Crazy Kisses (5 page)

Bling. That’s what she’d thought earlier this evening. She would put on a little bling to go with her sequins and tiara. She’d been in Panama for three nights, and for three nights running, she’d been hanging out with the Sandoval twins, waiting for Kid. It had been one party after another to keep from going crazy worrying about him, about why he wasn’t home like Skeeter had expected, and about how she was going to feel if he didn’t make it back before she had to leave—because she wasn’t looking back. She had a life to lead, and she couldn’t move forward if she was always looking back.

“What
are
you doing here, Nikki?” he asked again, lifting her hand between them, his meaning disturbingly clear.

“So Skeeter told you?”
Dammit.
She’d wanted to do it herself, in her own time, to explain her engagement in her own way, whatever in the hell that might have turned out to be.

“Yes.” The word came out flat.

Hell.
If she’d come and there’d been no connection left between them, if there’d been no chemistry, no heat, no love, she would have already told him everything, cleared the air, closed those damn books that were giving her fits, and be ready to catch her flight and move on in the morning.

But they’d gone nuclear.

And she’d just gotten busted for bling. She should never have put the ring back on, not after she’d taken it off. Given where she’d ended up tonight, she never should have put the ring on in the first place. That hadn’t been a news flash four weeks ago when she’d done it, and it sure as hell wasn’t a news flash when she was lying naked in bed with Kid Chaos.

“I needed to see you,” she said. “When you said you’d be back, I thought you meant before I hit menopause.”

Another grin touched the corners of his mouth, but just barely.

“You
did
say you’d be back, Kid.”

YEAH
, he had, Kid thought, and he’d meant every word when he’d said them, but things had gotten complicated.

“The mission took longer than we’d planned,” he said. “Adjustments had to be made.” And that was about all he could say about what he had done. Everything else was either classified or nothing he wanted her to know. She hated what he did, and she didn’t know the half of it. Hell, she didn’t know a tenth of it, a hundredth, and if it was up to him, that’s exactly the way he was going to keep it.

“Even Creed made it home for Christmas.”

“Yeah.” It was true. By Christmas, Pablo Castano and Manuel Garcia had been dead; his and Creed’s job had been finished. But Creed wasn’t a black-ops sniper. “I was . . . uh, tasked with another mission.” The assassinations of Juan Conseco’s lieutenants had taken weeks of planning, recon, and rehearsal, but the results had been exactly what they were supposed to be: two shots, two kills, the perfect ratio. From there, he’d been tagged for the Putumayo mission, and almost before he’d realized it, he’d been gone for seven months—six of them spent thinking she was still there, somehow part of his life.

He’d been wrong. The proof was staring him in the face, the damn thing he’d been trying so hard not to think about for the last four weeks. The thing he’d completely forgotten the instant he’d seen her, and remembered the instant he’d seen her ring.

“So you’re engaged,” he said as casually as possible.

Fuck.
It sounded so much worse out loud than it did knocking around inside his brain, painfully worse.

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

Oh, sure. Right.

He could see how she could have a few doubts at this point, but the ring looked damned real to him, and it made him feel goddamned awful, actually sick, and really fucking angry. A ring on her left hand said only one thing: She’d been sleeping with another man.

Sex. Like they’d just had. With another man.

Another man inside her.

Fuck.
He rolled onto his back and stared at the goddamned ceiling fan.

He couldn’t do this, this whole hash-it-out scene, not without saying things he knew he would regret, probably not without breaking something—and that was the wrong goddamn impulse to give in to right now. He was way too primed for violence, and no matter what she’d done, she didn’t deserve that from him.

With one move, he pushed himself out of the bed, and grimacing, headed for the bathroom. He didn’t look back. Sure she had doubts, or she wouldn’t have come to Panama, but before she’d had doubts, she’d fucked another guy—and he was in no shape to deal with it.

In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face, and then stood in front of the sink, forcing himself to keep his hands relaxed. He couldn’t get back in the bed with her. He knew that much.

After another minute of just standing there, watching the water drip off his face, he realized that was the only goddamn plan he was going to come up with—not sleeping with her the rest of the night.

Fine. Great. He’d go with it.

But when he got back to the bedroom, it was a done deal. She and her little purple robe were gone.

