Crazy Cool (17 page)

“I’m sorry.” She hadn’t known what else to say, even though it was a bald-faced lie. She wasn’t sorry for anything that had brought him into that alley, into her life. It had only been a week later that she’d finally correlated “picking up cars” with “stealing cars.” By then, she was too addicted to him to care.

“Creed and J.T. are going to wonder what happened to me,” he’d said, leaning back over the table and idly picking up her hand.

There was nothing idle about her reaction. It was the first time he’d touched her since he’d grabbed her in the alley, and she was electrified by his touch.

“It’s getting late.” He started to rise to his feet, and panic set in. She couldn’t let him go. She’d never see him again if she let him go.

She rose with him, her hand still in his.

“How about more champagne?” she’d asked, and immediately felt foolish. It was such an obvious ploy.

He’d grinned and dipped down to better see her face. Even though she wore heels, he towered over her.

“Are you trying to get me drunk?”

“No.” She’d looked away, embarrassed. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . well—thank you, Christian. Thanks for taking me to the doctor, and for what you did. It was . . . very brave.” And that sounded too stupid to bear.

Her blush deepened, and she swore at herself.
Very brave
. . . God, like he was a little kid or something.

He didn’t say anything for a long time, and she just couldn’t bring herself to look at him, not after saying something so dumb.

He still had ahold of her hand, though, and during the long silence, he slowly slid his thumb over the ridge of her knuckles—and her heart started to race.

“Only girls who kiss me call me Christian,” he’d said, entwining his fingers with hers. “Everybody else calls me Hawkins. Just Hawkins.”

It was all the encouragement she’d needed.

“And how many girls have you kissed, Christian?” she’d asked, daring to glance up at him.

“Just two.” His grin had broadened. “Just
mi abuela,
my sweet little grandmother . . . and now you.”

He’d bent his head down to hers and brought his other hand up to cup her face, and within half a minute of his mouth touching hers, she’d known he was such a liar.

Oh, God, he’d known how to kiss. He’d played with her mouth. He’d seduced her completely, without touching her anywhere else—and he’d forgotten nothing.

Nothing. No one kissed like Christian Hawkins. She opened her mouth on his and just breathed him in, tongues sliding, lips pressing. With everything about him so hard, the inside of his mouth was so very, very soft . . . wet. He tasted faintly of espresso, which was so very Hawkins, something rich, dark . . . sensually intense.

His hands were hot underneath her dress. Her underwear had disappeared. She was barefoot—and with just his kiss, he’d already taken her past “Oh, God, should I do this?” to “Please, God, don’t ever let him stop.”

She wanted him, desperately. She wanted what he offered, what he could give her, and she was willing to risk her heart to get it.

And that’s exactly what she was risking. Nothing less. She knew him, knew herself with him. No half measures would do. She would end up giving him everything, and he would take it all and then some, and when he left, she’d be left with nothing.

But, God, it had been so long, so very long since a man’s touch had made her melt from her core.

Between their bodies, she felt him unbuckling his belt, and a whole new level of thrill went through her. Her options were dwindling fast. Not that he wasn’t a gentleman. He was, and no one had more control of himself than Christian Hawkins—just the thought of all that control was enough to make her melt another degree. It had taken her years to take another lover. She hadn’t done it until long after he’d been released from prison. God only knew what might have happened to her, if he’d never been released.

He’d spoiled her young, though. She’d thought all men knew not to give up on a woman. She’d thought all men loved making love, loved every touch, every kiss.

She’d been wrong.

But not about Hawkins, never about him, not from the first moment she’d seen him and ran straight into his arms, not about taking him into her bed—and hopefully not about taking him again in the front seat of a 1971 Dodge Challenger R/T named Roxanne, seven floors up in a garage freight elevator.

Was she insane?

Or just shamelessly desperate?

She felt him slide his zipper open, and she dragged her mouth from his. Their eyes met in the darkened interior, and she knew it didn’t matter if she was wrong or not, or if they were jammed together in the front seat of his car, or spread out on her bed at home. His gaze was dark with need, his hand sliding up between her legs, and all she could do was watch his face—so beautiful, his hair silky long and damp on the edges, his eyes so deep set, so thickly lashed, so intensely focused on hers.

He touched her then, his fingers so sure, so unerring, and pure, sweet pleasure poured into her. With a soft gasp, she brought her mouth back down to his, moving against him, her hips pressing into his hand.

