Loose and Easy (5 page)

He guessed she was a pretty good artist. In fact, he knew she was an amazing artist.

“This is good…very good,” Esme murmured, quietly echoing his thoughts. “Um, sure”—she looked up—“why not. Why don’t you give me your number?”

She set the card on the desk and pulled her cell phone out of a pocket on her skirt. He recited the ten digits, watching her punch them into her phone’s memory along with his name—and all the while, he knew she was lying through her teeth.

She wasn’t going to call him, and suddenly it wasn’t just curiosity motivating him, and it wasn’t just his heated memories, or his teenage crush. Suddenly, she was a woman with a gun and something she’d stolen off a man in a hotel room, and she had an appointment she was damned serious about keeping.

Whatever was going on, Johnny had a feeling it had to do with her marketing genius of a father, and it was a bad feeling. He knew her. He’d spent six years in school with her, and he’d been paying attention, probably too much attention—but, man, she’d held it hard. She’d been more than book smart. She’d been able to think her way around things, book things, sure, but people and situations, too. East was a tough school. She shouldn’t have lasted a week in those hallways, not looking the way she had, all cute middle-class white bread. But she’d done three years, and the only time anyone had ever gotten to her had been in that locker bay with Kevin Harrell—and that bastard hadn’t gotten far.

She’d been the valedictorian of their class for a reason, and none of those reasons would have led her here. No way in hell did she work in this dump, and no matter where she worked, she didn’t have pens with naked women on them lying around on her desk.

Christ.
She had stolen goods, a .45, and an appointment. There wasn’t a thing in that combination that didn’t spell trouble in capital letters, and the one thing she didn’t have, the one thing he hadn’t seen anywhere since he’d first seen her up on Seventeenth, was backup.

He let his gaze drop down the length of her, and when he got to her feet, he stopped, his attention arrested. By whatever quirk of fate was out there, when she’d stepped over to the desk, she’d stepped right on top of her hooker skirt. It was under her slinky black high heel, and as he watched, she quietly and deliberately slid her foot across the carpet, dragging the small slip of leather and lace with her, until she could give it one small last push and make it disappear under the desk.

And she did it all without a word.

When she pulled her foot back from the desk, he looked up and caught her gaze. She knew he’d tailed her from the Oxford. She knew he knew about the German, the leash, the dog collar, and probably about the suit jacket she’d cut open, and man, oh, man, it didn’t faze her in the least. Butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth.

Oh, she was a cool one, all right, but not cold. Her hair was warm honey gold, swept up in a Holly Golightly twist. Her mouth was softly pink and glossed, and her eyes were gray, a dozen shades of it, any one of them callable at will—and the one she was currently calling up was clear. Not storm gray, not arctic gray, nothing to do with ice or an emotion—just clear, pure, simple, clean gray. Pure and simple “I know what I’m doing, so don’t get in my way” gray, and he was impressed as hell. What he’d seen in room 215 was none of his business. She couldn’t have made it any plainer if she’d painted it on a billboard in big block letters: “Back off, big boy.”

He knew women like her, had been in love with them most of his adult life, women like Skeeter Bang and the bodaciously dangerous Red Dog. Those two knew exactly what they were doing, and they really didn’t need his help, especially if they had each other.

But Easy Alex had taken on the German alone, and nobody had been waiting for her in the Faber Building. She was running a private game here—and she was cutting him loose, pushing him out the damn door. He had an emotion for that, but he really didn’t know what in the hell to call it.

Bottom line, though, this was her call, not his, no matter how skeptical he was about her father, her gun, and how she’d leashed that guy to the bed. She was done with him, and he wasn’t going to learn anything more by hanging around the B & B office, getting in her way and holding her up.

“If you want to get your things, I’ll walk you out.” He didn’t ask. It wasn’t a question. He was walking her out, end of story, and unless she threw herself at his feet and begged for his help when they hit the street, he was going to go back to his beer at the Blue Iguana.

