Crazy Hot (29 page)

“Have you had fun?” he asked.

“More than fun,” she confessed. “Your mother, your family, they're all wonderful.”

“You'll like my dad, too. Things are a bit more rambunctious at his house. The boys are younger than Jessie and Lynne. I thought, if you'd like to keep dating me, we could go over there next week. What do you think? I can get you a good deal on your next set of tires if you say yes.”

“Bribery?” she teased, charmed that he would stoop so low.

“Whatever it takes,” he said, unabashed.

“I haven't thanked you yet for getting my car back to me.” Her Taurus had shown up, none the worse for wear, the day before. It had broken her heart at the time, the reminder of him, and she'd spent the rest of the day crying, just as she had the day before and the day before that, but she didn't feel like crying anymore. “I suppose someone will be coming to pick up Betty.” He had left her the candy-apple-red Coronet to drive, just like he'd promised.

“No,” he said. “Keep her for a while.”

“A free ride?” she asked.

“Free ride?” he repeated, laughing softly. He slowed to a stop and gently pulled her into his arms. “Honey, you can have all the free rides on me you want.” His voice was husky and sweet, his words a little bit dirty in a way she well understood, and when his mouth came down on hers, Regan knew this was what she'd wanted. This was why she'd cried, this aching need she had to be with him, to make love with him and be loved by him.

“Come home with me,” he murmured against her throat.

“To Evergreen?”

“Yes. Tonight. I want to make love to you for days on end without having to stop, just like a honeymoon.” He cupped her face with his hands and kissed her mouth.

She kissed him back, then laughed. “You have to get married to have a honeymoon.” The minute the words left her lips, she felt a change in him. His kisses became more languorous. His tongue delved deeper in her mouth. His body came up more powerfully against hers.

“Yes,” he finally murmured, lifting his head. “Great idea. Let's get married.”

She was speechless, and before she could think of anything to say, he continued.

“Don't say we're moving too fast. We're not.” He sounded so sure of himself. “I feel like we're ten years late with this and four days behind schedule. So don't say it's too sudden, and don't say no.”

“That only leaves yes.”

“Yes,” he agreed, a smile breaking over his face. “Perfect.”

“You're crazy,” she said, but she was smiling, too.

“Not really,” he countered, his hands sliding down to her hips, holding her against him. “I'm in love, just like I was the first time I ever saw you naked in that tent.”

She felt his arousal, and a wash of color flooded into her cheeks. “We can't make love in your mother's backyard.”

“Well, we could . . .” He laughed. “Okay, we can't, and we can't go back to the patio until you can get my mind off sex, sex, and more sex.”

“How are we going to do that?” She loved teasing him, and loved that he wanted her so much, but he was right. They couldn't go back to the patio with him looking like he was ready to jump her.

“We can talk about dinosaur bones,” he suggested. “That usually settles me right down.”

“Would you like to discuss recent paleontological evidence for the existence of warm-blooded dinosaurs in the polar regions?”

“Yeah,” he said, taking her hand and starting to walk slowly back into the rose garden. “That ought to do it.”

“Or we could talk about the Air Force.”

He slanted her a wary glance. “And that will definitely do it.”

“Your mother and I were talking—”

“For about five hours, nonstop,” he interrupted, but she ignored him.

“She said she didn't know why you quit when you did. She said you still fly, all the time, for Steele Street.”

“I do. It wasn't the flying that made me quit. Hell, it wasn't even getting shot down that made me quit, at least not directly.”

“What do you mean?”

He stopped, looked over at the patio, where his mom and Jerry and the girls were starting to clear the table. “Did you ever see any of the magazines that covered the story after I was rescued?”

“Yes. Every single one, I think.”

“Even
People
?” he asked curiously.

Confession time, Regan
, she told herself. “Especially the
People
spread. I, uh, have had that one taped to my closet door for about five years now.”

He thought about that for a few moments, his eyebrows arching, trying not to grin—and failing. “This might be something we'll need to discuss at greater length later this evening—
much
greater length.”

“We have to get out of this rose garden first.” She loved teasing him just a little, loved the luxury of talking with him, taking their time. Loved knowing they had a tonight—and a tomorrow.

“Right,” he conceded, trying to get serious again. “This is kind of hard to explain, but I didn't mind the
People
photo.”

“You had your hand halfway down your pants,” she reminded him, and managed to do it without blushing.

He grinned again. “Did you like it?”

“Very sexy,” she admitted.

