Crazy Wild (19 page)

“You've lost,” he said, foregoing reassurance in favor of unadulterated bluntness. They were hell-and-gone out of time for reassurance if the CIA wanted her dead. “All we can do now is control the damage.” And maybe make a run for Mexico.

When she still didn't say anything, he gave her the best advice he could.

“Tell us everything, Cody, and maybe I can help you. Without your cooperation, there's nothing I can do.”

After another long silence, she finally spoke. “Everyone you mentioned is in Denver. Every man you listed, except maybe Hafiz. I don't know for sure about him,” she said, glancing back at Dylan after another slight hesitation. “He never spoke during any of the meetings with Sergei Patrushev. So I wouldn't recognize his voice, and I didn't actually see the two Iranians in the old library. I can only confirm that someone who sounded like Khalesi was there with another man and they were speaking Persian.”

Creed was impressed. That kind of discriminating analysis was just what they needed. They just needed more of it, hopefully the kind of analysis that would include the location of a nuclear warhead.

“What about in South Morrison? Who was threatening you with the knife?” Dylan asked. “Hashemi or Akbar?”

“Ahmad Hashemi. He's the one who was killed.” Her gaze slid back to him, and he wasn't sure what he read there—relief, revulsion, or maybe gratitude. It hadn't been a pretty death, and she'd been trapped right in the middle of it, a bad bit of timing on his part, but he'd had that little problem with the freakin' flashback.

“So, basically, Denver is Tango Central tonight.” There was no ambivalence in Dylan's expression. He was disgusted. “That must have been one helluva tracking device on your earrings, to have pulled people all the way from Prague.” Creed had given his boss a complete rundown of the night. “Is there anybody who
isn't
here tonight? And that is not a rhetorical question.”

“I haven't seen Hamas, Jemaah Islamiah, Prince Abdullah, the North Koreans, or the two men from Chechnya, but Hashemi said the Zurich Seven were in Denver, and there were people speaking German with Klein in South Morrison.”

Dylan grew noticeably quiet in his body language as Cody spoke, which Creed did not take as a good sign. True, she was talking her head off, confirming everything Dylan asked, but he hadn't asked her for anything other than what they'd already guessed or knew from the files. But that was all just the warm-up, and Creed could tell everything was about to change. “Bad cop” Dylan was about to make his appearance.

“A global signal tracking device on a pair of earrings?” Skeeter asked, turning away from the phone for a second and putting her hand over the receiver. “I'd like to see them.”

“I dumped them down a steam pipe on South Morrison's fifth floor,” he said.

“Holy crap, Creed,” she said, a look of disappointment crossing her face.

“Sorry, Skeeter. I didn't have time to debug them.” A weak excuse in her book, he knew. Skeeter loved tracking devices. She collected them like stamps, and liked nothing better than to stick them on something and find out where they went.

She gave her head a sad little shake and turned to Dylan. “What do you want me to tell these guys?” she asked, holding up the phone receiver. “They've made it clear that they don't want to buy a car, but they still want to see the merchandise.”

Yeah. Creed bet they did, but he hoped like hell Dylan wasn't going to show it to them. The situation was going to get real complicated real fast if Dylan decided to wash his hands of this mess and hand her over to the CIA. He wouldn't blame the boss, not really. O'Connell's murder had been bad, bizarre, and Cody Stark was the one who could tell Royce and his team exactly what had happened and who had pulled the trigger. That made her theirs.

He did know one thing. He wasn't going to let Tony Royce have Cody Stark. No way in hell. Witness or no witness, he couldn't let her go, not tonight, with the city in chaos and the mission looking damned ambiguous. Ambiguous missions were fucked missions. People got hurt—and he wasn't going to let one of those people be Cody.

“Whoa,” Skeeter said, her hand coming up to her chest, the brim of her hat turning toward him. “Creed?”

Hell, this was a fine time for Skeeter to go all spooky and clairvoyant on him. He was having trouble breathing. Too many things were crashing in on him, and he was just about ready to grab Cody and run.

Of course, there was the one little problem of the handcuffs.
Shit!
Now he really couldn't breathe.

“Give him the key, Skeeter.” Dylan's voice cut through the clamoring in his brain—steady, measured, utterly calm. “Creed, get Ms. Starkova out of here. We'll sort this out later, after Royce and his agents are gone. Leave your coat.”

Skeeter pressed the key into his hand and kept her fingers against his palm a little longer than necessary, long enough to remind him that he wasn't alone here tonight.

