Crazy Kisses (26 page)

C
HAPTER

25

I
SN’T THIS GREAT
, honey?”

Nikki peeked out from under a pile of blankets and quilts and felt the cold, frigid air settle over the top half of her face, the only part of her she’d dared to reveal. Even her hair hurt, it was so damn cold.

“We’re in a yurt, Kid.” A yurt, in the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest road, even more miles from anything that remotely resembled civilization, and her husband was standing in the open doorway, in what she had to admit was some very fine-fitting black long underwear, grinning like a fool.

God, he looked like a piece of sculpture, a long back, buns-o’-steel, thighs that made her melt, the whole six feet of him encased in some special, high-tech, warmth-retaining spandex stuff.

Well, it worked. She was starting to retain a little warmth just by looking at him.

“Yeah, a yurt. Isn’t it cool?” He turned back to look out the door, at snow-covered mountains, and snow-covered trees, at the snow piled up outside the door and their snow-covered skis, and at more snow falling from the sky, big, fat flakes. “I always wanted to do this, like since I was ten years old. I couldn’t believe it when you said you wanted to go camping in a yurt. I mean, it freaking amazed me.”

She’d freaking amazed herself, too. She’d never considered herself a very good liar, but she’d sure pulled this one off. He’d obviously forgotten the night he’d let his heart’s desire for this particular adventure slip.

She would never forget it. Not the whole wild twenty-four hours. He’d saved her life, hers and Fast Jack Spencer’s, who was incredibly darn lucky to have ended up in juvie instead of the state penitentiary. Skeeter had worked some magic there, along with Christian Hawkins, to keep Jack out of the slammer. But his debt to society was a long way from being paid. He was going to be stuck in the ragged wasteland of western Colorado for the summer, digging dinosaur bones for her grandfather in his jobs-training program for criminally convicted juveniles. The rest of the Rats had been picked up and were in the social services system. It was going to be a long process getting them all sorted out, or in many cases, getting their family situations sorted out. A few of the older ones had simply disappeared, slipped free, unwilling to be wards of the state, even more unwilling to go back to the bad family situations that had put them on the street in the first place.

Secretly, Nikki thought Jane Linden and Fast Jack deserved some kind of medal for feeding and housing all those kids with little more than their wits and sticky fingers to get them by.

Jane, of course, had not been charged. All she’d tried to do was help a bad situation that had long since been out of her control. Nikki didn’t know what was going to happen between the girl and Travis, but she was hoping they could work through the gulf seeming to separate them. At least that had been her hope before she’d gone to Panama. Since the night the Aztec had burned, and what had happened there, Travis had become more and more withdrawn, spending more time with Christian Hawkins than with anyone, even disappearing for days on end sometimes. For the first time since they’d become best friends, he was holding himself apart from her, keeping his own council, his own secrets. The last few times she’d tried to paint him, it had been hopeless.

She knew what had done it: the killings at the Aztec. He didn’t seem to be suffering any ill effects from his actions, but he’d been changed. She didn’t understand it, not really, even though Kid had explained it to her the best he could, before finally just giving her the quick, two-word bottom line—guy stuff—and his advice: Leave the guy alone; he’ll figure it out.

She and Kid had figured out all kinds of stuff, fun stuff, serious stuff, how to fall even more in love stuff.

“What a cool honeymoon, huh?”

Oh, yeah, it was cool. Below zero last night. She didn’t think a honeymoon could get much cooler than theirs, not and still have two live honeymooners in it.

Yurt camping.

Had she been insane?

“Are you ready for some coffee, babe?” He
finally
closed the door, for all the good it did.

“Yes, please.” God, what an incredible liar she’d turned out to be all the way around. She’d said “yes, please” to Kid’s coffee, as in “Please give me a cup of sludge, Kid,” except Kid’s camping coffee was even worse than his at-home coffee. It was instant, to match the milk.

Instant milk.

A small shudder went through her at the thought. What she wanted was a caramel macchiato with steamed whole milk and whipped cream on top.

He’d stoked the fire up and gotten it going before he’d decided to stand in the open door and freeze his whatevers off, and she could almost feel the tendrils of heat reaching the bed.

