Crazy Wild (23 page)

And she loved being touched by him; the sheer intimacy of it felt like a gift, to be so close to someone after being alone for so long. She opened herself to him, opened her legs, opened her mouth and captured his lips with her own, his name running through her mind—
Creed
.

The kiss was endless, sensually charged, mind-drugging, and she was dying with wanting him. Her head fell to his shoulder, her hands tightening on his arms. She hadn't expected such aching pleasure, only the deed, to have him inside her, making her whole, but here she was, melting into him, her body limp with the pleasure he was creating. She wanted to swoon with it, and when he started to push up inside her, she almost did. All he had to do was be there, pressing against her, and she was mesmerized.

“Creed . . . I—” She didn't know what to say, but needed to say something. She should tell him the truth, before he went any further, but she couldn't, not when he felt like this and it all seemed so much more than she'd planned.

“Shhh, everything's okay.” He brought one of his hands up to the side of her face, cupping her cheek with his palm, kissing her once, so gently.

On his next push, he slid deeper, and she watched, entranced, as his pale gray eyes slowly drifted closed, his dark lashes coming to rest on his cheeks. His head came forward, bringing with it a long fall of sun-streaked hair, a harsh breath escaping him as he moved inside her, hitting every nerve ending she had and all the tender places in her heart, and oh, God, it was all so much terrible trouble—to really need him, to need him like her next breath.

He felt so incredibly good, one soul-shattering sensation after another, thrust after endless thrust taking her someplace she'd never been, his hands all over her, his mouth burning a trail on her skin, leaving her dazed. His body was so tight and hard beneath her hands, one set of lean muscle layered over another. She loved the way he tasted, the way he smelled . . . the way he moved, pushing into her, holding her close. She tangled her hands through the long, silky strands of his hair, buried her face in the curve of his neck, felt the strength of his arms around her—and died a little just for the wanting of him.

Then, between one breath and the next, desire caught, every place he touched her suddenly taking her higher, until she couldn't take any more. It was the last thing she'd expected.

“Creed . . .”
She gasped his name, every cell in her body pulsing with the sudden sweetness of release.
Oh, my God.

A soft groan escaped him, and he buried himself deep inside her, his hips coming up flush against hers, his body going rigid in her arms.
Oh, God.
His breath was so hot on her neck, his arms so tight around her. She could feel the pounding of his heart, feel the pleasure coursing through him—and she was lost.

At the end, all she could do was cling to him and try to breathe. He had her in such a death grip, his arms like a vise around her, his body a rock solid wall of heat and power up against hers—and she never wanted him to let her go. Never.

After a long, intense moment, in which he didn't move, he sank to his knees in the pool, taking her with him. Water lapped at her chin as he rolled onto his back and drifted up against the base of the waterfall. He leaned back into a bed of ferns, still inside her, still holding her.

“Shhh,” he said, when she would have changed position. “Don't move. Not yet.”

Then he kissed her, over and over, his mouth opening on her forehead, her eyebrow, the side of her face, soft kisses, gentle kisses, each one of them making her feel more loved than she knew she had a right to feel.

C
HAPTER

23

S
KEETER LOOKED MUTINOUS.
Her arms were crossed. Her legs were crossed. Hell, for all Dylan knew, her eyes were crossed. But he couldn't see her eyes. Her ball cap was pulled down so low and tight on her head, he could barely see her sunglasses.

“You don't want me to have to take this place apart,” Tony Royce said, putting a new twist on the same threat he'd been making for the last half an hour, ever since he and his guys had made it back to Steele Street.

“No,” Dylan admitted, not too concerned about the possibility. Skeeter had sat her mutinous butt right in front of the main motherboard, and with a couple of keystrokes, she could shut the operation up tighter than lockdown at the state penitentiary. Tony Royce would be lucky to get out, let alone get farther in.

But he didn't think that was what was bothering Skeeter. She'd come out of the office and signaled him that they needed to talk, but before he'd been able to extricate himself from Royce's tirade, she'd gone all spooky on him, glancing toward the ceiling and sitting herself down in the chair and getting silently, seriously wound up. Something was going on, and something was going to snap if she didn't lighten up.

He glanced back over at her, and watched, fascinated, as she mouthed the word “sex” at him and jerked her head toward the ceiling. It was unmistakable, she'd said sex, and it had an equally fascinating, if inappropriate effect on him. He knew what she was talking about, and despite his reaction, it didn't have a damn thing to do with the two of them getting hot and naked.

