Crazy Hot (5 page)

C
HAPTER

5

L
ACE BRA.

Quinn kept his eyes on the road, mostly, but he couldn't help but glance over to the passenger seat every now and then.

She was wearing a lace bra beneath her wet shirt. The delicate tracery outlined against the lavender silk was unmistakable.

Lace.

God, it had been a long time since he'd kissed a woman. Since he'd undressed a woman.

He hadn't thought about it much lately, which probably said something about him he didn't want to know. He sure as hell hadn't thought about it since the rail yard rumble. At first, he'd been too busted up. Then Dylan had shipped him to Cisco and buried him in the desert to keep him out of the way. He knew Roper Jones wanted him dead. News of the hit had traveled fast, fifty thousand dollars fast, but, hell, it wasn't the first time Quinn had been on somebody's hit list.

It was just the first time Dylan had thought he might actually get hit.

Quinn didn't blame him. The disaster in the BN&SF rail yards had been the first time he'd needed somebody to scrape him off the street. Bullets had been flying; he'd been beaten and bleeding like a stuck pig from a head wound and an ugly gunshot that had torn open his shoulder. His knee had been wrenched damn near backward, and Hawkins had come out of nowhere, straight through the middle of the fucking melee, and gotten him out alive, if half dead counted as alive. Quinn hadn't been too sure at the time. Neither had Hawkins—but he hadn't admitted it until a few days later, when he'd dropped by the hospital.

“‘Keep breathing, you son of a bitch'?” Quinn had asked, repeating Hawkins's words to him in that frickin' alley. “Is that the new SDF triage directive?”

Hawkins had just grinned. “I didn't haul my ass back down there and put it on the line to drag out a corpse.” Tall and dark-haired, dressed in suede pants and a chocolate brown silk shirt, Hawkins—“Superman”—had draped himself with typical long-limbed elegance into one of the hospital's utilitarian armchairs. For being such a badass knuckle-dragger, he had a disconcerting habit of occasionally showing up looking like a
GQ
poster boy.

Quinn had tried to grin back, and failed. He'd hurt everywhere. His leg was in a brace, his face tight with the stitches below his eye, and his shoulder even tighter.

God, what a way to make a living.

Wait for the drop, and when it comes, steal Roper blind. That had been the Defense Department's directive to SDF. No rules, take everything you can get, any way you can get it. Quinn and Hawkins had been working together for four months, working as far inside Roper's criminal empire and as far outside the law as their pasts could take them—and Hawkins's past was good for five to ten on any given day of the week. Superman was so connected with Denver's underworld, the government guys they worked with sometimes wondered what side he was really on.

Christian Hawkins had made his reputation years ago with the high-profile murder of a senator's son in lower downtown. Hawkins hadn't offed the kid, but he'd gone to prison for it. That gave him more chops than most on the street and made him invaluable as an undercover asset for SDF when they were on home turf. When it came to Christian Hawkins, only a few very select friends knew he wasn't bad.

“How's your cover?” Quinn had asked, biting back a grimace of pain when he tried to turn his head. That had been his biggest concern after the rail yard fiasco, that Hawkins had finally blown his cover by coming to his rescue.

“It'll hold. It always holds.” Hawkins had shrugged.
No problem
.

Quinn hoped to hell it wasn't a problem. Roper Jones was the scum of the earth, but up until last year, he'd been strictly Chicago scum. Now he was moving out of drugs, bookies, extortion, and prostitution into international arms deals—or so government intelligence had reported.

General Grant, SDF's commanding officer at the Department of Defense, wanted to nail Jones's ass, preferably before the CIA got him, but all Quinn and Hawkins had found so far was a lot of dirty money, a little stolen jewelry, and a few kilos of Colombian cartel cocaine. It was enough to put Roper away, yeah, but not what Uncle Sam wanted. If there were exotic guns running through Denver, so far they hadn't been Roper Jones's guns.

There hadn't been any guns in the rail yard crates either, not unless they'd been packed inside plaster casts. The only other time Quinn had seen so much plaster had been the summer he'd spent jacketing dinosaur bones for Doc McKinney at Rabbit Valley. He could see right now that he was going to have to ask Dylan again what in the hell had been in those crates that was important enough to have almost gotten him killed. Dylan's original answer of “Nothing we're looking for” was starting to look bogus.

He glanced at the woman in the seat beside him. Dealing in hot dinosaur bones was hardly up Roper Jones's alley. In fact, it didn't make any sense at all, but Regan McKinney had ended up on his doorstep, looking for Wilson. Hell, something was going on.

He slanted Regan another glance. He'd been thinking about lace bras and sex before he'd gotten sidetracked by hit lists and guns, his body reminded him. Reminded him also of what a pleasant diversion it all could be. Of course, actually having sex with the grown-up version of a man's most treasured adolescent fantasy shot things way past diversion.

God, she was pretty, and soft, and still wondrously wet.

He shifted uneasily in his seat and forced his eyes back to the road.

“So, are you still married?” he asked. He was beginning to think not, but he had to ask. He had to know. Married women normally didn't live with their sister and their grandfather, and usually they took their husband's name, and just about all the time, they wore a ring. Regan was looking good on all counts.

Her silence gave him another excuse to glance over at her, and he had to wonder if she had the strength to white-knuckle-grip the door and the gear console all the way to Denver. Even at one hundred and twenty miles per hour, it was going to take a while to get there.

“How . . . how did you know I was married?”

Breathless, wrung-out, tense, and defensive—it was nice to know he hadn't lost his touch with the fairer sex.

“Wilson told me you were getting married the day I was at the house. There were dresses everywhere.” Small mountains of baby blue dresses and one big white one with pearl buttons running all the way down the back. He'd never been so tight-jawed in his life as he'd been standing there saying good-bye to Wilson and looking at that dress.