Almost, but not quite, not yet, but the bed, well, she had to admit there were some benefits to yurt camping, especially luxury yurt camping, like gazillion-thread-count sheets and silk-and-velvet duvets on down quilts. For a price, the yurt keepers would have snowmobiled in a caramel macchiato, but what she and Kid had wanted more than designer coffee and gourmet meals delivered was privacy—and her peek out the door had proved they definitely had privacy for as far as the eye could see.

There was nobody out there, not until the next yurt, or back at the lodge, which was a good three miles down the trail.

Three miles on cross-country skis, she’d discovered, wasn’t as daunting as she’d expected, even in the snowstorm that had caught them halfway to the yurt yesterday. And “Luxury Rough,” as their package was described, wasn’t all that rough, not with Kid Chaos ramrodding the expedition.

For starters, he carried all the gear and didn’t know the meaning of the word lost. Snowstorm or not, he’d guided them along a trail she couldn’t even see until they’d made it safe and sound to the yurt. As a matter of fact, she hadn’t even been able to see the yurt, until he’d opened the door. It had been such a whiteout, and she’d been so deeply huddled in her hat and coat, like a turtle, with barely her eyes peeking out, kind of like this morning. As far as getting lost, there was no such thing anymore, he’d told her, not since the widespread availability of the Global Positioning System.

Could have fooled her. She was lost, lying right there in bed with a GPS on the table next to her. She didn’t have a clue where they were, other than the San Juan range of the Rocky Mountains, somewhere outside of Telluride, Colorado.

Of course, she didn’t have his somewhat obsessive need for bearings, and positions, and lat-longs. She was with him, and that was as “unlost” as she’d ever been. She’d thought he was the storm in her life, but she’d discovered he was really the rock, the one steady thing she could hold on to when all else failed. He would go through hell itself to find her and keep her safe. She’d watched him do it, and watching Kid Chaos fight his way through hell was a profoundly amazing sight.

“You know what we could do today?” Kid asked.

Stay in bed?

“We could build a snow cave.” He was grinning like that long-ago ten-year-old.

Snow cave. Hmmm. She ran that around in her brain for a couple of seconds, but couldn’t get any further than “Why?”

There was snow everywhere, all of it beautifully arranged by Mother Nature. She didn’t really see the need to shove it around and get her mittens wet. Actually, it was too cold for her mittens to get wet, and she had special mittens now, with liners and over-mittens, and doodads for hooking them to her coat. She had a lot of things she’d never had before, like gaiters and skins and Gore-Tex. The only thing silky in her honeymoon wardrobe was her own set of long underwear, which he’d shimmied her out of early last night.

“Because the snow is perfect for packing. We could build a really nice one this morning, and then have lunch in there, or spend the night.”

Her eyes widened in alarm. He had to be kidding. They were already in a
yurt
, for crying out loud. They were already camping in the wilderness, and he wanted to take the whole honeymoon expedition down a notch to a . . . a
snow cave?

God, even the words “honeymoon expedition” were an oxymoron, or should have been. The situation was outlandish, but oh, it had made him so happy to plan and organize and pack and repack the supplies for their wilderness ordeal.

Still, there were limits.

She pulled the covers back up over her head and uttered one word into the blankets: “No.”

“I bet you’d be good at it,” he said, his tone cajoling, as if he actually thought he could talk her out of bed and away from the fire. She could tell from his voice that he was walking back toward the bed. “You could sculpt angels at the entrance.”

That might be fun, but the rest of it didn’t sound like any fun at all.

“And we could decorate it with the cranberry juice and make a big sno-cone out of it.”

Okay. Maybe it could be fun to freeze her butt off outside packing snow into into a big hollow ball, then staining it with fruit juice and sitting inside.

She thought about it for a second, then changed her mind.

“No.” He was nuts.

“Ah, geez, Nikki. What are we going to do all day, if we don’t go out and play in the snow?”

Try to stay warm. The answer was so obvious, it wasn’t even a question in her mind.

“Come on, Nik. Be a sport.”

She felt part of his weight come down on the bed.

“I am
not
a sport,” she said inside her silk-and-velvet cocoon.

“Not a sport?” he asked, settling more of his weight on the bed. “Then what are you, baby?”

The covers lifted for him to slide inside, and she started scooting to the other side as fast as she could. Darn it. He was going to be six feet of frozen Popsicle.

