Crazy Love (19 page)

Doing it with Dylan.

A frighteningly delicious shiver went straight down the middle of her and settled between her legs, right where they touched. It stole her breath. It made her consider crazy, crazy things.

No,
she told herself.
Get a grip.

“Dylan,” she whispered against his mouth. “I…I…” She couldn’t take advantage of him this way. He’d never even noticed her until they’d been standing on that street corner in Georgetown, and he wasn’t himself, not with the NG4 and that damned antidote in his body, but she didn’t know what to say, and…

“Shhh,” he murmured, stretching up to bite her lips, so gently, again and again. “You’re thinking too hard. You don’t have to think. I’ve got this covered.”

Oh, right. He had it covered.

He was naked, and she was dying inside.

And neither of those facts were the ones she needed to address. She needed to address the fact that…he was drawing her tongue into his mouth and playing with her, sucking on her again—
oh, yes,
she really needed to talk to him about that, and she would, she swore it, as soon as she stopped melting, as soon he was finished doing it.

Doing it.

With Dylan.

Oh, geez.

And all the while he was slaying her with his kiss, his hands were unzipping her pants, helping her move her leg, sliding the pants down, slipping one leg off over her shoe, and then his hand slid back up her leg and slipped inside her underwear. He moved the tiny scrap of material aside, teased her, and
oh, God,
this is what happened when a girl’s last line of defense was four square inches of black silk—
surrender.

“Dylan,”
she gasped, and tightened her hands on his shoulders, which didn’t slow him down in the least. “I’m not…sure about this.”

“I am,” he said without hesitation, his voice a soft growl.

He moved his hips underneath her, fitted himself to her, and any chance she had of salvaging a thought after that dissolved into a wave of anticipation and pleasure. She knew what was going to happen next. Of course she knew what was going to happen next. She wasn’t an idiot or a virgin, and she knew she needed to get off of him
now,
before anything happened, because…because…

He pushed, and it was all over.

Heat.
A tidal wave of it suffused her.

His head went back on the seat with a soft groan. His hands went to her hips, holding her to him, and he filled her, completely, hotly, sweetly.

“Dylan,” she sighed his name, and a sob broke free from her throat.

“Ah, don’t cry. Don’t cry, sweetheart,” he murmured. “This is good…all good. I swear, just don’t…move. Not yet. Just let me…”

She wasn’t going to cry, not really, and she wasn’t going to move. She could hardly breathe, she was holding on to him so tight.

He shifted beneath her and let out another groan. “
Jesus,
you are so perfect.”

Perfectly undone.

Perfectly insane.

His eyes drifted open, and his gaze met hers in the dim interior of the Impala.

“Skeeter Jeanne,” he said softly, and pushed deeper.

Oh, God.
He was a force of nature, a reckoning she had wildly underestimated in her fantasies. Neither of the boys she’d been with before had felt anything like this—but they’d been boys, not men. The difference was astounding. So help her, she could feel the echo of his heartbeat pulsing deep inside her, and it made him feel like a god.

“I’m…I’m overreacting.” Synapses sizzling, sweat breaking out on her brow, hands trembling. Nothing should feel this good, this mesmerizing, this intense.

“No such thing,” he said, reaching up and cupping her face with his hand. “Not for what we’re doing. Do you know how long I’ve wanted you? Like this?”

She shook her head. No, she didn’t know. She didn’t have a clue, but if she’d had to make a guess, she’d guess from about the time the damned drugs had drop-loaded into his system back in the vault at Whitfield’s—about an hour ago, max.

“Forever,” he said. “Always.”

Okay, that was considerably longer than she would have thought, especially considering that they had never hardly gotten past “Hello”—not that she really cared, not now, not when he was inside her.

With steady deliberation, he unbuttoned her uniform jacket for the second time.

“Demi-bra,” he said when the jacket fell open and revealed the scrap of silk and hot pink lace. A smile curved his mouth.

She was coming undone. He was undoing her, inside and out, and it was better and more awful than she ever could have imagined. Better in the sheer, mind-blowing eroticism of having him look at her, of being with him, and worse in what she was afraid it was going to cost her.

“You’re thinking again.” He kissed her breast, ran his tongue over her, took her in his mouth, and she knew he was wrong. She wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t thinking at all—except about what he was doing to her.

Oh, God.
She slid her hand up the back of his head, tunneling her fingers through the dark, silky strands of his hair, holding him to her breast, and she let her gaze drift over the planes of his face. He was so elegant—the refined shape of his nose, the clean, chiseled lines of his cheeks and brow.

Dylan.
He rocked his hips up beneath her, and she slid down on him, the rhythm coming so naturally, the heated give and take of seduction.