“Christian . . .”
she sighed, loving what he was doing to her, loving being so close to him, half on top of him with no place else to go.

She tunneled her fingers up through his hair, holding him for her kiss, for a hundred kisses, and she began undoing the buttons on his shirt.

H
E’D
been friggin’ nuts, Hawkins thought, to come through the window after her. Five more minutes and he could have had her in his bed, his king-size bed with pillows. Instead, they were going to end up doing a pretzel fuck in a bucket seat—because there was no other way this was going to end except with him inside her.

She fit in Roxanne, and she fit him like a glove, but he didn’t fit. He had one foot jammed up against the windshield, his other leg half under her. Not that it mattered. Nothing was going to stop him now. She was hot, and wet, and all over him, and this was the way it had always been between them. Instantly incredible.

The faintest taste of bubblegum lingered on her lips, so sweet and lovely, but not the taste he needed, the taste he’d driven himself crazy thinking about all night long with that damned manila envelope and the pictures of the two of them in his hand—his right hand, and yeah, he’d been holding on to himself with his left, but he couldn’t say he’d had all that much fun. With her lying in his bed, and not being able to touch her, the whole thing had been an exercise in futility. Not that he hadn’t gotten off. He had, but it hadn’t even begun to take the edge off his frustration.

He’d wanted her, and in addition to all that lust making him horny, it had demoralized the hell out of him. She’d lain there on his bed, nearly comatose, a little pile of drunken bad luck, and all he’d been able to do was watch her and ache.

Some things a guy liked to think he’d outgrown, and some things he had, but not her.

“Kat, help me,” he said against her lips, his hands going to her hips and trying to lift her on top of him. He didn’t mind if he ran into a few things getting organized, but he didn’t want her to get knocked around. He just wanted her on top of him, especially since he’d gotten her out of her underwear in record time, but he was only able to manage getting her on top if he slid farther down in the seat and put one leg out the window and braced the other against the dash, making enough room for her to get her knees on either side of his face. Thank God she wasn’t being shy about it, because the maneuver was already clocking in at a high ten for difficulty.

More sliding down and more pulling her up his body finally . . . finally got him what he wanted. He opened his mouth on her, found her sweet, hot center with his tongue, and proceeded to slowly drive them both out of their minds.

She gasped, almost a sob, and a huge wave of tension lifted away from him as he just gave himself up to the wonder that was her.
Sweet Jesus,
this is what he’d wanted, what he’d needed, the part of himself he’d held on to so desperately, the part of himself he’d shared with her—sex, pure and simple and the sweetest thing on earth, her giving it all up for him, her responses triggering his own, the two of them getting lost in each other.

Her hands were in his hair, his were on her hips, sliding over hot, satiny skin, until she came in a torrent of soft cries and trembling shudders—and it was better than he’d remembered, filling him with the deepest, bone-deep satisfaction. He kissed her again, and again, so softly, and she cried out each time, melting on top of him, until she slipped away down his body.

Cradling her against his chest, he smoothed her hair back off her face and kissed her cheek. “Backseat, sweetheart,” he murmured in her ear, then lay back down and gave her a little boost so she could crawl over him—and, oh, yeah, that alone was worth the price of admission.

Maybe the whole car thing hadn’t been such a bad idea after all, he thought, following her.

She slid down into the seat, and he slid in right after her, the condom package between his teeth and total victory in his mind. She was his. She’d always been his—and nothing happened in the next few minutes to shake his conviction. She had her hands all over him while he put the condom on, her voice whispering a whole litany of sweet nothings that seemed to mostly be made up of his name, which he loved more than she could possibly know.

Yeah, everything was going just fine, right up until he slipped her leg up around his waist, and started to push into her.

That’s when his wires got crossed, when he blew a fuse and short-circuited every commonsense synapse he had in his whole friggin’ brain. She was so hot, so slick; sliding into her, he felt like he was dying and on his way to heaven. There had to be a name for what happened to guys in this situation, maybe Electromagnetic Vaginal Impulse Syndrome, because when he thrust into her, his whole brain was instantly fried, as if he weren’t connected to reality at all anymore.

He thrust again, and it just got better, and with the next thrust even better, like he was sliding into a hot, silky sea and knew he was going to drown and didn’t give a damn. And then it suddenly all got so much worse.

