Crazy Wild (5 page)

He was a sick bastard. No doubt about it. But suddenly . . . suddenly she looked like bait, alluring, her mouth sweetly cold, enticing him to bend his head.

“No,” she whispered, staring up at him, snowflakes drifting onto her hair, her eyelashes—melting on her lips.

In her position, he would have said no, too, but he didn't give a damn what she said. She had the upper hand here. She had it all. She was running for her life. She had a reason to live, and he had nothing.

Nothing except her kiss, if he took it.

For so long, the only thing he'd wanted was death, simple, straightforward, kill-the-pain death, but with Dominika Starkova wrapped in his arms, holding his gaze, the faint scent of her teasing his senses, the feel of her body reminding him of all he'd lost, of all he'd missed, his list of simple desires had suddenly, inexplicably doubled.

Now he wanted death . . . and sex.

C
HAPTER

5

C
ODY KNEW HE
was going to kiss her. With the two of them freezing to death on the roof of the library, the psycho-surfer was going to kiss her. The thought, even more than all the fear that had gone before, absolutely paralyzed her. She couldn't move, not an inch, not away, not a breath's worth of distance. All she could do was watch and wait as he lowered his head, his eyes drifting closed, his lips parting. All she could do was wait, her breath held in a painful knot in her throat, the gun freezing to her hand as his movement pushed it lower and lower.

Then his mouth touched hers, so softly all she felt was the warmth—sweet, alluring warmth, his arm tightening around her, pulling her closer to his body, closer to his heat. His breath was so warm, the faint touch of his lips. It was seduction on a primal level, the warmth of a kiss for a moment's respite from the cold, for a moment's comfort.

He brushed her lips again, lingering longer, and all she could think was that they were both crazy. She still had the gun under his chin. She had the power. But she was the one trembling in fear—and he was pushing her too far.

If he didn't stop this tender little assault of his, she was going to . . . going to . . . oh, God, she was going to cry.

She felt the first tear slip free and knew deep in her heart she should shoot him just for that, but he was right. She wouldn't like killing him, couldn't kill him—not because of all the kisses he was so gently pressing to her lips, her cold cheek, the corner of her mouth, soft kisses mixing with her tears.

What was he thinking? Was he completely insane?

Or was she.

“Lo siento,”
he whispered, lifting his mouth from hers.

And what did that mean? she wondered. Then she knew.

Damn!
She'd lost the gun. He'd disarmed her, the bastard, first with his kisses, then by taking the gun.

“I'm sorry,” he said, though he didn't sound it, and she knew that's what he'd said in Spanish—
Lo siento. I'm sorry.
“I can't let you shoot me tonight.”

Of course not.

“It's not you I feel like shooting right now,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. She couldn't believe she'd been so stupid. And what the hell did he mean by not being able to let her shoot him tonight? Like maybe tomorrow night he'd be okay with it?

Biting off a silent curse, she pushed herself painfully to her feet, away from him and his warmth. He let her rise, but kept a strong grip on her coat, stopping her from what she really needed to do—run like hell.

Maybe to Los Angeles. Keep going west, if she could get away from him and stay out of Bruno's clutches. Denver was no good for her now. Reinhard wouldn't give up, not because of one small setback, not when he'd gotten this close. He was Sergei's right-hand man on the warhead deal, and he was going to want his cut of the take. Bruno and Ernst would be down on the street somewhere, waiting for her. She knew it as surely as she knew she wouldn't last much longer if they didn't get off the roof.

This must be what it's like on Mount Everest, she thought: frigidly cold, the wind blowing, cutting through your clothes, snow everywhere—but without the surf angel to share his heat and scramble a person's brain.

How could she have let him kiss her? Even if they had only been barely-there kisses. And how could she have been so cross-eyed stupid as to let him get the gun?

It didn't make sense. She'd spent the last three months living by her wits and doing everything in her power to keep Sergei and half his goons from kissing her, or worse, with varying amounts of success and one gut-awful failure, and she'd just let this total stranger get close enough to touch his mouth to hers? This very dangerous stranger?

Brain freeze, that had to be it, a total brain freeze. Disorientation. The onset of hypothermia. She did feel frozen clear through to her bones. She hurt with the cold, and it
was
hard to think. Her teeth were chattering again. Her breath was difficult to catch. God, they were going to freeze to death, if they didn't get off the roof.

She stomped her feet, trying to warm them, while her captor tried to stand up, and failed. He cursed and grabbed his leg, and the instant he let go of her coat, pure instinct flooded her body. She took off like a flash, but didn't get farther than a few racing strides before a shot rang out.

A bolt of fear sent her diving, and she crashed back onto the roof, her heart in her throat, her pulse pounding.
Good God!
He was shooting at her.

CREED
lowered his arm from where he'd shot into the air. Hell, he hadn't hit her. No way. But she'd dropped like a stone, and it gave him kind of a sick feeling. He'd wanted to stop her, not hurt her.