Very heated.
God.
The last solid brain cell she had melted in the heat. Nothing she’d done had ever felt like this. He thrust into her again, his soft groan of pleasure washing through her, turning her on in places she hadn’t even known existed.

“I…I think we’re making love on the astral plane,” she whispered. There was no other explanation for this otherworldly pleasure that was turning her inside out. It was so far beyond what she had imagined.

“Yes,” he agreed, the word spoken against her skin. “Absolutely. On all the planes.”

He was such a beautiful mess tonight, his clothes half off, which she loved, being able to run her hand over the soft hair covering his chest, to feel the hard layers of muscle underneath, to finally, after all these months and months of wanting him, have her hands on him.

Dylan.
She leaned over him, releasing a sigh, letting her hair fall around them like a silver veil. She could feel him everywhere, buried so deep inside her, his mouth teasing her nipples, his chest beneath her hand—and his heartbeat everywhere, pulsing, sending a message to her soul.

She was going to regret this later, when he came out of his drug-induced haze and realized what they’d done. It was going to be impossible to be around him and not be able to have him like this, again and again and again, whenever she wanted, which was going to be a lot.

Oh, God, yes.
She was going to want this a lot. He smelled like sex, and felt like sex, and he was consuming her.

She would have to leave SDF, leave Steele Street and Superman, and Kid, and Creed. She’d seen the type of women Dylan dated on those rare occasions when he was in Denver, and she couldn’t guarantee that the next time he brought one around she wouldn’t accidentally snap her pretty little neck.

His dates were
always
beautiful, and
always
brilliant. It’s like he put them through an IQ test or something.

But tonight he belonged to her, Skeeter Bang, street rat, gear head, computer nerd. He belonged to SB303, the spooky girl who loved him.

She wanted to tag him, mark him, claim him as hers for all time.

His hair was sinfully silky. He was usually so impeccably groomed, but not tonight. Swaths of dark, silken strands fell straight down on either side of his face, almost to his cheekbones. It was so sexy. He looked so rock-star cool.

Then he lifted his head from her breast, and she realized there wasn’t a cool cell in his whole body. He was all heat.

For a moment, she simply held his gaze, his eyes so perfectly gray, his lashes so thick. In her comic book drawings, he was Kenshi the Avenger, a powerful dragon lord and wizard. For one solid year, she’d drawn Travis as Kenshi, and for one solid year, the character had been wrong. Travis had told her as much, but she hadn’t been able to see it, until the night she’d darkened Kenshi’s hair and turned it from a tawny mane into a straight fall of black silk, until she’d turned Kenshi into Dylan.

Travis didn’t have a dark side, but Kenshi did, and so did Dylan Hart. What had happened to Wes Lake, a man incarcerated in the state penitentiary at the same time as Superman, had been a dark deed of justice wrought by a dark, ruthless hand, Dylan’s hand. Even Quinn and Creed thought Dylan had contracted the hit that had killed Lake before the man could carry out his sworn vow to either sodomize or kill Hawkins, but she knew Dylan had done the deed himself, a promise kept.

She knew him, and she would have loved him for that one deed alone, for doing what had needed to be done, for saving Superman. It had been such a dark time.

In turn, years later, Superman had saved her, and tonight…

Tonight she didn’t know who was saving who, but she felt redeemed from the hundreds of lonely nights she’d spent wanting him—and with him loving her, his body moving with hers, taking her someplace she’d never been, never imagined, to a completion she felt building to a peak under the knowing touch of his hands, the utter seduction of his mouth, and the naked, untempered physicality of sex, of him sliding in and out of her, deepening their connection with every stroke…with him loving her tonight, he looked like the very soul of salvation.

She let her head fall to his shoulder, felt him turn and open his mouth on her neck, his teeth grazing her skin, his tongue tasting her.

“I love you,” he said, his voice hoarse with need. “I love you so much.”

“Yes.” She knew he did. For now, in this moment, he loved her. She felt it everywhere.

And when his love and his body finally took her over the edge, the sweet release of it stole her breath. It tied her to him with a power that went far beyond the boundaries of their skin, beyond the boundaries of reason.

CHAPTER

22

P
IRATES,
Hawkins thought,
Jai Traon.
He’d gone up against Indonesian pirates once before, on an oil rig in the South China Sea, and all he could say was that these boys had obviously been out of their element on dry land—either that or they’d had the crap jet-lagged out of them. The Jai Traon on the rig had fought like sons-of-bitches and slid around like shadows.

Tonight, all the odds and determination had been on his and Creed’s side, especially after Hawkins had gotten a look at the papers he’d found on the Jai Traon they’d left under the COPO Camaro.

He waited, utterly still, utterly silent, watching Creed make his move on the last pirate. Out of the four men who had broken into Steele Street, two were dead, one was under Hawkins’s knee, out cold and flex-cuffed, and the fourth was drawing his last breath.

