the better part of the deal,” she said, her gaze slipping away from his.

“Scott's a fool.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. “Or maybe you should have kept the car.”

No way in hell. The only way he would have kept the car was if it had been her in the backseat. Then he would have enshrined the damn thing.

But it hadn't been her. It hadn't been Regan McKinney with her smart mouth and her lofty opinions, and her oh-so-intellectual discussions with the graduate students. She'd used words he'd never even heard of, and each and every one of those words had come out of the most beautiful, take-me-now mouth he'd ever seen. She'd been so blond—the curves, the hair, the eyes, the cheekbones—everything about her so ditzo gorgeous, and then she'd opened her mouth and out had come words like
Saurischia
and
Ornithischia
,
placental mammal
and
multituberculates
. He'd sat down and listened to her lecture on the cladistic system of biological taxonomy, and he'd fallen in love.