Crazy Hot (16 page)

Please fuck me, Quinn
—that's what she meant. That's what she wanted, and, finally, when he couldn't hold himself back anymore, he did it, one long, slow thrust at a time, each one taking them higher, each one coming faster and harder than the one before. He opened his mouth on her neck, filling himself with the taste of her.

The freight elevator slid steadily upward, shaking at each floor passage, marking the time. He was lost in her, lost in the soft panting of her breath in his ear, in the love bites she was leaving with her teeth along his jaw and down the length of his neck. He moved his mouth to hers, and she sucked on his tongue, her hips arching into his, trying like him to get even closer.

It was getting wild again, completely out of control. She arched back over Jeanette, reaching for the spoiler, and in one move he pushed her up onto the trunk of the car and was on top of her.

God
damn,
he wanted a bed. He shook his head once, hard, trying to clear it—but she was sweet and tight and so
hot
for him. His fuse was lit and burning down fast, but the trunk space on a Camaro was an oxymoron, and the absolute last thing he wanted was for them to go sliding off and crashing onto the floor, so a part of him had to stay sane and it was driving him crazy. Why hadn't he thought this through a little better?

The answer was just too damn easy—with her, he didn't think. How could he think when just the smell of her was enough to get him hard? He had a death grip on the spoiler and his other arm around her, anchoring her to him, and he was the one silently pleading . . .
please
.
Please, please come,
because he was right on the fucking verge and it was too late for anything to stop him from going over it—and then he was over it, his body rigid with the sudden, powerful rush of his release, and, oh, sweet miracle Mother of God, she was with him, her soft cry tearing through him, her body shattering around him. He felt her pleasure as surely as he felt his own, the throbbing heat of it, the sweet ecstasy coursing through her. She was holding him so tight, her ankles locked at the small of his back, forcing him deeper and deeper, until he thought he could die from the pure mind-blowing pleasure of it.

When she finally released him, her legs sliding off to either side of him, he was spent, completely spent. He wanted nothing more than to roll over and fall asleep, and he would have, if there had been even a square inch of space to roll over in. She'd gone so quiet, her body so relaxed beneath him, he thought she might have beaten him to it. Then her hand slid up his thigh and over his hip.

“
This
has been an amazing day,” she murmured, sounding as wrung out as he felt, completely done in. Her hand continued up his body, until her fingers were sliding through his hair.

He lifted himself up enough to look at her, resting his weight on his forearms. Her eyes were dark, her face utterly serene. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen anything like it. She looked transported, like a sated angel with kiss-swollen lips and a cloud of blond hair.

“Amazing,” he agreed.

A slow smile curved her mouth, and her eyes drifted closed as she adjusted her hips ever so slightly, while he was still inside her, still between her legs.

His eyes damn near crossed. He did let out a hoarse groan, short and guttural, using up the last ounce of energy he had in his body.
Christ
. He'd just had her and he still wanted her. Not sexually. After tonight, he probably wasn't going to be able to get it up for a week—or at least until morning. She'd done him in, but he still wanted her, wanted something. He brought his forehead down to rest on hers and let out a short breath. He was going to have to marry her. Yeah, that made sense. He didn't see any way around it.

He couldn't let her go. That was out of the question. And he didn't want another man within five feet of her, ever. She'd taken his most cherished adolescent imaginings of a fantasy fuck and thrown them into the stratosphere, and he was never going to be the same again.

C
HAPTER

16

A
FEW MINUTES LATER
, when neither of them had yet made a move, he started wondering if they ever would. It was possible the trunk of a Camaro, clinging to the spoiler, could become one of his favorite places to relax. He felt completely drained.

“You've been hurt.” Regan's voice was soft and languorous in his ear, barely a whisper as she lightly traced a path across the top of his shoulder with her fingertip, pushing his shirt back as she did.

On a scale of one to ten, getting shot was about a negative four on the list of things he wanted to talk about right now.

He looked off to the side of the Camaro. Bands of light and shadow were still sliding through the freight cage, giving the whole scene a somewhat surreal film noir look—which, interestingly enough, was how he'd felt in the alley off the rail yard after the bullet had gone through him. Up until then, the day had been going down in full Technicolor, even the bad parts, but by the time he'd dragged himself into the alley, bloody and beaten, his knee swelling to the size of a cantaloupe, his shoulder on fire with pain, everything had started looking real black and white with the edges fading to gray.

No. He didn't want to talk about it, not when he was still in a postcoital haze. The moment was just too damn good to mess up with the lousy memory of his last big mistake.

“Mmmm,” he murmured, deliberately
not
committing to the conversation. He eased himself out of her and nuzzled his face down into her hair. He loved the smell of her shampoo, her skin.

Come to think of it, he did have something he wanted to talk about: old Scott Hanson and what had gone on between her and her husband, because the two of them were setting some kind of record for good times in a horizontal position. Unlike her, he realized this was probably the last damn thing she wanted to talk about, so he kept his questions to himself.

