Crazy Wild (4 page)

“Well, Cody Stark,” he said, not sounding like he believed her for a minute, “when I let go of you, I suggest you run like hell for the stairs. Klein has this floor covered.”

A spark of hope ignited in her breast. He was going to let go of her. Thank God. The one thing she could do was run like hell. She just hoped the beach boy put up enough of a fight to give her a chance to escape.

She no sooner had the thought than she felt a twinge of guilt. Edmund was going to hurt him, badly, maybe even kill him. She shot her captor a quick look and had the unbelievable thought of “what a waste.” He truly did have the face of an angel, his eyes a pale bluish gray, his brown hair streaked with gold, his face artfully carved and too pretty by half, and he was about to be mangled by a psychopathic brute.

It was his choice, though. She'd warned him, and she had no intention of sticking around and watching Edmund beat him to a pulp.

With less than twenty feet left between them and the German giant, Creed released her from his hold with a hissed command to run, and she obeyed, skirting a pair of study carrels and heading fast for the stairwell door.

A gasp and a grunt, both sounding like they came from a cold-cocked bull elephant, preceded a crash behind her. Against every ounce of common sense and good judgment she had, she turned at the door and looked back.

She'd expected blood and mayhem. What she hadn't expected was to see the surfer boy rising from the wreckage unharmed, and for Edmund to be sprawled across the floor, out cold.

The California surf angel looked up and caught her gaze, and her breath stopped short. Without looking away, he reached inside his coat and withdrew a wicked looking shotgun. Then he glanced back at Edmund and, using the gun, struck him hard at the base of his skull.

When his gaze returned to hers, a ton and a half of adrenaline drop-loaded into her system, igniting a panic so pure it damn near paralyzed her.

He
was
wild. Crazy, crazy wild. It was all over his face, deep in his eyes. With a gasped breath, she wrenched the door open and took off up the stairs like the hounds of hell were after her.

C
HAPTER

4

H
E CAUGHT HER
at the second landing, his fist closing on the back of her coat and hauling her upright.
Oh, God.
She damn near had a heart attack.

“Keep running,” he growled, half lifting her off her feet as he ran beside her, taking the stairs two and three at a time, making sure she kept up with him.

Below them, the door opened with a commotion. The pack had arrived. The sound of men moving, talking, swearing, of feet pounding, filled the stairwell and spurred her on, caught between the devils behind her and the devil beside her.

“Did . . . did you kill him?” Edmund had looked dead, lying there on the library floor.

“Not this time,” he said, racing her across the third landing and hauling her up the next flight of stairs.

As she ran beside him, growing more breathless and wondering how long she could keep up with him—and what he'd do when she couldn't—it occurred to her, ridiculously, that she'd probably lost her job, damn it. Of course, if she died tonight, her whole library career was going to be a moot point, which was a damned disconcerting thought.

Lungs burning, heart pounding, she grabbed the rail and rounded the next landing with Creed's hand still buried in her coat. He wasn't even breathing hard, and she could hardly breathe at all. He still had the shortened shotgun in his other hand, and she didn't doubt for an instant that he would use it—maybe on her.

So help her God, who was he? The name Creed meant nothing to her, and she wouldn't have forgotten it any more than she would have forgotten him.

He had to want the nuclear warhead. That's what everybody wanted from her, a chance to get in on Sergei's big deal. But Sergei didn't have a deal without her, and the minute she'd figured that out, she'd known that simply escaping the Russian and running back home wasn't going to work.

Oh, hell, no. She was in way more trouble than that.

Damn!
She tripped on a stair, stumbling, and only Creed's hold kept her from falling flat on her face.

Behind them on the stairs she could hear someone struggling to keep up, probably Ernst. He was big and brawny, but out of shape. Bruno was big, too, but he was all muscle and horrendous strength, and he had to be the one gaining on them, his footsteps sounding closer and closer as he climbed, hot on their tails.

“Faster,”
Creed commanded, doing his best to single-handedly carry her up each succeeding flight.

It wasn't going to work. Her feet were sliding, slipping out from under her. She was at the end, exhausted from weeks on the run. He was pushing her beyond her limit, and she didn't have an ounce of “go” left in her.

Or so she thought.

A shot fired from below had them both leaping up the next few stairs. A second shot sounded, and Creed shoved her ahead of him, toward the outside wall, then leaned against the rail and returned fire.