“I love you, Kat.” The words whispered from his lips without a single connection to conscious thought, sanity, or his will. They just came out . . . and kept coming. “God, I missed you . . . missed you so much.”

Geezus,
he was holding on to her so tight, his arm low around her hips, lifting her into him, his head buried in the curve of her neck, and he was pouring out his soul. Damn, damn, damn.

“Kat . . .”
He ground himself against her with every deep thrust, wanting . . . wanting . . . getting so strung out, his mouth all over her—endless minute after endless minute, until she gave him everything he wanted, her body going stiff beneath his. Her head went back on a groan, and her back arched off the seat. God, he’d never seen anything more beautiful, never felt anything more exquisite than the cascade of her contractions tightening around him, and it undid him. He dropped his head between her breasts, his breath caught, his release so fierce and hot.

It was like being in never-never land, what she did to him, the place she took him, and it took a long, long time to come down. When he did, she’d long since stopped kissing him, stopped caressing him, and had curled up and fallen asleep.

Oh, God, Kat,
he thought, carefully pulling her on top of him so she wouldn’t get crushed. She settled in, and he got as comfortable as possible in a backseat that had to be pushing a hundred degrees. Steamy didn’t begin to describe it. It had been jungle love. Tropical jungle. And he’d given himself over to it body and soul.

So what in the hell, he wondered, was he going to do now? Damn.

C
HAPTER

16

I
NSIDE THE TOUSSI GALLERY,
on the biggest night of her life, Nikki saw Kid Chaos walk through the front door, and her heart jerked to a sudden, painful halt. Oh, God. Her hands gripped the stair rail where she stood in a crowd of people above the main gallery floor, looking out over dozens of her paintings and over a hundred patrons and potential clients.

Kid
. . . her heart started up again on an equally painful jolt. She could hardly breathe, her gaze running over him, hardly believing it was really him. He looked so different from when he’d left, older, and so very tired her heart broke even more. His hair was longer, still short and dark, but long enough to muss up, and it looked like he’d dragged his fingers through it a dozen times. He was dressed with a casual elegance she wouldn’t have thought him capable of the night they’d met, when he’d been wearing camouflage pants and a colorfully clashing Hawaiian shirt. Tonight he had on a white suit jacket and a fine black mesh T-shirt, with jeans and cowboy boots, a style that passed for semiformal in Denver, but nothing seemed to quite fit him, and she realized he’d lost weight, a lot of weight—
oh, God
.

The rest of him was the same, though: the six feet of pure predator, the hawklike gaze and chiseled cheekbones, the lean angle of his jaw, and the nose that gave the clean lines of his face an unexpected boyish appeal. He’d been hurt, and her heart twisted at the sight. A small patch of hair above his right ear had been shaved off, and she could see a couple of stitches, which only reinforced the awful truth. He’d finally, really come home, but under the worst circumstances imaginable.

She started down the stairs, then stopped when a woman she didn’t know approached him with a smile and a glass of champagne in hand. He took the drink and smiled back, and suddenly Nikki didn’t have a clue what was going on, a clue what to do.

It would be so easy to run across the room and throw herself into his arms, but what if he wasn’t here to see her, but because Quinn was here? Quinn and Regan had gotten home mid-afternoon. They’d seen Kid, spent the early evening with him at his dad’s house—but Nikki hadn’t expected him to show up here. She’d felt so left out, knowing he was in Denver and not having the right to go to him. He’d been gone for almost two months, and he hadn’t called her once. Not while he’d been gone, and not today.

Not once.

A smart girl would think about that for a minute, no matter how heartbroken she was for him. The last thing he needed was some girl he’d slept with one night to throw herself at him, expecting something he wasn’t willing to give, especially when he seemed to be charming the socks off the willowy brunette with the champagne.

The brunette leaned in close, said something in his ear, and he tilted his head toward her, another brief smile flashing across his face.

Nikki’s grip tightened on the stair rail, her fingers turning to ice, everything inside her freezing into a cold hard lump of pain. It was too much. She hadn’t smiled since he’d left her, and he was smiling with another woman? Had he brought the brunette to the show? Could he be that cruel?

Honestly, she didn’t know him well enough to know the answer, and that hurt, that she’d given her heart to someone she didn’t know. God help her, she’d never been jealous in her life, but she was jealous now, and it was an awful, awful feeling.

