by Tara Janzen
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 han
d.
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.
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?
<
br /> 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.