But he wasn’t. He was warm, and naked, and he had her in his arms before she got even two inches from her spot.

“Umm.” He nuzzled her neck, pulling her in close to his body. “You’re soft.”

And he was hard, everywhere, even after practically standing outside in the snow.

He took her breast in his mouth and teased her with his tongue, which she absolutely loved. “You’re sweet.”

Moving up to her mouth, he sucked on her lips, then slid his tongue inside and ravished her, all the while pressing her back into the bed. She had a feeling the old snow cave was sliding down to the bottom of his “To Do” list pretty damn fast. If he was going to do anything this morning, it looked like it was going to be her, which she absolutely loved.

“Hmmm. Soft and sweet.” He kissed her lips again. “You must be a doughnut.”

She giggled. A doughnut. “You’re a doughnut.”

“Me? Soft?” He laughed. “I don’t think so, honey. I’m hard and—”

“Yummy.”

“Yummy sounds soft.” He smoothed his hand up over her knee, then higher, and she opened for him, anticipating his touch. “How about—”

“Delicious,
mmmmm.
” Kid Chaos had magic hands. He moved his thigh over hers, and she felt him, hot and heavy between her legs.

“No, babe. Delicious
mmmmm
is you. I’m . . .” He pushed up inside her, and she all but melted beneath him. It was always so glorious, the way he made love to her. She ran her fingers up into his hair and brought his head back down to hers for another kiss, moving with him, breathing him in, letting him take her higher and higher.

She was so in love.

“Taking me to Paris,” she murmured a long while later, finishing his sentence after it had trailed off.

He let out a short laugh. “Yes,” he said, slowly easing himself out of her. “Paris.”

A year in Paris for a week in a yurt, and she still wasn’t sure she’d made a good deal, except in the marrying of him. Of that, she had no doubts. She’d take Kid Chaos any way she could get him, anywhere, any time—every time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tara Janzen lives in Colorado with her husband, children, and two dogs, and is now at work on her next novel. Of the mind that love truly is what makes the world go ’round, she can be contacted at
www.tarajanzen.com
. Happy reading!

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of heart-stopping action,
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and breathless passion.
Read on for a sneak peek of

C
RAZY LOVE

ON SALE SUMMER 2006

C
RAZY LOVE

ON SALE SUMMER 2006

P
INK.

Sweater.

Short.

Skirt.

Long.

Legs.

Dylan Hart flipped his cell phone shut and rubbed his hand over his forehead, trying not to stare at the girl on the other side of the office. She was out to slay him, his nemesis, the bane of his existence—Skeeter Bang, five feet eight inches of blond bombshell leaning over a computer.

Jail.

Bait.

She knocked a cigarette out of the pack of Mexican Faros on the desk and struck a match off her belt.

“Put that out,” he ordered. She knew there was no smoking in the office.

“Make me,” she said, then stuck the Faro between her lips and inhaled, holding the match to the end of the cigarette. A billow of smoke came out of her mouth when she exhaled.

Make me?

Dylan was the boss of 738 Steele Street in Denver, Colorado, second in command of Special Defense Force, SDF, a group of tough-as-nails black-ops shadow warriors who specialized in doing the Department of Defense’s dirty work.

Make me?

“Put out the damn cigarette, Skeeter,” the man working at the last computer said. “And if you bend over that desk one more time, I’m going to paddle you.”

Thank you, Superman,
Dylan thought.

The girl was out of control, but Superman, a.k.a. Christian Hawkins, had kicked more ass and taken more names than most men alive. He could handle Skeeter Bang, and honest to God, they had bigger problems, much bigger, like the phone call he’d just gotten from General Grant—and of course, there was still that little problem of the death sentence he’d picked up on his last mission. Wouldn’t want to forget about that now, would he?

Yes. Actually, he would, but forgetting about it wasn’t very goddamn likely.

“Skeeter,” Hawkins warned her again.

And the chit put it out, just like that, without batting an eyelash or missing a beat. Though who the hell would know if Skeeter batted her eyelashes? The girl
always
wore sunglasses, and a damn ball cap Dylan was about ready to burn, literally, put it in a trash can and blast it with a flamethrower.

He was hardly ever at Steele Street to see her, and then even when he was there, he couldn’t actually see her—which was all for the best. Just the way he liked it.

