Crazy Kisses (27 page)

A piece of work with a button nose and the softest, most perfect skin he’d ever seen on a woman. She was built like a centerfold, dressed like a goth princess, and had the face of a cherub. Every time he looked at her, he felt like the world’s biggest fool.

So he tried not to look, tried not to come home very often. Hell, he hadn’t been to Denver five times in the last seven months, but he’d already overstayed his welcome tonight. He could tell by the pain running down the middle of his chest. She gave him heartburn.

At least that’s what he called it.

“No,” he said. Hawkins was crazy if he thought she was invisible. Dylan saw her everywhere he went, from Bangkok to Paris, from L.A. to the Beltway. He saw her in his sleep. He’d spent one night in her company last January, chasing Creed Rivera across the city through the blizzard of the century, and he honest to God hadn’t been the same since. Hour after hour of talking with her, being with her, and damn near dying of fear for her life had only exacerbated his incredibly inconvenient obsession. He was so out of line to want her the way he did.

“She can shoot and loot,” Hawkins said.

The hell she could.

“Who has she ever shot?” he asked, then didn’t wait for Hawkins to tell him, because he already knew. “No one, that’s who.”

It was impossible. Office managers and computer techs did not go out on missions, not even with an outlaw outfit like SDF. Sure, he’d taken her with him to find Creed that night, but only as a computer tech, not as an operator. And yes, things had gotten out of hand, and yes, she’d gotten into trouble up to her neck and gotten back out all on her own, but none of it had been planned.

Again, Hawkins didn’t blink, just held his gaze, steady and sure, until Dylan finally got the message. Another shiver of alarm raced down his spine and damn near stopped his heart cold.

“What’s been going on around here?” he asked, very quietly, very calmly, very certain he wasn’t going to like the answer.

“It’s a natural progression,” Hawkins said, unperturbed. “She’s been training for almost three years, and she’s good, really good.”

“Where was she good?” He couldn’t believe this.

“Colombia. Kid and I took her with us as backup on the personal security detail we did for Occidental Petroleum in Bogotá.”

“The one where two members of the National Revolutionary Forces were killed during a kidnap attempt?” He’d read the report, which hadn’t had Skeeter’s name on it anywhere. The FNG’s, Fucking New Guy’s, name had been on the report, Travis James, but not Skeeter.

Hawkins nodded, then hit a couple of keys on his computer when it beeped.

“She got the first kill,” he said, looking back to Dylan.

Dylan, who couldn’t breathe.

“They were waiting for us in the lobby of the hotel we were using as a safe house,” Hawkins continued. “It was close quarters combat, textbook CQC. She beat Kid on the draw, which neither you nor I could do on our best day.”

She’d beaten Kid Chaos on the draw—and Dylan still couldn’t breathe. She’d been in battle, with people shooting at her, trying to kill her.

“Has she been anyplace else?” he asked, his voice still so very calm.

To his credit, Hawkins finally looked uncomfortable. “Kabul.”

“Afghanistan?” he asked, just in case, unbeknownst to him, there was a Kabul, Kansas, or a Kabul, Kentucky, like there was a Paris in Texas.

“Mostly just in Kabul, but a little bit up the Gayan Valley toward the Pakistani border.”

Dylan’s gaze went back to Hawkins’s cast. “Where you almost got blown to smithereens?”

Hawkins shook his head. “We’d sent her back to the capital before we went up into the mountains.”

“But she saw action.”

It wasn’t a question. He could see the truth on Hawkins’s face.

“An ambush. The Special Forces soldiers we were with weren’t too happy to have her along, and the Afghan Militia guys were downright horrified, but when the Taliban hit, she didn’t hesitate. The girl kicks ass, Dylan. She can hold her own, and she can certainly keep your back in Washington, where she’s a damn sight more likely to get hit on than hit.”

Unlike Skeeter, Dylan made no claims to clairvoyance, but he’d just gotten a very bad vibe.

“Hit?” he asked, working hard not to choke on the word.

“Skinned,” she broke into the conversation, turning around and giving him the full benefit of her mirrored gaze.

