Crazy Hot (2 page)

“Maybe” was all Kid conceded as he checked the load on his rifle, a highly “accurized” sniper's M40.

Quinn and Kid weren't getting paid to take chances. Not today.
Keep your heads down and don't get your asses shot off
had been Dylan's orders. A couple of weeks ago, when his body had still been pretty messed up, Quinn had been willing to follow orders. But he was mobile now. His stitches were out, and he was ready to get back to the job of taking Roper Jones down. If the unhappy guys in the four-wheel drive were part of that job, great. He just had to get Little Miss Tourist out of the way.

Damn. In about five minutes, if she was an innocent civilian looking for ghost town junk, she was going to wish she'd driven right on by Burt's old place and Cisco. What he didn't like to think about was that niggling sense of familiarity and the possibility that what she was looking for was him—though God knew how a woman could have tracked him down in Cisco. Or why.

“Call Denver,” he said to Kid. “Tell them we've got company. I'll get the woman.”

“No,” Kid insisted, quickly coming around the desk at the back of the shop. “I'll get her. You . . . uh, should be the one to call.”

Quinn narrowed his gaze at the younger man and was gratified to see him falter just a bit. It took a lot to make Kid Chaos falter.

“What I mean is, Dylan would rather hear the . . . uh, details of the operation from you . . . I'm sure.” Kid didn't sound too damn sure to Quinn.

“Dylan's in Washington, D.C., and we don't have an operation yet,” Quinn explained. “Skeeter's holding down the fort back at headquarters.”

“Well, see, there you have it.” Kid kept moving toward the door, each step slower than the last, until he finally came to a complete stop under Quinn's unwavering gaze.

Quinn knew the distance between the barn and the gas station. A hundred yards. “I can handle it.”

Kid didn't look convinced. “Maybe she's a decoy. Roper Jones is not going to give up, Quinn. Not until you're dead or Hawkins gets him.”

“Roper Jones is not stumbling around in Burt's Gas Emporium. A woman is, and I'm pretty damn sure we better find out why.”

With a reluctant nod, Kid finally agreed.

Quinn turned toward the door, slipping the Beretta under his shirt and into the waistband of his jeans. Hell. He wasn't making it easy for Kid to play bodyguard.

Bodyguard. Christ. He'd always been his own damn bodyguard, and done a damn good job of it—up until two weeks ago in those West Side rail yards.

The memory gave him an instant's pause.

Okay, he admitted. The Roper Jones heist had gone down bad, real bad, and Hawkins had literally had to scrape him off that friggin' back alley, but they'd gotten what they'd been after that night and he was healed now. He was ready to get back in the game. More than ready.

He slanted the computer screen a quick glance as he passed by. Plum lipstick. Lavender shirt. Golden ponytail.

Hell. She didn't look like she was ready to get in the game. She didn't look like she'd ever even heard of the game. Ready or not, though, she was about to get her first taste of it.

C
HAPTER

2

S
HE'D MADE A MISTAKE
coming here, Regan decided, and she'd wasted a whole lot of time doing it. There was no sign that Wilson had ever been to Cisco. If Quinn Younger had been here, well, it looked like he was long gone now, too.

Inside the gas station she'd found nothing but dust and spiders, greasy old oilcans, and tanker receipts.

Dragging her hair out of her eyes, she glanced through the nearest broken window at the other buildings and sighed. She'd come this far. She was going to have to search them, too. She'd never rest easy if she didn't.

Not that she was resting particularly easy, sifting through Burt's dust. Up until last night, when she'd found the mysterious entry on Wilson's desk calendar, she'd lived her life in a manner that had all but guaranteed she would never find herself in a situation like this—alone, in a deserted town, looking for a man she might need and didn't know. Her job in the paleontology lab at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science was everything Regan McKinney wanted. Her career was intellectually stimulating and yet fit within well-defined parameters of quietness and security. Haring around the world on wild adventures had been her parents' idea of living. It had also put them in an early grave. Regan wasn't having a thing to do with it.

At least she wouldn't have, if Wilson hadn't disappeared—or wandered off. More than once over the last two weeks, she'd wondered if that wasn't really the case. He'd aged in the last few years, truly aged, his body taking on a fragility she wouldn't have thought possible in the robust dinosaur hunter and flashy orator who had always been her grandfather. What had once been an endearing absentmindedness was possibly becoming something more, something she didn't want to think about too much.

She'd found the charger for his cell phone in his bedroom, which explained why she hadn't been able to reach him that way. All her calls to the places where he was supposed to have spent the night had only confirmed the worst: He was lost.

She had to find him. He'd raised her and her little sister, Nikki, after their parents had died. The three of them were a family, and she was terrified that if she couldn't find him, nobody would.

