Crazy Hot (10 page)

So who had dreamed up such a masochistic, homoerotic twist on the story?

The answer hit him before the question even finished forming in his mind.

She'd done it. Nikki McKinney.

I call it
Narcissus by Night, she'd said. It was her work.

Quinn had said she was an artist, but sweet Christ. He slanted her a look out of the corner of his eye. She didn't look old enough to know anything about what he was seeing on the wall.

And who was the guy?

Kid wouldn't let anyone paint him with that look on his face. Hell, he couldn't even get that look on his face, not on command, not without some serious incentive, like having the woman of his dreams stretched out naked beneath him and the two of them well into the most incredible sex of his life.

Someone like Nikki McKinney ought to do the trick.

The immediate visual he got cleared up the mystery. All he had to do was put her naked in the pool, and suddenly the whole painting made perfect sense—unless the Narcissus guy was gay.

He could only hope.

“It's amazing,” he said, telling the truth. Subject matter aside, the walls looked like something out of a museum.

“Thank you.”

“So you . . . uh, know all these guys?” He had to ask.

“Not in the biblical sense,” she said in passing, throwing him a coolly artless look over her shoulder.

He grinned. He couldn't help himself. Then in the next instant, his grin faded completely away.

She'd walked on by, leading the way through the living room, leaving him to follow behind the black Lycra miniskirt, behind the languid movement of bare feet, bare naked legs, and the smooth rolling motion of her hips, behind the most perfect ass he'd ever seen—perfectly curved, perfectly tight. And he was dying, the awful, wonderful feeling from the porch rearing up again and swamping him in one big crashing wave.

Pure lust had never come so close to dropping him to his knees. Never. He could handle lust, so this had to be something else, but he'd be damned if he was going to put a name to it. He didn't dare. Whatever it was, it didn't relent, not all the way through the dining room, through the kitchen, or across the back porch and out into the yard. It was like a fist around his heart, a cold knot in his stomach.

She kept up a casual, mostly one-sided conversation about the weather. He heard himself agree—
Yes, ma'am, it is definitely hot
—all the time trying to tear his gaze away from the sway of her butt and the little scrap of black cloth trying to cover it—and failing. The only victory he could claim was the struggle he won to keep his hands to himself and his tongue in his mouth; he didn't jump her. Yeah, that was a victory, a pitiful, embarrassing victory.

She made him feel like a hound, and he'd never dogged a woman in his life. He liked to think he was a classier guy than that, smarter—but she was taking him down with every step she took.

They were headed toward the stone cottage he'd noted earlier. With an effort of pure will, he forced himself into sniper mode. He checked out lines of sight and potential weaknesses in the building. On the up-side, he didn't find many of the latter. The place was a fortress; the walls looked to be two feet thick at the windows.

Concentrating on the business at hand gave him a bit of a breather, eased up on the tightness in his chest. He started to relax just a little—right up until she opened the cottage door and he followed her inside.

Then all bets were off.

Work, she'd said. She had work to do. He'd seen the living room, seen the doorbell, and he should have been better prepared—but he wasn't. Nothing on earth could have prepared him for Narcissus in the flesh, in the raw, in angel wings.

SRCHN4U
. He flashed on the Jeep in the alley and knew he'd just found the person with the ropes and gear, Nikki McKinney's favorite naked guy. The angel definitely looked like he could pull himself up the side of a cliff with just his arms and a solid finger jam.

Kid could do it. He knew what it took, and this guy had it.

Pushing his sunglasses a little more firmly onto his face, he checked out the rest of the studio. The place was a junk jungle: paint junk, camera junk, molds-and-plaster junk, computer junk, easels, frames, and rolls of canvas jammed in every cranny from the floorboards to the rafters. One wall was covered in black-and-white photographic portraits.

But inevitably, his gaze landed back on the angel. It sort of gave him the heebie-jeebies to know he'd practically seen the guy get off on himself. The sunglasses helped a little, like maybe he'd only
half
seen the guy's package.

Right, like if Narcissus turned around he wouldn't be staring right at it.

Geez. He'd grown up in and around Denver and had always heard Boulder girls were the wild ones, but this—this place, these guys everywhere, and Nikki McKinney the reason for all of it. This was really something else.