“No way,” he said. Impossible. Creed and Dominika Starkova hadn't been upstairs that long. He knew women found Creed damn near irresistible, but Ms. Starkova had looked like a drowned rat, and Creed had been way too strung out to put together any sort of “this is my place, can I get in your pants” scene.

“No condom,” she said with a tight little shrug, so angry it looked like she could spit.

Again, absolutely impossible. There was no way in hell for her to know something like that. He didn't care how “spooky” she was.

“No way.”

A strangled cough, coming from his right, drew his attention to Agent Mathers, whose gaze was riveted on Skeeter, everything in his expression saying “Yes, way. Anyway you want it way. With or without a condom, I'll go upstairs and have sex with you.”

Dylan had already been thinking he might have to kick Mathers's ass, because of the kid's fascination with Skeeter's breasts, and now he was convinced. It was just a matter of time.

“Do . . . uh . . . you two need to clear something up, so we can focus on what's happening here tonight?” Royce asked, sounding about as disgusted as Dylan suddenly felt.

He never got off track, and Skeeter had just sidelined him into the bleachers.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, we do,” he said, heading for his office and gesturing for her to follow.

She was off her leather-clad butt in a heartbeat and right on his ass all the way into his office.

SOMETHING
damn fishy was going on, Royce thought. Something about as fishy as what he'd found at South Morrison. He and his guys had hardly gotten out of the car before they'd been called off by the director himself.

Called off when there'd been goddamned gunfire coming right out of the goddamn building. All under control, Alden had said. Another set of agents was on the job.

Bullshit. There was only one reason for another set of agents to have been “on the job” at South Morrison: The “prongs” in Alden's multipronged approach to the Dominika Starkova operation were starting to trip over each other. Royce could see the writing on the wall. He'd been sent as a frickin' decoy to rattle SDF's cage and draw them off, while some other guys grabbed all the glory and Dominika Starkova.

Well, fuck that. This sort of snafu should have been all sorted out between the Pentagon and Langley before it ever got down to agents being deployed in the field. It was always a potential difficulty with clandestine operations, that one hand wouldn't know what the other was doing, and the kind of rogues the CIA had been recruiting as agents since 9/11 only compounded the problem. Nobody knew what in the hell some of them were doing. For a few years, Agency work had been a fairly clean operation of signal interception, electronic surveillance, and technical information gathering. They'd cut back on the less savory aspects of human intelligence gathering and lost most of their special forces capabilities, but gained respectability.

Of course, it had all been so damned ineffective, even Royce had balked at some of the changes. It was a well-known fact that if your enemy was in the sewer, you had to have a few rats on your side, the kind of rats who knew how to infiltrate enemy organizations.

Well, Royce smelled a rat, probably more than one, and while they were snatching Dominika Starkova and taking down terrorists, he was stuck in this friggin' impregnable building, watching his guys drool over a street punk and praying to hell he wasn't getting outplayed by a man who should have been sitting in Leavenworth for the last nine years.

He needed something to break—and if it couldn't be Dylan Hart's special status at the Department of Defense, he sure as hell would like it to be Creed Rivera's ass.

SEX?”
Dylan said, shutting his office door firmly behind him. “And what's this about a condom? You can't possibly know that.”

“Oh, yes, I can,” she said, facing him with her hands on her hips. “There hasn't been a condom in Creed's loft since I took over requisitions. Every week, I send out the list, the same list you get, and right there under Grooming and Hygiene is a little box for condoms—and it is
never
checked. Never. There isn't a condom on the ninth floor.”

Dylan stared at her, stupefied. Yes, he'd seen her unbelievably detailed requisition list. He got it via e-mail every Sunday, and every now and then he ticked off a couple of items: espresso, steaks, cordon bleu, croissants, maybe some of that special shaving cream he liked.

But he never checked the box for condoms.

“A guy can buy his own condoms,” he said. As a matter of fact, a guy
preferred
to buy his own condoms. He could A-1 guarantee it.

“Could,” she agreed. “But why? I've got all the options. There isn't anything you could want that I don't have on the list: cherry-flavored, ribbed, magnum, whatever. It's all there.”

Yes, he'd noticed all those options the first time she'd sent out the list, and he'd tried damn hard not to notice them ever again—and the very last conversation he wanted to have with her was the one that included cherry-flavored ribbed condoms.

