by Tara Janzen
The relief she might have felt failed to materialize. Being in the same country as Warner was enough to tighten her gut. Add Shoko, and her gut was tying itself in knots.
Nazi hero. Goddammit. She had half that mark, and the only thing that had saved her from the whole abomination was Dax. Eighteen months later, and she could still feel the tip of the bitch’s blade. It woke her up sometimes, always in a cold sweat, and the demon from that bad dream was here, in her hometown. So help her God, she’d never imagined Denver could be so damn full of so many badass felons out to grease her.
“Johnny and I left two of Bleak’s guys hog-tied in a convenience store off I-70 near Sixth Avenue.” And she was definitely pegging those two as felons. Hell, they worked for Bleak.
When Dax didn’t say anything, she knew she was hearing his “oh, for the love of God and Patsy Cline” silence, his unhappy silence.
“You were followed.” His words were flat when he finally spoke.
“Yes, but we did good,” she assured him.
“The two of you should have done good,” Dax said. “You’re you, and Ramos is a Ranger.”
Esme felt her eyebrows lift up.
“He just got back from Afghanistan two weeks ago, his third combat tour,” Dax said. “I’d guess he’s still pretty sharp.”
“Like a tack,” she said, all the pieces falling into place. She slanted Mr. U.S. Army Ranger a glance. Only one word came to mind, and she wasn’t shy about saying it. “Hoo-yah.”
Johnny didn’t look over, made no acknowledgment whatsoever of her revelation, except for the big grin that spread across his face.
Johnny Ramos a Ranger; it made perfect sense.
“You should have told me,” she said, still looking at Johnny.
“I did tell you,” Dax said on the phone. “What I haven’t told you is that the cops are looking for the blond hooker who was in Otto’s room, and my guess is that by the time they lift the prints off the prepaid phone you used, they’ll know your shoe size and your horoscope. So lay low.”
Crap. “I was wearing gloves, Dax. There won’t be any prints, but how in the hell did they find the phone?”
“Followed the emergency GPS signal straight to the B and B bathroom, babe. It was a piece of cake.”
And they had Shoko to thank for this. If she’d left Otto alone, no one would even have a clue what had gone on in the Oxford. No one would have cared.
“So where are you going to lay low?” Dax asked.
“Where are we going?” she asked Johnny.
“My place,” he said.
“No good,” Dax said, before she could relay the information. “Somebody at the Oxford gave them Ramos’s description, and they’ve got his name.”
Oh, hell. “Your place is no good,” she said to Johnny. “The cops are onto you at the Oxford.”
He didn’t say much to that, just one word under his breath, and it rhymed with luck.
She didn’t blame him.
“Tell Dax I’ve got a safe house in my neighborhood,” he said after a moment. “If he shows up at the corner of Vine and Hoover in Commerce City, I’ll come down and bring him in. Ask him what time he thinks he’ll get there.”
“An hour, maybe two,” Dax said, obviously able to hear everything in the car. “I’ve picked up a tail. When I shake it, I’ll show.”
“I still haven’t heard from my dad, about the name,” she said.
“Don’t worry. I got the name. Thomas called back and left it on the machine.”
“So we’re good to go?” she asked.
“You’ve got the money, and I’ve got the name,” Dax said. “We’re good to go. Just stay out of trouble until five o’clock. We’ll sort out this mess with the Denver cops once we’re back in Seattle. I’ll send them the file on Shoko. If they ask around, somebody at the Oxford will undoubtedly remember seeing the dragon lady tonight. Case solved. Everybody happy.”
“We’re going to run?”
“Like hell, bad girl.” He ended the call, leaving Esme to stare at her phone and wonder how in the hell she was supposed to stay out of trouble trapped in some safe house alone with Johnny Ramos for two hours.
Two hours was a long time.
Damn long.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Ouch.”
“Baby.”
“You’re being too rough.”