Except now he had this walking time bomb thing going, and if it turned out that things weren’t going to go his way and the whole damn shooting match was going to be over, well, if that’s the way things were going to be, maybe he should tell her how he felt.

Or maybe not.

Shit.
He was such an idiot. He shouldn’t have come home. He should have just toughed it out in Indonesia.

“So what did General Grant want?” Hawkins asked, gesturing at the cell phone Dylan still held in his hand. General Richard “Buck” Grant was SDF’s commanding officer at the Pentagon. He deployed them, paid them, and made sure damn few people beyond the secretary of defense had a clue what they did for a living. They trained at Quantico and Fort Bragg, lived in Denver, flew out of Peterson AFB or Buckley, and were the only group of special-forces operators in the world with a twenty-year-old girl on their team, even if she was just the office manager and their computer tech.

She also just happened to be one of the best auto mechanics they’d ever had at Steele Street—which was saying a lot, considering that most of SDF was made up of a bunch of former juvenile-delinquent car thieves who’d stolen, chopped, and rebuilt more cars than anyone else in the history of Denver. To the cops and the gangs, the short alley called Steele Street in lower downtown was still synonymous with grand theft auto, no matter that none of the guys had stolen a car in years.

Guys—that was his point. Every teenaged thief at Steele Street had been a guy. General Grant had started SDF with those same guys, all guys, until three years ago, when Hawkins had dragged home a spooky, baby-faced street rat with long blond hair and twenty stitches holding her face together.

Geezus.
They all needed their heads examined.

“Dylan?”

He jerked his attention back to Hawkins. The expression on his friend’s face told him he’d been caught red-handed, staring at her ass again.
Dammit
. He hadn’t even noticed her the first two years she’d been at Steele Street—and then one day, he had noticed her, noticed that suddenly she had more curves than a Camaro, that her stringy blond hair had turned into a platinum waterfall, and that though she was still spooky as hell, she wasn’t spooked anymore. She’d been standing on her own two feet, in combat boots no less, with confidence radiating off her like a supernova.

He’d been noticing her ever since. He couldn’t seem to help himself, which pissed him off to no end.

Ignoring Hawkins’s knowing grin, he cleared his throat.

“Grant’s concerned about some documents he saw at Senator Whitfield’s mansion tonight, about an hour ago,” he said. “He thinks they might be part of something called the Godwin File.” Concerned was putting it mildly. Apoplectic was more like it—which meant maybe Dylan ought to stop getting distracted by Skeeter’s butt and start focusing on the job he got paid to do.

“An hour?” Hawkins said. “He didn’t waste any time getting ahold of us.”

“No,” Dylan agreed. The general knew better than to drag his feet on something as volatile as the Godwin File, if what he’d seen really was the Godwin File. Most people doubted that the documents actually existed.

“And what does Grant want us to do with this file?”

“Steal it.” That was the mission. Steal the damn thing and bury it, before it blew up the careers of half a dozen congressmen and another half dozen major players at the Pentagon.

“From Senator Whitfield?” Hawkins’s gaze sharpened with interest.

Dylan knew it sounded nuts. Stealing from a United States senator was the kind of mission guaranteed to get somebody’s ass thrown in Leavenworth, even if the thieves worked for the Department of Defense—
especially
if they worked for the DOD. On top of all the regular “thou shalt not steal” laws, federal law explicitly forbade the use of military personnel for operations within the United States. More than once, though, when a situation had gotten sticky enough, Grant had shuffled him and a couple of the guys through the FBI’s payroll so they could follow through on a mission without having their backsides completely exposed.

Grant hadn’t mentioned any shuffling tonight, but Dylan knew their commanding officer always did his best to cover their asses and their tracks. Of course, under normal circumstances, Buck Grant and Arthur Whitfield were on the same side, America’s side, and under normal circumstances, U.S. Army generals did not go around authorizing the theft of top secret documents from senators—but nothing about the Godwin File was normal.

It was a legend, a myth, a time bomb that had been lurking in the murky waters of the Defense Department’s rumor mill for over a decade. It was the bogeyman sitting at the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and clandestine operations, and if the rumors were true, it had been a death warrant for a CIA agent stationed in the Middle East, two Israeli Mossad officers, and a foreign ambassador under their collective protection, just the sort of dirty laundry nobody wanted aired, especially the people whose names were on the orders.