Think on your feet—yeah, that was him. The trouble was he couldn't get to his frickin' feet, and he wasn't thinking at all.
Geezus
. He'd kissed her. Dominika Starkova, international criminal, Russian Mafia moll, and the world's most dangerous woman according to Interpol and the DIA. Maybe he needed his head examined—again. Pushing himself up against the ventilation unit for support, he finally made it to standing and started a limping run across the frozen rooftop to where she'd fallen.

She didn't move, not so much as an inch, and his fear grew sharper with every awkward stride he took.

More sirens sounded below on the streets, coming from a couple of directions. They needed to get off the roof and away from the library now, before the cops found them. The last damn thing he wanted to do tonight was explain himself to Denver's finest, especially about Edmund Braun and the discharging of firearms in a public place. He was already into Lieutenant Loretta Bradley for a couple of traffic violations she'd taken care of for him—okay, a couple of dozen—and he doubted if she wanted to see him again any more than he wanted to see her.

And he sure as hell didn't want the cops to see Dominika Starkova. When Dylan said clandestine, he meant clandestine, and this op was as black as they came. That meant Ms. Starkova was his. He'd found her; he'd tailed her; and he'd saved her from Reinhard Klein. By jungle law, even the urban jungle, that made her his.

She still hadn't moved when he finally got to her, and he swore under his breath. He reached down, and in the next second found himself flat on his back, scrabbling to keep a hold on her, any kind of hold on any part of her, to keep her from getting away.

Kee-rist
. She'd kicked him. In his bad leg. Again. His frigging bad leg, and it hurt like hell with pain shooting through his knee up to his hip, not to mention how badly it hurt to fall flat on your back on a frozen slab of icy roof—for the second frigging time.

He grabbed for her, and she rolled. He lunged, and she dodged, but with the roof slick, and her flailing on the ice, and him
de-term-ined,
it was a done deal, and in another couple of seconds he had her firmly under him, a squirming, Czech-swearing, very angry woman.

And that was his problem. She was a woman. He would have done whatever it took to put a man down, but he didn't have it in him to hit her. He didn't. No matter how many nuclear warheads she was selling. Not after he'd kissed her.

And if he was going to get any stupider tonight, he didn't want to know it. Not right now.

Using his weight to hold her down, he reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a flex cuff. In one smooth move, he had her wrists bound, which pushed her over the edge of angry into ballistic. He didn't know what language she was chewing him up in, but it sounded like she'd gone beyond just Czech, maybe into Russian with a little German on the side. He was reaching for another cuff to do her ankles when the stairwell door slammed open.

Time was up.

With a superhuman effort, he hauled both of them to their feet and slung her over his shoulder, capturing her legs with his arm and completely ignoring the searing pain that shot up into his hip. Behind him, he heard men coming out onto the roof.

Taking off at a limping run, he headed for the north side of the building and the ladder rail he'd seen curving up over the edge. There was no way to the street from the new library roof except down the stairwell and through the building, but the old library was a warren inside and out, including the roof, and it butted up against the new library. All he had to do was climb down two floors on the outside of the building, clinging like a limpet to a frozen ladder—without dropping her.

Piece of cake.

C
HAPTER

6

W
HO IS THIS GUY?
The question tore around Cody's brain as she hung upside down over his shoulder, staring death in its cold, dark, ugly face. Two stories of sheer emptiness gaped below her, a swirling vortex of wind-driven snow spiraling down into a visually fathomless abyss.

An abyss—and he wasn't holding on to her. Not at all.

He was holding on to the ladder, leaving her balanced—
balanced
—on his shoulder like a bag of feed.

She had a hold on him, though. Oh, God, did she have a hold on him. Her frozen fingers gripped his coat with every ounce of strength she had left—which wasn't much. She couldn't see the old library below them, but she knew it was there, and despite her desperate desire to reach it in one piece, it was the last place she wanted to go with anybody involved with the warhead.

How long had he been following her? Days? Ever since she'd arrived in Denver?

Long enough to know what she'd done?

No, she told herself. She would have seen him if he'd been following her around while she worked, especially in the old library. He was impossible to miss. Every librarian and research assistant on the third floor had noticed him the moment he'd gotten off the escalator. The newspapers had been straightened so many times tonight, there wasn't a page left out of place, not even in
The New York Times
. There was no way he could have been following her without her knowing. In Prague, by necessity, she'd become an expert at watching her back, because there had always been somebody there, watching her, guarding her, keeping her from escaping—except once, and once had been enough.

He slipped on a rung, and her heart, which was already lodged in her throat, stopped for a long, painful second until he steadied himself.

So help her God, it was a long way down. Even squinting against the snow, she couldn't see the roof of the old library, and suddenly she was filled with an unreasonable panic that the building had disappeared. That it simply wasn't there anymore, and they would climb forever—or until she fell, whichever came first.

She started to tremble deep down inside, her body shaking, and a strong arm immediately went around her legs—which meant he had only one hand left on the ladder, which didn't really help.

“I'm not going to let you fall,” he said, his voice rough-edged, but calm. She didn't feel calm. She felt scraped and frozen and raw. Fifteen minutes ago she'd been calm, and warm, and gratefully going about her job. Fifteen minutes ago she'd thought she was safe.