“This scar is new, like the one on your cheek.”

Okay, she wasn't taking the hint. He was going to have to tell her something.

W
HAT
happened?” Regan asked, refusing to be put off, if that's what he was doing. She'd just made incredible love for the third time with the man, and she wanted to know more about him. Everything. She needed to know. She didn't feel like a one-night stand, but by all rights of definition, if he dropped her off at the hotel and she never saw him again, that's exactly what she would be—and she still wouldn't have missed it for the world. Whatever she had given him, she'd gotten far more in return.

He'd thrown his denim shirt on for the drive into Denver, but hadn't bothered to button it, and while her one hand was being oh so careful checking out his shoulder, the other was doing a sensory exploration of his chest. He was a wall of hard muscle covered with soft, dark hair. Touching him, sliding her fingers across his skin, was heaven. She flattened her hand close to his heart and felt the deep, solid rhythm echo through her palm and into her awareness, and she knew he'd given her more than just sensual pleasure.

Since the death of her parents when she was twelve, she hadn't had much of feeling safe. She'd
been
safe; Wilson would never have let anything bad happen to her. But she'd seldom felt entirely safe or secure.

She felt safe with Quinn, cocooned within the open drape of his shirt, the warmth of his body surrounding her. It didn't make sense, but her instincts all those years ago had been right-on. They'd broken some sort of barrier, she and Quinn, and on what was actually the most dangerous night of her life, she felt safer than she had in years. She didn't even know if she liked him, let alone loved him, but she knew she was crazy for him. They'd made love in an out-of-control, over-the-edge way that had sent her someplace she'd never been before, into rapture, utter, unequivocal rapture, and nothing had ever felt more right, more safe, or more freeing—certainly nothing she'd ever done with Scott.

After a long, silent moment, when she was about to give up on him answering her question, he brought his hand up to smooth his thumb along her jaw. They were lying rather precariously on Jeanette's trunk, held in place by the Camaro's spoiler, but she wasn't about to move, not if there was any hope of his telling her what had happened.

“Are you sure you want to know?” he asked, looking down at her. His eyes were impossibly green in the low light, his lashes thicker and darker than any man should be allowed to have.

Her answer was a simple nod. She needed to know something about him besides what she'd read in
Newsweek
and
People
magazine.

“I got caught in a vise the night we stole the bones,” he started. “Bad guys on both sides and me not quick enough to get out of the middle, not all the way. Hawkins, Dylan, and Skeeter had already left with the truck, and I should have left with them, but I went back to make sure we'd cleared out the railcar. Something had caught my eye, a piece of paper, maybe a waybill. I never got close enough to find out. They were waiting for me when I got there. I took down the guy with the knife, but not until after he'd caught me on the face. That was crazy. He should never have come at me like that. There were a few more of them, and it's just lucky for me that the one who finally got me in his sights was a lousy shot.”

She swallowed softly, appalled by what he'd told her and trying not to show it, trying not to think about what he meant by “took down.” She'd asked, and now she knew.

“This is a gunshot wound?” She gently ran her fingers over the scar. She was in over her head with him, way over. Maybe she was only fooling herself, and nothing about the two of them together made sense. Maybe she was just so pitifully desperate she'd mistaken the realization of her most perfect fantasy for something more.

But, God, who would ever have dreamed she would ever actually make love with Quinn Younger? Three times, no less. In one night.

Not her, not in a million years.

“Not much of one,” he assured her. “It just kind of tore across the top there, caught a little meat, nothing serious. The bad part was—” He stopped and gave her a shrug and a grin. “The bad part was that Hawkins had to come in and save my ass, and he's never going to let me live it down.”

“So he's still pretty tough?” She loved being this close to him while he talked. She could feel the rumble of his voice through her hand on his chest.

“Tough enough.” He nodded, his grin flashing again. He was so beautiful, his features chiseled to near godly perfection—straight, narrow nose, deep-set eyes, hair a fall of black silk on either side of his face.

“Was one of the guys Branson? The ones who hurt you?”

“No.” His smile faded, and he pushed himself to a sitting position. “Come on.” He offered her his hand, and she took it as he slipped off the side of the Camaro and helped her down. She wasn't sure her legs would hold her, but they did. She only wished they had a week and a bed to spend it in—a thought that had never crossed her mind in six years of marriage.

“Branson and his partner are new in town,” he continued, hitching up his jeans and walking over to a trash bin in the corner of the elevator. “They work for a real psycho mother—” he stopped suddenly and switched gears, “. . . uh, guy out of Chicago. But Chicago keeps coming up clean on the goods we're looking for.”

“Is the psycho named Roper?” She probably should have looked away as he cleaned himself up, but she couldn't take her eyes off him. He was tall and lean and broad shouldered, with a lanky kind of grace when he moved. It was all she could do to keep her hands off him.