From the looks of her, he figured the odds on her begging him for anything were zip and none.

Esme hesitated, but only for a second, before she walked back to the bathroom. She knew what time it was, and she knew she didn’t have any to waste.
Good God, Johnny freakin’ Ramos.

She had a handheld black light already in the bathroom, and once she closed the door, she turned it on. It would only take her a minute to check the painting. The last thing she wanted was to show up at Nachman’s with a fake. The Meinhard was her bargaining chip. She needed to know she had a solid opening hand.

Reaching into the white vinyl tote, she removed the thin metal case containing the Meinhard and popped it open. With a small screwdriver also from out of her tote, she loosened the wooden frame on the painting and lifted off the protective covering. One slow pass with the black light was all she needed, and as soon as she was finished, she reassembled the painting and the frame and put the piece back into the case.

The metal case measured precisely two by ten by fifteen inches, and when she got back to her dad’s desk, she slipped it neatly inside a black leather messenger bag she’d designed for a courier contract she’d taken last May. The job had been to transport a rare manuscript from Presque Isle, Maine, to Bern, Switzerland, and it had gone without a hitch.

She zipped the interior pouch on the bag closed, securing the case inside, then buckled the outside straps.

John Ramos, standing right there next to her. That was a bit of a hitch, maybe more than a bit.
Cripes.
She’d seen the way he’d looked at her red leather skirt, and she didn’t have a doubt in her mind that he’d been the
“policía”
at the Oxford, or that he’d followed her through the hotel room, or that he knew exactly what she’d done to Otto Von Lindberg.

Hell, for all she knew he
was
a policeman, undercover, off-duty, whatever. It was enough to make a girl sweat, if a girl ever sweated. Thank God, Esme didn’t, never, not on the job.

The messenger bag had been constructed with a net of very fine steel mesh sandwiched between its lining and the thick latigo leather. It also had a cipher lock connected to a steel cable running through the flap. She engaged the lock before slipping the bag’s shoulder strap over her head and adjusting it across the front of her body in a manner that insured it wouldn’t get in the way of drawing her pistol. Nobody could get the bag without taking her with it, which suited her just fine. This was a four-part deal with three parts left—Isaac Nachman, Franklin Bleak, get the hell out of Denver. That was the plan, and she was still damn close to being on schedule, despite Johnny freakin’ Ramos.

He walked ahead of her into the hall and waited while she locked up.

Hell.
She probably needed her head examined for opening the door to him. She should have waited him out, toughed it out, gone out the window—something.

Jiggling the key in the lock, trying to get the deadbolt to slide home, she hazarded another quick glance at him, and got hit by that freight train all over again, which brought her train-wreck quota for the last ten minutes up to an even dozen, easy,
dammit.
She felt the collision the same place she’d felt all the others, in her throat and her upper chest, a pure respiratory reaction—as in he took her breath away. It was ridiculous. She was too old for this, too jaded. She’d had real lovers since him, with real sex—and never ever had a man gotten her so hot in a backseat or anywhere else that all she could see on her horizon was complete and utter annihilation. It was the only thing that had stopped her from losing her virginity to the baddest of the bad boys that night—fear of destruction. Everything between the two of them had been so hot, and wild, and edging on frantic, the windows of the car steamed over, his body like corded sinew, all muscle and bone and warm skin, his dark hair so silky, and so tangled from her fingers, his mouth on her everywhere.

Everywhere.

Dammit.
Her fingers slipped on the key, and she chipped a nail on the jamb.

Dammit.

She glanced at him again—and got hit by the memory train one more time, except the collision was closer to her solar plexus, and a little lower down.

He’d been naked that night, the first naked boy she’d seen, and she’d never seen another one like him, naked or otherwise, until ten minutes ago.

Perfect.

What an absolutely perfect image to have slide out of her memory banks—John Ramos naked.
Cripes.
With another couple of tries, she finally got the deadbolt locked.