Unexpectedly, he stepped down off the ladder to solid footing, and relief flooded through her. She hadn't died . . . yet.

But nothing else was right. Nothing. The night had spiraled out of control—and the only thing that could keep her alive was being in control. Helplessness meant death, and the psycho-surfer had handcuffed her.

A soft curse escaped her lips. She couldn't even control her body. She was shaking like a leaf, and the tips of her fingers were going numb.

“Y-you, you . . . we h-have to . . .” she ground out between chattering teeth, then gave up on a long explanation and cut to the chase. “I'm f-freezing.”

CREED
heard her and knew exactly what he had to do—get them off the roof and inside. He was cold, too, freezing, and his leg hurt like a bitch.
Geezus
—she'd practically crippled him.

Above them, a light cut down through the wind-driven snow and strafed the roof, crisscrossing the darkness. He glanced up; sure enough, a couple of cops were coming down the ladder, with a few more lined up along the roof ready to follow.

Okay, it was official now. Things were going to hell. The cops were taking the situation damn seriously, and he'd bet his Chevelle's pink slip that Reinhard, Bruno, and Ernst would be waiting for them on the street, if they'd gotten out of the library.

Something told him they had. They didn't seem like the kind of bad boys to get cornered by a few cops.

Neither was he.

Limping across the roof he headed into an alley of ventilation units, knowing there were a number of doors and windows that led inside. He'd been on a lot of downtown Denver roofs as a kid, messing around with his friends, hiding from the cops, and the roof of the old public library, overlooking Civic Center Park and the gold-domed capitol building, had been a favorite.

Halfway across the roof, he found what he was looking for, a skylight with a broken latch that led into an attic, but when he opened it and looked down inside, he got a bad feeling—real bad.

“What's going on in the old library?” he asked her. All he could feel was emptiness gaping below them in the dark.

“R-remodel,” she chattered. “B-building an atrium, like in the n-new library.”

As his eyes adjusted, he began to make out scaffolding along the edges, and what remained of the floor running along the walls. But it was the big hole in the middle, plunging four floors down, that kept snagging his attention. If they jumped and didn't land on what was left of the attic floor, they were looking at a thirty-foot-plus drop.

It was a chance he was willing to take. He could handle the heat of getting busted. Even if Lieutenant Bradley wanted to lock him up and throw away the key, she wouldn't. But the Prague princess was something else. It wouldn't take the Denver Police Department long to figure out she was a case for the feds, and once the CIA got ahold of her, or the FBI got involved, her life was going to take a very bad turn—and that was a chance he
wasn't
willing to take, not yet.

The woman calling herself Dominique Cordelia Stark had a really convincing American accent, and her school uniform in the photo he'd lifted off Bruno just happened to have the words Wichita Day School embroidered on the insignia—a little bit of information he'd been realizing, and assimilating, and shuffling around in his brain over the last few minutes. If she was Cody Stark of Wichita, Kansas, her whole Blonde-Bimbo-with-a-Bomb profile got shot right into the high-treason category, which, as he recalled, still carried a death penalty.

Before he let the feds have her, he'd like to get the facts. He knew for sure that Dylan would want them, even before they handed her over to General Grant—and Dylan was on his way home tonight. All he had to do was hold onto her and hold everybody else off for a couple more hours.

So it was going to be the drop into the attic. It wasn't that far, not really. With the extra flex cuffs in his pocket, he could make a rope and put her exactly where he wanted her. If it had just been him, he wouldn't have second-guessed it for a minute.

“Okay. You're going in first, and I'll follow,” he said, lowering her off his shoulder and standing her on her feet.

“Wh-what?” she gasped, staring at him.

He took hold of her hands and began methodically looping one flex cuff after another together, starting with the one securing her wrists. Her skin was ice-cold, her body trembling. Cops or no cops, he had to get her off the roof.

“I'm going to lower you over the edge and swing you toward the wall. Once I get you over the floor, I'll let go of the rope and be right behind you.”

“N-no,” she said, giving her head a hard shake, her eyes wild. “N-no. You c-can't—”

But he could.

“Stay loose. Bend your knees,” he advised, then lifted her up and put her over the side.

OH, SWEET
Mary, Mother of God.
Cody couldn't believe this was happening to her. She was dangling—
dangling!
—in the dark over an open construction site in an old building with nothing to stop her fall except a whole lot of thin air and the
lunatic
who was holding on to the other end of a rope he'd made out of plastic handcuffs.

And oh, so help her God, he was starting to swing the rope.
She held on tighter and gritted her teeth, because her jaw was simply locked up in anger and fear. She couldn't see anything except the faintest grid of the scaffolding, but that was because she was right on top of it. She didn't know how he could see anything. As a matter of fact, she doubted if he
could
see anything, which meant he was swinging her blind, and he was going to drop her blind, and she was going to die—die like a homeless dog.

At the apex of her arc, her stomach flipped, and she thought
Oh, God, I'm going to be sick,
which was going to be the absolute worst thing.

But then the real absolute worst thing happened, and she realized being sick was way off base.

He let go of her.

Just let go and sent her flying through the air.