Hawkins couldn’t read Indonesian, but a few things defied translation and had to be written out in their original language—things like names. Like the names of everybody who lived at Steele Street, including the names Katya Hawkins and Cody Rivera, two names guaranteed to bring out Creed’s finest qualities and most lethal skills. Hawkins had quietly suggested that they not kill one of the bastards so they could interrogate him, and the guy under his knee had pulled the lucky number.

Pirate number four was going to come up short in about five seconds.

Actually, it only took three. The man went down under Creed’s knife in a classic Wingate maneuver. It was very smooth, very quiet, and very, very violent, Creed’s killing strike coming out of the darkness, his right hand grabbing the guy around the face, his fingers spread, the strength of his hand and arm jerking the man’s head to one side, laying wide the back of his neck and the small area where Creed silently jammed his knife up into the man’s skull, severing his brain stem.

It was clean, quick—bloody, but not the mess of a gunshot killing.

The jungle boy didn’t let the pirate fall, but rather lowered him to the floor. Then he wiped his knife across the pirate’s shoulder and put it back in its sheath—a night’s work well done, but not finished. There had been another bit of nontranslatable information on the dead pirate they’d left up on the fifth floor—an address in Prince William County, Virginia, across the state line from the nation’s capital, where Skeeter and Dylan just happened to be stealing the Godwin file from Senator Whitfield.

Hawkins didn’t believe in the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, or coincidences of any kind, and he needed to run the address through his computer and call Dylan and Skeeter while he did it. Something was definitely up with the damned Godwin mission.

Travis should have arrived in Washington, D.C., an hour ago, so at least they had another SDF operator on their side. Hawkins just hoped the three of them would be enough. He didn’t care what Dylan had said, the boss was not at his best, not by a long shot. There was one other hope, though. It was possible that the number of good guys was four. There was a new girl at Grant’s office, a Gillian Pentycote, code-named Red Dog by Skeeter, and he knew the general ran his staff through a training program. Hawkins hadn’t gotten any evaluation reports on her, but maybe, just maybe, Red Dog could kick butt.

If Negara had set his men loose in Washington, Hawkins hoped so, for everybody’s sake.

G
ILLIAN
swiped the key card through the hotel suite’s lock, watching to see if the light turned green, all the while humming. She’d been humming since she’d gotten on the elevator down in the parking garage—humming and smiling.

Oh. My. God.
Sex was incredible, especially angel boy sex. So incredible, she wasn’t sure she would ever be quite the same again—and she loved it. “Being the same” had been her third greatest marital crime, according to Ken. She’d always had her nose in a book, always been too serious, always been only about half put together with her clothes, and her glasses had always been broken, a phenomenon she hadn’t understood any more than Ken. It was just one of those things. She’d no sooner get her glasses fixed in one spot than some other little part would let go.

Kimberly was a fashion plate, a clotheshorse, a shopaholic who spent more money on her haircuts than Gillian spent on groceries—which had been another point against her. Kimberly could cook, really cook. It had come down to a choice between a life of tuna casserole or baked sole, Ken had said, in what Gillian considered one of his more uninspired moments.

Kimberly had that effect on him, bringing out his least-inspired side, reducing him to an endless litany of clichés and shopworn opinions, and Gillian had warned him that uninspired clichés weren’t going to do his career any good. They both knew he needed to be pushed to do his best work, and nobody pushed him more than Gillian—which had been her second greatest marital crime. He had his book now, and he was ready to slide into tenure. He didn’t want to be pushed anymore, and he didn’t want the competition of having a wife who was a little more brilliant at her worst than he was at his best. And that had been her greatest crime of all, being better than Dr. Kenneth Pentycote—even with her still being half a dissertation short of a doctoral degree of her own.

She swiped the card again when the light flashed red instead of changing to green.

Well, she was brilliant, all right, brilliant enough to change directions and try something new. Brilliant enough to get a job working for a man her father considered one of the great unsung heroes of America, a job where she got to load UMP magazines with .45 caliber cartridges, the kind of job where she picked exotic angel boys up at airports and ended up more than half naked in the backseat of her Honda.

Good Lord.
Her smile broadened into a grin. What she’d done made her feel incredible, but that she’d actually done it made her head spin. What in the world had she been thinking? What in the world had Travis James been thinking?

And what, she wondered, were the chances of him thinking it again?

A small laugh escaped her. She felt so good—which elicited another soft laugh, because that’s exactly what the angel boy had told her.

The light finally turned green on the third swipe. She grabbed the handle and opened the door, humming again. The door closed behind her as she dropped her purse on the entryway table. Then she looked up and realized, truly, just how incredibly brilliant she was—brilliant enough, she realized, seeing the three men coming at her with their weapons drawn, to get herself into more hot water than she would ever have dreamed possible.