Dropping the keys into an outside pocket on the messenger bag, she headed for the stairs, and he fell in beside her.

She took a breath, calm, easy. About two more minutes and he’d be firmly back in memory land, a blast from the past that was behind her. She took another breath and kept walking.

He had definitely filled out since high school. He was broader through the shoulders, broader through the chest, taller—just plain bigger all the way around. His hair was thick, and dark, and cut short, shorter than she’d ever seen him wear it. The style made him look older than she knew he was, and the thickness of it made his hair stick up a little, and altogether, combined with the lean, carved lines of his face, he looked tough, like he’d just walked out of the LoDo alley where he’d been seen, like he was still running wild on the streets.

Oddly enough, he also looked like he’d just walked out of an Abercrombie catalog. Clean, softly worn, button-fly jeans; expensive boots, tactical boots like Dax owned; a dark gray T-shirt; and over the T-shirt, a black, collared shirt, worn unbuttoned and untucked, the long sleeves neatly buttoned at the cuff. He’d slipped the naked-girl pen in his pocket between a mechanical pencil and a small spiral notebook—whatever in the world he needed those for on a Friday night in LoDo. She could also see the top end of an envelope peeking out of the pocket. In another life, if he’d grown up another way, this close to the Auraria Campus, he could have been taken for one of the university’s graduate students. As it was, she’d never seen a college boy with that hard a gaze, so much “Don’t fuck with me” stamped in the way he carried himself.

Maybe he really was a cop.

Or maybe, the gang his brother had been fighting for the night he’d been killed, the Locos, maybe Johnny had climbed to the top of it, made himself the shot caller.

Honest to God, she didn’t know which would be worse, cop or gang lord. For her sake, it would be better if he wasn’t a cop. She didn’t want to show up anywhere, officially, as having been in Denver, and she sure as shoot didn’t want to get arrested, but everything in her hoped for his sake that he hadn’t followed in Dom Ramos’s footsteps, that he’d done better by himself.

At the bottom of the stairs, she felt a moment’s regret. This was it. Her dad’s car was parked on the street, right out in front, so as soon as they walked out of the Faber Building, that would be it.
Sayonara. Adios. Ciao.
He’d go his way, and she’d go hers.

Too bad.

This close to getting rid of him, she could admit it. Another time, another place, under different circumstances, she might have taken him up on that drink, just to catch up with him, see what he was up to, see how he’d really turned out. But tonight, she was on a mission: return the painting, get the reward money, buy off the bookie, full speed ahead—up until they came out onto the sidewalk and her mission came to a sudden screeching halt.

She couldn’t believe it.

Parked next to the curb in all its cheap-ass, middle-of-the-road, minivan glory was her dad’s car, right where she’d left it, but somehow, for some unknown but probably easily deducible reason, sometime in the last twenty minutes, between when she’d walked in with the painting and was now walking out, the cops had booted it.

Big, heavy, and clamped to the rear wheel, the hunk of bright orange metal said only one thing to her: She wasn’t going anywhere, not in her dad’s damn minivan.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Dressed to kill and driving a minivan?

Johnny double-checked the direction of her gaze and ended up right back at the same POS minivan he’d thought she was looking at—the butt-ugly brown-and-tan one with the license plate number LVH3590 and the big orange boot on it.

From her crestfallen expression, she knew that baby wasn’t going anywhere tonight. To her credit, the news only waylaid her for about three seconds, before she turned and stuck out her hand to him.

“Well, it was great to see you…really,” she said, giving his hand a firm shake when he took hold of hers. One shake, then she let go of him. “Good luck with my dad tomorrow. Maybe we can have that drink sometime.”

Sure they could, he thought, watching her take off across the street, dodging the traffic. Talk about a bum’s rush.

