Crazy Kisses (15 page)

Then the warning cry came: “Cops!”

The film was instantly switched off, throwing the whole place into darkness—and as one swarming organism, the Rats ran, melting off the stage, out of the seats, away from the aisles, disappearing, every one, and out of pure, gut-deep instinct, Jane disappeared with them, whisking Travis away with her, across the boards, behind the screen, and into the dark at the back of the stairs.

C
HAPTER

13

30,000 feet over the Caribbean Sea

T
HROUGH THE WINDOW
of his private jet, Juan Conseco watched the moonlit clouds course across the sky over the dark ocean below. Beside him, Drago was furious, delivering his polemic in a constant stream of Spanish punctuated by butchered English when he wanted to make a particularly damning point.

“This is insane,
insanity.
Far worse than Panama. You will be naked in the United States, without friends, without protection.” His uncle had been stoically unhappy from the moment Juan had decided to make a bold, lightninglike strike at his enemy on his home ground, where
el asesino fantasma
would least expect it.

“We have friends in every city in the United States, Uncle,” he corrected Drago’s latest mumblings. “In the major cities and the minor ones, in cities on their last gasp of life, cities with new industry and old. We are there, in all of them. You’ve gotten the name of our Denver connection from our man in Tijuana—
¿es verdad?
What was it again?”

“Baby Duce.” Drago’s mouth thinned in disgust.

Juan understood. His uncle didn’t like dealing with people at the street level. The regional distributors, the men with money, were as low as he liked to go. But Juan understood there was very little difference between himself and men like Baby Duce, and those differences had more to do with the cut of their clothes than the working of their minds. That understanding gave him an advantage when dealing with the street lords. It was why he had taken over the family business when his father had died. It was why Drago had let him.

“You told Baby Duce what we need?”

“Yes,” Drago replied. “There is a club called the Aztec. Very popular, he said. It will be crowded tonight, and it has a basement where we will not be disturbed.”

“Good.” Besides Drago, Juan had brought three of the other four men who had been with him in Panama City. The fourth man, the one he’d left watching Chronopolous’s house, had stupidly gotten himself picked up by the police. There would be no new information coming out of Panama City. If the man was smart, he would hold his tongue, or Juan would hold it for him.

It had been a terrible thing, but he’d had to leave poor Sanchez and Mancos at the mercy of the Panamanian police. With the ghost killer within his grasp, there had been no time to do otherwise. He’d had no choice. Such was the nature of his business. Pray God the bodies would be treated with respect.

He fingered the cross at his throat and said another prayer for his fallen men and for the capture of the hated gringo. The woman was the key now. She would lead him to
el asesino fantasma.
Juan had a thousand ways of getting information out of a woman, and if necessary, he would use them all. Nicole Alana McKinney would be praying for one of her angels to come and save her before he was through.

C
HAPTER

14

Denver, Colorado

A
GONY OR IDIOCY?

That was the question.

One of the little Rats trapped with him in the very small closet under the stairs farted again, and Travis decided on idiocy. That was how he was going to die, sheer idiocy, gassed to death by a ten-year-old with no self-control.

“Robin,” a small feminine voice said from right up against his left leg. “Make him stop. I’m gonna be sick.”

Yes, sir, that was the only thing missing from this intimate encounter—someone throwing up on his shoes.

“Shut up, Blue,” another Rat whispered. “We’re s’posed to be hiding, and her name is Jane.”

“Jaaaane,” Blue whined. “Make him stop.”

It was dark and hot and incredibly cramped in the closet, bodies pushing on him from every direction, kids hanging on his clothes, someone actually standing on his right foot. All of which he could have borne, except for Jane being laminated to the front of his body, pushed up next to him so tightly he could feel every curve she had, every breath she took, and the snap on her jeans.

It required pressure to get that close, and he was feeling that, too, intense pressure in all the wrong places.

He was dying.

And she’d called him Mr. James, which was even worse than what the Jack kid had called him, lame-ass loser. Mr. James made him sound like an alien, like he came from another planet, like the only way in hell they could ever get together would be if their worlds accidentally careened out of orbit and crashed into each other . . . which, when he thought about it, was kind of what had happened tonight, where they’d started off with this huge gap between them, but had ended up in the exact same spot—and he meant exact. If they got any closer, one of them was going to have to change their name.

It was killing him.

Her hair was silky against his neck, and despite what was going on down around his knees, she smelled divine, like heaven. The closet had been a great hiding place for all of two seconds for two people, but it had turned into a torture chamber. He didn’t know how many Rats had jammed themselves in on top of him and Jane before somebody had finally gotten the door shut.

“Shhh. All of you,” she whispered, then lifted her mouth to his ear. “Boost me up.”