He'd wanted it, by God, he'd wanted it and the woman who went in it. He'd wanted them for himself. Isn't that what he'd been working his ass off for—so he could have a chance with the granddaughter of a friggin' college professor, a Boulder-bred, pink-pantied virgin who was so clean it made him ache? That summer at the dinosaur camp, he'd watched her on and off as she'd come and gone, and fallen more in love and lust every day. He never had gotten up the nerve to talk with her, but he'd listened when she'd talked to Wilson and his grad students. With every word she'd proved herself to be way out of his league. She'd intimidated the hell out of him, which had only made him want her all that much more.

He'd been such a cross-eyed romantic sap at sixteen—and at twenty, when he'd been standing there looking at her wedding dress. He'd been so fucking galled by the situation, and it had only gotten worse in the following weeks, a whole helluva lot worse.

“Yes, well, the dresses. That was . . . uh . . . sort of a high point, the dresses,” she said, a small catch in her voice, her gaze glued to the road.

“So marriage is a rough go, huh?” Considering who she'd married, he wasn't surprised to hear it. Fate had definitely been fucking with him when it came to Regan McKinney.

“Rough?” she repeated, and gave a short laugh, which broke her single-minded concentration on the road—and that's when he got her attention, all of it. Her head came around, and her eyes narrowed in an offended glare. “My marriage isn't any of your—”

“Business. Right,” he said, cutting her off. “I'm just trying to figure out what's going on here, trying to figure out why a man would send his wife to Cisco alone, and—”

“I'm not a wife,” she interrupted him. “I don't have a husband. I make all my own decisions, including the very bad one to come to Cisco so I could get my car ‘dumped' somewhere and be practically kidnapped by a couple of—”

She cut herself off, obviously thinking better of what she'd been about to call him and Kid. He didn't care. He'd gotten the answer he'd wanted. It was all he could do not to grin.

Things were looking up.

T
HINGS
were going downhill fast, Regan thought, sitting back into her seat, her arms coming up and crossing over her chest. In truth, they could hardly look worse. She'd lost her car and was at the mercy of a . . . a speed freak in a muscle machine.

And to make things just that much more awful, he'd brought up her marriage.

Her defunct marriage, she reminded herself. Under normal circumstances, remembering she was divorced was usually enough to give her spirits a lift.

These were not normal circumstances.

She slanted the speedometer another glance, then wished she hadn't.

“Let's talk cars,” she said abruptly. Cars were her business with Quinn Younger, cars and Wilson.

“You mean the cars I stole from Vince Branson and sold to your grandfather?” he asked, downshifting around a curve in the road.

“Yes. Those cars,” Regan said, gritting her teeth. She couldn't help herself, as they went into the turn she clutched the door panel and held her breath, but the car stuck to the road, all four tires gripping asphalt, and she had to wonder how in the hell he managed to do it. He shifted up again, bringing them out of the turn, and by the time they hit the straightaway, he was running the Camaro at full throttle.

God, he drove like a . . .
a fighter pilot
.

Of course,
she thought, the realization coming to her from out of the blue. Whatever kind of lousy, low-life car thief he'd become—
if
that's what he'd become, and the jury was still out on that one—he was still one of the most highly trained and highly skilled pilots in the world. Surely he could drive a car better than most, even at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.

“What kind of cars were those again?” he asked, ratcheting the speed up another notch, so help her God.

She dug her fingers into the car's upholstery. “Huh?”

“The cars I stole, then sold to your grandfather.”

Oh, right. “A . . . uh, 1967 Dodge Coronet, with red paint and a red leather interior with hot pink piping.” Nikki had loved that car. Regan had thought it looked pretty cool, too, just not cool for her seventy-two-year-old grandfather who seemed to be losing track of some of his marbles. “And the Porsche he disappeared with, a silver one with a black interior. He only had the Coronet for a couple of days before trading it in on the Porsche.”

“Hot pink piping?” he repeated, sounding a little incredulous and none too pleased with the color scheme.

“It had a lot of power. He liked to sit in the driveway and run the motor.”
What in the world had Wilson been thinking?
she wondered for about the millionth time, to drag home a candy-apple-red car to their sedately historical, upper-middle-class neighborhood and then sit around in the driveway revving up the engine like some sixteen-year-old kid. It had been embarrassing and distressing at the time, but now she wished she were sitting in that driveway again, listening to the neighbors complain. She'd rather be embarrassed than dead, and that's what she was going to be if Quinn didn't slow down. She'd also rather have Wilson back. “The Porsche was a little quieter.”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice tight. “It would be. So what tipped you off to Cisco?”

Okay,
she thought. It was time to put her cards on the table, or rather her card. She'd only had one reason for coming to Cisco. Lifting her hips off the seat, she searched in her pocket for the piece of paper that had sent her on her doomed mission. Unfolding it, she smoothed the page open on her leg.

“This is from Wilson's calendar, a page from June. At the bottom, on Saturday, it says ‘Pick up Betty. Contact Quinn Younger, Cisco, Utah, for nine-one-one.'” She glanced up at him. “That's the kind of Porsche he went off in, a nine-one-one.”

“A nine-eleven, yeah,” he said, his expression growing even darker.

She hated to ask the next question, but she had to know. “So . . . uh . . . do you know this Betty lady?” As impossible as it had seemed, she hadn't thrown out the possibility of seventy-two-year-old hormones being the catalyst for the crazy happenings in her grandfather's life.

“Betty,” Quinn repeated with a short laugh, giving his head a disbelieving shake. “Betty is the candy-apple-red Dodge with the pink piping.” And it was SDF's baby, the most cherried-out machine in their Steele Street garage, a car so reeking of girly-girlness, the only one of them with enough balls to drive it in daylight was the boss, Dylan.