“Hey, it's looking good, Travis,” Nikki said, breezing into the studio.

“Yeah.” Without turning around the angel stepped back from where he'd been painting a dark, ragged maelstrom on a canvas backdrop. He tilted his head to one side, studying his work. Shoulder-length blond hair slid over the high arc of one white-feathered wing. “Yeah,” he said again. “That's the best eternity-sucking vortex of hell I've ever seen.”

Kid had never seen anything like this just-shy-of-six-feet, blond-haired, naked angel with a paintbrush in his hand. He'd never seen a guy wearing nothing but white wings curving higher than his head and draping all the way to the floor, powerful, muscular arcs of feathers and form. He'd never seen a guy with electric blue and glitter green shooting stars painted on his body, with blue and green comets streaking down his legs and across his back—the same electric blue and glitter green paint caked into Nikki McKinney's fingernails. The same blue paint smudged on her cheek.

Damn.

He got turned on just looking at her, and she'd spent the afternoon finger-painting some other guy—not exactly a hit on his top ten sexual fantasies playlist.

Top forty, maybe, but not top ten.

Shit.

It was going to be a long, hot, strange night, and he had a feeling he was going to wish he had some backup before it was through.

C
HAPTER

10

H
OLY MOTHER OF GOD,
Regan thought for the millionth time, working hard to keep from constantly looking over at Quinn while he drove. He'd kissed her, slanted his lips over hers, licked the inside of her mouth and consumed her, and she'd gotten wet. Instantly. Just like that.

She couldn't believe it.

Neither would Scott—not that her ex-husband was ever going to find out.

Five years of fantasizing about Captain Younger must have preconditioned her for a response. She couldn't explain it any other way. Five years of dreaming about his kiss, of imagining how it would feel to have his tongue in her mouth and his body pressing into hers, of how he would taste, had cross-wired her sense of reality—and reality had won, hands down.

In her fantasies, she hadn't imagined his mouth being so hot, or that the sheer physical heat of his kiss would wash down her body like a flood tide and make her ache for more. She hadn't known her breath would catch and her heart would race, that her hips would rise toward him and her body would yearn for his, before her mind had even registered the facts, let alone analyzed them and formulated a plan.

She needed to get a grip on her emotions—a highly unlikely occurrence when she was still using everything she had to keep her grip on Jeanette. Though he'd slowed it down considerably, the Camaro was still eating up the highway, coming off the last mountain pass, sliding in and out of the lanes and cruising through the traffic. They were heading for Steele Street and the lights of Denver on the plains below, miles and miles of luminous lights spreading all the way to the horizon.

“So you work for the natural history museum,” he said, surprising her out of her thoughts. “With the dinosaur bones. That must be very interesting.”

The way he said “very interesting” sounded a little like “drier than dust,” but he was obviously too nice to put it quite like that.

Nice?
She did a mental double take.

No.
Nice
was not a word she associated with him. Dangerous, devastating, an explosion going off in her life—that's what he was, not “nice.”

“It's quiet work, at least on my end of the museum.” Nice. My God. The man was carrying a gun. She must be crazy.

“Do you still go out to Rabbit Valley every summer?”

“No. Fieldwork isn't my strong point. I like working with the bones in the lab.” She liked it a lot, but had long ago learned that other people seldom shared her boundless enthusiasm for dragging the past up through millions of years of stone. Everyone loved the idea of bone hunting in the wilds of Wyoming or Argentina. Everyone loved the final product, a big dinosaur skeleton mounted in the hall of a museum. But the preparation of the bones, the scraping away of the rock with a dental pick, square inch by square inch, was not most people's idea of excitement.

They were wrong, of course. It was all amazingly exciting, actually riveting, watching the bones unfold from the stone.

“What are you working on now?”

She looked at him again. He was actually starting to sound pretty interested. That he was even attempting conversation was interesting. With Jeanette's low-pitched, rumbling snarl as background noise, there weren't exactly any awkward silences that needed filling. She could hardly hear herself think.

Of course, given the track of her thoughts, that had been a blessing. She'd practically devoured him when he kissed her. The more she thought about it, the more embarrassed she became all over again, which had made it tough for her to come up with anything to say or a good enough reason to say it.