From the other side of Wynkoop, she hailed a cab, but the cabbie passed her by. That was her problem, not his. His problem was…hell, he didn’t have any problems. He’d done three combat tours and gotten away with nothing worse than a sprained ankle, a bajillion flea bites, and a few stitches once when a round hadn’t quite missed him.

He didn’t have any problems.

Except for the skinny, blond-haired guy getting out of the passenger side of a Buick LeSabre about halfway up the block on her side of the street. Two things bothered him about the guy. One, Johnny knew him. His name was Dan Smollett, more often known as Dovey, and he worked for a bookie up in Commerce City named Franklin Bleak. Two, Dovey was looking straight at Esme as he was getting out of the car, which made this as close to a high school reunion as Johnny had ever gotten—him, Dovey Smollett, and Easy Alex. They’d all graduated from East the same year, and apparently, only one of them had gone straight. Surprisingly enough, it hadn’t been the class valedictorian.

Dovey closed the door on the LeSabre and started toward her, and Johnny felt another knee-jerk reaction coming on.
Goddammit.

Civic duty, he told himself. They were in the middle of lower downtown, Esme had not yet seen the scumbag zeroing in on her, and Dovey was coming up on her strong side. The element of surprise could really work against old Dovey in this situation, given that Esme had a .45 strapped under her arm, and from the extra little bit of adjusting she’d given the messenger bag, Johnny was guessing she practiced drawing out of her shoulder holster, which had the potential of making her fast.

Not that he thought she might accidentally shoot old Dovey. No, he figured if she shot somebody, it probably wouldn’t be by accident.

Kee-rist.
He stepped off the curb, checking the traffic both ways, and made his way across the street. She saw him coming, he made sure of it, and she didn’t look happy about it, but that was just too damn bad.

He headed for her left side, to put himself between her and Dovey, and no doubt, Dovey was going to see him, too, and no doubt he’d tell Franklin Bleak what and who had happened to his bird, which meant Johnny was going to have to call Sparky Klimaszewski and have him put the heat on Franklin to set things right and get the bookie off his ass.

It was amazing really, how quickly life could get complicated, amazing just how quickly a guy without any problems could acquire a whole boatload of them.

Case in point: Being in debt to Sparky usually required felonious restitution. Sparky was only interested in one thing, cars and the grand theft auto thereof.

Hell. Johnny hadn’t stolen a car since he’d been fifteen. Okay, seventeen, but that had been a strictly one-off job for the last time he’d needed a favor from Sparky. But fine, he could deal with Sparky, because Sparky, for all that he ran more cars through Denver than any other chop shop, was not an undersized psycho who tried to compensate for his lack of physical stature by committing violent acts of retribution against losers who didn’t pay and anyone else who got in his way.

Franklin Bleak was all that and more, a verifiable freakazoid. He had a very nasty reputation, well earned, for doing very bad deeds—and he’d sent his errand boys to pick up Esme Alden.

Johnny didn’t particularly bother to explain all this, or himself, to her when he stepped up on the curb on the other side of Wynkoop.

“Let’s go.” The command was short, succinct, and impossible to misinterpret, his specialty, and before it was even out of his mouth, he had ahold of her, one of his arms going around her back, his hand gripping her upper right arm, his other hand going across his front and taking hold of her left biceps. Without expending too much effort, he had her under control, half lifted off her feet, and heading back across the street.

“Wh-what in the…who do you think…wh-what in the hell?”

“Incoming at nine o’clock.” He kept walking, hustling her along. Given half a chance, she might have resisted, but he didn’t give her half a chance. He’d grabbed her, and they were moving back through the traffic, fast, too fast for her to get any leverage against the hold he had on her.

“Incoming? What the…
dammit
…This is a
bad
move, Ramos,” she said in a tone of voice that reminded him that besides the .45 he could feel through her jacket, she had a knife, that she had a knife for a reason, and that he’d just become one of those reasons.

Sonuvabitch.
That was not the sort of information he was used to forgetting. That was the sort of information he was used to hardwiring into his brain.