Jesus
. It was giving him hot flashes.

He turned away from her and walked over to his desk.

“It looks like Royce and his guys are here for the long haul,” he said, sitting down and opening a new document on his computer, and doing his best to just forget about condoms. “Unless we can draw them off.”

He wanted the bastards gone. It wasn't just professional. He couldn't really fault Royce for trying to do his job—but Mathers was skating on thin ice, and he didn't want the guy hanging around Steele Street all night staring at Skeeter's ass.

“I'm going to go—no, I'm going to send
you
to police headquarters, over on Thirteenth and Cherokee. Take the Humvee.” There wasn't anything that could get to her or stop her in the Humvee. “Drop off all the intel Creed collected tonight. Give it directly to Lieutenant Bradley. I'll send instructions for her to make sure it gets to the CIA guy she's been arm-wrestling with all night. It won't take him long to call Agent Royce, and then they can all go hole up somewhere else and go through their goodie bag. And make sure Loretta gave them the address to Dominika Starkova's apartment. They can have that, too. All we need is the girl.”

“Won't Lieutenant Bradley think that's all kind of roundabout?”

“Loretta owes me, big time. It won't matter what she thinks; she'll do it.”

Royce had been chasing his tail all night long. Dylan could guarantee that he'd jump at the chance to get ahold of something besides his dick tonight.

“Once Royce is gone, I promise you, I'll save Creed from Dominika Starkova's evil clutches.”

He didn't know how. Hell, if Creed was that far over the edge, it was going to take more than a well-intentioned friend, a direct order, or a bucket of cold water to stop him.

“Now what else do you have for me?” he asked. “You came out of the office with something on your mind.”

Her face cleared in an instant. “Yeah, right. Wow. You won't believe what I found when I started running some of this stuff through the computer.” She came over to the desk and leaned down next to him, sorting through the top layer of papers strewn everywhere.

She smelled good. Real good. She always did. It was one of the fascinating things about her, how from a distance she could look like such a piece of street trash, but up close, everything about her was squeaky clean, buffed, polished, shined, every bit of chain mail, every bit of leather, that silky fall of platinum hair—her sweet face.

Her mouth.

And she always smelled good.

Honor. Duty. Loyalty.
He read the Chinese tattoo inked into the skin of her upper arm. She'd gotten it long before she'd come to SDF, back when she'd still been a wallbanger.

He understood honor among thieves. He and the rest of the SDF guys had epitomized the credo back in their chop-shop days. The same with loyalty. They'd each put their lives on the line for each other at some time in the last sixteen years.

But duty. That one threw him. What “duty” did a wallbanger have? Or duty to whom? He'd never boosted a car out of duty. He'd chopped a few when he would have rather sold them whole, in order to meet a quota or smooth over a rough deal, but he'd always called that “covering his ass,” not duty.

He would have to ask her about it sometime, if he ever allowed himself to be alone with her in a quiet place without a crisis raining down on their heads.

Nah,
he decided.
Bad idea.

“Here it is,” she said, a thread of excitement running through her voice. “This is so cool . . . well, not cool. It's kind of bad news, but it's bad news we've got, so in a way that makes it good news. Right?”

“Right.” He guessed.

She picked up a copy of Bruno Walmann's business card and the sheaf of papers underneath.

“I ran this company name and hooked into their office in New York. They sell computer parts, hardware, all legit as far as I can tell. But they've got a couple of subsidiaries and one of those is a dummy corporation out of the Dutch West Indies. Interestingly enough, it's got a few subsidiaries of its own, including a corporation headquartered in London with branch offices all across the United States, including Atlanta, Cleveland, Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix, Los Angeles—”

“And Denver.” Amazing. Not the information, but that she'd gotten it all in less than half an hour.

“Yeah. They've got a small warehouse on the north side.”

“How . . . how did you get this so quickly?” Frankly, he was stunned. Nobody worked that fast.

“Followed my nose,” she said, as if it was nothing. “Broke a couple of codes. Didn't
dawdle
.” A smile curved her lips, and it took everything he had not to just reach up and kiss her.

He should marry her. That's what he should do.

“This is incredible work, Skeeter.” He looked through the papers, following the trail she'd discovered. “Really incredible. I need to give you a raise.”

“No, you don't.”

“I don't?” He glanced up.

“No,” she said, her smile returning. “You already overpay me. Superman and I made sure of it.”