She let out a little snort and kept dabbing away at his cheek. She’d taken her shoulder holster off and left it in the bedroom, where she was planning on taking a nap before they went to Bleak’s.
Johnny understood the concept. Rangers slept when they could. It was just good standard operating procedure, but he was pretty damn sure he wouldn’t be napping.
“You should probably have a stitch put in this, maybe two,” she said.
He’d been cut on his face, fairly deep, where Mitch Hardon had hit him. The guy must have been wearing a ring.
“If you want to do it, get a suture kit out of the pack.”
She leaned back and gave him a look. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No.” Johnny wasn’t kidding, he was dying. Esme was standing in front of him at the kitchen table in the safe house, doing her Florence Nightingale impersonation, and all he could think about was her cleavage, the soft shadow between her breasts, the soft curves at the V of her jacket.
He wanted to touch her so badly, he hardly dared move.
It had been quiet on the corner of Vine and Hoover since they’d arrived. The blue neon sign for the Commerce City Garage was lit up across the street, and that’s where his apartment was, on the ground floor. One of the other SDF operators had the second-floor apartment, Red Dog, Gillian Pentycote.
The building he and Esme were in had started out thirty years ago as a restaurant with a few office suites on its upper floors. Since SDF had bought the place last year, the restaurant had been gutted and converted into a garage for storing cars, and the two upper floors had been redesigned into working and living space. Steele Street Annex, it was called, with some talk going on about building another team. General Grant wanted it. The world situation needed it, and Johnny wanted more than anything to be part of it.
Except for right now. For right now, there wasn’t anything he wanted more than Easy Alex.
He’d pulled Solange into one of the bays on the ground floor, and the whole place was locked up tighter than a drum with all the building’s security systems up and running.
Esme was safe from everything in Denver except him, and he was safe from everything except the tightness in his chest that got worse every time she bent over and dabbed at his cheek with an antiseptic-saturated cotton ball. It stung like hell, and he didn’t feel a thing. He was completely removed from the minor pain of having his face cut open in a fight, and completely, totally fascinated with the cut of her jacket-low.
He knew what was underneath it, the red lace bra, the one that matched her panties, which was all that was under her skirt, except for her black satin slip.
There had to be a way to get her out of all that stuff, but he’d been enduring her tender care for half an hour and was down to four and a half hours before they left, and he hadn’t gotten anywhere.
Four hours, if he included drive time over to Bleak’s warehouse-much less than that, if this Dax guy shook his tail and showed up.
Great. He had two hours he could count on, max, and he was sucking air.
Dax. The name had thrown him for a second there. He’d only ever heard of one guy named Dax-Dax Killian, the Gunfighter. But where he’d heard about him was over in the Sandbox, never anyplace in the States.
Esme leaned over him again, this time with a small gauze bandage and a couple of pieces of first-aid tape, and he had to remind himself to breathe.
His heart was pounding deep in his chest, and he knew if she’d had any idea how much he wanted her, she’d be running in the other direction.
And he didn’t want that, so he kept himself still. If all
he got was her company until five o’clock, he’d take it and be glad. Nothing in Afghanistan smelled like her. Nothing in Afghanistan looked like her. She was soft curves and golden hair, strands of it slipping loose and curling along her cheek. She was high heels and a tight skirt, and everything about her got him hot.
She laid the gauze on his cheek and oh, so carefully smoothed the tape down with the tips of her fingers.
It was crazy, and he wondered why it always had to be like this, with a woman so cool and calm and going about her business, and a guy driving himself nuts thinking about that hot, sweet place between her legs and how much he wanted to touch her there with his tongue, and his fingers, and be with her there, so deep inside her.
Geezus. The way she smelled made his head swim. It made it hard to think, made him hard… harder than Chinese arithmetic.
The sound of a car door being slammed shut on the street below had him reaching for her. He closed his hand around her wrist, stopping her from finishing with the bandage. Another door slammed shut, and he quickly rose to his feet and headed toward the bedroom that looked out onto the Commerce City Garage.