“Do you remember Dan Smollett?” he asked, his grip still very firm on her, very close to a death grip. He couldn’t afford to have her squirming away just yet, or going for one of her weapons, or doing any damn thing, not in the middle of the street, or anywhere else for that matter. He was in charge, and that was for the best almost one hundred percent of the time.

“Dovey?”

Obviously, she did remember the cretin.

“He’s thirty yards behind us and closing.”

She let out a short sound of disgust. “If you’re on the run from Dovey Smollett, that’s your problem, not mine.”

“No. It’s your problem, babe.” They reached the other side of Wynkoop, but he didn’t relent with his grip. He kept her moving. He had a plan, and it didn’t involve letting Dovey Smollett catch up to them.

“The hell it is. I don’t give a damn if Dovey Smollett is in LoDo, or if he dropped off the edge of the earth. Now let go of me, you…you…
jerk
.” She tried to twist out of his grip, and got exactly nowhere—for a damn good reason. He was well trained in the ways and means of physical restraint, and he could bench-press Esme Alden, all hundred-and-what pounds of her.

Hell, he could bench-press three Esme Aldens.

“Can you run in those heels?”

“Yes.” She didn’t hesitate with her answer. “But—”

“There’s no but,” he cut her off. “If I say run, you keep up. Got it?”

“Go to hell.” Short, succinct, and impossible to misinterpret—he had to give her credit for that much.

He opened the next door they came to and pushed her inside ahead of him, straight into the crush of people jamming O’Shaunessy’s back bar.

“Excuse me…sorry…” Johnny edged his way through the crowd, keeping one hand wrapped around her waist, keeping her close. Nobody was getting to her without going through him first, and the only people in this town who could get through him were on his side.

She could thank him later—but he wasn’t going to hold his breath.

“
What the
…
oh, cripes.
You’ve got a…a…
dammit,
” she said, her voice low.

Yeah, he had her pulled real close to his right side, and he’d wondered when she would notice the pistol riding under his arm.

“
Dammit,
” Esme swore again. “I don’t believe this. I can’t believe I…
dammit.
”

“Just keep moving.”

The crowd thinned out at the service end of the bar, and after getting the two of them tucked into the dark corner between the waitress station and the kitchen door, he took a moment to check and see if Dovey had followed them inside.

Geezus.
Franklin Bleak. Whatever she’d gotten herself into, she needed to get herself out, or she was going to end up wishing she’d picked a different line of work. The stories he’d heard about Franklin Bleak weren’t just grim; they were gruesome.

“Dammit, Ramos. If this is your way of getting a girl to have a drink with you, I can see why you’re alone on a Friday night.” He had her about half behind him in the corner, and her voice was close to his ear and very sharp-edged, understandably so. He’d pretty much railroaded her into O’Shaunessy’s.

Which in no way fit in with his plan to head back to his beer at the Blue Iguana, despite the fact that she had in no way begged him for help.

No, there had been no begging. That was too big of a stretch, even for him. It had been a clean snatch-and-grab all the way.

“And now, if you’re finished
manhandling
me,” she continued, starting to push by him, “this party is over.”

No, it wasn’t.

“Stay put,” he said, shifting his body sideways and holding her in place, while keeping his gaze on the crowd of people.

“You’re out of line, no matter what you’re packing under your shirt,” she whispered, her voice even closer to his ear.

“And you’re in more trouble than you seem to realize.”

At that, she let out a short, surprised laugh. “And how in the hell do you figure that?”

“For a secretary, you’ve got some real bad guys after you.”

“Like you?” The comeback was vintage Easy Alex, pure smart-mouthed.

“No. Dovey,” he said, turning to face her. “He’s what we call an undesirable element, no matter where he is—in LoDo, dropped off the edge of the earth, or sitting at home on his couch.”