“Five years, huh?”

Oh, God, now he
was
making her blush.

“I think you're trying to tell me something really important.”

“No,” he disagreed. “Not important, just true. I didn't like being a hero, not on a coast-to-coast scale, and after a few months, I started to realize the country and the military and the politicians were never going to let it go. I'd become a commodity, instead of a pilot. So I quit. But, trust me, my mother does not want to hear that. She still thinks I'm a hero, not just a guy who was doing his job and managed to pay enough attention during survival training to actually survive—and let's not tell her otherwise. Okay?”

“She'll never hear it from me,” she promised him, but not because she believed what he'd said for even a minute. His mother was right. Regan had not only seen the pictures, she'd read the articles in all those magazines, and he'd done more than just survive. He'd been behind enemy lines for over a week, outsmarting two armies to reach a landing zone where the Marines could get in to save him.

“Good. Come on.” He took her hand and started down the path again. “I think if we're quick, and you don't get within twenty feet of me, we can leave the garden and get out of the house.”

“But you're holding my hand,” she pointed out, trying to keep up with him and not to laugh, and more than ready to be alone with him.

“Then we better be real quick,” he told her with a wink.

Hours later, lying naked under a pile of quilts they'd dragged out onto his deck, looking up at the moon and the stars, Regan stirred herself enough to rise up on one arm.

“You lied to me.” It was an out-and-out fact, and she wasn't going to take it back.

“Not really,” he said around a long yawn, not sounding too concerned about her accusation. He stretched his arms out full-length above his head, then reached for her and pulled her back under the covers beside him. “I swear to God, I did not think I had it in me to do it again. So technically, that wasn't a lie.”

“That's not what I was talking about.” And it wasn't.

“Okay, you mean the part where I told you we'd run out of whipped cream. Okay, you've got me. There
are
two more cans in the fridge, but I thought we might want to save them for morning. So technically, again, it wasn't a lie, because by my figures, we
are
out of tonight's allotment of whipped cream. Though, honest to God, I don't know what happened to four cans of whipped cream. You aren't that big.”

“You are,” she said, leaning down to whisper in his ear.

“Oh, yeah. Right.” He rolled onto his side, suddenly sounding a little more alert, a definite gleam coming into his eyes.

“But that's not it, either.”

“Ohhh,” he said after a long moment's thought, then let out a laugh. “You mean when I told you I'd pay you a million dollars if you'd let me—”

She gave him a quick kiss, then said, “Hush, or I'll let you do it again, and you'll owe me two million, but that's not what I'm talking about.”

“Okay, I give. Which lie was it?”

“The one where you told me you didn't like being a hero.”

“No,” he contradicted her. “No points for you. I
don't
like being a hero. Tried it once, didn't like it.”

“You tried it twice,” she contradicted him back. “Once when you got shot down, and once when you walked into Roper's warehouse and gave yourself up for me.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.”

“Well,” he began, levering himself over her until he had her fully under him again on the quilts. “Technically that wasn't heroics. It just so happened, lucky for you, that it was the precise moment when I saw you standing next to Roper, in his clutches so to speak, that I realized I couldn't live without you. So that was pure survival on my part.”

“Lucky me,” she said, a smile playing about her lips.

“Lucky you,” he agreed, easing her leg up around his waist. “So what's it going to be, lucky girl? Another million dollars, or do you want to go for the whipped cream?”

“I'll take the million.”

“Damn,”
he swore softly. “You know that's going to wipe me out.”

“God, I can only hope so,” she said, laughing as she pulled him down on top of her.

A long, bliss-filled time later, Regan roused herself from a drowsy half sleep.

“Quinn?”

“Hmmm?” came his barely audible reply.

“What happened to the diamonds?”

“Hmmmm.”

She leaned down and gently nibbled on his ear, which got her more of the reaction she was looking for as his arm came around her and he began slowly dragging himself up from the depths of sleep.

It took a while.

“Diamonds,” she murmured, giving him another nibble.

Finally, he let out a long, slow breath. “You mean the diamonds that got blown up at the airport, in the warehouse?”

“Yes.”

He yawned.

“Well, those diamonds are in the process of being recovered by the FBI. The last I heard, they'd gotten about a quarter of a million dollars' worth out of the wreckage.”

“And the others?”

“Others?”

“Um hmmm. The ones Wilson and I had already taken out of the
Tarbosaurus
nest and put in the canvas bag, the ones I vaguely remember you grabbing just before you pulled me out of Jeanette.”

