by Tara Janzen
Oh, yeah. This was amazing. He had a handful of black thread with more falling off of her every second, and the more he tried to stop it, the faster it came undone. It was like watching a runaway train, and in less than a minute he was left holding a whole lot of ruined fishnet, and she was left with her outfit in shreds.
He loved it.
“Wow.” She looked even more naked with only half the fishnet—and what was left wasn't going to last long.
He let the ruined part fall and slid his hand around her waist. She was so soft and sleek, nothing but smooth curves. He followed them around over her hip to the small of her back and lower, onto the little triangle of black satin with the word Saturday racing across her ass.
She stretched up on tiptoe to kiss him again, and it was all so perfect.
So almost perfect.
Something was wrong. He could feel it. He'd had desperately hot and fast sex before, and yes, he'd had it with a stranger once—a memory which regularly played on his surefire fantasy hit list. That night in the women's bathroom at McDaddy's Bar and Grill, him in the last stall on the right with Miss February and a condom, had been every twenty-year-old homeboy's dream come true.
But this was different. The stakes were higher, incalculably higher, and he knew a whole lot more about Cody Stark than he'd bothered to find out about Miss February.
Women came onto him all the time, and those women had moves, moves Cody Stark didn't have. Her kisses were too short, and her hand never had made it to where it needed to go. If this was a “kiss me, Creed, please” seduction, she could have given him a long, slow, wet, deep, drugging kiss, unzipped his pants, and had him on his knees.
But she hadn't.
So he slowed things down. He didn't want everything to go so fast that she didn't have any fun. Once with Miss February had been enough. He was older now, wiser, and he wanted to play with Cody Stark all night long.
And then he was going to want to take her to Mexico.
Shit. He could see it all now: weeks on the run, making love on the beach, and a Butch and Sundance end.
What in the hell did he think he was going to get away with? And when had desperately hot sex turned into making love?
He was so screwed up, he needed a warning label.
And she needed a little help. So the next time she went for his mouth, he slid his hand up under Saturday, pulled her close, gave her one of those long, slow, wet, deep, drugging kisses, and felt her die a little in his arms. She groaned, such a sweet sound, and it did nothing but make him harder.
He wasn't just going to take her. He was going to make her his.
Sliding the black satin straps off her shoulders, he pushed her push-up bra down, and when she tried to go all shy on him, he bent his head and sucked on her until she went molten in his arms.
This was all working out so well. He had her breast in his mouth, and his hand all over her ass, and when he slid his fingers between her legs, so slowly, so gently, and pressed up against all the soft wonderfulness of her most private parts, she trembled all over.
“Creed,” she whispered his name, and her hands went to his shoulders, then slid up into his hair, holding him.
Yes, everything was working perfectly, until he slid down her body and pressed his mouth to the juncture of her legs, and she balked.
“No, I . . . What are you doing?” she gasped.
What was he doing?
Well, now there was one for the books. In the not-so-distant past of his teenage years, he'd known seventeen-year-old good girls who'd known exactly what he was doing and loved it—and bad girl Dominika Starkova didn't know what he was doing?
Maybe he'd misunderstood.
He started to pull down her panties, those black satin ones, and she clamped her legs shut tighter than a vise. Fortunately, his other hand was still in there from the Saturday side, so there were some compensations.
“I . . . I don't like that,” she said, but she didn't sound too sure to him.
Taking a deep breath—but not getting off his knees, because he still had high hopes for this pivotal part of his plan to “make her his”—he rested his forehead on her stomach, her lovely, silken stomach.
“Have you ever tried it?” he asked.
“N-no. Well, once, maybe . . . almost.”
Sweet Jesus. His eyes closed on a silent invocation. When he opened them, he let his gaze linger on the few dark curls he'd revealed, and his heart slowed for the space of a breath.
Virgin territory.
He and Cody had fallen way out of the boundaries of desperate hot sex. It was impossible to have truly desperate hot sex with someone who was so inexperienced they'd only “once, maybe, almost” been gone down on, and there was really only one way for a guy to screw up what was basically a fairly straightforward deal and turn it into a “once, maybe, almost.” Some idiot lover of hers, of which she couldn't have had very damn many, hadn't liked it—which boggled Creed's brain. He was pretty much riveted by all the possibilities between a woman's legs. Everything was so soft, always warm, smelled like sex, and tasted better.
What wasn't there to love?
“Come on,” he said, rising to his feet and snapping her panties back up around her butt.
“Ouch.”
He grinned and took her hand in his to lead her farther into the loft. His bad girl wasn't so bad after all, and why that should have him grinning like a fool, he didn't have a clue.
