Crazy Kisses (11 page)

His head was a fucking mess, but he was fine.

“You were telling me about the three scars you and Creed have on your arms,” she said, smoothing her other hand over his brow, suddenly looking so solicitous, he almost grinned. This was the Nikki he’d fallen in love with, a teasing, I’m-so-in-charge-of-my-world Nikki, the take-no-prisoners Nikki who looked into men’s souls and took what she wanted.

Yeah, that was Nikki, and he most definitely wasn’t in any shape for her to be doing that to him. He wasn’t ready for anything even close to that much of an invasion.

Hell, no.

“No, I wasn’t,” he said, and wished he would just cool out. He didn’t like running hot, being on edge inside. Cool, calm, collected, that was him—with everyone and everything except her. “I was telling you not to photograph Hawkins naked, ever again.” It was none of his business. He knew that. But she had him flat on his back and was still holding all the cards.

“When you see the painting I did of him, you’ll change your mind.”

Yeah, he knew that, too. She was an amazing artist, and for a while tonight, when he’d first seen her at the Sandovals’, he’d thought she was still his.

Unbidden, his gaze went to her left hand, but the ring wasn’t on her finger.

Oh, Christ. Had she lost it at the Parrot? Thrown it out with her tissues or some damn thing?

No. Impossible. His luck couldn’t be running that good.

“Where’s your ring, Nikki?”

She followed his gaze, and for a moment she looked confused, then stricken. “I . . . I forgot about it. Oh, geez. I didn’t think, I mean it’s in my luggage, back at the house. I took it off and put it in my jewelry bag when I packed, but in the rush, those men, I don’t—”

He tightened his hand on hers in warning, and she fell silent, but looked distraught, which he didn’t blame her for, not a bit. The ring had to be worth a fortune. But the important thing, the really so-help-him-God important thing, was that she’d taken the damn thing off and packed it in her luggage.

“You put it in your suitcase?” he asked, his voice very serious, as if buck-ass naked he was conducting some sort of investigation into the missing ring, which of course he would if it proved necessary—but mostly he just wanted to hear that part again.

“Yes, in my big pink suitcase. I took it off, and—” she paused for a moment and her gaze locked onto his. “Yes, Kid,” she repeated. “I took it off. After tonight, how could I wear it?”

He didn’t know the answer to that, because, frankly, he didn’t know how in the hell she’d worn it in the first place.

“We need to talk about this,” she said, her voice very solemn. “There are things you need to know.”

Or not, he thought, feeling a cold sweat break out on his brow.

Great. This was perfect. Racing heart. Cold sweat. What was next? Hyperventilation?

“I know how angry you are, Kid.”

No, she didn’t. Not even close.

And excuse me, but was his breath getting a little short?

Fuck.

“Don’t worry, Nikki. I’ll get the ring back for you,” he said. It was a promise—and didn’t that just make the whole screwed-up night complete? There he was, filleted like a fish with a paper towel covering his dick, going into panic mode for God only knew what reason, and promising to get back the ring that said she was engaged to marry another man.

He needed his head examined.

A knock sounded on the door, and one of the DEA guys popped in. “Five more minutes, max, if you’re going to make that plane.”

Kid nodded and completely ignored the guy’s quick glance at the paper towel and his shit-eating grin. There was no way in hell they were going to miss that plane, not if he had to finish sewing himself up on the tarmac—and honestly, five more minutes of this situation was about four and a half more than he thought he could take.

C
HAPTER

10

Denver, Colorado

T
RAVIS WATCHED SKEETER
slip out the back door in a flurry of snow and a gust of wind.

Damn
. The storm was turning into a blizzard, and getting colder. The temperature had dropped even since the boy, Kondo, had left.

He threw the dead bolt and turned back around only to find Jane looking right at him. For as quiet as she was, she never hesitated to meet his gaze straight on when she wanted to, and twice she’d just about leveled him with an intense sidelong glance from across the gallery. She wasn’t quiet because she was shy. Oh, no. She just had nothing to say to him. He’d gotten that message the same way he was getting the message she was sending now, which was “If you’re finished for the night, why don’t you go home?”

It was amazing, really. He was no mind reader like Skeeter, but he was starting to feel like one with Jane, or Robin, or whatever she wanted to call herself.

He was also starting to feel a little annoyed with himself and frustrated with the situation, two emotions he usually found useless. The only other girl who had ever blown him off so completely was Skeeter herself. So his batting average with hot, streetwise women was exactly zero. Girls like that were obviously looking for something else, but he’d be damned if he had a clue what. Lots of different kinds of guys came on to Skeeter, from lawyers and FBI agents to gangbangers and downtown hustlers, and he’d watched her shut each of them down every single time.

The same way Jane was shutting him down now, with a look that said he simply didn’t register anywhere on her radar.