Even in the dark, she saw the smile that curved his mouth. “Ah, yes. Well,
those
diamonds are in a CHF.”

“CHF?”

“Contraband Holding Facility,” he was quick to offer.

“And what, exactly, is a Contraband Holding Facility?”

His grin broadened. “So far, it's a coffee can in my kitchen at Steele Street, but we've been thinking of moving them to a more secure area.”

A small laugh escaped her. “You stole the diamonds?” Good Lord. Regan McKinney was sleeping with a thief. She should have known. What she didn't know was what to think about it. She loved him. She'd loved him for fifteen years—but a thief. Good Lord.

“
Confiscated
is the word we prefer, confiscating and holding in lieu of allocation. It's all very official.” His grin wasn't official. It was pure larceny.

“And who does the allocating?” Her money was on Dylan Hart. He was still the brains behind all the chop shop boys' adventures.

“Well, there's a guy at this little place in Washington, D.C., known as the Pentagon, and he's the one who decides how much we confiscate and how much we allocate. Some people call him ‘Buck' Grant, but not very many. We mostly call him General Grant, or just ‘sir,' as in ‘yes, sir.'”

She went very still at his side. “Steele Street is part of the Pentagon?”

“Twenty-four/seven as a Special Defense Force team called SDF, but, given the nature of our work, our unique skills, and our rather slippery status over there, General Grant has always encouraged us to do a little independent fund-raising on the side, which he oversees. When we're needed, he wants to know his guys can respond, no matter who's in office or what political agenda is guiding policy and making budgets—and that's more than I've ever told anyone outside of Steele Street.”

She believed him. She also understood what he hadn't quite said. “So you sort of steal for the government, when the opportunity arises.”

“Or when we're outright asked.” He grinned again. “At least I used to.”

He turned toward her, shifting onto his side, his expression growing serious—and her heart slowed down for the space of a breath.

“We're going to have to stop meeting like this,” he said.

“We are?”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I'm getting married real soon, going to have to give up wild women and chasing bad guys. Going to have to settle down, learn how to stay out of trouble.”

“You are?” Now he had her attention, but good.

“Yeah.” He smoothed his hand up over her hip. “I've met this woman, and I'm crazy about her, and I think there's lots of things the two of us would rather do than sit around and worry about if I'm going to make it home every night or not.”

A lump formed in her throat, and for a second she was afraid she might cry. Instead, she kissed him.

“Sounds like a lucky woman,” she said after a sweet moment, lifting her mouth from his.

“A
very
lucky woman,” he agreed, pulling her back into his arms for another long kiss.

Can't wait to join Tara Janzen
in the next outrageously
sexy “crazy” adventure?

Read on for a preview of
Christian Hawkins's story in

C
RAZY COOL . . .

Available October 25, 2005

C
RAZY COOL

on sale October 25, 2005

T
WENTY BUCKS SAYS
the guy in the Armani suit is hired muscle.”

Hired muscle?
Katya Dekker looked up from her auction catalogue.

“Where?” She glanced around the outdoor amphitheater, her brow furrowing. She knew what her secretary, Alex Zheng, meant. She knew exactly what he meant, and she could only think of one reason for there to be any “hired muscle” at an art auction:
her
.

The thought only deepened her scowl.

She followed Alex's gaze across the delicately lit nighttime grounds of the Denver Botanic Gardens, search-ing through the crowd and the two dozen canopied tropical huts that had been erected for the dining comfort of the evening's guests. She found the “hired muscle” on the edge of a group of people next to the caterer's tent.

He was good, discreet, but she could spot a security detail at a hundred yards—and he had “high-priced bodyguard” written all over him, very high priced.

“What do you think of the suit?” Alex said. “I almost bought that one myself.”

“No way, babe. Too structured. Too conservative,” she told him, her gaze going over the man in the distance. There was nothing particularly remarkable about him, other than his choirboy looks, his shock of silky brown hair, and the alertness of his every move—the dead giveaway. He was quartering the gardens with his gaze, looking for God only knew what. Fund-raising art auctions hosted by the Denver Botanic Gardens were not hotbeds of intrigue.

“Not with my blue silk shirt,” Alex countered. “So you don't know him?”

“No,” she said, trying to keep her jaw from clenching, trying to hold back the first faint teasing of the headache she felt coming on. Even for August, the day had been unconscionably hot, and for Denver unbelievably humid, and the night wasn't setting up to be much better—especially now.