He heard her banging around in the kitchen, and figured it was good enough. She could bang around all night long, what was left of it. He was going back to bed—alone.

C
HAPTER

3

T
HE MISSION TOOK LONGER.

We had to make adjustments.

Nikki banged a pot on the stove.
Damn him.

He was angry. Well, there was plenty of anger to go around. Seven months and all he could say was “the mission took longer than we’d planned”?

She banged another pot on the stove just for the hell of it.

I was tasked with another mission.

She’d show him “tasked.”

Another pot came down, and then she had to stop. He only had three pans. She started water for tea in one and slammed the others around a bit getting them back in the cupboard.

This had been their whole problem the whole time they’d been together: Peter “Kid Chaos” Chronopolous was the most buttoned-up man she’d ever met.

Men gave it up for her—always, every time. She took off their clothes, put them under her lights, and deconstructed them, and up to a certain point, every man she’d ever painted or photographed had been glad to do it. After that “certain point” they all balked, except for Travis James. Her angel model simply didn’t have anything to hide. But balk or not, she had never let a guy get away from her without giving up at least some of his secrets. More often than not, she got more than they ever meant to reveal.

Except for Kid Chaos.

He was incredibly self-contained. So self-contained, there wasn’t room for her, except in his bed.

Damn him.

Two people could not make a life out of just sex, not even the kind of sex they had. In all the nights they’d spent together, there had been only one where he’d opened up, the night he’d gotten back from Colombia with his brother’s remains. The experience had been shattering. He’d hurt so badly that night, and she’d hurt for him. But for all they’d shared, by morning, he’d had himself back under control.

He was the Ice Man, glacially cool Kid Chaos. In his line of work, that was probably considered an asset, but in a relationship, it was a definite obstacle.

Adjustments had to be made.

She’d show him adjustments. She was going to “adjust” herself back to Denver in the morning, and if
anything
he’d said to her tonight had been true, he wouldn’t be too far behind.

And if he was too far behind, that would be the end of it, because she’d be gone.

KID
knew three things the moment he woke up: Nikki wasn’t by his side; he was crazy in love with her, which under the circumstances was a goddamn awful thing to have to admit; and something was wrong—more wrong than just Nikki not being next to him.

Sure, when he’d gone to bed, he’d wanted to be alone, but he didn’t now, especially when something didn’t feel right.

He pushed himself out of the bed, soundlessly, and slipped on his pants. Reaching for his pistol was automatic. Racking the slide and chambering a round was deliberate, something he usually did before he fell asleep. But last night he’d fallen asleep with Nikki in his arms, and he’d forgotten, which he hoped to hell wasn’t indicative of the way things were going to be, that he’d be so sex-addled around her, he wouldn’t be able to think straight. Guys like him did not fall asleep without their guns cocked, locked, loaded, and less than an arm’s length away.

Yeah, he was hoping there was some way for them to work through this mess, despite that goddamn ring on her finger. A future together, that’s what he’d been thinking, and he kept right on thinking it up until he got outside and had to face the fact that she was thinking something else.

There was light coming from the kitchen, illuminating the front half of the courtyard, and her hot pink mock-croc leather suitcases were stacked next to each other on the patio, both of them packed, zipped, and ready to go.

It didn’t even take a second for what it all meant to register, and he couldn’t believe it. She was walking out on him. In the middle of the night. What the hell part of “I love you, Kid. Oh, God, please, I love you,” had he misunderstood? Or had all that just been the heat of the fricking moment?

Because there had been heat, searing, consuming heat when they’d made love. He’d been reborn in it, felt hope in it, up until he’d seen her ring—and now the suitcases.

Goddamn.
This couldn’t be right. It couldn’t end like this. Something huge had happened to him when he’d seen her at the Sandovals’. Suddenly he’d seen a life for himself again, something beyond the day-to-day battle of staying alive, and for him, for the last seven months, it had been a battle every single fricking day. Somebody was
always
out to grease his ass.

He started toward the door into the living room, determined to do something, say something, anything, to make her understand, to apologize, whatever it took—and then he saw the body, a crumpled form in sequins and feathers lying next to the garden wall, drenched in blood.