She wanted to run and hide, just disappear, but she couldn’t do that and face herself in the morning. So she steeled herself instead and started down the stairs. There were other people she needed to meet here tonight. Unbelievably, and for reasons unknown to her, Katya Dekker had not shown up, and Nikki was trying not to overanalyze what that might mean to her career. Suzi Toussi and Alex Zheng had done their part in keeping her introduced to all the right dealers. Now she needed to hold up her end and charm them if possible, or at the very least make a little polite conversation. She did not need to fall apart over a man she barely knew.

She did need to make damn sure their paths didn’t cross.

She couldn’t bear that. Really, she couldn’t, not while that woman was practically hanging on him and he didn’t seem to mind.

K
ID
couldn’t breathe. The gallery was unbelievably crowded, and he didn’t see Nikki anywhere. And then this woman—who was only trying to be nice, bringing him a drink and all—was confusing the hell out of him. He couldn’t hear half of what she was saying with the band playing and all the noise in the room, and he didn’t want to be rude, but he didn’t have a damned thing to say to her. He didn’t have anything to say to anybody, except Nikki. She was the reason he’d come. She was the one he needed—and he didn’t see her anywhere.

He’d seen Quinn and Regan leaving by the back door as he’d been coming in the front, too late to get to them through the crowd. They were going back to his dad’s. They’d said they wouldn’t be gone long, but he hadn’t been able to wait. He’d had to bail out. Skeeter had said Hawkins might come by the gallery, too, some kind of problem with a murder last night. Not the usual SDF op, but connected with the orders Hawkins had received to leave Colombia. Dylan had talked to him about it on the plane from Panama City, but he’d been so exhausted and hungover, he hadn’t heard even a tenth of what Dylan had said—except the part about all of them returning to South America.

To finish the job.

The thought was enough to make his stomach churn. He knew what it would be like when they went back to Colombia, knew what they would do, and he was afraid it wouldn’t be enough—and that scared the hell out of him. Creed had said he and J.T. had been set up. Finding the people who had done it was going to be harder than finding the people who had tortured Creed to within an inch of his life, and killed J.T. Bringing them to justice might be even harder—but for the rebels who had killed J.T., justice would be swift and exacting.

A picture of his brother’s body flashed across his brain, and he felt a sheen of sweat break out across his brow. Struggling for a breath, he looked down at his champagne glass, then shoved it into the chattering woman’s hand and walked away.

He had to find Nikki.

He crossed the room twice, working his way through the crowd, searching faces, and was just about ready to give up and leave, before he stopped breathing altogether, when suddenly, there she was, in a group of people in front of a huge painting of Travis James, the wonder stud and her favorite model. He recognized the painting from the night they’d first met, but it was the sight of her that stopped him cold in his tracks.

God, she was so beautiful. Even trying hard to remember everything about her, he’d forgotten. Looking at her, it was hard to believe he’d touched her, kissed her, made love to her and had his body inside hers. He’d never met anyone who affected him the way she did. She wasn’t very big, but she was powerful in a way he’d found strangely daunting and utterly fascinating. She exuded an energy that lit her from within. She was heat, and light, and warmth, and more than he’d ever known of love before—and he hardly knew her at all.

He glanced around the gallery again. This was her night. The place was full of her paintings, most of them of Travis, who was a nice enough guy, but Kid would have liked him better if he wasn’t so naked everywhere, especially in front of a girl he was sure he’d fallen in love with in less time than it usually took him to ask someone for her phone number.

She excused herself from the crowd and started making her way back across the gallery—alone—and he knew he had to make his move or leave. There was no middle ground.

He started forward, but had only gotten a few steps toward her when he was waylaid one more time by the woman with the champagne.

“Hi, again,” the brunette said, all bright teeth and spangly beaded dress. “I didn’t get your name. I’m Pamela.”

She held out her hand, and Kid stared at it for a second before habit kicked in and he took it with his own.

“Uh . . . I’m . . . uh”—out of the corner of his eye, he saw Nikki approaching—“I’m Kid, well, Peter,” his voice trailed off.

He was staring at Nikki so hard, she had to feel it, had to know he was there. Finally, she glanced in his direction, and the rest of the world fell away. Nothing else existed, just the two of them, him frozen to the spot, and her . . . growing suddenly pale, and a spark of . . . anger? . . . coming into her eyes.