A bodyguard. Damn it. She knew who was behind this, just like she knew this wasn't the sort of event that required a bodyguard. Bottles of French wine and magnums of French champagne were being opened by bartenders in tuxedos. White-boxed dinners tied with forest-green bows were being delivered to the tables by waiters in tails. Every female patron at the art auction had been given an orchid wrist corsage upon arrival, and each man sported a boutonniere of exotic rain forest leaves and a bit of liana—even the choirboy. Tonight's auction was for the Amazon River Basin Coalition and in honor of the Botanic Gardens' new orchid pavilion. Alex had designed the boutonnieres, his contribution, and they were nothing short of fabulous, very masculine, very primal. They would speak to the Rain Forest God in every man, and to his wallet, according to Alex, who had impeccable taste and instincts—two of the many reasons he was Katya's right-hand man.

His six years with the Los Angeles Police Department were another.

“What about the other man?” he asked. “Next to the Jaguar Gate.”

Two bodyguards?

“My mother wouldn't dare,” she muttered, biting back a curse and turning toward the Jaguar Gate, a multicolumned, elaborately constructed plywood and papier-mâché portico serving as a grand entryway into the party.

There was only one man standing beneath the fierce black cat bridging the last pair of palm tree posts, and he turned away just as she looked at him. All she saw was his back and the champagne flute in his hand as he disappeared into the trees, but that was enough to make the hair on her nape rise in sudden, unexpected awareness.

She hadn't known the first guy, but this one . . .

After a couple of seconds, she let out her breath in a soft rush and told herself to get a grip. Of course she didn't know him. Maybe it was the cut of the stranger's dark hair, longer than most of the men's at the exclusive and rather elegantly conservative soiree, that had sparked her fleeting instant of recognition. Maybe it was his height, or the way he carried himself, or maybe it had been nothing at all.

She'd been wrong before in her life, an inordinate number of times actually, especially about men.

“Your mother would dare anything she thought she could get away with.” Alex belied her statement with a short laugh. “As a matter of fact, her latest pork-barreling in Congress was a consummate dare to every budget-watcher in Washington.”

Katya cast her secretary an annoyed glance. He did not look like someone who read the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
every single morning of his life—but he did, religiously, usually while drinking a double espresso and wearing his autographed Lakers jersey, which he'd had his tailor integrate into a cinnabar-colored silk robe. His hair was short, jet black, expertly cut, bleached gold on the tips, and moussed to artistic perfection. He had beautiful Asian/American features, a black belt in tae kwon do, and a boyfriend he'd left in L.A. His suit
was
Armani, his shoes Chinese red, his shirt snowy white and worn open at the throat with a loosely knotted Prada tie.

She didn't know how she was going to keep him with her in Denver, Colorado, or what she was going to do without him when he'd had enough of the former cow town and hightailed it back to Los Angeles.

“That's going to cost you a mocha latte,” she said. Growing up in Denver as Senator Marilyn Dekker's daughter, Katya had lived, breathed, and eaten politics every day of her life. As an adult, she didn't touch the stuff. She voted. End of story. That, however, did not dissuade Alex from keeping her informed of every maternal political detail he gleaned out of the newspapers or saw on CNN—and every bit of unwanted news cost him a latte.

“And I'm still up on you by seven for winning the point spread on the Lakers game. The last time you got a mocha latte out of me was before the last Ice Age.”

True, but he didn't have to rub it in.

“Mr. Armani Suit and his friend probably don't have anything to do with me. Let's just ignore them, and maybe they'll go away,” she suggested, glancing back at her catalogue. She did not want to deal with unwanted bodyguards. Not tonight or any other night. “Our painting is up first. Maybe we should go check and make sure it's still in one piece.”

Katya's newest addition to her art dealership business, the Toussi Gallery of Denver, had donated a large, beautiful floral painting by Oleg Henri to the auction. The staff at the Botanic Gardens had picked it up two days ago. It only made sense to go check on the painting before it went up for bid.

But Alex was like a dog with a bone.

“Sorry, luv. You're the only one here worthy of high-caliber security. My guess is your mother sicced the two freelancers on you. Though God knows why, unless she knows something we don't,” he said, his tone of voice suggesting she give him her undivided attention until they figured this out. “I guess we could ask her Sunday morning.”

“No, we couldn't,” Kat was quick to say. Her mother was kicking off her campaign with a brief stop in Denver on Sunday, but there had been no plans for them to get together. Marilyn was too busy—thank God.

