Crazy Love (16 page)

This was one of those times.

Red Dog was damn cute in a tousled, repressed, coming undone sort of way, and up close, in the shadows and the half-light of the parking garage, with the little piece of tape on her glasses barely discernible, she looked damned cute in a very exotic way. She had an elegant nose, and one of those mouths where the upper lip was only slightly less full than the lower, a sensual mouth—and her shirt was gaping open where she’d buttoned it wrong, and she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from his naked chest.

Still, he knew better than to kiss her. So he took the first-aid kit out of her hands, and that broke the moment, and between the two of them they decided to just go ahead and change the whole bandage, and put on another layer of antibiotic, and put on a double layer of gauze, and extra tape, and why they hadn’t just gone up to the hotel room to do it all, he didn’t know, except it was very quiet and very private in the garage, inside her Honda, where they had to work in very close quarters.

Very close.

She was practically on top of him the whole time, and he was loving it just a little too much—the whole thing, with her hands on him, and her voice close, and her fingers smoothing down the edges of the tape and sliding over his skin. Her elbow would brush against his forearm. Her knee touched his. Every now and then, he would feel her breath on his shoulder. With every moment of contact, the heat in the front seat rose another degree.

It was wonderful, and fascinating, and absolutely riveted his attention.

“So how does a woman named Gillian Pentycote end up with a handle like Red Dog?”

A brief smile curved that sensuous mouth. “You’ll have to ask Skeeter. She’s the one who started calling me Red Dog, and my name is going to be Gillian Shore as soon as I get it changed back.”

“Pentycote was your married name?”

“Was,” she confirmed, tucking her hair behind her ear before she tore off a new piece of tape. Her smile had disappeared.

Interesting, and very self-explanatory, but he went ahead and did the dance, mostly out of true curiosity, but also out of habit. People liked to talk about their problems, and he liked listening.

“How long have you been divorced?” It was an easy question to ask, the obvious question, but he’d never had anybody give him anything but a hard answer.

“The final papers were signed four months ago.” She laid the last piece of tape across his bandage and very gently pressed it to his skin. “And Ken, my ex, is…uh, having his first child with his new wife any minute now.”

Another hard answer to the question—one of the hardest.

“I’m hoping I can sleep better once the baby comes,” she continued, running her fingers over the tape again. “That must sound pretty odd.”

“Actually, it makes perfect sense.” And it did. “Considering the timing, and the infidelity, and the pregnancy making the whole thing incredibly public, it will probably be a huge relief when that part of it is finally over.”

Her smile returned in a fleeting curve, and she gave a slight shrug of her shoulders.

“Do you have any children of your own?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “Ken always said the timing wasn’t right, and for the most part, I agreed. We were busy doing research and trying to get our first book published.”

And then old Ken had gone and gotten some other woman pregnant. No wonder she couldn’t sleep and could hardly say the word “sex.”

“Not much of a deal. She gets the baby, and you get a book.”

A short laugh escaped her. “You’re the only guy who’s ever said that to me.” She glanced up and met his gaze. “My women friends say it, especially my sisters-in-law, but a lot of my colleagues at the university seemed to think I did get the better part of the deal, getting published instead of getting pregnant.”

Then a lot of her colleagues at the university didn’t understand women.

“What university?”

“Arizona.”

Bingo. The map in the visor was marked with her escape route.

“So you drove all the way out here from Arizona a month ago, but never quite finished unpacking the car?”

Her smile came back, and he realized it was something he was really starting to enjoy—making her smile.

“I guess I’m waiting to see if it’s going to work out.”

He reached down and lifted an item out of the box at his feet. “And until you commit, the egg beater stays in the Civic?”

That got him another laugh, a better laugh, and if he wasn’t mistaken, a slight blush.

“You know a lot for someone who’s so young.”

Yes, he did. He knew she hadn’t moved back to her seat, even though they’d finished playing doctor, and he knew her blush was deepening, and that she was having a hard time holding his gaze. He knew that despite her best attempts, her attention kept straying to his chest and his abs, and down the length of his arms.