Half a gallon of adrenaline instantly drop-loaded into his veins, switching on every survival instinct he had. He tightened his hold on the .45, wrapping his right hand around his left on the gun’s grip, his gaze raking the yard. The dead person wasn’t Nikki. He’d known that immediately. The body was too big, all long legs, muscular arms, and broad shoulders—the exact opposite of everything that was Nicole Alana McKinney.

The rest of the yard was clear. He ran his gaze over the body again, saw the mutilation that told him just exactly how much fucking trouble he was in, and all the while, he listened.

Listened for a breath, for a step, for any little snick of sound that would tell him where the killer was, where Nikki was, tell him she was still alive, still
here
.

Please, God.
If she’d been taken from the house, the odds against them got so much worse. He wasn’t even going to consider the possibility of death—not hers, not tonight.

Then he heard it, the scrape of a chair and the clink of a cup being set on the kitchen table.

The assassin heard it, too.

Kid saw a shadow slide across the window in the other bedroom, and he moved to intercept, silently, quickly, from the patio into the main bathroom. He was waiting for the bastard, his knife in his hand, when the killer came down the hall.

Shooting him at close range with the .45 would have been effective, easy—and loud. The five-inch, razor-sharp Spyderco blade was just as effective and far quieter, but it came at a cost when the man instantly countered Kid’s attack and fought back, blocking Kid’s first strike.

Kid would have fought, too, if someone had been trying to slip a knife up under his skull to sever his brain stem, or stab him in the neck to slit his throat. He would have fought like a sonuvabitch, and the guy was—fighting for his life. The assassin got in a good hit with his elbow, catching Kid right on the mother-fricking bullet wound in his side. Pain, white hot, flashed over him like a strobe light on speed. Stars flashed in front of his eyes, but he didn’t make a sound, didn’t let go, and didn’t let up. The guy kicked and squirmed, until Kid body-slammed him hard into the doorjamb and stunned him enough to wrestle him to the floor. He got in one deep cut to the guy’s gut and jerked the blade upward—hard.

As added insurance, Kid took the assassin’s head in his hands and twisted, hard and fast, breaking the guy’s neck. The sound was unmistakable. He heard the snap loud and clear.

So did Nikki.

Her gasp brought his head around.

She was sitting at the table in the kitchen, on the other side of the living room, staring right at him, frozen in shock. The look of horror on her face did absolutely nothing to ease the rush of adrenaline coursing through him, jacking him up. He knew how he looked: frighteningly fierce, kneeling on a guy he’d just killed with a knife—killed, he might add, with a fair amount of skill. The guy had gone
down,
and except for whatever screwup had alerted the guy, and the resulting grappling around, Kid had taken him down almost without a sound. If there were other gunmen in the house, they didn’t know he was on the hunt.

But they knew someone was in the kitchen, someone who gasped out loud, and clinked her cup, and didn’t have a clue what kind of danger she was in.

Kid knew. He heard the soft crunch of a footstep on the grass runner in the hall behind the kitchen, and drew his pistol, his knee still firmly in the dead assassin’s back.

Nikki’s eyes widened, the blood draining from her face. In another life, he would have told her, “Honey, when a guy points a gun in your direction, duck, dive, run, anything, just move and keep moving.” But it was all over before he could have even gotten the word “honey” out of his mouth. The other killer cleared the hall; Kid covered him and squeezed the trigger twice, rapid-fire, on his Heckler & Koch .45—body shots. The guy dropped like a stone behind her.

Perfect. Now everybody in a five-block radius knew somebody was shooting something. More likely, if Juan Conseco had sent more than two guys to murder him in his sleep, and they were paying attention, they knew
el asesino fantasma
was shooting something, probably their guys. The man he’d strangled had been carrying a silenced semiautomatic pistol. The guy he’d shot had been carrying the same, and he’d just squeezed off two full, hot loads with plenty of bang.

Aiming at the dead guy’s head, he rose to his feet and, standing between the man and Nikki, fired off another hollow-point bullet. He wasn’t taking any chances. He never took any chances.

He was across the living room and had Nikki by the arm and out of the chair before she could even get her mouth closed, let alone wipe the stunned expression off her face. Holding her close, he shielded her off to his right side as he put another bullet in the other killer, head shot. Neither of the bastards was ever getting up again. When Kid cleared a room, it stayed clear.

Turning her around, he hustled her back out the door to the patio. The house had been made. He’d been made, and that left only one thing to do: run like hell.