“Well, I’ll just be heading on home now,” he said, reaching for his coat where it hung next to hers by the back door.

What the hell,
was what he was thinking. He needed to start getting interested in women who were interested in him, instead of driving himself crazy with hot dreams and wild fantasies about Jane Linden.

Jane, who, naturally, didn’t say a word. As a matter of fact, she wasn’t even looking at him anymore. She’d gone back to shuffling the envelopes, lining them up, and she’d conveniently stationed herself between him and the rest of the gallery, sending another silent message for him to leave by the back door and not let it hit him in the ass on his way out.

Man, oh, man, he’d never seen anybody work the body language the way she did, all of it saying “closed, keep out, no trespassing.”

“I’ll see you tonight then, at the show.”

Oh, Christ.
Had he just said that? He couldn’t believe he’d just said that. The woman did not want to talk to him, and she didn’t give a flying leap if she saw him tonight at the show. What did it take—a neon sign flashing over her head?

He was stuck in perpetual nice-guy mode, and she was all about attitude with a big, silent “A.”

He let himself out the door, thank you very much, and closed it solidly behind him. He didn’t move away, though, until he heard the dead bolt slide home—just more stupid nice-guy stuff. He was the king of it.

Glancing across the alley, he swore under his breath. His Jeep looked frozen, like a metallic ice cube, cold and heartless, and like maybe it wouldn’t get him home tonight.

Great. Just great,
he thought, stepping off the stoop. From out of nowhere, a small form darted out from behind him, and his heart jammed up into his throat.

Geezus!
He jumped to one side.

The kid was fast, like a streak of lightning, disappearing down the alley and around the corner almost before Travis even registered that he’d been there.

How in the hell hadn’t he seen the little bugger? He must have practically stepped on him when he’d come out the door. And sonuvabitch—there was another envelope, lying on top of the snow.

He bent down and picked it up, already knowing what it would say: Castle Import Rug Company, with the words
Robun Rulz
scrawled across the front.

Robun
? This one couldn’t even spell, and where in the hell did these kids keep coming from? It was damn cold out tonight, almost morning. Shouldn’t they still be tucked into their beds or something? Who was taking care of them? Nobody?

He shoved the envelope in his pocket, not about to go back inside. He’d give it to her later, her tribute. It was all starting to bug the hell out of him. Where were all these kids coming from? And why were they running around in the middle of the night?

If he’d thought he could have gotten any kind of answer at all out of Jane, he would have gone back inside and asked for one.

Geezus.
He needed to go back to his real life in Boulder and stop getting wound up in all the urban angst of a landscape he didn’t understand—street life, pickpockets, girls with crews, girls like Jane, except she wasn’t a girl anymore. She’d grown up, gotten a job in an art gallery, and moved on.

He dug the envelope back out of his pocket and looked at it again.
Tribute
.

He’d seen how hard she worked. Toussi’s was a big gallery. Besides crating and uncrating pieces for shipment or show, she cleaned the place and worked with Katya in the office. Katya had two other part-time employees and Suzi Toussi, the original owner of the gallery, to help her with the customers, but she was probably going to work Jane into it—unless the girl got involved with the Castle Rats again.

Sure, Christian Hawkins knew what she’d been, but Travis knew what Katya expected her to be, and it didn’t include taking tribute from pickpockets.

None of which was his problem, he reminded himself. Jane had kicked him out, after another night of brilliantly ignoring him. He needed to get a clue, and right now wasn’t any too soon to start.

By the time he got his frozen piece of crap Jeep running and turned onto Seventeenth Street, he’d decided he was done banging his head against a wall. Then he realized he’d left his backpack.
Dammit
.

Swearing under his breath, he pulled over in front of the gallery. He hated to disturb her, really he did, when she was probably so damn sure she’d finally gotten rid of him, but since he wasn’t coming back, he needed his stuff.

At the front door, he pulled out his key to let himself in, a nice cheery “hello” ready to go so he didn’t scare the crap out of her, when he noticed her standing in the middle of the gallery, looking up at the triptych.

And looking and looking.

And looking—easily breaking the record for the longest time she’d ever spent looking at him in real life.

So maybe she liked him naked and going to hell—because that’s what was happening in the painting, without a doubt. Nikki was never ambiguous when she tortured him. She made him bleed. She tore him and his wings to shreds. The way she smeared the paint over the super-enlarged photographs she took of him in her studio made him look broken. People found the dark angel paintings disturbing. Some of them disturbed even him, like the triptych. It was especially raw—and Jane couldn’t take her eyes off of it, which just fascinated the hell out of him.

He wasn’t sure what it meant exactly, but it at least meant she wasn’t nearly as oblivious of him as she’d been letting on. He hoped. When he looked at Nikki’s work, he saw only what Nikki had created, which wasn’t really him. Maybe Jane didn’t see him either, but saw only Nikki’s creation.