“Where are we going?” she asked, staying close to his side. He noticed she'd rearranged her bra back into place. Damn.
“For a long hot soak in a waterfall.” He needed it. The night hadn't been without its fair share of dings. Edmund Braun had gotten one good hit in. He'd cut himself on a frozen edge of that friggin' fire escape, and played a game of real rough-and-tumble leading Reinhard Klein and his gang through South Morrison.
She'd had her hurts, too, and he felt bad for having forgotten them. He should have taken care of her before he'd started taking her clothes off.
“That's what I've been hearing?” she asked. “A waterfall?”
“Uh-huh. With a jetted pool. It'll feel great.”
CODY believed him. After the way he'd held her and kissed her, she was inclined to believe every word he said. It was absurd, she knew, and something she'd definitely thought she'd outgrown, but she felt like she had a crush on him, a mad kind of crush on the maniac wild boy who'd been dragging her around and saving her life all night—the kind of crush that left her a little dizzy and overly thrilled and thinking he was way too cute to be real—which was so much easier than thinking about everything else, about the men after her . . . about actually making love with him. She didn't think her reaction to him was that captor/captive attraction that sometimes happened.
They hadn't been together that long, only a few hours.
But cute? This was the man who had killed Hashemi and broken Edmund Braun. There was nothing cute about him, except for his long, surfer-boy hair, the dreamy, washed-out color of his eyes, and the erotic fullness of his lower lip, nothing except the arch of his cheekbones, the lines of weariness marking his face, and the short scar across the bridge of his nose. If cute had a hard, rough edge, it was Creed Rivera.
She was worried about the sex, though, real worried. Everything had been going great, until she'd been such an idiot. She couldn't afford knee-jerk reactions. She was running out of time. And as far as oral sex went, she knew lots of men liked it, liked giving it—her ex-fiancé, Alex, being the exception, for reasons he'd taken great pains to explain. Hell, by the time he'd gotten done, she hadn't blamed him for not liking it. So she'd spent four years in the approved missionary position, and the sex had been okay, because she'd been in love and had loved being so physically close to him, to share all that time under the covers. She hadn't realized what a truly sanctimonious bore he'd been until long after he'd left her and she'd been swept up into Sergei's world.
Of course, if Alex hadn't left her, she never wou
ld have left Wichita and gone halfway around the world to find a father she'd never known, looking for adventure and some relief from her broken heart.
Women settled for too little too much of the time, but here she was again, willing to settle for anything Creed Rivera would give her, because even though she rather desperately wanted to have sex with him, what she wanted wasn't about sex.
She needed redemption, and he was her last chance, and those facts far outweighed any moral disquietude she felt about making love with a virtual stranger. It wouldn't be the first time—and that was the problem, the sin that ate at her. She wanted Reinhard Klein and what he'd done to her, what she'd let him do to her, wiped off her slate, or at least pushed back into history. For whatever future she had left, she wanted Creed Rivera to be her memory of what could be shared between a man and a woman. She wanted a hero. She wasn't going to call it love, any more than she could call what Reinhard had done to her rape—and even though she tried not to, she hated herself for that.
She could have told Reinhard no and taken the consequences. But with Keith O'Connell's body hanging from the rafters behind her, and the air filled with the scent of gunpowder, and his blood everywhere, a pool of it on the floor, the taste of it in the air, terrifying her, horrifying her, she'd taken the easy way out.
Except it hadn't been easy. Reinhard made her skin crawl and her stomach churn, and every time she'd had to be in the same room with him after Karlovy Vary, she'd wanted to scream.
The only easy thing she'd done since her father had delivered her to Sergei Patrushev was kiss Creed Rivera and be in his arms.
She followed him down a short flight of stairs, into the main living area. There were a lot of large, looming shadows in his apartment, and as they passed beyond the first set of them into the wan light coming in through the windows, she was able to see what they were.
“Trees,” she said, looking over her shoulder, then back all around, flabbergasted. “You have an apartment full of trees. Huge trees.”
Palm trees, some of them scraping the ceiling which was maybe thirty feet above them. A couple of the palms seemed to actually disappear up into the ceiling. There were ferns everywhere, and giant philodendrons, the kind that came from the tropics. Her only excuse for missing all of this at first was that it was dark and she'd been so focused on him. He hadn't turned on any lights, which was fine with her. She didn't want to have to face anything too clearly. But she had noticed how warm and humid it was when they'd first entered his apartment—or maybe loft was a more accurate description. There didn't seem to be any walls, anywhere . . . only trees.
“Skeeter's been running an experiment in here for the last couple of years,” he said, “and I think the plants have won.”
