by Tara Janzen
She didn't know how she was going to keep him with her in Denver, Colorado, or what she was going to do without him when he'd had enough of the former cow town and hightailed it back to Los Angeles.
“That's going to cost you a mocha latte,” she said. Growing up in Denver as Senator Marilyn Dekker's daughter, Katya had lived, breathed, and eaten politics every day of her life. As an adult, she didn't touch the stuff. She voted. End of story. That, however, did not dissuade Alex from keeping her informed of every maternal political detail he gleaned out of the newspapers or saw on CNN—and every bit of unwanted news cost him a latte.
“And I'm still up on you by seven for winning the point spread on the Lakers game. The last time you got a mocha latte out of me was before the last Ice Age.”
True, but he didn't have to rub it in.
“Mr. Armani Suit and his friend probably don't have anything to do with me. Let's just ignore them, and maybe they'll go away,” she suggested, glancing back at her catalogue. She did not want to deal with unwanted bodyguards. Not tonight or any other night. “Our painting is up first. Maybe we should go check and make sure it's still in one piece.”
Katya's newest addition to her art dealership business, the Toussi Gallery of Denver, had donated a large, beautiful floral painting by Oleg Henri to the auction. The staff at the Botanic Gardens had picked it up two days ago. It only made sense to go check on the painting before it went up for bid.
But Alex was like a dog with a bone.
“Sorry, luv. You're the only one here worthy of high-caliber security. My guess is your mother sicced the two freelancers on you. Though God knows why, unless she knows something we don't,” he said, his tone of voice suggesting she give him her undivided attention until they figured this out. “I guess we could ask her Sunday morning.”
“No, we couldn't,” Kat was quick to say. Her mother was kicking off her campaign with a brief stop in Denver on Sunday, but there had been no plans for them to get together. Marilyn was too busy—thank God.
Stifling a sigh, Katya looked up at him again. “My mother is paranoid.”
“About everything,” he agreed, tracking the choirboy bodyguard with his gaze. “But this . . . I think this is about your youthful transgressions.”
He would bring that up, she thought, feeling the headache start to win.
“Who was it you said you ran into tonight?”
“Ted Garraty,” she said flatly, hating the turn of the conversation. “But I didn't exactly run into him. As a matter of fact, I made a point of not running into him.”
She'd gone to school with Ted at Wellon Academy in Denver. They hadn't been friends, but Wellon was small, very exclusive, and she and her date had ended up in the same crowd with Ted and his friends on prom night thirteen years ago—a night that had changed her life forever.
“Well, your mother obviously got ahold of the guest list and didn't like it.”
Katya rolled her eyes in his direction. “I don't need a bodyguard to protect me from Ted Garraty, let alone two bodyguards.”
But on that long-ago prom night, she had needed someone to protect her from Ted and his group of drunken friends.
Her gaze slid to the Jaguar Gate, but just for an instant before she forced her attention back to the catalogue. Just about every gallery in Denver had donated something to the auction, but the Oleg Henri was a true signature piece, and she expected its sale to help launch her into the Denver art world—not that her name wasn't already about as high profile as it got in the Mile High City.
And with that unpleasant thought, she finally did give in to another sigh. God, what an odd night. Seeing Ted had been nothing short of a ten on her weird-o-meter, and the visceral reaction she'd had to the second bodyguard had red-lined the weird-o-meter and hit an easy number one on her Don't Go There, Girlfriend list.
Bodyguards, damn it.
She'd known that returning to her hometown, the location of her “youthful transgressions,” had held the inherent risk of zealous parental meddling, but she truly hadn't expected her mother to jump in with both feet at her first event. Marilyn had left her well enough alone in Los Angeles, barring a couple of embarrassing intrusions into her personal life over the last several years. Professionally, though, her mother had been strictly hands-off.
But then it was here in Denver, not Los Angeles, that she had been associated with a high-profile, high-society, front-page, scandal-ridden murder of another senator's son. That sort of thing was bound to stir up even the most latent parental instincts, and Marilyn's had been pretty darn latent while Katya had been growing up—at least until Jonathan Traynor III had shown up dead in a back alley in lower downtown, a neighborhood known as LoDo, with a bullet through his brain, heroin in his veins, her phone number written on the back of his hand, and a bloodstained piece of her prom dress stuffed in his pocket.
Of its own accord, her gaze shifted back toward the gate again, and this time she let it linger.
No, she assured herself. The man who'd disappeared beneath the trees couldn't possibly be who she'd thought. A teenage car thief who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for Jonathan Traynor's murder thirteen years ago couldn't possibly be wandering around the Botanic Gardens wearing a suit and drinking French champagne. He'd been pardoned after two years in prison, justice had finally been served, but this would still be the last place he would show up, right? The last place he would ever be invited.
But for a moment, just a moment, her heart had raced and she'd remembered how it had been on another hot summer night in Denver. She'd been eighteen, a little crazy, a lot in love, and scared senseless by the intensity of living so far out on the edge she wasn't sure she'd ever get back to familiar ground. The boy had been a year older, the wild boy, the bad boy, the street thief who had saved her. That boy, the boy she'd loved, would never have murdered Jonathan, but he'd been convicted of the crime, and she'd sat by helplessly and watched it happen.
The trial had been a travesty, her silence a betrayal she still hated herself for, and deep in her heart, she knew he had to hate her for it, too.
HAWKINS drained his glass of champagne, wished it were Scotch, and took a breath.
Kat Dekker.
Son of a bitch.