The shotgun blast echoed in the steel-and-concrete stairwell like a dynamite explosion, rocking her back against the wall, hurting her ears, but she had enough sense to keep scrambling. Before the sound faded she felt him propelling her forward again, his fist once more closed around her coat, lifting her to her feet, keeping her going.

Who
was
this guy? she asked herself. And how in the world was she going to get away from him—if, by some chance, they got away from Bruno?

At the next landing, he slammed into a door leading to the outside while using the butt end of the shotgun to release the lock, and in the next second the two of them were stumbling out onto the roof.

The cold hit her like a runaway train, knocking her back on her feet. She gulped in a great lungful of frozen air, and the pain of it almost put her on her knees.

“Come on,”
he insisted, urging her into a run.

The roof was slick with ice and drifted in snow, and she felt almost sick with the sudden, awful cold, but he wouldn't let her slow down for an instant to catch her breath. Surefooted, he raced across the roof, through a maze of air conditioners, ventilation equipment, stacks of all sizes, and a blinding, swirling blizzard of snow, keeping her firmly in tow.

A flash of light and the sound of the door banging open again had him making a sudden, lightning-quick change of direction. In her leather-soled shoes, she had no traction, and she slipped, landing against him with enough force to send them both tumbling.

“Geezus,”
he ground out between his teeth, falling into a slide and taking her with him, his arm coming around her.

Cody went down on top of him, and the two of them careened across the roof, heading for the edge. A low wall kept them from going over, but he couldn't stop their slide, and they ended up jammed behind a ventilation unit in a tangled heap of arms and legs.

In the middle of scrambling to his feet, he suddenly froze, still on his knees, and pulled her tight against him with his gun hand, his other hand going over her mouth.

She heard it, too, the sound of someone approaching, footsteps crunching through the snow and slip-sliding every few steps on the ice.

He caught her gaze, his warning clear:
Don't move, not a muscle.

She gave a short nod and had to wonder why. She didn't know him. It was entirely possible he was even more of a danger to her than Bruno the Bull.

But she stayed where she was, kneeling with him, facing him as he slowly and silently lifted his arm from around her waist and angled the shotgun toward the opening they'd slid through. If anyone rounded the ventilation unit, they were going to be looking straight down the gun's barrel—but probably not for long.

She shivered with the awful thought of seeing someone get shot at very close quarters, and she shivered with the aching cold. It had to be below zero, the snow falling in endless, white waves from the sky, and it had to be Bruno getting closer, because the next sound she heard was another guy coming out of the door, cursing the cold: Ernst.

Reinhard wouldn't have run up the stairs, not even for her. Given that Edmund was hurt and out cold on the library floor, Reinhard had probably gotten in his car and left. Cleaning up messes wasn't what he did. Bruno was his cleanup man, and he would undoubtedly pay for letting this night's job turn into a mess in the first place.

“Why are we out here, Bruno?” Ernst grouched in German. “Why don't we just get the book and go?”

“Get the book? You idiot. We need the girl,” she heard Bruno reply. “We don't even know if the book is here, and there are forty-seven miles,
miles, you idiot,
of bookcases in the Denver Public Library.”

“You don't know that, Bruno.”

“It's in the fucking brochure,” Bruno said. “Now keep looking for her.”

Another shiver racked her. Her feet felt frozen in her thin leather shoes, and she didn't even want to think about her knees. Her ears were so cold they burned. Her teeth started to chatter.

Without a word, the man holding her removed his hand from her mouth and reached down to open his coat. In seconds, she was wrapped inside, her head against his chest, his body heat seeping through her sweater.

God, he was actually warm—so warm. It was all she could do to keep from wrapping herself around him. She did wrap her arm partway around his waist.

And that's when she discovered his other gun—at the small of his back, underneath his sweater. A pistol.

Off in the distance, the low wail of sirens coming from different directions, converging on the library, told her someone must have found Edmund or heard the shots, or both, and called the police.

It wasn't good news.

She no sooner wanted the authorities to find her than she'd wanted Reinhard or the psycho-surfer to find her. All she wanted was to be left alone, to go back to her old life, the one that had been so predictably safe until she'd gone looking for her father. But that wasn't going to happen, not as long as she had the book and Sergei didn't. Even so, giving it to him was impossible. She'd seen the people he was lining up as buyers, and they were terrorists, every one of them, from every corner of the world.