Sure. No problem. He’d just bend his knees a little, just slide his face down the side of her neck and over her breasts, and cup his hands for her boot.

No problem—despite the complaints he got for shoving Blue and rearranging everybody else. He couldn’t help it. They were packed in like sardines.

No problem at all when Jane’s knee ended up in his armpit and her crotch ended up in his face—no problem, but he slipped straight into the twilight zone, his senses flipping on one by one, gearing up for the leap into hyperdrive. It didn’t help when he lifted her, and the whole silky length of her midriff slid along his cheek.

Only his years of training saved him, all the time he’d spent studying and working as a certified massage therapist while he’d developed his theories on sexual imprinting. He was used to skin, soft, estrogen-infused skin. Professionally speaking, it was a familiar work surface—for his hands. Of course, that kind of skin against his face conjured up a whole different scenario.

He held his breath, trying not to go nuts, but quickly gave it up. Not breathing was always a strategy doomed to failure.

So he breathed and held her steady against him. He breathed and let the scent of her skin go to his head. He breathed and felt like he was falling in love, because it had been a long time since he’d been this close to a girl he liked this much.

Above him, she was busy doing something with the wall close to the ceiling. When he heard the scrape of wood against metal and felt a breath of cold air, he realized she’d opened a trapdoor or a ventilation shaft.

“Come on, Rats. Up.”

And that was when Travis discovered a new personal talent: He was the perfect shape and size to be a human stepladder.

Who had known?

The Rats swarmed up his body, helped by Jane, who pulled them up one by one, then pushed them through the opening. They used his shoulder as a resting spot and his head as a pushing-off point. He gritted his teeth and bore it, his arms straining, his patience thinning.

Out in the theater, he could hear the police coming up on the stage, the low sound of their voices and the heaviness of their steps hitting the boards. The irony of the situation was not lost on him. He’d never run from the cops in his life. As an EMT, he worked with the police, side by side, saving lives, picking up the pieces. He was one of the good guys, heart and soul. He knew he looked like just another slacker dude, but man, if your heart stopped, he was the guy you wanted showing up fast. If your kid overdosed, he was the guy to call. His best friend from high school, Connor Ford, was a cop, and Connor was going to have a heyday with this story, if Travis could swallow his pride long enough to tell it.

Two beers ought to do the job.

With the last Rat through, five by his count—and he didn’t know how five kids had jammed themselves into the tiny closet—Jane boosted herself through the trapdoor and reached down for him.

“Hurry,”
she whispered, pulling on his shirt. The voices were growing closer.

It was ridiculous, hiding from the cops, but her sense of urgency was contagious, and he found himself reaching for the opening. It wasn’t very big, not as big as he’d hoped. He went ahead and shoved his coat through, then grabbed onto the edge of the ventilation shaft and levered himself up. It was a tight squeeze, and between him pushing and her pulling, they ended up tangled together in a pile inside a place infinitely smaller than the closet.

“Weisman, get over here and put your shoulder to this,” one of the cops said, rattling the closet door. “I think I heard something.”

Jane went motionless beneath him, her hands still clutching his shirt, her breath in his ear.

“What’s wrong with
your
shoulder?” Weisman wanted to know.

“Just get over here.”

Travis took a breath and told himself to move off of her. It was the right thing to do, as opposed to trying to absorb her through his pores, which was not the right thing to do. But when he rolled to his side, he ran into somebody else, somebody much smaller.

“Hey, get your own spot,” the much smaller somebody whispered, elbowing him in the ribs.

Geezus
. He winced and rolled back on top of Jane. Bunch of freaking little heathens—he didn’t know whether to throttle them, put them all in time-out, or pay them.

He heard one of the Rats take off crawling up ahead, scrambling through the shaft, the sound of their shoes scraping on metal.

“Wait your turn,” came a whispered order a few seconds later, also from just up ahead.

“What’s taking so long,” somebody complained.

“Jeeter’s stuck.”

Travis knew which kid had to be Jeeter, Rat number two on the human chain that had crawled up him, the big Rat. Jeeter weighed about a ton and a half, and if he was stuck, they were all stuck. Logjam, pure and simple. Nobody was going anywhere.

He swore silently, praying he wouldn’t embarrass himself, which was really going to ruin his night, when suddenly, it dawned on him that the universe might be trying to tell him something. Being plastered up close and personal to Jane twice in less than five minutes couldn’t possibly be just a cosmic roll of the dice. It was karma. It was fate.

It was going to make him do something stupid, if he wasn’t careful.

“Kiss, kiss, kiss,”
came a small voice, very softly, from somewhere on the other side of Jane.

Yeah. That was it. The stupid thing he was in danger of doing. She already had to think he was a total idiot. Making a move on her just because his face was buried in the curve of her neck and her mouth was just inches away would be totally juvenile.