She hadn't changed. She still looked like trouble with a capital T—wild blond hair, sea-green eyes, clothes so expensive it used to make his teeth hurt, all of it wrapped around a small bombshell package set to explode. That was Kat Dekker, one big bang for the buck, big enough to blow a man's life to hell.
Maybe this was all one huge coincidence, the two of them showing up at the same place at the same time, but he doubted it. She certainly couldn't have been the one to get him and Dylan called back from South America. She didn't have that kind of power, and she sure as hell hadn't bothered herself anytime in the last thirteen years to look him up. She especially hadn't bothered herself when he'd been arrested and thrown in jail, when he'd needed her the most.
Swearing again, he started across the lawn, skirting a string of canopied platforms decked out like jungle huts and working his way closer to the caterer's tent and Dylan, who was also working this cakewalk.
Hell. If this was a coincidence, it was one of the worst badass mojo coincidences he'd ever heard about. She was obviously part of the art auction, helping some guys move a painting, hanging around down by the stage, which was all decked out with fake palm trees and twisted vines, like a rain forest. She belonged here.
He didn't.
Dylan looked over and caught his gaze as he neared the caterer's tent.
“You saw our problem?” Dylan asked, the coldness of his gaze telegraphing his mood—royally pissed off verging on ballistic.
“Yes.” Problem was a good way to put it.
“Do you think she's the reason we're here?”
Hawkins hated to think so. He really hated to think so.
“She wasn't named in our orders,” he said, trying to convince himself as much as Dylan, wh
o knew the orders as well as he did.
“She's the highest-ranking civilian here,” Dylan said, his glacial gray gaze going to the woman on the amphitheater stage and giving her a cool once-over. “She hasn't changed at all.”
Without wanting to, Hawkins found himself looking at her again.
“No. She's changed.” He'd been wrong earlier, real wrong, the way he'd always been about her. She'd changed. Plenty. She wasn't scared, alone, and eighteen anymore. She wasn't the prom queen or the poor little rich girl tonight—two acts she'd had down pat—and she wasn't naked in bed with him. She'd been most of those things, most of the time, that whole crazy month they'd spent together.
Then the earth had opened up and swallowed him whole. He'd spent two years in the state penitentiary, thanks to Katya Dekker and her crowd of too-rich, too-fast, too-frickin'-dumb-to-stay-out-of-trouble friends.
And thanks to her mother, the mighty Marilyn Dekker. What a piece of work that woman was. Christian had been steamrolled, hog-tied, and locked up before he'd even known what had hit him.
“None of these cops seem to appreciate who she is, so maybe we better keep an eye on her. I'm going to put in a call to General Grant, in case there's something else going on here and this isn't as simple as it was supposed to be,” Dylan said.
Hawkins slanted him a dry look. “There is nothing simple about you and me being at a frickin' garden party.”
Dylan conceded the point with a grim smile.
Geezus, what a mess. Hawkins looked back at Katya Dekker and felt something cold harden in his chest. She'd cost him. Loving her had cost him.
If it hadn't been for Dylan and his Seventeenth Street lawyer working their asses off to get the case reopened, Hawkins knew he might still be in prison. What had clinched his pardon was the deathbed confession of a downtown vagrant named Manny Waite. In and of itself, the confession might not have been enough. Manny had been a lush whose grip on reality had been tenuous at best, but with one helluva lawyer and Dylan pushing hard to get him a pardon on one end, and poor old Manny giving it up on the other, Hawkins had been set free.
He'd been tough when he'd gone in, but not as tough as he'd thought, and not tough enough, not at nineteen years old. By the time he got out at twenty-one, he had killed a man, and his whole world had changed—all thanks to Katya Dekker.
Down on the stage, the auctioneer stepped up to the podium as Katya finished directing the placement of the first painting. The piece was at least six by eight feet of bright, oversize flower petals in a thickly ornate gilt frame. He recognized it as an Oleg Henri, nothing he'd want in his own collection, but a beautiful piece and one sure to appreciate in value once the artist became better known.
The irony of the night wasn't lost on him. Thirteen years ago, he wouldn't have gotten within a hundred yards of a place selling an Oleg Henri or any piece of collectible art. Thirteen years ago, no one would have let him. Back then, he'd looked exactly like what he was, a street kid on the take and one of the most successful car thieves ever to give the Denver cops a run for their money. Dylan had always had a way of looking innocent no matter what crime he was committing, but Hawkins knew he and the rest of the guys at the chop shop on Steele Street had always looked like trouble.
Just the way this damn garden party looked like trouble. Either he needed another Scotch, or he needed to be back on a plane to Colombia. What he didn't need was to be hanging around an art auction with a bunch of socialites—like Katya Dekker.
His gaze followed her as she crossed the amphitheater stage and went down the steps. There had to be a bounty on the dress she was wearing: a little black nothing, slit to the hip. With her mane of blond hair, her golden tan, and a pair of spike heels, she should have looked cheap.
But she didn't. She looked sleek and expensive. A California wet dream come true. Barbie with an attitude.
She had a tattoo, which, oddly enough, unnerved him. She hadn't had a tattoo at eighteen. It wasn't discreetly hidden on a hip or an ankle, or twined around her navel, and it wasn't a butterfly, or a rose, or a unicorn. Nothing sweetly banal for Kat; she'd decorated herself with a shooting star at the top of her arm, just below the curve of her shoulder.
Kee-rist. He shook his head. Kat Dekker was back in town.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Of the mind that love truly is what makes the world go 'round, Tara Janzen can be contacted at www.tarajanzen.com.
Happy reading!
CRAZY HOT
A Dell Book / October 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2005 by Tara Janzen
Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33470-5
v3.0