Okay, maybe he did have a brain left in his head. That was very reassuring.
And he had an erection.
And maybe that was reassuring, too, though to date, that hadn’t been a problem for him. His problem was the exact opposite.
Standing at the window in the darkened room, he watched two men approach the garage where he normally would have been for the night, if he could have stood the place on his own.
“Dovey,” she said, stopping beside him, her gaze angled toward the street.
“And the other guy, the one from O’Shaunessy’s, do you know him?”
She shook her head.
Below them, Dovey Smollett and the guy in the Chicago Bears jacket walked back and forth in front of the garage, trying the doors, and looking in the windows. Dovey stepped back and looked up at the second floor, but like the first floor, all was dark, quiet, empty. With Solange parked inside this building, there was nothing there to make anyone think he and Esme had run for home.
Dovey pulled out a phone and made a call, and after a few more minutes of wandering around, both he and the Chicago guy got back in the Buick LeSabre and hunkered in-stakeout.
“Looks like we’re going to have company for a while,” he said, glancing down at her, and for an instant she was looking up at him, but only an instant, before she looked away, a soft casting downward of her eyes, a lowering of her lashes.
And that was it, the one missing piece in all his heated lust and yearning, the one admission of awareness that she had any clue of what he was feeling, and that maybe she was feeling it, too-a guy needed that. Just because she’d kissed him twice in the car didn’t mean she wanted to kiss him here, where the distance between a kiss and the bed was shorter than a shift worker on payday.
Geez, she was so beautiful.
The blue glow of neon washed over her face, deepening shadows, highlighting curves, like the curves of her mouth, the soft fullness of her lower lip, the sweet dipping curve of her upper lip. Her face was more contoured as a woman than it had been as a child, even as a teenager. She was far more alluring, far more lush. He’d wanted her so desperately at eighteen, it was hard to imagine that he would have ever come to want her more-but he did. At sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, it had all been hormones and whatever ideas of love he’d managed to comprehend at the time.
Tonight the need was deeper. She’d been there with him during that firefight, only her out of all the people he’d ever known. He’d never claim to understand why, but he knew his tie to her was strong. It had happened in an instant, at first sight, a long time ago, and what he wanted from her was a chance to see where it all went.
Just a chance to lay himself up against her, to connect with her, mouth to mouth, body to body, to see if she could save him just a little bit, just enough to take the sharp edges off his dreams, to take the tension off his mind.
No. He didn’t have PTSD. He had what everybody else over there had, three tours of combat and a lot of rough living in between, and there had to be a break in there somewhere. When he’d seen her on Seventeenth, that’s exactly what he’d seen: a worn-out little hooker and a safe harbor all wrapped up in one blonde.
He’d been home for two weeks without being with a woman, and the need for her was running through him hard, cutting deep, straight to his core. There were other girls. There were always other girls, but the whole damn night had been about this girl, about winning her for himself, and the win was to have her sweet and naked beneath him, wanting him, her mouth parted, her legs spread, letting him push up into her, take her, fuck her, make her his.
It was primal. It was real. It was what he wanted. Hell, he’d been wanting it, or some version of it, since seventh grade, and there was no damn explanation for that. Or if there was, he wasn’t sure he could face it. Esme Alexandria Alden, geezus, she had always been the one-the only one who turned him inside out. He wanted her, and she was standing next to him in a dark, and quiet, and private place, knowing it.
Arousal didn’t wash down through him. It had already arrived between his legs, hard, and hot, and heavy. She wasn’t running anywhere. Not moving an inch-and she was blushing. He couldn’t see the color of it staining her skin, not in the blue light, but it was there, in the downward tilt of her head, as if she had something to hide. It was there in her stillness beside him, the same stillness he’d felt in himself sitting at the table.