The sound of an approaching car brought her head around. A blue SUV passed by Burt's big front window heading west. According to her map, the road through Cisco turned into a scenic byway once it hooked up with the Colorado River. With the thermometer hovering over the hundred-degree mark, she figured the river was the only smart place to be going in Utah in June.

Admonishing herself to get back to business, she left the gas station through a half-hung back door and made her way across a stretch of barren ground toward the nearest shack. A quick look around inside only confirmed her suspicion: Quinn Younger wasn't living in a two-room hovel in Cisco.

Wild-goose chase,
she thought, turning around to leave. That's what she was on, a lousy wild-goose chase. Five more buildings to go and not so much as a crow or a dust devil stirred in the whole damn town.

Correction,
she told herself, coming to a stop just inside the hovel's doorway. The blue SUV was back, and it was pulling up in front of the gas station. Before it disappeared around the corner of the building, she saw two men inside. Suddenly she wished she'd parked her car someplace else—like Arizona. Slamming car doors revved up her heartbeat and made her doubly aware of how precarious her position might be.

She backed deeper into the shadows of the broken-down room. And froze.

There was no sound, no warning, but in that instant she knew she wasn't alone.

The fact no sooner registered than a steely arm wrapped around her waist; at the same time, a powerful hand clamped over her mouth. Before she could kick or scream or even register the depth of her alarm, he pressed her up against the shack's wall—pressed hard, his whole body flat against her back, immobilizing her.

Adrenaline washed into her veins on a river of stark, icy fear.

“I'm not going to hurt you, but I can't vouch for the guys in the four-by-four.” His voice was soft and gravelly, and very close to her ear, his breath blowing across her skin as he spoke. “We're going to stay just like this for now. Real quiet, until they leave. Got it?”

She managed a sharp, terrified nod.

“Good. Now take a breath, then tell me if you locked your car before you went into the gas station.”

She had to think for a second before she nodded. Yes, she'd locked her car. It was a careful city-girl's habit.

“Are you lost? Is that why you stopped?”

She debated her answer for a second, but then shook her head no, telling the truth. She wasn't lost. Scared senseless, but not lost.

“Then I guess that leads us to the obvious question.” He spoke so quietly, she had to strain to hear him. She had to focus on him, focus on his breathing and slow down her own.

It wasn't going to happen. Not as long as her heart was racing, totally at odds with the slow, steady beat of his. She could feel it against her back. She was frightened, but he wasn't. He was calm, breathing normally, holding her, but—she realized—not crushing her, not hurting her. It was very effective, what he was doing, and made all her diligently attended self-defense classes moot. He had immobilized her in one second flat. She felt shrink-wrapped between his body and the wall. She could feel the splinters in the boards and the old nails where they protruded. A cobweb was draped across her face, and she had to blink to keep the dust and spider silk out of her eyes.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he asked his obvious question.

“Did you come here looking for me?”

The slight loosening of his hand over her mouth gave her just enough leeway to turn her head. He was close, and she was so scared, it took a couple of seconds for his face to register. When it did, she slowly nodded. Yes, she'd come all the way hell out to Cisco, Utah, and had the holy crap scared out of her just so she could find him. He was unmistakable, his eyes dark green and deep set beneath black lashes and the straight dark lines of his eyebrows. His hair was longer than on the framed
Newsweek
cover Wilson kept at home, the lines of his face more defined by the intervening years, but it was him, Quinn Younger. And if Wilson had thought him an outlaw at sixteen, her grandfather should see him now.

“What's your name?” he asked, slowly removing his hand from her mouth. A small, thin scar slanted across his cheek, showing pink against his deeply tanned skin, telling her he hadn't had it long. Flecks of pale, fine-grained sand dusted the ends of his midnight black hair. His body was warm, very hard against hers, and if she wasn't mistaken, the cool, steely ridge she felt at the base of her spine was a gun. The imprint of it had slowly registered over the last few seconds, and now she was sure: Quinn Younger was armed.

“Regan McKinney,” she said hoarsely. Her mouth had gone painfully dry. “Wilson McKinney is my grandfather.”

The slight lift of his eyebrows told her he recognized the name. The slow slide of his gaze over her face and the brief moment it spent focused on her mouth made her wonder if he recognized her. She wouldn't have thought it possible after so many years. It had been such a brief encounter, a few agonizing seconds of absolute mortification for a fifteen-year-old girl, and it most definitely hadn't been her face he'd been staring at.

A brief smile curved his mouth and he eased up on her body a bare degree.

“Don't move.”

She nodded her head once. She wasn't going anywhere. He had a gun and was either slightly deranged, sneaking up on her like that, or he knew something about the guys in the blue SUV that she didn't. Either explanation was enough to freeze every muscle in her body.