“Whitfield has an appointment to see the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Monday morning at nine a.m. Grant wants the file to disappear before the meeting.”

“So we’re heading to Washington, D.C.”

“I am.” It was a one-man job, and given his current condition, he wanted to keep it that way. The last thing he needed right now was a partner breathing down his neck. Fortunately, it was a non-issue. All the other SDF operators were assigned elsewhere, except Hawkins, and he wasn’t going anywhere, not this week, and probably not next.

“You’re going to need somebody to watch your back,” Hawkins said.

“And that would be?” Dylan asked, giving the other man’s leg a pointed look. A cast went from just below Hawkins’s knee to down around his foot. The broken ankle was compliments of a successful mission six weeks ago in Afghanistan that had netted the United States armed forces a long-sought-after terrorist leader. No one was naming names at this point. Hawkins, with two other SDF operators, Creed Rivera and Kid Chaos, had done their jobs so well, word had yet to leak out that the terrorist leader was even missing, let alone that he was sitting in a cell in Guantanamo Bay. Besides, Superman had other things to take care of this week.

In answer, Hawkins flicked his gaze toward Skeeter.

A shiver of alarm skittered down Dylan’s spine. He couldn’t be serious. Skeeter? On a mission?

No way in hell.

Especially one of his missions, which all required deception, deceit, discretion, and stealth of the highest order, not to mention plenty of sheer, unadulterated nerve. He was a thief, the best. Big things, little things, cars, computer chips, ideas and identities, fingerprints, information, jewels, gems, high-tech junk, a nuclear war head out of Tajikistan, or seventeen million dollars out of an Indonesian warlord’s black-money slush fund: whatever General Grant wanted, Dylan delivered. Those were the terms of his freedom, and they hadn’t changed in the nine years since the general had first proposed SDF to the U.S. Secretary of Defense. An elite force of highly expendable men had appealed to the man who had been the secretary then, and to the two who had followed. SDF had a commendable reputation, but dozens of successful missions hadn’t changed Dylan’s situation. The other members of SDF, most of whom had been in the military, could come and go as they pleased, but he was always on borrowed time. The CIA still wanted his ass in a federal prison for his involvement in a dicey operation in Moscow back when he’d been a green kid smart enough to get what he wanted, but not smart enough to stay out of trouble while doing it. To date the agency had consistently been outgunned by General Grant and Dylan’s benefactor in the State Department, a man code named White Rook. It was a situation Dylan wasn’t going to allow to change. He’d be damned if he went to prison, which meant he couldn’t afford failure, ever.

So he didn’t fail, ever.

He shot Hawkins a cold look and silently shook his head. He wasn’t taking Skeeter to Washington with him. He wasn’t that insane, or that selfish. Not yet.

“Don’t talk about me behind my back like I’m not in the room,” she said, continuing to tap on the computer’s keyboard without so much as glancing over her shoulder.

Dylan swore under his breath. The girl
was
spooky. Neither he nor Hawkins had said a word, but she knew.

“You’re not going,” he said clearly, not wanting there to be any doubt in anybody’s mind, most of all his own.

“She’s good,” Hawkins insisted. “Steady as a rock and practically invisible when she wants to be.”

And when would that be? Dylan wondered, arching his eyebrow at his friend.

Hawkins didn’t blink, and against his better judgment, Dylan let his gaze slide back to Skeeter.

Forget it. She was outrageous, the cosmic opposite of invisible. Her pink sweater was sleeveless, practically Day-Glo, and absolutely, positively laminated to her body. Her black leather miniskirt hugged her hips like a second skin. She had Chinese tattoos inked into the upper part of her right arm. Underneath her black tights, a lightning-bolt tattoo streaked up her leg from her ankle and shot over her hip, up under her arm, up around her back, and down over the top of her shoulder. He’d never seen the whole thing, couldn’t see it now, but he knew it was there. She had that perfectly silky, perfectly straight, perfectly maddening platinum-blond ponytail that went all the way to her butt, and every day she managed to work a little chain mail into her outfit. Today it was her belt and a knife sheath. Add the mirrored sunglasses and the ball cap and she was nothing short of a piece of work.