“Sure, come on up,” Skeeter said into the phone, letting him go.

He had Cody released in seconds.

“You should see door number two opening now,” Skeeter continued, working the laptop's keyboard.

He helped Cody as she shrugged out of his coat, knowing full well why Dylan wanted it. The pockets were stuffed with the night's work.

And he tried not to stare as the coat came off—but it was impossible. In full light, her fishnet cat suit left very little to the imagination, and she had more curves than a pony car on slicks.

His gaze dropped down her body, from the slope of her shoulders, over breasts and hips and the sleek length of her legs, and he felt poleaxed. Here was Dominika, club scene princess and punk rock baby, all sex and come-on with her spiky hair and kohl-rimmed eyes. The mousy librarian had been a first-class illusion. The lost boy had never existed.

But Cody Stark did, and she still looked scared.

“Skeeter,” Dylan said, his voice sounding strangely far away. “Remember, as far as Royce is concerned, we never left the building tonight. We came back downstairs, and they were gone. We're still waiting for Creed to bring in Dominika Starkova.”

“Sure.” Skeeter sounded kind of far away, too.

But Cody was close, where he needed her. Her hand in his. Her gaze locked onto his.

He wasn't going to kiss her again, no matter what she looked like, no matter how poleaxed he felt. Hell, he could hardly breathe, and kissing her wasn't what this was all about. She was a target. She needed protection, and that's what he did better than anybody, protect, whether it was Uncle Sam's best interests or a life put in his care.

Keeping hold of her hand, he quickly led her out into the main office and toward the elevator.

Yeah. Close was where he needed her. Close and going home with him.

C
HAPTER

20

“W
OW,” SKEETER SAID
as soon as they were gone. “Did you feel that? What was that?”

“A guy who has had enough for one night,” Dylan said, knowing exactly what Skeeter was talking about. Creed had been about ready to jump out of his skin. “We send him down to the library to pick up a woman, and nobody seems to know that half the tangos from Berlin to Tehran have invaded the country? Or if they did, they forget to tell us.
Geezus
.”

“Who killed this Hashemi guy?” Skeeter asked.

“Who do you think?”
Shit.
If he'd known how screwed up the night was going to get, he would have picked up Dominika Starkova himself. He hadn't been that late getting in from D.C.

“You think that's what's bothering him?”

Hell, no.

“It never has before.” Killing bad guys was what they did, and there wasn't a commando in the employ of Uncle Sam who couldn't do it coolly, calmly, with utter precision and no fucking regrets all day long, including every one of the SDF operators. Winning the gunfight or the knife fight was always a good thing—and Creed had won every fight he'd been in tonight, for which every cop in the city of Denver owed him one huge thank-you.

“So what's up?” She was concerned. Rightly so. Creed had been a little wild-eyed there for a minute.

But the jungle boy wasn't that complicated. Right, wrong. Good guys, bad guys. More than any of the rest of them, Creed had a certain innocence about him, a purity of purpose—not that Cesar Raoul Eduardo would ever have seen it that way. But Dylan knew it, just like he figured he knew what had set Creed off.

“Hashemi had Ms. Starkova down with a knife to her ear, right on the vein, threatening to cut her up from here to Sunday and send her home in pieces, the same way J.T. was sent home.”

Skeeter's face fell, her skin turning even paler than normal, her soft mouth softening even more.

“Geez,”
she said, swallowing.

“Yeah. Geez. And I don't think he can take anybody else dying on his shift—especially if they're butchered by some psychopath with a knife. That would be enough to push anybody a couple of degrees south of normal.”

“Not you,” Skeeter said, sounding so very sure. “Nothing pushes you over the edge.”

Except you,
he thought, dragging his gaze away from her. She'd been superb in South Morrison, the perfect partner: followed orders, held up her end, done the deed, and fulfilled her mission. Christian Hawkins was doing one helluva job training her, but Dylan still wasn't happy about it.

True, she didn't spook as easily as she used to, wasn't nearly as jumpy, and he was glad about that. Really, he was. He'd hated seeing her live inside a nervous shell—but maybe Hawkins had gone too far, the way she'd strapped on that 9mm like it was a second skin. He'd heard she'd pulled a knife on Gino Cuchara last summer and lived to tell the tale. When she'd been tagging, she and her crew had been more like shadow wraiths than graffiti vandals. No one had seen them, not the cops or the gangsters. The police had gotten lucky a couple of times, but mostly it had been as if SB303 had shown up out of nowhere, painted all over the city, night after night, all on its own.