But, by God, she'd found him. She'd found Quinn Younger. She hadn't expected to, not really.

He shifted his gaze to the open doorway, but she kept hers on him. He'd changed plenty from the clean-cut Air Force poster boy she'd seen on all the news magazines and national papers, but the classic structure of the face that had landed him on
People
magazine's Fifty Most Beautiful People list the year he'd been rescued out of Iraq hadn't changed. He was still drop-dead gorgeous, but in a wilder way, especially with the scar on his cheek. She'd be the first to admit that it was page 72 of the entertainment magazine she'd shown all her friends and tacked to her wall, not the
Newsweek
cover so proudly displayed by her grandfather. But she also had to admit that, even with his face basically unchanged, it was hard to reconcile the sexy guy in the
People
photograph—his mouth curved in a teasing grin, his uniform shirt unbuttoned, and his pants dangerously unzipped—with the deadly calm man pressed up against her and watching the back of Burt's like a hawk.

A juvenile delinquent teetering on the edge of a felony conviction—that's what Quinn Younger had been before he'd been given over to Wilson that long-ago summer for three months of fulfilling his societal obligations. An underage car thief with a knack for a sixty-second hot-wiring, before the ink had even dried on his driver's license.

Something crashed outside, bringing her head around. A man swore, and Quinn Younger stiffened and he pulled the gun out of his waistband.

“If this doesn't go down right, head for the barn.” He leaned in close to whisper in her ear. “Take the Camaro. My keys are in it. Just be damn careful when you put it into gear. First is tricky, and stay away from sixth. Sixth can get away from you.”

Her already racing heart didn't slow down one iota at his words, or the drawing of his weapon. Sixth gear? She'd never heard of a sixth gear.

“If
what
doesn't go down right?” she asked in a forceful whisper verging on panic, looking from his face to his drawn gun and back to his face again.
Good God.

He slanted her a questioning glance. “I thought you were going to tell me. You're the one those guys followed.”

Followed?

“Me?” She hadn't been followed. “Why would anybody follow me?”

“Maybe they're looking for the same thing you are.” His tone matched his gaze, very cool, very assessing.

Regan swallowed. He was trouble. She'd come looking for it and found it.

Damn.

The intense look on his face had her slowly turning her head back around. Through a sliver of an opening between the shack's wallboards, she saw enough to make her heart slam back up into overdrive.

The two men had entered the gas station, coming their way, moving silently through the shadows inside the abandoned building.

Every muscle in Quinn's body was taut, ready. He leveled his weapon and aimed at the first man. Regan got a sick feeling in her stomach.

Dear God, the last thing she wanted to see was someone murdered. A sob lodged in her throat. The soft, strangled sound was enough to make the two men stop. She froze, too, and behind her, Quinn leaned in closer, his free hand gently sliding over her mouth again. He was totally focused on the men. One had white-blond hair, his body athletically fit. The other man was dark-haired, much older and heavier. He looked used up and mean. Both were carrying guns.

Regan felt a bead of sweat trickling down the side of her face, and her knees started to tremble. Something terrible was about to happen, something violent she didn't want any part of—and yet, if those men had followed her, Wilson had to be in a kind of danger she hadn't even imagined.

The men slowly scanned the inside of Burt's, their expressions flat and serious. When the blond spotted something in the corner near the ceiling, a very brief, very curt conversation ensued. The only word she caught was “camera.”

They started forward again. The blond man pointed to something on the floor. Directing the older man's attention, he traced an invisible line through the air, following something Regan couldn't see around the inside perimeter of the building. Burt's was full of junk, but Regan didn't remember seeing anything significant—until the blond-haired man said, “The whole place is wired to blow.”

Quinn's hand tightened over her mouth to muffle her gasp, while the two men carefully backed up a step, turned, and very slowly started walking out of Burt's.

Regan would have slumped to the floor if Quinn hadn't been holding her against the wall.

He didn't move until the men were back in their car and were heading back down the road. They didn't go far, only about two hundred yards from Burt's, before they pulled off into the dirt and stopped.

“Let's go,” Quinn told her, taking just enough of a step back to give her some breathing room. She started to slide down the wall. He quickly caught her around the waist with one hand while he slipped his gun back into the waistband of his jeans with the other. “Can you walk?”

“No. I don't know,” she said, too frightened to lie. Her legs were trembling. “You . . . you were going to shoot those men.”

“Me? No. I was just the backup. If they'd needed shooting, Kid would have done it. Now come on. If we stay close to the buildings, they won't be able to see us.” He pulled her with him out the door into the bright sunshine and took off at a fast walk, his hand like a vise around her upper arm.