Crazy Kisses (12 page)

And this, he told himself, was what happened to guys who got badass crushes on girls who’d spent their formative years running wild on the streets. Those guys got curious about where wild girls went in the night, real curious, curious enough to follow them into the darkened alleys and deserted streets of lower downtown at four o’clock in the morning—common sense be damned.

C
HAPTER

11

30,000 feet over the Caribbean Sea

W
ELL, IF THIS WASN’T
the longest goddamn flight Kid had ever taken from Panama, he didn’t want to be on the one that was. His side was killing him.

Sure, Dr. Varria had given him a packet of Vicodin, but jacking himself up with narcotics wasn’t really an option, not on a commercial flight, not until he had Nikki safely at SDF headquarters on Steele Street in Denver.

Taking a breath, he tried to situate himself differently in his seat, tried to find a position that didn’t hurt like hell—and failed. So he raised his hand and signaled the flight attendant for another beer. He’d already had two first-class in-flight breakfasts and was thinking about ordering a third. Eggs and beer, it didn’t get any better than that.

Yeah, right.

He glanced at Nikki, sleeping soundly in the seat next to him. Her empty wineglass was on his tray with a bunch of snack wrappers and beer bottles. After the night they’d had, he was glad she’d been able to unwind enough to get some sleep. It was better for her and easier on him.

The DEA guys had stuck with them until liftoff, so the dreaded I-know-how-angry-you-are talk had not taken place, which really was for the best, whether she knew it or not. The wine had done the rest.

He took a long swallow of the beer when it arrived, and then took a deep breath. He had to give her the gold wedding rings. It didn’t matter that she’d called him a savage. It didn’t matter that she honestly didn’t have a clue how pissed off he really was about Rocky Solano, or that he was probably way underestimating how angry she might be with him for not calling her since September.

Okay, that sounded bad. In the jungle, it hadn’t seemed so long. In real life, he figured it was long enough to win him the Jerk of the Year award.

Regardless, he’d half killed himself getting the damn rings, and he had to hand them over.

Just not yet.

The timing was bad, even if they felt like a lead weight hanging around his neck.

Yeah, he thought, taking another swallow of beer. This wasn’t the place. Being trapped on an airplane with a woman when you gave her the wedding rings you’d taken off her dead parents’ bones was probably not a good idea under the best of circumstances. Under the worst of circumstances, which they had, no thanks to him and the goddamn bounty on his head, it was just asking for disaster. Even if the circumstances had been better, Nikki deserved her privacy when she received the rings. He may be a freaking savage, but he did know that.

Yeah, she deserved a lot of things—probably none of them him. And wasn’t that the bottom line, the truth as best as he’d been able to see it for months? She deserved better. It was as simple as that, and Nikki being a smart girl, she’d gone and figured it out for herself.

And if he was going to get maudlin, he probably didn’t need any more beer.

He set the bottle down and signaled for the flight attendant to clear his tray. With luck, in a few more minutes, the alcohol would kick in and he could get some sleep, too. The cabin was dark, with just a few low lights on toward the front, and the sun hadn’t yet started rising over the Caribbean. There were two other first-class passengers two rows back. The rest of the plane wasn’t much fuller.

His gaze strayed back to Nikki. He’d bought her a silk T-shirt and a matching skirt in the airport and given her other clothes to the DEA guys. The blood on her dress had been Hernando Sanchez’s. The man he’d killed in the hallway had been Javier Mancos. Both bodies had still been in the house when the police had gotten there. Both had been positively identified by the Panamanian police as members of Juan Conseco’s organization. The police had picked up another man, too. So far, he’d told them nothing, but Conseco’s mark was on him, a tattooed
C
in the shape of a fer-de-lance, its fangs showing.

Kid was going to be watching his ass for a long, long time.

He started to settle in, when Nikki stirred in her sleep, a frown creasing her brow. Then, suddenly, she jerked awake with a gasp.

He caught her halfway out of her seat and got himself clobbered. Twice. Once with her knee as she twisted around, flailing, and once with her hand across the side of his face. The first injury damn near doubled him over,
shit;
the second woke him up the hard way.

Christ.

“Nikki. Nikki.” He grabbed her hands and pulled her close, trying to keep any more damage to a minimum. She was wild-eyed, her body stiff and unyielding. “Nikki, shhhh. It’s okay.”

“
Kid
.” Her breathing was ragged.

“You’re okay, Nikki.”

“It was the . . . the gunshots, and . . . the blood everywhere. I was reading, no, having tea, the kitchen was cooler, and . . .” Her voice trailed off, as if she realized she wasn’t quite making sense. Then her gaze fell to his cheek, and he felt her soften in his arms. “Oh, Kid, I hit you.”

“It’s okay, Nikki. I’m fine.” And his face was fine. It was the rest of him that suddenly felt like pure crap again, inside and out. He knew which gunshots had woken her up. His. “You were having a nightmare. That’s all.” A bloody fucking nightmare about him blowing the hell out of Sanchez and Mancos.

“There was another body, in the garden,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “I saw it when we ran through the backyard. I think it was one of the guys who was singing at Sandoval’s, a man named Martin.”

Oh, Christ.
She’d seen the transvestite.

“Those men you killed, I’m pretty sure they’d done something to him, to Martin’s face or something.” She ran her fingers up into her hair in an absent gesture, her gaze losing some of its focus, as if she was trying to remember—which he really wished she wouldn’t do. “It was dark. I couldn’t quite see, we were moving so fast, but something was wrong, very wrong. I felt it. When I fell asleep, I could see his face more clearly, and what I saw scared me. Then you were there, and”—she took a shaky breath, her gaze coming back to him—“and for a moment, I didn’t know who you were.”

More than the wind went out of him at her declaration. Everything went out of him, and he was suddenly, completely drained, especially of his anger.

