Crazy Wild

by Tara Janzen

  It had been crazy to kiss her up on the roof—and it would be even crazier to kiss her again, but he was thinking about it.

  He must be out of his mind. None of the shrinks had come right out and said it, not yet anyway, but they had to be thinking it. Skeeter was definitely thinking it. He could tell by the way she watched him—like a buzzard on roadkill, every move he made.

  He needed to call her. Skeeter worried the way other people breathed, and she'd probably tried to call him a couple of times since he'd left. He needed to tell her—again—that he could take care of himself. It was the people who counted on him that got screwed. No matter how much shit hit the fan, he kept coming out in one piece.

  Slipping his phone out of his pocket, he flipped it on and checked the screen. Fifteen missed calls. He ran through the first few numbers, got the general idea, and turned off the phone.

  Hell. Fifteen calls from Skeeter were about twelve more than he could handle.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked the woman he'd all but kidnapped. When Dylan told him to keep somebody in one piece, he meant with a sustainable body temperature, not one frozen piece, and Cody Stark was still shivering uncontrollably. He needed to do something about that before he took her back outside to get to his car, or she wasn't going to make it.

  She shook her head, but he already had his hand inside his coat. He hadn't left Steele Street once in the last two weeks without Skeeter putting something to eat in his pockets. He knew he'd hit the jackpot when he pulled out three gold-wrapped candy bars.

  Count on Skeeter to go first-class.

  “Sugar rush?” He offered up the chocolate, fanning out the bars to give her a choice.

  She shook her head again, the action almost indistinguishable from all her regular shivering.

  “This isn't one of those don't-take-candy-from-a-stranger things, is it?” he asked. “Because if it is, I gotta tell ya, you're in more danger of going into hypothermic shock right now than you are from me.”

  She considered his words for a few seconds before making her decision and reaching for a candy bar. Her hands were too cold for her to get the wrapper off, though, which worried him plenty.

  Damn it. He wasn't going to lose her to the cold after he'd saved her from Reinhard Klein and Denver's finest—who, from the sound of it, were entering the library down on the main floor. Flashes of light were coming up through the scaffolding, and he could hear voices.

  “Come on, get closer,” he told her, softening his voice so as not to be heard. It was an order, not a request, and he didn't wait for an answer before pulling her into the circle of his body and wrapping his coat around her. From another pocket, he retrieved his black knit cap and pulled it down on her head. He didn't know how in the hell she'd gotten so cold, so fast, unless she was running on empty. “Put your hands under my sweater, and let's not do the gun thing again. Okay?”

  When she hesitated, he did it for her and tried not to flinch when her icy fingers rested on his T-shirt. Then he tore the wrapper off one of the candy bars and offered it to her.

  “Come on,” he urged. “Either we get you warmed up, inside and out, or you can forget playing ‘Let's Make a Deal,' because I'm going to have to haul you over to Denver General where they're going to start something intravenous and ask a whole lot of questions and—”

  She took a bite.

  Finally, he thought, he was starting to get this mess under control, and for a moment or two it was kind of peaceful: his breathing deep and even, hers shaky as hell, him fairly warm and getting warmer, her like an ice cube; it occurred to him that feeding Cody Stark chocolate while he was half wrapped around her was as close to sex as he'd been in a long, long time—but not close enough, not tonight, and not when it was her.

  And wasn't that a hell of a thing.

  C HAPTER

  8

  I 'M NOT SAYING your boys don't have plenty of reason to be wild,” Tony Royce said, backing off from his last few rounds of demanding to know Creed's whereabouts. “Especially Rivera. Jesus, what he went through.” Without looking back, he stretched his hand out to young Agent Mathers, who handed him a folder sealed with orange tape, which he in turn handed over to Dylan. “These were sent to us a few weeks ago. They were found in an abandoned NRF camp in northern Colombia.”

  Dylan took the folder, stacking it on top of the Castano photos, and broke the tape. Then he flipped the folder open.