He knew she looked like a woman who had not been held in a long time.

“I’m not that young.” Not when it came to soft blushes, soft mouths, and sweet women who were coming undone—but not quite undone enough.

Not when it came to what he had in mind.

“You missed a button on your shirt.”

“Oh.” She reached for it, paused with her fingers almost doing the deed—unbuttoning and rebuttoning her shirt in front of him—then reconsidered.

He should have reconsidered, too, but he didn’t. He reached for her instead.

It was crazy.

He was crazy, but there she was, with her glasses resting a little crookedly on her nose, with her cloud of tangled hair and her pockets spilling over with notes and pencils, and he was going to kiss her. One kiss, that was all.

He slid his hand around the back of her neck and gently pulled her closer—and she let him.

CHAPTER

18

T
HE FIRST
seven floors of 738 Steele Street were garages, and every garage was filled to capacity with cars—cars to drive, cars to race, cars to sell, cars to hide behind. Not that anybody was hiding behind any of the cars on the fourth floor.

Hawkins had flushed three men out of the bays and was systematically herding them to their doom down on three. Creed was waiting for them there.

They’d cleared the building from the top down and left one asshole dead up on five, under a COPO Camaro Skeeter was rebuilding, a dead Indonesian pirate with a Jai Traon tattoo on the back of his hand.

Hawkins had rolled him over, rifled everything out of his pockets, and wondered, really, what the guy had thought he was going to get away with, being in the wrong country, at the wrong time, in the wrong building, and going up against the wrong fucking guys.

There was never anything easy about hunting down men and killing them. Too many variables came into the mix. But doing it on home ground was as easy as it got. He and the other operators war-gamed Steele Street every week, in the dark, with and without night vision devices. Travis still stumbled over things sometimes, but he was the FNG, and he didn’t live in the building. For the chop-shop boys like him and Creed and Quinn and Dylan—hell, they could do it blindfolded.

Skeeter had done it blindfolded.

Kid did it like a Marine.

And J.T. had done it like a coyote, the trickster, “mining” the trail behind him, setting traps, making them think, forcing them to get ahead of the game, to try and get ahead of him.

Hawkins took a breath and let it out, not letting his concentration waver—but it still hurt.

None of them had ever gotten ahead of J.T. It was the one thing they all knew, that the best of them had died. Tonight, though, only the bad guys were buying their last ticket home. They were good, but not good enough, not even close.

Hawkins saw a flash of movement at the stairwell and knew one of the Jai Traon bastards thought he’d just made his getaway.

Fat chance.

He let the next one go, too, then adjusted his position to get a clearer shot. When the last pirate made his move, Hawkins pulled the trigger on his suppressed MP5 twice, and once more for good measure. Two to the heart, one to the head.

“Four clear,” he said into his comm unit. “Two to you.”

“Roger” came the whispered reply, and Hawkins moved out.

TRAVIS
wasn’t going to kiss Gillian Red Dog Pentycote/Shore all night long, hell no, and he wasn’t going to ravish her on the spot, not because by some fluke of an accident the two of them had ended up scrambled together in the front seat of a Honda Civic.

But neither could he quite convince himself to let go of her, not when kissing her lit up every cell in his body like the Fourth of July.

“I—you…we really shouldn’t be, umm…” she said breathlessly, her voice sighing in his ear, her heart pounding next to his as he ran his teeth over her neck, gently grazing her skin.

He understood. He shouldn’t have his hand under her shirt, and she really shouldn’t be kissing some guy she’d just met like her life depended on it, but she was trembling, just a little, and clinging to him, a lot, like she needed something solid to hold on to tonight.

And he was solid, all right, like a rock. It had happened so damn fast, and she was bound to notice any minute.

“Oh,”
she said, even more breathlessly, if that was possible, and he figured that was it. She’d noticed.

