Crazy Love (11 page)

“It’s my job, Mr. James…um, Travis, and I’m very happy to be doing it,” Red Dog said, looking very serious behind her crooked glasses, and still shaking his hand.

And Regan had underwear, a whole wardrobe of it, sheer silk and lace, in every color of the rainbow. He’d never actually seen Regan in any of her underwear, except in one notable photograph her sister, Nikki, had taken, but he’d seen the underwear. In fact, he’d spent some of the most formative years of his life ogling Regan McKinney’s underwear while it dried on the towel bar in the upstairs bathroom of the McKinney house in Boulder, Colorado. Old Doc McKinney should have charged him rent for all the time he’d spent up there.

“Skeeter left some things for you at the hotel,” Red Dog continued. “We’ll stop there first, and then I’ll take you over to Senator Whitfield’s. So, if you have all your luggage…?”

But this woman, even with wanting to take her to bed, he wanted, somehow, also to straighten her up, had a real urge to tap a few pocketfuls of paper into a tidy stack, to clean the smudges off her glasses, to redo the buttons on her shirt, correctly, to zip her and tie her, and get her back into her clothes, before someone else noticed she was coming undone.

“This is everything, just the pack,” he said, finally releasing her hand, and not so absently wondering what kind of underwear a girl named Red Dog would be wearing underneath all that sensible, serviceable, and practically falling-off khaki.

CHAPTER

12

L
EANING BACK
against an empty Town Car parked in Whitfield’s driveway, Skeeter took one long, last drag off her cigarette before dropping it on the concrete and grinding it out with the toe of her boot. That was her last one. She swore it.

She popped a couple of cinnamon mints in her mouth and went back to doing what she’d been doing—watching and waiting, and biding her time. She’d already done everything else, including taking it a little too personally that Travis still hadn’t gotten to Whitfield’s. She didn’t need the extra aggravation. Dylan had been giving her plenty. Between him getting up, and getting his steak, and finally getting in the Mercedes, it had just been one argument after another tonight. But by God, she was right where she’d planned on being, or close enough, right here in the freaking senator’s freaking parking lot of a driveway, with dozens of other drivers and what seemed to be about forty frat boy valets.

Okay, it was a compromise, like wearing the cheesy chauffeur uniform Dylan had gotten her, instead of her very cool Versace gown, but at least she wasn’t sitting on her butt back at the Hotel Lafayette, or on her way back to Denver, and even though she was the one dressed like a nutcracker in a black suit with black satin piping, gold braid, and epaufreakinglets with red fringe, she had the satisfaction of knowing that Dylan, the world’s biggest Mr. Know-It-All, didn’t know nearly as much as he thought he did.

He didn’t know what was in the trunk of their car, which she’d parked on the street, down a ways from the mansion for a better getaway. He hadn’t taken the time or even suspected for a moment that he should look in the trunk, because he’d
ass-umed
that she’d followed orders instead of thinking on her feet, which is what she got paid to do.

Just as well. Mr. Know-It-All had enough on his mind without the burden of knowing she’d brought all her toys to the party—and then some.

A small smile curved her lips. She hadn’t confessed to half of the equipment she had stuffed in her rucksacks. She had flash-bangs and flashlights, tactical, high intensity—the kind where a girl could blind the bad guys and shoot them at her quick-fingered leisure. Dylan didn’t like her Tac II combat knife? Well, maybe if the going got tough, he’d prefer one of her razor-sharp, five-inch folding knives, or her “MacGyver” knife and gizmo tool. She had sling ropes, carabiners, pressure dressings—which she hoped to God she wouldn’t need—and a weatherproof notebook with plastic-laminated pages. In case she fell into a lake or had to ford a river. Here. In the middle of Senator Whitfield’s driveway.

Geez.
Maybe she was overprepared.

Nah,
she decided after a moment’s consideration. She’d nailed this gig.

The sudden vibration in her pocket was a good sign, something she’d been waiting for since before they’d left the hotel.

Pulling out her phone, she flipped it open and brought it to her ear. “Skeeter.”

“Hey, Skeet. Travis. I’m with Red Dog.
Whoa
…watch out for that…uh, truck…. Uh, Skeet, we’re heading to the hotel now. We’re still at least—
oh
,
geez
…”

There was a short pause.

