Crazy Wild (21 page)

“Did Skeeter design the whole loft, or just the jungle?” The girl seemed immensely talented.

“She's just the jungle girl. Superman and I built the original platforms and the staircases years ago. The walls on the platforms move, very Japanese. You can have privacy if you want, but usually the whole place is just open.”

“Superman?” She wanted to know everything about him, or as much as she could, and as long as he was answering questions, she was going to ask—and she wasn't going to quit holding his hand. If they were touching, she felt like she still had a chance at redemption.

“A friend,” he said. “More than a friend. A brother.”

“Like Dylan,” she said, remembering how the two of them had come in together, the easy way they'd been with each other—up until the CIA had come into the conversation.

“Like Dylan,” he agreed.

“What about Skeeter?” The girl fascinated Cody, the way she looked and the way she fit into this place with all its high-powered cars, high-tech equipment, and highly skilled warriors. This building was luxuriously expensive. The art in the hallway outside Creed's loft was of museum quality. Everything in the building was unique, from the cagelike freight elevator crawling up the side of the building, to this indoor jungle, to the men who lived here, to the girl.

“Skeeter's our wild card. She's only been with us a couple of years, but she's taken over the whole place.”

“She scared me a little.”

“Yeah, well, you're small. She could have taken you.”

“That's what she said.”

“You tried something?” He didn't sound at all happy about the possibility.

“No.”

“Why not?” And he sounded intrigued by that. “You didn't waste any time ditching me.”

She shrugged, a small gesture. “I was afraid.” Afraid of escaping only to find out she had no place left to go. Afraid of Reinhard finding her. Afraid of never seeing Creed again, but she doubted if he'd make that inference.

“You're safer here than anyplace else in the world tonight. I can guarantee it.”

Since he'd been the only guarantee of safety she'd had for months, she didn't find his statement too hard to believe, but there was a problem, and it was only two floors away.

“What about the CIA? Is Dylan going to tell them I'm here?” It would be the end of her if he did.

NOT
tonight,” Creed said and hoped to hell it was true. She was hanging by a thread no matter how anybody looked at the situation. The best he could do was catch her if the thread broke or if somebody out-and-out took a machete to it.

A sudden breeze drifted through the trees, setting leaves in motion and fronds swaying.

“Wind?” she asked, a small laugh escaping her. “Can you make it rain, too?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. The fans cycle every fifteen minutes, and there's a sprinkler system to make it rain for three minutes every eight hours.” They were almost to the pool, or the lagoon as Skeeter called it. It was the deepest, darkest jungle in the loft, with the trees and ferns planted close together to create at least the illusion of privacy, if not the reality.

“It smells good in here,” she said. “Different.”

He knew what she meant. The loft smelled green. He'd always had the largest apartment in the building and had long ago dismantled part of the ceiling to open it up to the tenth floor. It was a cavernous living space, but it was Skeeter who had added the fans. Skeeter who had started at the copper and iron waterfall he and Hawkins had welded together as kids and begun transforming the industrial ambiance of his multiplatformed loft into a literal urban jungle.

The place seethed with life.

He could feel it around him. Smell it. The greenness rich and decadent. It had driven him a little crazy at first, when he'd realized what Skeeter was doing to his place. Every time he had come home, there had been a new layer of forest added to the last, another wall of vegetation encroaching on his few pieces of furniture, another tree towering over his bed.

Now he depended on it. He was living in a garden of Eden, and he'd just brought home Eve in torn fishnet with sparkle gel in her hair.

C
HAPTER

22

“S
O WHAT HAVE
we got?” Skeeter asked.

“A thousand dollars,” Dylan said. “Half of it in Euros.”

“Check.” She marked it off on her list.

“Four wallets.”

Skeeter grinned. Creed was so smooth. He'd made a damn good living as a twelve-year-old pickpocket before he'd started boosting cars and working with Dylan at the chop shop. She'd heard the stories. It was that sweet face of his, or at least she guessed his face must have looked sweet at twelve. Now he looked like what he was—battle-hardened, street tough, and not to be fucked with—but in the right light, with a couple of beers in him, there was a little trace of sweetness still there. Damn little, but it might come out with the right woman, who would
not
be Dominika Starkova.
Cripes
. Her underwear. Geez, for herself, Skeeter managed to remember the freakin' days of the week without having them embroidered across her butt.

“You wanna give me those names again?”

“Bruno Walmann,” Dylan called out, opening each wallet in turn. “Edmund Braun. Ahmad Hashemi. Qasim Akbar.”

Okay, so Creed had tagged two of those guys and bagged one. That still left Walmann as a very nice lift.

“Check. Check. Check. Check.” She liked working with Dylan. They made a good team, and she'd been wondering like crazy if he'd noticed.

“Two sets of car keys.”

“You want them to go to Lieutenant Loretta?”

“No,” Dylan said, shaking his head. “I'd love to, but all this stuff will go to Royce.”