She knew what the two of them were about, and without another worrisome thought, he slid his hand around the side of her neck, cupping her face, and he lowered his mouth to hers.
Her response was to melt against him with a soft groan, her mouth open, welcoming him, her hands going to his chest, and that felt so good, to have her touching him.
But take it slow, he told himself. Don’t devour her, and whatever you do, pendejo, do not…do not scare her off. So for a long, endless minute, he kissed her, his tongue sliding deep, his mouth slanted over hers, just letting the taste and softness of her seep into him.
Yeah, this was all going to go just great.
Breaking off the kiss for a moment, he unsnapped and shrugged out of his holster and set the whole rig on a nearby table. Then he kissed her, picking the whole marvelous thing up again.
Her hand came up around the back of his neck, drawing him closer, and he gave in to it, letting her run this show, until she rocked her hips against him. It was a small move, just a brush of her pelvis up against his-and it was like getting plugged into a 220-volt outlet.
He stood perfectly still, holding her, his tongue making a slow foray across the inside of her mouth-his brain on fire.
God, it had been too long since he’d done this. She had no idea what she was doing to him-because she did it again, rocked against his cock, and his hands tightened on her, going to her hips. Slowly, inexorably, he started pulling up her skirt, hauling it hell and gone up over her ass, because he had to get his hands on her, on her skin, between her legs, under those panties.
And when he did, she felt like heaven. She was so wet and soft, his fingers sliding through her silken folds and into her vagina. His kiss got harder, his body pressing against her, and when she groaned, her legs widening, he knew she wanted exactly what he wanted. With one hand, he undid his belt buckle, no sooner getting it open than she was helping unsnap his jeans, unzip them, and push them down off his hips, so she could take him in her hand.
It was sweet, he couldn’t deny it, but what he wanted wasn’t sweet. What he wanted was to ride the edge she was putting him on and take it home. With his hand in her hair, holding the back of her head, kissing her, he pushed the scrap of red lace down-down to her thighs, then farther. He lifted her leg to get one side of her panties down off her calf and over her high heel, and with her leg wrapped around him, and her body so hot and warm up against him, everything in his world started coming together.
She had her tongue halfway down his throat, her little groans echoing in his mouth every time he pushed into her. Oh, geezus. He was so into her, driving deep, hot and hard and fast, and just feeling her come apart all over him.
“John… Johnny… Johnny-” She strained against him, riding him, and when she tightened around him, he went straight over the edge, pumping into her one last time, and oh, God, it felt so good to come inside her.
So amazingly good.
He held himself still, letting it all roll over him, her sweet, sweet softness, the way she smelled, the smell of them together, the sound of her breathing in his ear. She tightened around him again, a small contraction of her inner muscles, and he let out a soft laugh, nuzzling the side of her neck.
“Keep your legs wrapped around me,” he said, carefully pulling himself free and repositioning his arms around her to keep her close.
She sighed, and he kissed her ear.
“Esme,” he whispered her name and nuzzled her neck again. This was heaven. Easy, easy Alex in his arms, making love with him. He’d had a few girls. Once, he’d even thought he was in love-but this, with Esme, it felt different to be with her, different and better, more complete.
He kissed her again, his mouth partly open on the tender place below her ear. She responded by sliding her fingers up into his hair, and it felt so good.
“Come on, baby,” he said, carrying her over to the bed. “Let’s go do this right.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Picked up a tail-Dax guessed that was one way to put his problem, and it was true. He did have a guy on him, no doubt one of Lieutenant Loretta’s, but then there was this other part of his problem, the bigger part, the “trying to pick up a tail” part of his problem, or at least trying to pick up a piece of it. He was going to give it another five minutes, and then he’d head out, lose the cop, and make straight for Commerce City. The corner of Vine and Hoover, where Johnny Ramos had taken Easy, was a good location, within striking distance of Bleak’s warehouse without being too close for comfort.