Skinned
. His heart lurched to a stop, then started back up on a ragged beat.

“It burned my pants, grazed my leg, and was gone. I didn’t even feel it,” she finished.

Bullshit.

He shifted his attention back to Hawkins. He’d trusted Christian Hawkins with his life more times than he could count, real “end of the line, so help me, God” times—but he no longer trusted the man with hers.

It was a wrenching realization.

For seventeen years, trusting Christian Hawkins had been the bedrock of his life. They’d been to hell and back, firefight hell where the odds had been against their chances of survival, the hell of losing two of their SDF brothers, and the black hell where a man was more dangerous to himself than anybody else on the planet. They’d pulled each other back from the razor’s edge more than once, and once was all it took to cement a bond that went deeper than blood. If asked, Dylan would have said nothing would ever come between them, nothing could shake their friendship. They were solid.

But Skeeter had gotten “skinned” on a black-ops mission in Afghanistan, of all the goddamn places for her to be, and Dylan’s trust in Hawkins’s judgment was shaken to the core. He’d known Christian was training her, and he’d known that what had started as a course in self-defense had turned into something far more demanding, far more serious. The girl had proven adept, skilled, and too uniquely suited to the clandestine world in which they worked not to be brought deeper into the fold.

But not as an operator in the line of fire. Never as an operator. Hawkins should have known that.

Keeping himself carefully under control, Dylan slowly rose from his chair. He was going into his office, his private office, where he could close the door and drink himself under his desk.

He didn’t have a choice.

He couldn’t afford to say something he was bound to regret, not where Hawkins was concerned, and his nerves were just a bit on edge. He needed a break, a vacation, something, before he snapped, and if he was still alive after he took care of General Grant’s Godwin File disaster, he was going to disappear for a while, go someplace and see if he could get this head back on straight. Skeeter Bang was not for him, and he needed to convince himself of the fact before he did something irredeemably stupid. He had enough sins on his head without adding her to the list.

At the door to his office, he stopped and turned, his gaze meeting her damned mirrored sunglasses. It was probably a bad idea, but he had to say something—just a little something straight from the heart.

“I think it might be best if . . .” He stopped, recognizing a weak start when he got off to one. What he needed was to be honest, forceful but kind. He needed to use the authority of his position, and yet be reasonable.

And so he began again, his voice carefully modulated with all the kind and reasonable honesty he could muster.

“If I ever . . .
ever
. . . hear of you going out on another mission, so help me God, Skeeter Jeanne Bang, I’ll bust you back down to grease monkey so fast, it’ll make your head spin, and then I’ll ship you up to Commerce City to work in the garage, sweeping floors for Johnny Ramos.”

His words fell into an abyss of silence.

Okay, so it had been a carefully modulated threat, but it felt good, and he would deliver on it in a heartbeat. Guaranteed. And if he did say so himself, he was pretty damned impressed with how calm and steady he’d kept his voice. Listening to him, no one would ever guess how badly his heartburn was suddenly acting up. The pain was like a knife in his chest, and the nausea was about ready to double him over.

He turned to go. She’d killed a man and been hit by a bullet, and he needed a drink.

“Screw you.”

He froze where he stood, his hand on the doorknob.

Screw you?

He wanted to paddle her himself, then shake her, then sit her down in a chair and explain to her why she must never, ever get herself in a situation where she could be shot at again—and then throw himself at her feet. It was all so tragically stupid he couldn’t bear it. He’d never been a sap over a woman, and she barely qualified for the designation. He knew exactly how much older than her he was, to the day, and he couldn’t quite fathom his fascination. He’d never been attracted to younger women. So what was different about her . . . except everything.

Screw you?

He wasn’t going to dignify the remark with a reply. He didn’t dare, not when he’d fantasized about it more ways than she could possibly imagine. Scotch on the rocks was what he needed, something cold and serious. He did not need an argument with a tattooed, clairvoyant street rat who just happened to be the woman of his dreams.

CRAZY KISSES

A Dell Book / March 2006

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2006 by Tara Janzen

Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Published simultaneously in Canada

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33584-9

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