“Sounds like rats to me,” the cop named Weisman said. “These old places are full of them.” He put his shoulder to the door with a solid thump. “You want to tell me what we’re doing here again?”

Totally juvenile, Travis decided—but he couldn’t help himself. Every time she exhaled in his ear, his temperature rose ten degrees, and he was damn close to critical meltdown, because this was Jane beneath him, molded to his body—wild Jane with the wary green eyes who watched everybody within a thirty-foot radius and held them all at bay, Jane who never spoke to anyone except Katya or Suzi, Jane who could disappear in plain sight, blending in, being still, being oblique, so subtle, so smooth.

Jane who simply fascinated him with her feral gaze and sidelong glances, with the way she moved.

Jane whose hand had drifted over his painted angel’s body and made him wonder if she was actually seeing him, thinking about him.

“We’re making Lieutenant Bradley happy,” cop number one said. “And if we find something, it’ll make her even happier. We’ve fielded over half a dozen complaints on the Empire over the last couple of months, but we never find anything.”

“What kind of complaints?” Weisman hit the door again with a solid, board-cracking thump.

Damn.
He needed to stop thinking about Jane and start worrying about the cops. If Jeeter didn’t get his butt through whatever opening he was stuck in, Travis was going to get his ass busted. He was last in the Rat line. It was his cheese hanging out in the wind.

Which brought him to another, sudden, blinding realization: He didn’t have anything left to lose. This was it. The whole screwed-up night was heading toward a dead end faster than a Mack truck with no brakes.

Hell, inside of five minutes, he’d probably be in police custody, while all the Rats would be home free. He’d be starting his rap sheet and heading downtown, and they’d be back watching
Fantasia
and tying up some other unsuspecting fool.

“
Kiss, kiss,
” came the little voice again, and Travis stopped fighting it. This was going to happen. Jane had to be thinking about it, too. The Rats had been chanting “kiss” since they’d dragged him up on the stage.

Kiss
. . . he’d know soon enough if she wasn’t interested. He’d know instantly.

Turning his face deeper into her neck, he let his nose slide through the silky strands of her hair and brush against her skin. Her breath caught softly in her throat, which was a good sign, and she didn’t pull out her silver switchblade and gut him, which gave him a ridiculous amount of confidence.

“Trucks pulling up in the middle of the night, unloading stuff. Kids running around at all hours. I don’t know,” the cop was saying. “I’ve been here three times, and we’ve come away empty-handed every time.”

“You talk to the owner?” Weisman gave the door another hit, but Travis hardly cared. He was sinking into Jane, into the scent and softness of her, opening his mouth on her cheek, sliding his hand up into her hair, holding her—filling himself up with her. He grazed her jawline with his teeth, and a shiver went through her. He slid his nose down the side of hers, and her hands tightened on his shoulders, which was such a perfect turn-on, to have her holding onto him.

“Louise Nash, yeah,” the cop said. “She’s been renting it out to a guy in Phoenix for the last four years, a Nick Daley, who we haven’t been able to find. Apparently, he’s trying to turn the place into a venue for concerts, but hasn’t been able to pull together any backers. That’s her story, anyway.”

“The place is a dump,” Weisman said, hitting the door again. “I wouldn’t put my money in it.”

That caused the first cop to laugh. “You don’t have any money.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Weisman gave the door one more hit and burst through with a muttered curse.

Travis’s time was up.

“
Jane,
” he whispered her name, then covered her mouth with his own.

Her lips were incredibly soft, her breath catching in her throat again, but her body didn’t melt into his. Just the opposite, in fact. She stiffened up. It was pure fight, flight, or freeze like a bunny in the headlights, and she’d gone the bunny route—definitely. He could feel it in her heartbeat, in the silent thrum of energy suddenly holding her so still beneath him. He didn’t blame her, not really. She was compromised. He was on top, and there was no mistaking what he wanted. Out-and-out telling him no would have been one thing, but her breathing was shallow, as if she was feeling the same thrill coursing through him, and she was still holding on to him like her life depended on it, so he went ahead and kissed her. He breathed her in and teased her, rubbing his lips over the corner of her mouth so very, very gently, and he whispered her name again.

“
Jane
.” Beautiful, wild Jane . . .
open for me
.

And finally, she did, her lips parting on a ragged sigh he felt all the way down to his groin, a sigh of surrender. He didn’t hesitate. He slid his tongue inside, into soft, wet heat, into the sensual seduction of her mouth—into serious trouble.

He’d wanted to kiss her. God, how he’d wanted to kiss her, and he’d known it would be good, but he hadn’t known it would make wanting the rest of her instantly so much worse.