Stifling a sigh, Katya looked up at him again. “My mother is paranoid.”

“About everything,” he agreed, tracking the choirboy bodyguard with his gaze. “But this . . . I think this is about your youthful transgressions.”

He
would
bring that up, she thought, feeling the headache start to win.

“Who was it you said you ran into tonight?”

“Ted Garraty,” she said flatly, hating the turn of the conversation. “But I didn't exactly run into him. As a matter of fact, I made a point of
not
running into him.”

She'd gone to school with Ted at Wellon Academy in Denver. They hadn't been friends, but Wellon was small, very exclusive, and she and her date had ended up in the same crowd with Ted and his friends on prom night thirteen years ago—a night that had changed her life forever.

“Well, your mother obviously got ahold of the guest list and didn't like it.”

Katya rolled her eyes in his direction. “I don't need a bodyguard to protect me from Ted Garraty, let alone two bodyguards.”

But on that long-ago prom night, she had needed someone to protect her from Ted and his group of drunken friends.

Her gaze slid to the Jaguar Gate, but just for an instant before she forced her attention back to the catalogue. Just about every gallery in Denver had donated something to the auction, but the Oleg Henri was a true signature piece, and she expected its sale to help launch her into the Denver art world—not that her name wasn't already about as high profile as it got in the Mile High City.

And with that unpleasant thought, she finally did give in to another sigh. God, what an odd night. Seeing Ted had been nothing short of a ten on her weird-o-meter, and the visceral reaction she'd had to the second bodyguard had red-lined the weird-o-meter and hit an easy number one on her Don't Go There, Girlfriend list.

Bodyguards, damn it.

She'd known that returning to her hometown, the location of her “youthful transgressions,” had held the inherent risk of zealous parental meddling, but she truly hadn't expected her mother to jump in with both feet at her first event. Marilyn had left her well enough alone in Los Angeles, barring a couple of embarrassing intrusions into her personal life over the last several years. Professionally, though, her mother had been strictly hands-off.

But then it was here in Denver, not Los Angeles, that she had been associated with a high-profile, high-society, front-page, scandal-ridden murder of another senator's son. That sort of thing was bound to stir up even the most latent parental instincts, and Marilyn's had been pretty darn latent while Katya had been growing up—at least until Jonathan Traynor III had shown up dead in a back alley in lower downtown, a neighborhood known as LoDo, with a bullet through his brain, heroin in his veins, her phone number written on the back of his hand, and a bloodstained piece of her prom dress stuffed in his pocket.

Of its own accord, her gaze shifted back toward the gate again, and this time she let it linger.

No, she assured herself. The man who'd disappeared beneath the trees couldn't possibly be who she'd thought. A teenage car thief who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for Jonathan Traynor's murder thirteen years ago couldn't possibly be wandering around the Botanic Gardens wearing a suit and drinking French champagne. He'd been pardoned after two years in prison, justice had finally been served, but this would still be the last place he would show up, right? The last place he would ever be invited.

But for a moment, just a moment, her heart had raced and she'd remembered how it had been on another hot summer night in Denver. She'd been eighteen, a little crazy, a lot in love, and scared senseless by the intensity of living so far out on the edge she wasn't sure she'd ever get back to familiar ground. The boy had been a year older, the wild boy, the bad boy, the street thief who had saved her. That boy, the boy she'd loved, would never have murdered Jonathan, but he'd been convicted of the crime, and she'd sat by helplessly and watched it happen.

The trial had been a travesty, her silence a betrayal she still hated herself for, and deep in her heart, she knew he had to hate her for it, too.

H
AWKINS
drained his glass of champagne, wished it were Scotch, and took a breath.

Kat Dekker.

Son of a bitch.

She hadn't changed. She still looked like trouble with a capital T—wild blond hair, sea-green eyes, clothes so expensive it used to make his teeth hurt, all of it wrapped around a small bombshell package set to explode. That was Kat Dekker, one big bang for the buck, big enough to blow a man's life to hell.

Maybe this was all one huge coincidence, the two of them showing up at the same place at the same time, but he doubted it. She certainly couldn't have been the one to get him and Dylan called back from South America. She didn't have that kind of power, and she sure as hell hadn't bothered herself anytime in the last thirteen years to look him up. She especially hadn't bothered herself when he'd been arrested and thrown in jail, when he'd needed her the most.