No one would believe this about her, about Miss Straight-and-Tidy McKinney. She hardly believed it herself. She should probably at least feel a little shame. But she didn't, not one iota, nothing,
nada
. She felt wonderful, like he'd handed her the keys to the Magic Kingdom. She wasn't a frigid sexual disaster case, far from it. She was
hot
—Quinn had told her so, whispered it in her ear as he'd driven her out of her mind, and she believed him. He made her feel exquisitely female, desirable, beautiful.

And in love.

The thought came from nowhere and froze her to the spot.

He came back to the car, zipping his pants, his gaze narrowing on her. “Where did you hear that name?”

Love?

She
had
lost her mind.

“In the . . . uh . . . parking lot at Jake's. You told Hawkins you should be getting your intel from Roper's guys, and at the barn in Cisco, Kid mentioned the name. I figure he's your main bad guy, the one Branson works for.”

He bit off a curse. “You're damn quick, aren't you?”

“Top of my class.” She couldn't possibly be in love. She barely knew him. Of course, what she did know was more than she'd ever known about any other man. She knew how much he wanted her. How it felt to be consumed by him, and how he'd never forgotten her, any more than she'd ever forgotten him.

He leaned back against Jeanette, a flicker of a grin returning to his mouth.

“Which brings us back to the stolen goods,” she said, “which even you don't believe can be bought with the bunch of dinosaur bones you have my grandfather working on.” She needed to take a deep breath, get a grip. Fantasizing about someone, even for years, was not love. Having sex with someone was not love, even great, oh-my-god-I'm-dying sex. Of course, marrying someone and living with him for six years hadn't turned out to be love, either. So what in the hell did she know about love?

“No, it doesn't bring us back there at all.” The freight elevator came to a jarring halt at the seventh floor, but he ignored it, his attention focused solely on her. “You're out of this, Regan. With luck, you and Nikki will have a great night at a world-class hotel and never have to think about this situation again.”

Nikki,
she thought. Nikki was love, and Wilson. She would go to the ends of the earth to keep them safe. She knew that much beyond doubt.

Looking at Quinn, she realized she didn't want him hurt either, ever, and it was more than a slight possibility that she would go to the ends of the earth to keep him safe, too.

Damn, oh damn.

“I could help you.” The words were out before she considered them. Then she considered them a lot, real quick. Helping men with mysterious jobs and gunshot wounds was definitely out of her depth. Way out, as in no way in hell should she be offering to help him out.

“No.” He was adamant.

She, on the other hand, was simply crazy. Just like Suzie, she'd snapped for great sex, just snapped. Obviously, guys like Suzie's cowboy and Quinn Younger should come with warning signs:
WOMEN: BEWARE. THESE ARE THE RULE BREAKERS, AND IT
'
S YOUR RULES THEY
'
RE GONNA HAVE YOU BREAKING.

“I know at least as much about dinosaur fossils as Wilson, and I've probably forgotten a lot less. Maybe you should let me have a look at them.” And maybe she needed her head examined.

Okay, she definitely needed her head examined. Once she got back to her regular, dry-as-day-old-toast life, today—and especially tonight—was going to look like a seriously dangerous aberration.

“No. You're out of it. The bones are out of it. We're giving them back. Then Roper has no reason to remember your name, let alone come after you.”

It was the perfect solution, she was sure, to all her problems except one: what kept happening between the two of them.

“You never actually mentioned what's been stolen.” It was terrible, but the more she thought about it, the more sense it made for her to look at the fossils. He'd been hurt very badly stealing the damn things, and her life and Wilson's and Nikki's lives were apparently on the line because of the damn things.

“And I'm not going to. Roper Jones plays for keeps,” Quinn said. “Everybody is a little nervous. If he's got our stuff, he's upped his ante significantly.”

“Who is everybody?”

“The alphabet soup contingent—FBI, CIA, DOD, DIA, NSA, BSA,” he went on and on, being deliberately obtuse, she was sure.

“The Boy Scouts of America?” She let out a disbelieving laugh at his last acronym, and he grinned. She knew that DOD stood for the Department of Defense, and she guessed DIA was the Defense Intelligence Agency, and NSA could only be the National Security Agency; given the company he kept, she was pretty sure she had it right.

“They're good guys,” he defended himself. “Always prepared. We like that, remember?”

She didn't doubt that they did, but it begged the question. “What about Steele Street? Are you guys nervous, too?”

“Nah,” he said. “We're not nervous, we're double-D'ed.”

“Double-D'ed?”

His grin returned, broader than before. “Destructive and Dangerous for you, if you're one of the bad guys.”

“Are you classified?” she asked, tilting her head and giving him a very considering look. It was the only thing that made sense.

He didn't so much as blink. “Honey, we're a bunch of car salesmen, and other than that, we don't exist.”