“Half an hour out,” Travis said, sounding a little breathless.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m…” There was a long, pregnant pause, during which she could sense him holding his breath again. “…fine, just fine. Uh, maybe you should…”

“Should what?” she asked, when he didn’t continue.

“Uh, not you. Red Dog. Uh, Red Dog, why don’t you let me take that and…uh, put it over here…. No, honestly, there’s plenty of room.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Fine,” he answered, a little too quickly, she thought. “Just fine. Half an hour to the hotel, or less, and Red Dog says the Lafayette is just a few minutes from Senator Whitfield’s, so hopefully…
damn
…I can be there in under an hour.”

An hour. “Damn” was right. She hoped to be headed back to the hotel herself by then.

“We’ll stick to the plan,” she said. “With you coming to Whitfield’s ASAP. If Dylan and I get ahead of schedule on this end, I’ll call.”

“So how does it look?”

“Like a very big party. Nothing unusual…yet.” She wasn’t looking for trouble that wasn’t there, but she still had the same uneasy feeling she’d had this morning when she’d called in her equipment list to Red Dog, and that feeling said trouble was looking for her, or Dylan.

“Let’s hope it stays that way. I’ll be there as soon as I…
whoa
…can.”

Whoa
can? What the hell was
whoa
can?

“Thanks. I rented you a tuxedo, the best I could get on short notice. It’ll be in the closet in my room at the suite. I’d like you to work the party from the inside.”

“How bad is the best you could get?” For a couple of seconds, he sounded skeptical, instead of breathless.

“You’ll be fine. You won’t stand out. I promise.” Skeeter wasn’t worried about the quality of the tuxedo. Travis James made everything look good. He even made nothing look good. Some people would say he
especially
made nothing look good, being the favorite nude model for one of the hottest rising stars on the American art scene—Nikki McKinney Chronopolous, a name that was a mouthful by anyone’s definition.

“Then I’ll see you as soon as I get suited up.”

She could almost see the smile she heard in his voice, and the unusual nervous edge that went with it—damned unusual. Nothing made Travis James nervous. He was the personification of the laid-back, Boulder slacker dude, imperturbable. Of course, he’d just gotten back from Colombia with Creed, and those missions sometimes slid toward a wild, dark side. She’d know just how wild when she saw him. None of the guys could hide anything from her—except Dylan. He was the boss, the loner, the brick wall she could never get around, which was damned inconvenient for a lot of reasons, especially tonight.

“Thanks. I’ll see you when you get here.” She hung up the phone and stuck it back in her pocket. Then she checked her watch.

She and Dylan had hammered out a schedule. Actually, Dylan had hammered out a schedule, while she’d held her tongue and silently fumed. She’d won the war, she told herself, she was at Whitfield’s, but she’d definitely lost the schedule skirmish.

The plan, according to Dylan, was that he would mingle and schmooze for an hour or two on his own and discreetly check out the lay of the land, including spotting any added guards on duty for the party, or cameras that hadn’t shown up on the plans of Whitfield’s security system. Then once he’d made himself perfectly at home in the posh palace and practically invisible in the posh crowd, he would mosey on back to Whitfield’s office, jimmy open the door, use Whitfield’s fingerprints to open the safe, then grab the file and mosey back out to the party, and from there, back out to the Mercedes, while she stood around and stayed out of trouble.

Well, they were well into the mission, and she’d done plenty of standing around. She’d also mingled with the chauffeurs, schmoozed with the valets, discreetly checked the lay of the land, and located the outside door into Whitfield’s office, and she was ready to make her move, which was not leaning her butt against somebody’s Town Car and shining the side panels all night with her black satin piping. The Godwin file was as good as hers, and once she got it, she was calling Dylan on his phone and telling him to ditch the party, they were going home.

Then she was going after Negara. The research she’d done this afternoon on the drugs used in interrogations had scared the hell out of her. Dylan should have stayed on the U.S.S.
Jefferson.
He’d had no business coming home, and no business whatsoever in taking the Godwin mission tonight.

She didn’t want to think about the injuries she’d seen on his wrist, but she had been, a lot.

Yeah, Negara was hers, but it was going to take time. She’d need months of intel gathering and preparation for the mission, and she’d need Kid Chaos to make the hit.