This wasn’t good. He hadn’t planned for anger, which had been damn dumb on his part. He could have kicked himself. Of course she was angry. He’d up and left her, and though he’d told her he was leaving and how much she meant to him, he never had been sure that she was exactly awake when he’d said all those things.

From the look on her face now, she hadn’t been.

He started forward again, and realized the spangly-dress woman still had ahold of his hand.

Geez.
“Uh—excuse me.” He got his hand back and crossed over to where Nikki was still stopped in the middle of the room, only to find that he didn’t have anything to say.

Well, that wasn’t exactly true. He had a thousand things to say to her, a million thousand, just none of them were coming to mind.

“Hi” was the best he could come up with. When she didn’t say anything right away, he tried a little harder. “I’ve been out of town for a while.”

“I know,” she said, her voice a little shaky, her gaze angled somewhere past his shoulder. “I’m . . . I’m very sorry about your brother.”

He was going to have to ignore that. He couldn’t talk about J.T. Not at all, not to anyone. He hadn’t even been able to talk to Dylan about him.

“I was in—uh—South America.” He should have called her, dammit. He could see what a big mistake that had been now, not calling her when he’d had the chance, the couple of times he’d been in Panama. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought about calling her. It just hadn’t seemed right to drag her into what had been going on. “The orders came down the night we—uh—were together, and I was hoping we could kind of pick up where we—uh—”

She glanced up at him, both of her eyebrows arched in a look that was half confused, half a complete mystery, but didn’t look good.

“. . . left off,” he finished lamely. The expression on her face changed ever so slightly, but with the change he recognized it for exactly what it was: anger again. He started to feel the sand slipping out from under his feet, like a big old wave was sucking him back into a riptide.

“What I mean is—” God, he was stupid. He’d said it all wrong.

“I know what you mean,” she said through her teeth. “I know exactly what you mean.”

He caught her by the arm as she turned to leave. He couldn’t let her go. Not yet. Not when just looking at her was enough to tear him up inside. Not when she was angry with him.

“Nikki,” he said, his voice hoarse, his hand tightening on her arm.

Her skin was so soft.

“No, Kid.” She glared at him, her cheeks flushed. “You can’t just walk in here and expect—” She stopped suddenly, the color fading out of her face, a stricken look coming over her. “I’m sorry, so sorry, but I can’t—”

“Nikki?” Another voice intruded, and Kid glanced up. His jaw immediately tightened.

Travis, the blond-haired, blue-eyed wonder stud, stopped next to her, close enough to slip his arm around her waist. Kid felt his already short leash get shorter.

“Kid.” Travis greeted him with a nod of his head and an easy smile Kid didn’t misinterpret for an instant, but he wasn’t going to let the situation deteriorate into a dogfight, not if he could help it.

Of course, no one knew better than he did what a goddamn big “if” that might be. He hadn’t exactly been in charge of himself lately.

“Travis.” He returned the other man’s greeting and tried not to think about how many hours the model had spent naked in Nikki’s studio. Tried not to think about Travis’s hand on her waist or what might have happened between the two of them since he’d left.

He didn’t want to hurt the guy. Really, he didn’t. Nikki would hate him for sure if he busted up her angel—and despite the warning in Travis’s gaze, Kid didn’t have a doubt in the world about which one of them would get taken down. He could have come right out and told the guy, “Don’t fuck with me tonight. You’re too nice a guy to get in the middle of what I’m dishing out,” but he didn’t.

The important thing tonight was to win, and winning meant leaving with Nikki. To that end, he backed off, letting his hand slide down her arm, until he held her hand in his—a nominally less dominating hold, but still a connection. He wasn’t going to let go of her, no way, not unless she absolutely shot him down.

“One dance,” he said, turning his attention to her. “That’s all I’m asking. Just one dance. It’s my birthday.” He had to work not to wince as those last words came out. It was true, but it was also about as lame a thing as he’d ever said.

Okay, it was worse than lame. It was pitiful, and if she turned him down after such a pitiful plea, it could only be because she was sleeping with Travis. He didn’t have any facts to back up his conclusion, but his intuition was telling him it would be true—and then the night might get ugly. Whether Travis had only the purest of sexual motives and instincts or not, and according to Nikki he always did, Kid was probably going to deck the guy.