  For a long, silent moment he didn't move, not so much as a muscle. He barely kept breathing. The top photograph was of Creed and J.T., and it explained a lot of things—like why Creed was so fucked up.

  “He's got to still be thinking about it,” Royce said, managing not to sound like a complete asshole.

  Yeah, Creed was thinking about it. Dylan knew it for a fact. He'd come home late one night a couple of weeks ago and gone up to Creed's loft on the ninth floor. Creed had been asleep, curled up on the floor next to the kitchen, gasping for breath, sweating, his body twitching, fighting something in his dreams.

  He'd started to wake him, but Skeeter had stopped him.

  “Been there, done that,” she'd said from the shadowed depths of the jungle Creed's apartment had become over the last two years. He hadn't seen her through all the vegetation and trees. “And it's better if you just let him work through it in his sleep.”

  Now he had a pretty good idea of what “it” was—sweet Jesus.

  “Ms. Bang?” He looked up and gestured toward his private office. They needed to talk.

  SKEETER rose to her feet even as her heart did a dipping flip to the bottom of her stomach. Ms. Bang? What the hell was up with that?

  Dylan Hart never invited her into his private office, and despite what he'd said to Royce, she was no more his secretary than he was hers. At best they had what she would describe as a coolly cordial working relationship, no matter how heated her imagination. The other guys—Hawkins, Quinn, Kid, Creed—they all treated her like a kid sister. Dylan had always treated her like somebody else's kid cousin, a visitor, even though she'd lived at Steele Street for over two years.

  But she'd seen the look on his face when he opened the folder; she'd felt a shift take place deep in his psyche, the closest she'd ever been to getting a real reading off of him, and she had a terrible, awful feeling that she knew what he'd seen.

  He waited for her to precede him into his office before he closed the door behind them. The room was spartan, stripped down to the basics of a desk and chair in pale beech. Two black laptop computers sat in the middle of the desk, flanked by a black phone and a black-and-chrome lamp. A low bookcase, also in pale beech, ran along one wall. A bank of locked filing cabinets made out of the same pale beech took up another. There wasn't so much as a pencil or a piece of paper anywhere in evidence. Not so much as a paper clip. No stapler, no scissors, no handy-dandy glue stick. No coffee cup. No half-dead plant.

  He worked in the office. She knew he did, sometimes all night long, but she didn't know how. There wasn't a picture on the walls, no calendar, nothing other than a clean expanse of elegantly expensive woven-grass wallpaper in pale green. Four tall double-hung windows overlooked the alley called Steele Street. There was a private entrance to the garage floor, but nothing else. Not so much as a single extra chair for visitors—for the plain and simple reason that nobody visited Dylan Hart in his private office, except now for her.

  At first he said nothing, just stood by the door, his gaze angled toward the floor.

  “I—” he started, hesitated, then cleared his throat and tried again. “I noticed you and Creed have been working on Mercy.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, then winced. She'd called him sir. There were a lot of things she wanted to call Dylan Hart, and “sir” was not one of them.

  “How's it going?”

  Well, she wasn't going to sugarcoat it for him.

  “With high-octane gas and ten pounds of boost, we've got her up to over seven hundred ponies . . . way over.” A lethal amount of horse
power.

  Dylan nodded. “I see,” he said, walking toward his desk and, after a second, laying the folder and the other photos on top. He left his hand on the pile, his eyes closing briefly before he lifted his gaze to hers. “I want you to blow the engine. I don't want Mercy leaving Steele Street.”

  “The drags won't even start until spring.” Sure, Mercy was bad, but she was also a work of art.

  “That won't keep him from going up there on a clear day and killing himself.” Hart's voice was flat, matter-of-fact, but his whole body was tight with tension. The grace and elegance that usually defined his every move had been replaced with barely controlled anger—and pain. It didn't take any special insight to feel it coming off him in waves. Hell, she could almost see it, the emotion was so intense. It scared her a little bit, and it depressed the hell out of her.