There was no place for it here tonight, not with her, and there shouldn’t have been earlier, either, when the two of them had been lying in bed after making love.

Geezus.
He really was the world’s biggest jerk.

“It’s okay, Nikki,” he said, lifting the armrest between their seats. “I saw the body, too.” And please, please, please don’t want to talk about it.

“You did?”

Hell.
She was trembling, and she looked exhausted, with circles under her eyes and her skin pale. There were sleep lines on her cheek, where she’d been resting her head against the edge of her seat.

“Yes. I saw it before I came in the house,” he told her. “That’s why I was looking for those other guys.”

“With a knife.”

“Yes, with a knife.” And enough stone-cold deliberation to get the job done—and then some.
Shit.

A heavy sigh went out of her, and he could tell she was still confused by all of it, still about half asleep. What she needed was to be completely asleep. Exhaustion on top of shock was a recipe for disaster.

Settling back against the window, he stretched his legs out and cradled her in his arms, and was incredibly grateful when she didn’t say anything else about what he’d done with the knife or question what he was doing now, but just went with it, getting closer, lying down with him. A soft breath went out of her as she relaxed along the length of him, which was exactly where she belonged—cared for, protected.

God, Nikki.

He kissed the top of her head.

Her hair was a mess, of course, silky and wild, black and purple, and she was right. The guy’s name had been Martin Chivay.

She relaxed even deeper against him on another sigh, and for just a moment, he thought she’d fallen back asleep.

“Kid?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m angry, too.”

Perfect.

She let out a long yawn and snuggled closer. “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

Sure. Great. Anything was better than talking about her anger or poor Martin Chivay.

“I flunked the third grade.”

She lifted her head up and looked at him. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“But you’re the smartest guy I know.”

Well, if she’d ever wanted to knock him over with a feather, now would be a good time. She lived with a college professor, her grandfather.

“How do you figure?” he asked, truly curious.

She gave a little shrug of the most beautiful shoulders he’d ever seen, before settling back on top of him. “You just know stuff, all kinds of stuff, and you’re really aware of everyone and everything around you—way more aware than about ninety-nine percent of the people on the planet.”

He was a sniper, he could have told her. He’d been trained to be aware of everything, every sound, every scent, every shadow.

Yawning again, she rested her head back on his chest. “Tell me more. Talk me back to sleep, Kid, and don’t let go of me, just . . . just because.”

He wasn’t going to let go, no matter how angry they were with each other. This was too perfect, the way it should always be between the two of them.

“I’ve either skied or boarded every single run at Mary Jane and A-Basin,” he said, after thinking a moment. “From the bunny trails to the chutes, and I mean the badass chutes where only the big boys go.”

“And the big girls,” she murmured.

“What girls? There aren’t any girls up in big-boy territory.”

She let out a little snort. “They’re up there.”

“How would you know, Nik?” She didn’t ski, or climb, or kayak, or bike, or do too damn much of anything athletic. She ordered out pizza and painted her toenails to look like windows in a house. She sewed her own clothes and painted shooting stars on her legs. She played with makeup and broke his heart on every breath.

“I’ve seen them on TV, real girls on real mountains. So there.”

She painted Hawkins naked.

“I’ve . . . uh, always wanted to go camping in a yurt,” he said. “One of those ski-in and ski-out trips over the divide.”

Thank God, Creed had more sense.

“Too cold for me.”

“The yurts have stoves.”

“Still too cold for me,” she said, then, as if to prove it, snuggled even closer to him. “Tell me a deep dark secret.”

No way. His deep dark secrets were classified and guaranteed to give her more nightmares, but there had to be something.

There was.

Geezus,
he couldn’t believe he was going to go there for her—but he was.
Shit.
He took a deep breath, then let it out.

“I’ve never seen a porno movie.”

That little confession was enough to get him another lift of her head.

“Never?”

“Never.”

“You never got together with your high school buddies and snuck a copy of
Donna Does Denver
into the DVD player?”

“Never.” Hell, no.

She propped herself up on his chest and gave him a very considering look.

“Why not?” she finally asked.

“Too scared,” he said honestly.

She shook her head, obviously not buying it. “You are
so
not afraid of sex, Kid.”

“Not sex,” he agreed. “Just porno movies.”

“This really is a deep dark secret, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“Are you going to tell me why they scare you?”

He’d never told anyone, not even J.T., but yeah, he was going to tell her.

“I was afraid ‘Donna,’ or ‘Trixie,’ or ‘Charlene,’ might turn out to be my mother.”

Shock froze her in place for all of five seconds, then she blurted out, “Your
mother
is a porn star?”

“Don’t know.” He lifted one hand, palm up, with a small shrug. “But that’s what Jimmy Pennick told me in the fourth grade, and I guess I was never able to convince myself that he might not be right.”

Confusion furrowed her brow. “What would Jimmy Pennick know about it?”

“What everybody did. That my mother left Dad and us boys to go make it big in Hollywood, but as far as any of us has ever been able to tell, she hasn’t made anything except a lot of noise about all these producers she knows and all the directors she’s worked with. She doesn’t have a regular job. We know that. Sometimes she’ll call Dad and tell him she’s between films and ask for a little cash to tide her over.”

“Does he give it to her?”

“Every time.”

“Yeah,” she said after a long moment. “That does sound a little sketchy, doesn’t it?”

“Just sketchy enough that I’m not taking any chances.”

“Good call,” she agreed.

“So what about you?” he asked, then realized how dumb that sounded. Nicole Alana McKinney didn’t have any secrets, let alone any deep dark ones.

Or so he’d thought.

She dropped her gaze, and a little warning bell went off in his head.

“Nikki?”

She didn’t say anything, just kept staring at his third shirt button.