“Slow down” had crossed her mind a few times, though. So had “Could you pull over and kiss me again, because I really can't believe what your kisses did to me.”

She'd kept both thoughts to herself. Played it safe. That's what she was good at, playing it safe.

“Well, we've got the
Seismosaurus
phalanges from New Mexico I've been working on for the last three years.”

“Long-term project, huh?” He flashed her a grin. For a moment she forgot all over again that he was dangerous. When he smiled, all she could remember was that not so very long ago he'd been America's hero and one of the fifty most beautiful people in the world.

Good Lord, he'd shaken hands with the President of the United States. What in the world was she doing sitting in a car going ninety miles an hour with him, talking about dinosaur toes?

She took a breath and did it anyway.

“It is taking a while, but the sandstone is like concrete, and there's only so much time I can devote to it. We have a lot of fossils in storage. I don't know if you've been to the museum lately, but the dinosaur exhibit is incredible. Dr. Houska, our curator of paleontology, is a phalanx expert, and he'd like to highlight some of our more spectacular fossils. Of course, what he'd really like to be known for is finding a Cretaceous carnivore's nesting site.”

She did a surreptitious check to see if his eyes had glazed over yet. Surprisingly, they hadn't.

“Isn't that what Wilson was always hoping to find at Rabbit Valley, a
Tyrannosaurus rex
nest, or egg, or a juvenile, or something?”

Regan's eyebrows lifted, her estimation of him skyrocketing, guns and bad guys or no guns and bad guys. Thanks to Spielberg, most people thought of Tyrannosaurus as a Jurassic dinosaur. Quinn seemed to know it belonged to the Cretaceous period.

“Well, yes. It's his dream, actually. I'm surprised you remember.” Shocked was more like it.

“I remember everything.” He smiled again, albeit a little more wryly. “And not just about that summer. It's how I got through college after almost flunking out of high school. Photographic memory. Of course, by my junior year at CU, I realized I actually had to start learning how things worked together, not just memorize facts.”

“You went to school in Boulder?” He was a wellspring of surprises.

“My last two years of undergrad work. I spent the first two at UC Denver.”

“And you never came back by the house to say hello?” She didn't know why the thought was so disappointing, but it was.

“We weren't exactly friends,” he said with a shrug. “And by then you were married. Scott Hanson, wasn't it?”

“How did you know that?”

“He's still a professor at Boulder, right? In the engineering department. That first semester I was at the university, right after I'd gone to see Wilson, everyone was talking about Dr. Hanson getting married. That he'd left his wife for some really young girl who was barely out of high school.”

Regan had been wrong. She hadn't been embarrassed before. She was embarrassed now, shamefully embarrassed. Mortified.

“It took me a while to put it all together,” he continued, his tone perfectly normal, perfectly conversational, as if he weren't saying the most awful things. “You getting married that fall, and him getting married that fall. I never would have put the two of you together, but your name came up, and there it was—Professor Hanson was marrying old Doc McKinney's granddaughter. Just so you know, I aced his class. I was the only A he gave that whole semester.”

“Congratulations.” The word was as stiff and cold as she felt. He wasn't nice. He was despicable.

“All the other students were hoping you'd show up one day, bring him his lunch or something. Even the girls wanted to get a look at the sweet young thing Hanson had snatched out of the cradle. Not me, though. I was glad you never came.”

So was she. It would have been horrible to have walked into one of Scott's classes and seen Quinn Younger—her middle-aged husband and the fantasy crush of her youth. It hadn't taken her long to realize she'd made a terrible mistake in marrying Scott—not nearly as long as it had taken her to get out of the marriage. It had all been so stupid and awful, the way he'd treated her like a child instead of a wife, telling her what to do and whom she could see, when she had to be home and what she should wear. He hadn't treated her like a child in bed, though, and given her lack of experience, the whole sex thing had been a disaster right from the very first time to the last.

To be fair, she'd made plenty of mistakes, too. By the time it was over, neither one of them had looked like much of a bargain.

Damn Quinn for dragging up the whole sorry mess. She didn't owe him an explanation, no way in hell, but her pride demanded one.