  Dylan had come home. They were finally in the same room together, actually talking, and everything was wrong—terribly, awfully wrong.

  It broke her heart, the way looking at him broke her heart. The last few months had been so damn hard on everyone, and now this. Damn Royce. Dylan was tired. Lines of strain marred his features. His hair had grown longer since summer. Usually impeccably in place, tonight it fell on either side of his face, dark and silky straight, nearly to his cheekbones in front and brushing the collar of his white shirt in back. The carelessness of the style made him look younger than his thirty-two years, as did the leanness of his physique. Dylan was the brains of Special Defense Force, the geek extraordinaire, and the player when they needed one. She knew that, too. She'd seen him in action—an exquisitely elegant woman on his arm, an embassy invitation in his hand, a private jet waiting. Guys like Creed and Hawkins were the brawn. Not that they weren't all certifiable geniuses, given what she'd seen in their files, and she'd made a second job out of reading the guys' files, even the classified sections when she could break enough codes to access them. There was damn little she didn't know about any of the SDF operators, and nothing she didn't want to know.

  She shifted her attention to the folder. Dylan still had his hand on it, keeping it closed . . . somehow, she thought, keeping it safe.

  “Maybe you should let me see what's in the folder,” she suggested.

  She knew. In her heart she knew what was inside. Royce had given it away—found them in an abandoned NRF camp in northern Colombia—but that didn't keep her from needing to see it for herself.

  “No,” Dylan said, his voice losing its matter-of-fact tone and taking on a rough edge. “There's no reason for you to have this information.”

  “Is it J.T.?” she asked, undeterred. “Photographs?”

  He didn't answer, but that was answer enough for her.

  Royce was such a bastard for giving them to Dylan like that, without warning, without preamble. This wasn't like Castano and Garcia. J.T. had been one of their own.

  “Creed never turned away,” she said, telling Hart what she knew, what he needed to know. “Not once, no matter what they did to him or to J.T.”

  “He told you this?” Dylan looked up, his gaze sharp.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “He doesn't know he told me, but he did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged, knowing it wasn't easy to explain. “It was the second time I found him in the middle of a nightmare. I didn't wake him, because the first time, the night I did wake him up, he . . . well, he couldn't let go of the dream, and everything got a whole lot worse before it got better. So I just sat with him, tried to hold his hand when he'd let me, just so he'd know he wasn't alone.”

  “And?” he asked when she stopped.

  “And he was putting out a pretty heavy vibe.” Overwhelming, actually. Creed had almost drowned her with the intensity of the emotions running through him, tearing him apart; of the visions flooding his mind. She had hardly let him out of her sight since that night, except for tonight, when Dylan had sent him off into the storm to track an international criminal who had brought the CIA right to their freakin' doorstep—damn.

  “A vibe?” Dylan asked, a note of skepticism in his voice. “What kind of vibe?”

  She didn't blame him for doubting her, not really. He hadn't spent enough time around her to know what the other guys had long since started to take for granted—that she was hot-wired with extrasensory perception, ESP, the real deal, and it worked pretty damn well on the guys most of the time, but not on Dylan Hart. He was the shadow warrior in her mind, indecipherable, unbreachable, a fascinating mystery.

  “He was handcuffed, chained to the back of a Jeep, on his knees in the mud,” she said, describing the image she'd gotten of Creed's dream. It had been quick, a searing flash, but everything had been crystal clear. “He'd been beaten. He was bleeding. J.T. was someplace close. I couldn't see him, but Creed could, and he never took his eyes off him. Not once. He bore witness. It was what kept him conscious, the need to bear witness.”

  “You didn't see J.T.?”

  She shook her head.

  His gaze fell on the folder again, and a weary breath left him on a sigh. “You're a spooky girl, Skeeter.”

  Yeah, she knew it. She also knew “spooky girl” wasn't a compliment; far from it. Dylan went for sophistication, women who looked like fashion models and talked like college professors, women who had class—not weird little street rats with paint under their fingernails.