There was only one way out for her—to disappear. She'd tried turning herself and the book over to the U.S. authorities in the Czech Republic, and that had gone terribly, horribly wrong. Her contact had been executed. It was her nightmare, what had happened in the warehouse in Karlovy Vary.

“Ernst!
Idi slanu yaytsa kachat'!
” Bruno yelled, sounding a crude retreat as the sirens drew closer. Blue and red lights flashed below on the street—the police cars arriving. The last thing the big German would want would be to get picked up by the police. He might have legitimate papers, but the Braun boys were definitely personae non grata in the West, having been linked to the death of a United States embassy attaché in Prague. CIA agent, not attaché, had been the word on the street—and the rumor had been true. She'd known the attaché, known he was an agent, and she'd been living for weeks with the awful knowledge that she was the reason he'd been taken to Karlovy Vary and killed.

She looked up at the man holding her so close, watching him, seeing his breath blow white in the frigid air. He was more death, an angel of death. She felt it in his heartbeat. She saw it in his eyes, in the utter commitment he'd made with the shotgun in his hand.

There wasn't a doubt in her mind about what would happen if Bruno or Ernst crossed into his space. They would die—blown to hell, straight to hell, by a sawed-off shotgun.

Creed—such a strange name.

Slowly, carefully, she slid her hand under his sweater and over the pistol's grip, until she felt it cold and solid in her hand.

The door into the library opened again, sending another slice of light across the rooftop, and the last of the voices faded away. Bruno and Ernst were making their escape.

It was time for her to do the same.

With an ease she was sure had been designed for his convenience, not hers, the gun slipped smoothly out of the holster into her hand. She didn't hesitate to shove the end of the barrel against the front of his sweater.

One breath passed, then two, before he cut his gaze to her.

“Have you ever killed a man?” he asked, his words as cold as the vapor surrounding them.

She said nothing, but neither did she move the gun.

“You won't like it,” he assured her, his gaze sliding away to look out over the night. Hundreds, thousands of snowflakes drifted onto his shoulders, into his hair, onto his face, some vestige of warmth melting them when they touched his skin.

More long seconds of silence passed. She had demands, they were on the tip of her tongue, but she was too cold to get the words out—or maybe she was just too damned scared.

“The first thing,” he said, returning his attention to her, “is to get serious.”

He had dark lashes, as dark as his eyebrows, a fascinating contrast with his sun-streaked hair.

“If you gut-shoot me, I might still get a shot off myself.” He lifted the shotgun slightly, making sure she noticed it, giving her fair warning. “But if you
get serious
”—he wrapped his other hand around hers and lifted both it and the pistol until he'd positioned the gun's barrel under his chin—“you can kill me without risking yourself.”

Her hand started to shake, which didn't seem to bother him nearly as much as it terrified her.

He was crazy.

AND SO IT COMES
to this,
Creed thought, looking down at the woman looking up at him. It always seemed to come to this: a standoff, a gun in the dark, and one person just a shade more determined than the other. Before Colombia, that had been him, the more determined one, every single fucking time.

A sigh of frustration or weariness, or both, left him in a white puff of breath. Of course, if she shot him, it would solve a lot of his problems.

Hell, it would solve all of them—except for one. He and the Lord hadn't been on speaking terms for a while, and that was a helluva way for a good Catholic boy to meet his maker—pissed off.

Not that he was really too worried about dying on the roof. In about ten more seconds, Dominika Starkova was going to be too cold to squeeze a trigger, no matter how much encouragement he gave her.

Cody Stark, she'd called herself. He didn't know whether to believe her or not, but it was an easy enough fact to check. He did know she was pretty, much prettier without all the makeup she'd been wearing in the photo taken in Prague. With her dark hair really short in back and too long in front, hanging in her eyes, and that delicate nose, her eyes wide with a slight tilt, thickly lashed, she looked familiar in a way he couldn't quite place.

It had been a long time since he'd kissed a woman, a very long time, and he certainly had no business kissing this one—but there it was suddenly, in his mind, his gaze drifting to her lips, a hot longing curling deep in his gut.

It had definitely been a long time since he'd felt that. But then it had been a long time since he'd had a woman pressed up against him, turning him on, let alone one offering him oblivion with a gun jammed up under his chin.