She popped another couple of cinnamon mints in her mouth. She didn’t need anybody’s help to get the damn Godwin file. After Dylan had gone upstairs to pack this morning at Steele Street, she’d done a little packing of her own. For the most part, both hers and Dylan’s rucksacks—whether he’d claim his or not—were identically equipped, but she’d brought a few extra pieces to put in hers: a small biometric fingerprint pad no bigger than a compact, which it resembled, and her own version of a decoder ring—the DRSB303. The only biometric lock in Steele Street belonged to Creed, and she’d taken the damn thing apart and recoded it so many times, it was a wonder it still worked. Except, of course, she’d made damn sure it worked, even after the time she’d programmed it to open only when reading the print off her left butt cheek.

Creed had thought that was a hoot.

His wife, Cody, hadn’t thought it was quite so funny.
“Kids,”
she’d said.

Old married people,
Skeeter had thought.

She didn’t have anything quite so creative in mind for Whitfield’s safe. Using her own fingerprints was out of the question, of course, but she had the vice president’s, a little souvenir Grant had sent her a few months back, and since Whitfield and the veep were in the same political party, she figured the deed would create a lot of private conversation but not much press, which was just the way they liked things at SDF—media free.

Cripes.
She wished Travis were already here. Her “spidey sense” was humming.

She wanted him on the inside, watching out for Dylan, since she’d been banned from the party and told in no uncertain terms not to budge her butt from the car.

Screw uncertain terms. She’d budged big-time, and she was ready to budge again. She couldn’t afford to wait for backup. She wanted to wrap this thing up and get the hell out of there—and the time to start was now. She’d “cased the joint,” and the party looked exactly the way it was supposed to look, like well-controlled chaos. Everybody was moving in the right direction, everybody doing their job, including the guests she’d been checking out since she and Dylan had first pulled up.

So this was it.

Pushing off the Town Car, she did a quick check of her pockets to make sure she had her B&E—breaking and entering—tools, and her handy-dandy interference remote for messing with the camera honed in on Whitfield’s office door.

Her suppressed Para .45 was concealed in a shoulder holster under her uniform jacket, her Tac II combat knife was in a sheath on her belt, and she knew for a fact that she wasn’t the only chauffeur in Whitfield’s driveway packing heat and a seven-inch blade. Some of these “drivers” had necks as big as her thighs.

She could think of a lot of ways she would have preferred to cross the huge expanse of open lawn from the driveway to Whitfield’s office, like invisibly, on her belly, in camo cream and a balaclava, but given that there was damn little hope of stealth in her cheesy outfit and amid the crowd of chauffeurs, valets, and caterers milling around the grounds, she was sticking with a full-out frontal approach. She’d just walk past all of them and then blend into the scenery at the back of the house. Yes, sir, she’d take all the gold braid and black satin piping Dylan had stuffed her into and pretend to be a tree—like maybe a Christmas tree. She wasn’t even going to mention the red fringe.

He’d done it on purpose. She knew it. There was no way to get a uniform this gaudy by accident. But if he thought it was going to clip her wings, he was wrong. Her biggest problem was the guard patrolling the back of the mansion, but even dressed like a Christmas tree, she had enough skill to make sure he didn’t see her.

DYLAN
had a bad feeling.

It wasn’t new.

He’d gotten this bad feeling ten days ago at the exact instant that he’d been snatched off the street in Jakarta, and though it had alternately gotten much, much worse and somewhat better, it had never gotten close to going away. It was clinging to him, like a giant leech with its sucker locked onto his skin.

Interestingly enough, there had been actual leeches attached to him on Sumba. Not torturously, just naturally, a few dozen hugely fat, free-range leeches that had made him their home for a few days, and since he’d been shackled to the wall, they’d pretty much had their way with him.

Fuck.

He hated leeches, and there was absolutely no reason for him to be thinking about them while he was going through the contents of Arthur Whitfield’s safe, looking for the Godwin file and breaking out in a sweat while he did it. The air-conditioning in the rest of the mansion didn’t seem to reach back into this cubbyhole of a vault room behind Whitfield’s bookcases—and he wasn’t out of there yet.

Dammit.

That was the thing about going through a lot of papers—trying to find the right one, and Whitfield had a boatload of documents in his safe. Shelves of them, and the likelihood of a clearly stamped name on the envelope containing the file he needed was damn slim, especially in the case of something like Godwin, where even the best of it would be couched in acronyms and double-speak. Ordering the assassination of two fellow countrymen had a way of making people obscurant.