“Just so
you
know, I was a sophomore in college when I got married, a long way from being fresh out of high school, and whatever problems Scott and his first wife had didn't have anything to do with me. He had filed for the divorce before I ever went out with him, and I never slept with him before our wedding night. Never.”

“That's interesting,” he said in a tone that all but called her a liar.

“No.” She turned angrily in her seat and glared at him. “That's true. Believe me, if I had slept with him, I would never have marri—” She cut herself off and sank back into her seat, so furious she could barely speak.

“Well . . . he
was
old enough to be your father.” He turned on his blinker and switched lanes, moving toward an exit ramp. They were still in the mountains, overlooking the city below.

“Which was obviously the whole point of my getting married in the first place,” she snapped back. “I was looking for a father figure. I didn't need a rocket scientist or a therapist to tell me that then, and I sure as hell don't need you to tell me that now.”

A hundred yards off the exit, he pulled onto a dirt track heading into the trees and turned off the Camaro. After all the roar and rumble, the silence seemed sudden and complete. Slowly, the night sounds intruded. Wind blowing through the pine trees and rustling the leaves on the aspen. The muted sounds of traffic on the highway they'd left to the north.

“Look, I wasn't making a judgment.”

“You most certainly were,” she fumed.

“I was only—”

“Stop it. Just stop it.” She cut him off again, her words sharp-edged with emotion. “You don't know anything about my marriage. Not anything.”

“So tell me.”

“Go to hell.”

G
REAT
, Quinn thought, sinking back into his seat, both hands draped over the steering wheel. He hadn't meant to make her angry.

Or maybe he had. God knows he'd been angry. It was crazy, but after he'd kissed her and they'd gotten back on the road, he'd started thinking about her husband, a subject he'd thought he'd thrown out of his memory banks years ago. But there they'd been, cruising down I-70, and he'd suddenly gotten an image of old Hanson kissing her like Quinn had just kissed her but without having to stop. That had gotten Quinn pissed off.

Really
pissed off.

But he still hadn't meant to bring up the subject—and that was the God's truth.

It had just happened.

“I'm sorry,” he said, and wondered if it was true.

Shit. Professor Hanson—he really shouldn't have started thinking about the old buzzard.

“You don't know me. You don't know
anything
about my life.” Her voice trembled, and underneath his anger he felt a twinge of alarm. He'd be damned if he wanted to make her cry.

“You're right. I don't.” So why did he care so damn much? A thousand other women could have shown up in Cisco that afternoon, and he would have treated them with the utmost professionalism. But Regan McKinney was different and always had been.

A moment later, he heard her gasp.

“You,”
she exclaimed. “It was you.”

She swiveled in her seat, staring at him aghast, suddenly not sounding like she was anywhere near to crying.

He had a feeling he knew what was coming.

“
You
stole Scott's car.”

“Guilty.” He couldn't help it. He grinned. God, he'd been such a moron. He'd stolen Hanson's prize 1966 Mustang. It had been street-punk jerk adolescent revenge. Revenge against Professor Hanson for having what Quinn couldn't have: Regan.

“How could you?” She sounded appalled. “How could you steal his car?”

Somehow, he didn't think she wanted the technical answer.

“He loved that car. It was a classic, totally unique.”

“Trophy car,” Quinn admitted, turning his gaze on her. “Trophy wife. Did he love you, too?”

Even in the darkened interior, with only the moon to light her face, he saw her blush.

“I am not going to discuss my marriage with you. Not now. Not ever.”

“Fine.”

Damn it. Eighty-four days—that's how long he'd spent in Wilson's bone beds at Rabbit Valley. Eighty-four of the most important days of his life, even though he'd only been sixteen at the time. Without ever saying a word directly to him, hardly making eye contact, Regan had ruled every one.

She and Wilson had changed him that summer. She'd come and gone a number of times, breaking his heart every time she'd left to go back to Boulder, giving him a thrill every time she'd returned, but Wilson had been a constant presence, always talking and teaching and pushing.

Baking in the hundred-degree heat and digging old bones out of the sun-baked dirt had not been fun, not by any stretch of the imagination. It had been more like torture, punishment for all the bad deeds he'd piled up as the car thief king of Steele Street.