Yeah, that was probably it.

Damn
. There was just no way for him to make this work.

He lifted the key to the lock again, then stopped when she moved away from the large paintings to a smaller piece he and Skeeter had hung on the west wall. It was another of him, about six feet in height, more life-size than oversize, an ascending angel Nikki had printed in a creamy sepia and painted over in yellows, gold, and blues. He tended to like the ascending angels better, because at heart he was basically kind of an easygoing, “ascending”-type guy. Not too much angst in his real life, other than not being able to get laid by Jane the way he’d been fantasizing, but that was just regular guy stuff, nothing too life-threatening, no matter how much he wanted it. Or at least that’s what he’d been telling himself. The only thing he didn’t like about the ascending angels was that Nikki always made him look too good. In real life, he didn’t glow, his skin wasn’t perfectly smooth, and his face . . . well, his face really wasn’t angelic, not the way Nikki made him look.

Not the way Jane looked.

God, she was so wildly different from the other women he knew.

She stepped around one of Rocky’s fabric pieces to get closer to the painting, and his gaze slid down her body. Without a doubt, in anybody’s book, she had a world-class ass. He tried not to think about it too much, the same way he tried not to think about her breasts too much, because it was hard on him, but for someone who was kind of small everywhere else, she really filled out a sweater.

And here he was, half turned on and freezing his butt off. Typical. He ought to just go home and forget about his pack. There wasn’t anything in it he couldn’t get by without until Nikki could get it to him.

Slipping the key back in his pocket, he started to turn and go, when she did something that stopped him in his tracks.

She touched the painting, touched him, sliding her fingers over his eyebrows, down his nose, and lingering on his mouth, the tips of her fingers outlining his lips, which pretty much riveted him to the spot.

Painted angel or not, that was his mouth.

Slowly, she traced over his shoulder, following the curve of his muscle down to his arm, then traced the length of his outstretched arm to his hand. One by one, she set her fingertips to his, then pressed her palm flat against the canvas.

She was so close to the painting, he could almost feel her brushing up against him, how the softness of her sweater would feel against his chest, the texture of her jeans against his groin, and suddenly, even with the snow blowing around him, he wasn’t cold.

He took a breath and let it out, nice and easy. Ridiculously, this was working for him, the voyeurism of it all, watching her explore him, her hand so small against the lines of his body, her fingers so gently following the curves of muscle and ridges of bone beneath his skin.

She slid her hand to his chest and down his rib cage, continuing her journey, and then, just as things promised to get really damned interesting, she stopped.

It took him a second to realize she was walking away, he’d been so focused on all the possibilities of where her hand was going next. But it wasn’t going anywhere.

Damn
. If he’d needed any more proof of how hard up he was, he’d just gotten it. He was so lonely for a girl, it was pitiful, and the one he was lonely for, the one he wanted, was her, the wild one who wouldn’t give him the time of day.

He watched her thread a path toward the back of the gallery, but when she got there, instead of heading up the stairs to her apartment, she reached for her coat.

Now what in the hell?
he wondered, but not for very long.

Sitting down on the bottom step, she kicked off the heels she’d been wearing, slipped into a pair of boots, and started lacing them up.

He couldn’t believe it. She was going somewhere? In the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of lower downtown? Making three of the worst moves he could imagine in one fell swoop?

She’d told Skeeter she would take care of all the loose Castle Rats running around, but he hadn’t thought she’d meant tonight, in the cold and the dark and the damned dangerous. It was one thing for Skeeter Bang to cruise the streets alone. He knew she had a switchblade in a sheath on her hip, a Heckler & Koch 9mm holstered at the small of her back, and a reputation that guaranteed she wouldn’t need either, not in this part of town. If Jane had a weapon anywhere on her, he sure as hell hadn’t seen it, and he’d spent plenty of time checking her out tonight.

So this was perfect—perfectly bad, any way he looked at it.

She slipped into a black hoodie and put her wool coat on over the top. A black knit hat came out of one pocket, a pair of gloves out of the other, all of the gear telling him he was in for a long, cold hike somewhere.
Damn.
He zipped his coat up a little higher, pulled his own hat down lower. She didn’t have a car, so it wasn’t going to do him any good to fire up his Jeep again, and there was no way in hell for him to let her go out into the city alone, no matter how many little Castle Rats she had waiting for her somewhere.

She’d probably be damn hard to follow, but he didn’t see any way around it. The chances of her inviting him along were between slim and none, weighted heavily toward none.

He set off for the corner of the building. Even in his mountain parka, he could feel the cold. He hoped her hoodie and coat were a helluva lot warmer than they looked. At the alley, he waited, his body up against the bricks, until Toussi’s back door opened. For a brief moment she was silhouetted in the light, then the door fell closed. A second later he saw her take off, heading away from him, and he started out after her.