SITTING
in the front seat of the broken-down Impala, Dylan wanted to kiss Skeeter so badly, it hurt, but if he kissed her, he was going to devour her again, take her from the top down and drown himself in her. God, he was such a selfish bastard. He should never have let the situation get so far out of hand, especially since it didn’t look like he was going to die.

Oh, yeah, that had been his bottom line.

Geezus,
he was so fucked up, and yet it was the god’s truth, impending death and certain doom were the only two justifications he would accept for what he’d done. Unfortunately, he felt great, like he was going to live at least another fifty or sixty years, plenty of time to nurse his regrets into a colossal case of guilt. Not that it was going to take anywhere near that long. Five minutes out and he already had a good jump on it.

He’d fallen off the edge, and that unnerved him almost as much as what he’d done. It wasn’t like him to lose control, to break one of his own rules. He’d been breaking the rest of the world’s rules since he’d been fifteen, but not his own, never his own.

Until now.

She was melted on top of him, totally relaxed, about half undressed, her head resting on his shoulder, her breathing deep and even, but she wasn’t asleep. He could tell.

He dragged his hand back through his hair and just held her with his other arm around her waist, his fingers gripping her tighter than they should. He knew it, but he couldn’t help it.
Geezus.
It was Skeeter, Baby Bang, and he’d had amazing sex with her in the front seat of a Chevy that probably qualified as a toxic waste dump.

Someone should shoot him.

And yes, he knew the name of the exact someone who would be only too glad to do the job—Christian. Cristo. Hawkins. Superman.

The whole situation made him feel a little wild, a little wildly crazed.
Fuck.
He let his gaze drift over the baby soft curve of her cheek, down the side of her neck, back to her shoulder, then lower, down the sleek, silky length of her upper arm.

Whitfield’s had been a grade A disaster, complete with Negara’s bastard pirates, and they were still out there, gunning for him, and for Skeeter, which was tearing him up. They shouldn’t even know she existed, let alone have caught her with him.

It was going to go down as one of the best shots of his life, the one he’d used to kill that guy in Whitfield’s office. His eyes had been crossed, he’d been so fucked up, and his arm had still been on fire, but he’d made the shot.

He let out a breath, and with an act of pure will kept himself from smoothing his hand down her arm, or up her leg and that amazingly erotic lightning-bolt tattoo. He’d been running with the wrong women if lightning-bolt tattoos turned him on—and they did. At least Skeeter’s did.

But he kept his hand to himself. He needed to think, not start feeling her up again. He wasn’t out of the woods yet. He could tell by the edge of faintness he felt skirting the borders of his brain—or maybe that was postcoital craziness. He felt that, for sure.

Ah, Skeeter.
What in the hell had he done?

Honor, Loyalty, Duty.
Those were the tattoos inked down her arm. Her whole hip-hop crew had been tagged with the same symbols. Honor among thieves, he understood all too well, and he knew they’d been thieves as well as wallbangers. Loyalty he understood even more, especially for a crew of graffiti artists trying to paint the city without getting busted by the cops or capped by the gangs. Duty he understood best of all. It was the mantra his father had given him.

Honesty would have been another good one to add. He always was with himself, no matter what it cost. Tonight was no different in that respect, and he knew the problem wasn’t that he couldn’t love her. He did. The problem was that he didn’t want to love her, and try as he might, he couldn’t see his way around that one inviolate fact.

He didn’t want this sick pain in his heart that said he’d put her in danger. He didn’t want the heartache of knowing he really couldn’t have her, not forever, if only because he knew himself, and he knew he would move on.

Oh, yeah, kissing her now, making love to her now was so perfect, but it wouldn’t last. Nothing ever lasted for him, except the friendships he’d forged with the chop-shop boys. It’s what he should have tried harder to have with her—friendship.

But, man, a friend didn’t whisper your name when you pushed up into her, didn’t melt you with a sigh when you took her breast in your mouth. A friend didn’t get wet when you touched her, and didn’t hold on to you when she came—hold on to you like you were the last solid thing in the universe.

Geezus,
he’d felt her tighten around him, and he’d come all the way from the soles of his feet. The sides of his neck were hot, and the place at the base of his throat, just north of his heart and south of his brain, was pulsing. He’d just had her and his balls were still tight. He still wanted her.

He knew her down to the taste of her mouth and the scent of her skin, and everything about her said she was his. The soft place on the underside of her arm?
His.
The silky feel of her hair sliding over him as he’d thrust into her?
His.
The sound she’d made deep in her throat when she’d come undone? Most definitely
his. Only his.

But she was so damn young, it was mind-boggling—and his mind was boggled enough, thank you.