But now. Hell, she had more balls than Toys “R” Us.

Baby Bang,
Creed had called her, a name she'd brought with her off the street. He knew both Hawkins and Creed had laid down the law from West Denver to East Colfax: Mess with Baby Bang at your peril—your guaranteed peril.

Well, it was a warning he needed to heed, pronto. This ache he had for her, it needed to go away.

He wanted her. There was no denying it. He wanted her lightning-bolt tattoo and long legs wrapped around him. He wanted her under him and his mouth on hers. He wanted all that spooky psychic energy focused on him, getting under his skin, figuring him out, letting him in. He wanted to be so incredibly close to her it scared the hell out of him—but it would reach an end, and when it did, there would be way too much hell to pay.

So he stayed away—a tactical strategy that had been working really damn well for him, up until tonight. He felt burned just looking at her.

“Thanks for that . . .” He gestured at the desk, where she'd thrown her jacket over the photographs from South America. The coat had been a present under the tree to her from Santa Claus this year. He'd seen it in a shop on Larimer Square, sable and leather, and known she would love it. He'd been right. From himself, he'd gotten her a set of wheels for her 350 Boss Mustang, Babycakes.

“Yeah, well, he doesn't need to see that,” she said. “Not ever again.”

Santa Claus. That was him all right. And as long as Santa stayed out of Victoria's Secret, he might be able to maintain his cover.

“Did you . . . uh . . . happen to see her butt?” Skeeter asked.

A grin flashed across his face. Yes, he'd seen her butt.

“Saturday,” he said, his grin widening.

Skeeter grinned back. “Yeah. Saturday.”

CREED
wasn't going to kiss her.

Right.

He was so glad he had that straight in his head. So little was straight in his head these days.

He'd held her hand all the way up the elevator. It hadn't been necessary. She hadn't offered any resistance. She had no place to go, and actually, holding someone's hand, while incredibly effective as a defense move, wasn't exactly the best way to hustle someone down a hallway. A firm grip on their upper arm gave a person a lot more leverage, a little more control over a perp's speed and direction.

But he'd held her hand—was still holding her hand.

He'd also used the brilliant strategy of maintaining absolute silence. He was sure she was impressed.

Not.

But she had to be impressed with the hallway. He called it Superman's Annex. Hawkins had more paintings than he had walls up on the eleventh floor, and a lot of very fine art had ended up in Creed's hallway. Polished oak floors, cream-colored paneling, discreetly appropriate lighting, and Christian Hawkins's discriminating taste in Cubist Modern. It was all very cool.

So was the door into his loft.

He pressed his hand on a freestanding biometric scanner, and the embossed steel door slid open, retracting back into the wall.

“This is my place,” he said. “You'll be safe here.” At least for a while. He honestly didn't know what was going to happen to her, or how much, if any, control he was going to have over it.

Once inside, he pressed his hand to another biometric screen, and the door slid closed, nearly silent, leaving them in the dark. He pressed the blue screen again, pushing down with his fingertips, and a pair of bolts slid home with a solid
thunk thunk,
locking out the rest of the world.

A boatload of tension drained out of him at the sound. Home. Safe. There was nothing and no one who could invade this place.

He lowered his forehead to the door and just rested for a moment, letting the quiet and the warmth seep into him, still holding her hand, still keeping her close. After a couple of seconds, she leaned back against the door, too, and let out a soft breath. He looked over. Her eyes were closed, her expression still tight, but not quite so strained as it had been in the office, as if she knew that for a while everything was going to be all right.

Watching her, his eyes slowly adjusted to the faint glow of the city lights filtering into the cavernous room through the windows. There were two floors of them, thirty feet of iron-bound glass extending the full length of the south wall. A full moon was visible in the clearing sky. The sound of free-running water, a lot of it, coming from the far end of the loft, was unmistakable.

“Did you leave a faucet on?” she asked softly, a slight tremor in her voice.

“Sort of.” The steel was cool against his skin. Her hand was warm in his, and with every breath she took, an irrepressible longing was building inside him, making his chest tight.

“Should you turn it off?” she said after a moment's hesitation, as if afraid to mention something so obvious.

“It'll be okay.” But he wasn't sure he was going to be, not with her wearing a push-up bra.

Black satin.

With silver stripes.