“Why?” She looked up, surprised.

“It's a nuclear bomb we're looking for, Skeeter, not a couple of homeys with a gang vendetta. Loretta got to first base with Braun and the Iranians, but Royce will have them out from under her in less than an hour. He needs this information.”

Well, that all sounded damn generous of him.

“And it'll get him off our ass.”

Now that made sense.

“So we give him the trinkets, but we keep Dominika Starkova?” she asked.

“Until we hear from General Grant.” He picked up the next item on the desk. “One tracking device.”

“Chee-eck.” One razzle-dazzle, supercalifragilistic, totally sick tracking device with the receiver embedded in a teeny-tiny pair of earrings which Creed had regretfully dropped down a heat vent in South Morrison. Dropped them and lost them.

Except, of course, it was impossible to lose an operating tracking receiver, and if somebody wanted to find those teeny-tiny earrings—well, there was the thingamajob that could do it. Sitting right in the palm of Dylan's hand.

“Don't even think it.”

She jerked her head up, breaking her laserlike concentration on the big wristwatch.

“What?” she asked, giving him the most innocent look she could conjure up.

“Don't think what you're thinking,” he said. “This all goes to Royce, every last piece of it.”

“Of course.” Well, duh. Like she didn't know that. The only things up for question were
when
it would all go to Royce and whether or not all the evidence would go at the same time, or if, possibly, one of the pieces might be sent along later.

A blinking light on the computer screen warned them their time was up.

“Royce is here,” Dylan said, setting the tracking device back down on the desk. “Photograph and catalog everything. Run as much of it through the system as you can and let me know if you come up with anything, but first send it all over the secure connection to General Grant, all the pictures and information. When you're finished, box it all up and seal it. Work fast. Don't dawdle.”

No shit, Sherlock.

“Yes, sir,” she said, doing her damnedest to give the impression of someone who could be trusted to follow his orders to a T.

CODY
had never known anyone who had a refrigerator in their bathroom, or anyone whose bathroom was a tropical rain forest, at least not until now.

Creed had touched a light pad on one of the few solid walls in the whole loft, and half a dozen lamps had gone on: two in the water, to softly light the pool; two in the trees, directed at the waterfall; and two on the solid wall, to light up a sink and cabinet area and a very sleek stainless steel refrigerator. The whole area was covered in light blue, iridescent tile, which made it seem like the place was under water. It was a magical effect.

“We have every fruit and vegetable known to man in those bottles,” he said, gesturing at a stunning array of shampoos, conditioners, face masks, spa scrubs, and lotions lined up on the counter. She recognized a lot of the labels; all the products were first-class herbal organics.

“And flowers,” she added, noticing small vials of lavender oil and rose oil, and a special brand of chamomile shampoo.

“Yeah, the way it smells in here sometimes, I'd say flowers, too. I think Skeeter has cat parties in the bathroom when I'm gone.”

“Cat parties?”

“You know, when you get all your friends together and do stuff with shampoo and fingernail polish.”

“You mean hen parties.”

“No.” He let out a short laugh. “There aren't any chickens in Skeeter's crowd. They're all cats. Probably bobcats, and wildcats, and I'm pretty sure there's a couple of real feral cats from her old crew. The kind of girls you do
not
want to meet in a dark alley.”

“So Skeeter lives with you?” She'd gotten the impression that he lived alone, the way he'd said “my place,” but she could easily be wrong. She had not gotten the impression that he had a girlfriend, not the way he'd been kissing her all night, but again, she could easily be wrong. Skeeter did seem to have the run of the place.

She wasn't going to be picky about it. She couldn't afford to be, and truth be told, she wanted him no matter how many other women had a claim on him. He could be sleeping with a hundred of them, and she'd still want him tonight, because he was her last chance, her only chance—which didn't really make it any less shameful.

God, her life had gotten so strange, was so different from what she had ever imagined it would be. The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States government wanted her dead. The only thing stranger was that from Russia to Denver, there were a whole lot of other people who felt the same way.

She was so scared, too scared not to hold on to the one sure thing she had: him.
Kiss me,
she'd asked him, and she might as well have said,
Save me. Save me if you can.

“She has the loft above this one,” he said, “but she does run things around here. She's a first-class mechanic and computer tech, and she's taking over Superman's job as majordomo of Steele Street—ordering in the food and organizing the houseboys.”

“Houseboys?” she said, relieved. She didn't really want to share him, even if he was only hers for one night. But lord, he really did live rich. The elevator had shown thirteen floors, and she knew from the ground-floor garage how big each floor was. It must take a small army to keep up the building, especially if there were many lofts like Creed's, and yet the place was very quiet, as if it was resting, peaceful, until called upon to be otherwise—which sounded ridiculous, even to her.

CREED
nodded and wondered why. It was true that Mama Guadalupe brought over a select crew once a week to do general housekeeping of the apartments on floors nine through thirteen. Floors three through eight were classified. No one got in there without specific orders and secure access codes. But none of that was any of Cody's business.