A flash of something darkened her gaze, but only for a moment, and it took him another second to realize what it had been: alarm, the first instance of it he’d seen in her since he’d spotted her up on Seventeenth.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to let Dovey get within ten feet of you.” The skinny numbers runner was no match for a U.S. Army Ranger, not on his best day with three of his buddies.

“It’s not Dovey I’m worried about,” she said, giving him a carefully measured look, holding the moment for the space of a breath before she continued. “So what’s with the ‘we’ and the ‘undesirable element’ lingo? You sound like a cop.”

Her tone implied it would be the worst damn thing in the world, which did nothing to reassure him that she was up to anything except no good.

Geezus.
She’d hog-tied that poor sap in the Oxford. She’d stolen something from the guy, and Mr. America here had been going to let her just walk away from the crime. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to know what was up with that. Just because he’d liked a girl in high school did not make her a saint, although he had seemed to fall for the saintly ones, the good girls, the ones who wouldn’t give it up in a backseat.

No wonder it had taken him so long to get laid.

Thank God, he’d expanded his horizons since then. Saintliness didn’t even make the cut on his top ten list of attributes to look for in a woman anymore. As a matter of fact, given what he’d learned of human nature, any woman aspiring to saintliness was highly suspect in his book.

Which, of course, under her current circumstances, made Esme Alden look like the perfect girl for him all over again, except this time from the dark side—very dark, if Franklin Bleak was after her.

“No. I’m not a cop. I’m the guy who just saved you from getting shook down by Dovey Smollett and maybe getting thrown into the back of that Buick LeSabre parked on Wynkoop.”

Her reaction was almost imperceptible, a slight, extra stiffening of a body already strung tight, but without another dose of alarm. He knew the difference between readiness and fear—and she was ready.

Ready for the likes of Dovey Smollett, and alarmed by the police. That didn’t look good or set well.

“What’s it to you who shakes me down?” she asked.

Her cool little attitude didn’t set too well either. Neither did the fact that he didn’t have an answer to her question. What the hell was it to him who shook her down? None of his business is what it was—and yet here he was, jammed into the back of O’Shaunessy’s, up close and personal with her for no damn good reason.

“If you tell me why he’s after you, maybe I can help.” And maybe that was enough, the whole “damsel in distress” motif. Although, from what he’d seen so far, she was doing pretty good on her own, and if it hadn’t been for Smollett and Bleak, he might have let it be.

But it was Smollett, and it was Bleak, and if she knew what he’d heard about Bleak, she wouldn’t be quite so nonchalant.

She seemed to consider his words, weigh his offer, and see what it might be worth.

“I saw the LeSabre,” she finally admitted. “But I can’t imagine any reason for some guy from high school to get on my case, let alone abduct me—present company excluded, of course.” The last was delivered with the arching of one delicate eyebrow.

He got the point.

Smart-mouthed Easy Alex didn’t mince words, and she was right. He had abducted her off the street, and done a damn good job of it. He had her, and Dovey Smollett was sucking air out there on Sixteenth and Wynkoop.

“Dovey was staring at you so hard when he got out of his car, I’m surprised your hair didn’t start on fire. He had a tractor beam on you.”

“Guys stare at me all the time.” She was stating a fact, not dabbling in vanity, and he didn’t doubt her for a second. Hell, he’d hardly taken his eyes off her since he’d spotted her up on Seventeenth.

But he shook his head. “He was waiting for you, parked on Wynkoop with a good line of sight on the Faber Building. If you hadn’t been dressed in your flavor-of-the-week getup, I’m guessing he would have recognized you when you first went to your dad’s office and tried to pick you up then.”

“Are you
sure
you’re not a cop?”

“No, I’m not, but I know a stakeout when I see one.”

“Congratulations. So do I, and you’ve been following me since the Oxford. But we’re done.” She looked up at him from underneath her lashes. “Right here, right now. I’m walking out of here, and if you touch me one more time, I’m going to take deep, personal offense. No more nice girl just because we’re old school chums. Do you understand me?”