Yeah, he'd noticed. The same way he'd noticed Saturday written across her ass and that she was holding his hand, too.

Now that he could breathe again, everything was starting to fall into place in a little bit different order, stacking up to one undeniable truth: He wanted her.

God, it had been so long since he'd wanted a woman. Well, he always wanted one. He just hadn't bothered lately to find one, something he used to do without putting out too much effort. Usually, the women were just there—beautiful, warm, soft, sweet, funny, sometimes a little bitchy, and sometimes he didn't mind. And usually they found him.

But if they'd been anywhere lately, he hadn't noticed, not since Colombia.

He'd noticed her, though. Noticed her in a way that was impossible to ignore, deep down in his gut, viscerally. With the snow falling on her hair and melting against her cheeks, she'd looked up at him, and he'd suddenly noticed everything about her—the thickness of her lashes and the softness of her breath, the paleness of her skin and the racing of her heart, and he'd wanted her, the baddest badass girl to ever hit his part of town. She was so off-limits, she should have come wrapped in concertina wire—and he wasn't sure even that would have been enough to hold him at bay, not tonight.

He rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand and let out a heavy breath. Okay. What was he going to do here? He'd never out-and-out fraternized with the enemy before, but right now, every cell in his body was consumed with the thought of doing a whole lot more than that.

His gaze drifted over the little triangle of black satin clinging to her hips and the absolutely amazing sight of her breasts practically spilling out of her bra, and it tied him in knots. Just watching her breathe made his skin hot.

Covert war was like rugby, he thought. Women shouldn't even be allowed on the field, because it made the game impossible to play. He was supposed to bring her down, just like any other tango, and turn her in, and all he could think about was touching her, getting his mouth and hands on her, getting inside her.

Oh, yeah.
Inside her, that was the picture hardwired in his brain and short-circuiting his common sense all the way down to his groin.

A black-market arms dealer,
geezus
. He was a highly trained special ops warrior. He was supposed to know better than this. He killed guys like her.

But he wasn't going to kill her, no matter who ordered it, and he'd be hell-and-gone damned if he was going to let anybody else, either, because somewhere, deep inside, he was having serious doubts about her involvement in this mess. She'd been bugged, and nobody bugged their partner.

You are so fucking crazy,
he told himself. He couldn't think of a damn thing she'd done to slay him like this. In truth, she hadn't done anything except run for her life all night long—but he was slain, at her feet. All she was doing was holding his hand, and he was getting hard.

Perfect. He wanted to groan with the absurdity of it.

CODY
felt his fingers twine through hers, felt the silky length of his hair slide across the top of her cheek where they stood so close together—and it was all she could do to keep breathing. Her heart was racing so fast.

O'Connell had told her if she didn't cooperate it might become expedient for the CIA to “retire” her. She knew exactly what “retire” meant, and the minute Dylan had spoken the word, her blood had run cold.

It was still running cold—dead cold, if she couldn't find a way out. Time had escaped her, all of her time, all at once, and she was alone, except for Creed Rivera.

She'd missed him, her guardian angel. She hadn't known how desperately, until he'd walked into the office, bruised and cut across one cheek, his pants torn. She hadn't expected to see him again, ever—but he was here now, holding her hand, and she was loathe to let him go.

She tightened her hand around Creed's. She could feel his pulse, feel his strength—and she could feel the sharp edge of panic snaking through her gut.

Everybody wanted her dead—except for Creed Rivera.

“Would . . . would you kiss me?” The words came out softly, barely audible, almost taking her by surprise, but not quite. She knew why she wanted to kiss him again—and it was all selfish, but she wasn't going to take the words back. The place they were was warm and dark, and he was close, and this was it, as safe as she was ever going to be for the rest of her life, in this room, with him.

He'd kissed her in South Morrison the same way he'd kissed her on the roof of the library, with more tenderness than she'd had in too long to remember. It had been instantly consuming, the taste of his mouth, the softness of his breath upon her skin, the sheer heat of it washing through her and making her melt.

She'd like to melt now, or at least feel warm, and he was a wall of warmth standing beside her, almost face-to-face, his chest almost touching her shoulder. He was alive, and her life was slipping through her fingers. She looked up and saw him silhouetted in the shadows with moonlight limning his face and running like silver down the bare skin of his throat, and everything inside her ached. He looked like an angel, a ruthless, heartbreakingly beautiful angel, and he'd killed a man to save her life.