“Everything is okay. Honest. We’ll be all right.” Whatever the hell that meant. He didn’t have a clue. “You’re in charge here, whatever you want.” Yeah, that sounded better, more of what he’d meant to say, and he meant
whatever
. He just didn’t want to stop what he was doing. He knew that for sure, and he sure as hell didn’t want her to stop what she was doing, so he slid his mouth over her cheek, heading back to her soft, soft lips.

This was all so very, very good, especially when she melted on top of him, letting go, making supergood body contact—and yes, it was that sort of response that had him thinking his dreams might come true.

He knew what he was supposed to be doing—and it wasn’t this—but he could really use five minutes of R&R to get his head together. Ten minutes, really, if he could get it.

And maybe to get laid, if that was at all possible.

Under any other circumstances, he would have said no way in hell, but geezus, she was sweet, and so unbelievably responsive that honestly, he figured anything could happen—and he really should try and find out if it could.

Five minutes. He swore that was all.

Or maybe ten.

Because she was way more than cute. Every place he kissed her, she was beautiful, her face heart-shaped, her nose delicately sculpted and turned up ever so slightly on the end. She had a small scar on the bridge, and another across her left cheekbone, little nicks she could have gotten a thousand different ways, but which gave her sweet face a bit of an edge.

He liked it, the way he liked her soft curves, loose papers, and half-buttoned, half-zipped clothes. He loved being this close to her, wanted to get even closer, wanted to be on her, over her, in her.

Inside her.

Definitely ten minutes.

Oh, yeah
. Ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty—if he could get even a little bit closer, he had a feeling his “God it would be great to take the edge off” sex was going to happen.

GILLIAN
moved her head sideways to close the last scant inch of space separating her mouth from Travis James’s. His arms tightened around her. Her lips parted, his tongue slipped inside, and she fell straight into heaven—again.

Oh…my…God
—she couldn’t believe this was happening, heat washing through her, a sweet ache coming to life between her legs. She hadn’t felt anything like it in so long, she’d thought that part of her had died with her marriage. But even during the best days of her marriage, she didn’t remember anything ever feeling like this.

She opened her mouth wider, wanting more. No man could possibly taste this good, feel this good. She was ready to make a religion out of it—because this…this made up for everything, for months of being alone, for all the humiliation and hurt, for all those averted gazes and half-heard whispers, for the rumors and the even worse truth. For the smug look of satisfaction on Kimberly’s face and the irritated indifference on Ken’s—kissing Travis James made up for all of it. He was so strong and sure, molding her to him like he wanted her, only her, Gillian Pentycote soon-to-be Shore.

Ken would never believe it. She hardly believed what she was feeling, that anyone this amazing would want her so
physically
. She was the smart one, the brainy one, not the girl the guys wanted, but he was responding to her with every breath, with every touch, opening himself to her, practically begging her to explore, and there was nothing she wanted to do more than to feel the hard warmth of him, the lean toughness, to sink herself into the exquisite reality of his body.

Coming back to Washington, D.C., had been the right decision. She was so sure of it now. Giving up her academic position, starting fresh, setting herself on the track of a new and exciting career, practically becoming a secret agent of the government.

This was the life for her, necking in cars with exciting men—very exciting, almost too exciting. The way he made her melt was skirting toward the edge of something she wasn’t sure she could handle.

But she could kiss him. There was no danger in kissing. And she could touch him, just a little, just enough to see her through.

A sigh left her mouth, so sweet. She pulled the band off his ponytail and slid her fingers up through the long, silky strands of his hair, pleasing herself and him. She could tell by his soft groan and the way his hand moved up again to cover her breast.

Dangerous ground, but so incredibly delicious, and it had been so long since anyone had touched her, and no one had ever touched her like this. The beautiful, beautiful angel boy was consuming her.

Groaning softly, she turned him deeper into her kiss, and he slid his other hand down around the curve of her waist, pressing her into his hips.

Oh, yes,
she thought, feeling a new and deeper thrill shoot through her.
A thousand times yes
.