Shit.
He was talking to her, and he shouldn't. He should be asking questions, hard questions, the kind of questions where he needed to sit her in a chair in an empty room and be a real son of a bitch until she broke—which was exactly what Hashemi had been doing. And yes, he'd always known that he had far more in common with the men he killed than the people he protected. That was the job. That was the life.

And that was why the few women he'd thought he loved had not stuck around. Too many secrets, too much leaving without a word in the middle of the night, too much maybe-I-won't-make-it-back-this-time. He hadn't blamed any of them for walking away, and neither had he missed them for too long—which had always made him wonder if he knew what love was, true love.

He was pretty sure it wasn't something that was going to hit a guy on a frozen rooftop with a woman who had a gun to his head, but he wasn't completely positive, which left him on shaky ground in the son-of-a-bitch department with her.

“Would you like something to drink?” he asked, foregoing one of those thousand and one hard questions in favor of an easy one, and sounding like a perfectly nice, normal guy who'd gotten lucky and brought a girl home.

Right,
he thought, a perfectly nice, normal guy who'd killed someone tonight, and if he wasn't mistaken, gotten a piece of another one with his Glock.

“I've got all kinds of juice, beer, wine, probably some organic smoothie things . . . shots of tequila.” He could use a couple of those, but technically he was still very much on the job, in charge of a hardened international criminal, and though he had every intention of getting her into his bed, he'd probably be better off if he was stone cold sober when he did it. That way, at the court-martial, he'd have all his facts straight.

Kee-rist.
He needed his head examined. Fortunately, he had an appointment later in the week with a Captain Teal, USN, to do just that . . . again. Honestly, he couldn't have too much left in there that somebody hadn't seen and probably already poked a couple of times, except for the stuff he wasn't letting anybody see—how it had been with him and J.T. at the end.

Shit.
He brought his hand up to his chest.

“Juice, please. Orange juice, if you've got it.”

Taking a deep breath, he left her by the side of the pool and walked over to the refrigerator. Skeeter did a helluva lot better job of keeping things stocked than Hawkins had ever done, and she bought all the really nice stuff. Superman had never ordered organic smoothies, which Creed had discovered he liked. It was Skeeter's bottles of watery stuff with leaves and whatnot floating in them that he couldn't take. Guaranteed to add years to his life and life to his years, Skeeter liked to say.

She could be such a dork. Years to his life, his ass. A Kevlar vest and a two-and-a-half-pound trigger pull added years to his life, not herbs.

But he was in the refrigerator looking for orange juice, just the thing to get a woman in the mood.

No wonder he hadn't been laid in months.

And today must have been houseboy day, because there was lots of new stuff in the fridge, and in an interesting twist, all the orange juice was in little boxes. Great, he was going to be offering her a juice box. How incredibly seductive.

Hanging on the refrigerator door, he gave in to a brief, but totally heartfelt sigh. His life had been falling apart in a lot of ways lately. Not the job—he'd kicked ass tonight, he was glad to say. But the rest of his life. He spent all his time in rehab, or at the shrink's, or under Mercy's hood, and he let a twenty-year-old girl do most of his shopping for him, so he ended up with juice boxes and forty-eight bottles of mango-papaya shampoo in his bathroom.

He grabbed an orange juice out of the fridge and was delighted to realize that each came with its own unbelievably tiny straw stuck right to the box—utterly fucking delighted.

Geezus
. He did the deed, got the whole thing organized, then grabbed a few first-aid supplies and a bunch of towels and turned back to the pool.

“Thanks. That's . . . uh . . . sweet,” she said, when he gave her the juice box.

That was him. Sweet.

He dropped the towels on the tile behind her.

“Let's see your arm.” He'd noticed her favoring it in the elevator, and then had conveniently forgotten all about it once he'd gotten his mouth on her.

He sat down cross-legged at the side of the pool. She'd taken off her shoes and had her feet in the water, but he was still in full battle gear, including the pistol-gripped shotgun strapped to his hip and Velcroed around his thigh—another real romance-inducing item.

Yessiree, he'd just about brought this party to a full freakin' all-out stop, and for someone who was still pretty much consumed by the thought of full body contact, hot, sweaty, lose-your-fucking-mind sex tonight, that couldn't be a good thing. God, he wanted to eat her, all of her. He wanted to lick her up one side and down the other, bury himself inside her and drive her crazy, right over the edge, and when she came undone all over him, he wanted to start over again.

He needed that, needed it like air—was beginning to think it was the only thing that could save him.

“I think it's okay, just sore,” she said, lifting her arm, testing it, and not sounding like she had a clue what he was thinking. “For a minute there, in that room, I thought it was broken, but it's not.”

“You're bruising.” He could see it through the fishnet. Reaching up, he started easing what was left of the cat suit down off her arm. “I've got a cold pack to put on it for now.”