  “What you described isn't what Creed wrote in his report, except in the most general terms,” Dylan said. “It's not what he's been telling the doctors.”

  Yeah, she knew that, too. She'd made a whole sideline out of reading Creed's medical files.

  “But it's exactly what's in the photographs inside this folder.”

  Sometimes she was wrong—not often, but often enough for her never to take too big of a risk based solely on something she'd “seen.” It was just too damn bad she hadn't been wrong this time—too damn bad for Creed. She reached for the folder.

  “No,” Dylan said, holding it to the desk. “You've seen enough. Done enough.”

  “You're about five years too late to protect me from anything,” she said, and tugged the folder free.

  Hell, yeah, she was a spooky girl, from way back, and this wallbanger needed to know what the Colombians had done to J.T. She needed to know for Creed's sake, and for Kid's, and for her own. J.T. would never be dead to Steele Street. His spirit filled the place. She felt it all the time—J.T. Chronopolous, one of the original “chop-shop boys,” guardian angel to all the other juvenile delinquents running wild on the streets of Denver with him. She knew the stories. He'd watched their backs, picked them up when they'd fallen, and kicked their butts when they'd made mistakes . . .

  She opened the folder.

  . . . and the Colombians had crucified him.

  Crucified.

  Oh, yeah, he'd been close to where Creed had been chained, barely ten feet away, nailed to a cross . . . his chest cut open.

  For one blinding second, she flashed on the scene, the brutality of it, the viciousness, the smell of J.T.'s blood. She felt the strangling heat of the jungle, heard his last agonized scream, his last dying breath—and through it all, Creed, naked on his knees, screaming at their captors and crying out his name . . . J.T. . . . John . . . John Thomas, I'm here. I'll never leave you . . . never . . . never . . . never . . .

  UNBELIEVABLE, Creed thought. Cody Stark had fallen asleep—like a rock. Warming her up had turned her sugar rush into a carbohydrate crash, putting her down for the count.

  He checked his watch.

  The cops had been crawling all over the library for the last ten minutes, and she hadn't moved so much as a muscle in the last five, just lain there against him, her head cradled in the curve of his shoulder, her body limp—which wasn't all bad. Someone had checked the skylight about eight minutes ago, giving it a good rattle and swinging their flashlight around through the glass before moving on. Given the number of nooks and crannies in the old building, he doubted if they'd
be coming back to check this one again. Keeping quiet in the backwater corner of the attic where he and Cody had washed up was the smart move until the police left.

  He'd had worse nights. That was for damn sure.

  But few as interesting. His ops usually didn't include women, especially ones who had their hands inside his clothes. Dylan usually handled any women who showed up on Steele Street's radar. He was better than the rest of them with the sort of female who traded secrets for power and money on the world stage. Creed and J.T. had always been the down-and-dirty jungle boys, racking up more Boy Scout badges than the rest of the guys put together.

  Yeah, him and J.T. That's the way it had been since he'd been fourteen. J.T. Chronopolous at his back—bigger, badder, faster, older, smarter. J.T. covering his ass every time they'd boosted a car, keeping him out of the kind of trouble that could have gotten him killed, giving him a place to stay on the nights when he'd had nowhere else to go. For years, the Chronopolous home had been like a frat house for the wild boys from the chop shop on Steele Street. Somehow all those wild boys had gone from stealing cars to serving their country, and for years everything had been going great—until it had all gone to hell in Colombia. Nothing had been the same for any of them since Colombia.

  Ah, shit, J.T. He rubbed his hand across the sudden ache in his chest. I'm so fucking sorry.

  The ache didn't ease. It never eased, and by his next breath, an awful heaviness had settled over him, making him even more miserable, a feeling he was getting so damn tired of fighting.

  “Shit,” he swore softly. He couldn't do this.

  “What?” the woman in his arms whispered.

  He glanced down and found her wide awake, her face tilted toward his, and his breath caught. Geezus.