“Where do all the stairs go?” Looking around, she could see three swooping iron staircases, freestanding, winding up through all the vegetation. The whole place was simply amazing.
He nodded toward the staircase closest to the windows that took up one whole, huge wall on the far side of the room. There must have been a hundred feet of thirty-foot-tall windows, if not more.
“That one goes to my bedroom. The other two lead to a bedroom and an office, all at different levels. The kitchen is behind us on the main floor, and the bathroom is up ahead.”
“With the waterfall.” Unbelievable.
He grinned down at her. “With the waterfall.”
“Did Skeeter design the whole loft, or just the jungle?” The girl seemed immensely talented.
“She's just the jungle girl. Superman and I built the original platforms and the staircases years ago. The walls on the platforms move, very Japanese. You can have privacy if you want, but usually the whole place is just open.”
“Superman?” She wanted to know everything about him, or as much as she could, and as long as he was answering questions, she was going to ask—and she wasn't going to quit holding his hand. If they were touching, she felt like she still had a chance at redemption.
“A friend,” he said. “More than a friend. A brother.”
“Like Dylan,” she said, remembering how the two of them had come in together, the easy way they'd been with each other—up until the CIA had come into the conversation.
“Like Dylan,” he agreed.
“What about Skeeter?” The girl fascinated Cody, the way she looked and the way she fit into this place with all its high-powered cars, high-tech equipment, and highly skilled warriors. This building was luxuriously expensive. The art in the hallway outside Creed's loft was of museum quality. Everything in the building was unique, from the cagelike freight elevator crawling up the side of the building, to this indoor jungle, to the men who lived here, to the girl.
“Skeeter's our wild card. She's only been with us a couple of years, but she's taken over the whole place.”
“She scared me a little.”
“Yeah, well, you're small. She could have taken you.”
“That's what she said.”
“You tried something?” He didn't sound at all happy about the possibility.
“No.”
“Why not?” And he sounded intrigued by that. “You didn't waste any time ditching me.”
She shrugged, a small gesture. “I was afraid.” Afraid of escaping only to find out she had no place left to go. Afraid of Reinhard finding her. Afraid of never seeing Creed again, but she doubted if he'd make that inference.
“You're safer here than anyplace else in the world tonight. I can guarantee it.”
Since he'd been the only guarantee of safety she'd had for months, she didn't find his statement too hard to believe, but there was a problem, and it was only two floors away.
“What about the CIA? Is Dylan going to tell them I'm here?” It would be the end of her if he did.
NOT tonight,” Creed said and hoped to hell it was true. She was hanging by a thread no matter how anybody looked at the situation. The best he could do was catch her if the thread broke or if somebody out-and-out took a machete to it.
A sudden breeze drifted through the trees, setting leaves in motion and fronds swaying.
“Wind?” she asked, a small laugh escaping her. “Can you make it rain, too?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. The fans cycle every fifteen minutes, and there's a sprinkler system to make it rain for three minutes every eight hours.” They were almost to the pool, or the lagoon as Skeeter called it. It was the deepest, darkest jungle in the loft, with the trees and ferns planted close together to create at least the illusion of privacy, if not the reality.
“It smells good in here,” she said. “Different.”
He knew what she meant. The loft smelled green. He'd always had the largest apartment in the building and had long ago dismantled part of the ceiling to open it up to the tenth floor. It was a cavernous living space, but it was Skeeter who had added the fans. Skeeter who had started at the copper and iron waterfall he and Hawkins had welded together as kids and begun transforming the industrial ambiance of his multiplatformed loft into a literal urban jungle.
The place seethed with life.
He could feel it around him. Smell it. The greenness rich and decadent. It had driven him a little crazy at first, when he'd realized what Skeeter was doing to his place. Every time he had come home, there had been a new layer of forest added to the last, another wall of vegetation encroaching on his few pieces of furniture, another tree towering over his bed.
Now he depended on it. He was living in a garden of Eden, and he'd just brought home Eve in torn fishnet with sparkle gel in her hair.
C HAPTER
22
S O WHAT HAVE we got?” Skeeter asked.
“A thousand dollars,” Dylan said. “Half of it in Euros.”
“Check.” She marked it off on her list.
“Four wallets.”
Skeeter grinned. Creed was so smooth. He'd made a damn good living as a twelve-year-old pickpocket before he'd started boosting cars and working with Dylan at the chop
shop. She'd heard the stories. It was that sweet face of his, or at least she guessed his face must have looked sweet at twelve. Now he looked like what he was—battle-hardened, street tough, and not to be fucked with—but in the right light, with a couple of beers in him, there was a little trace of sweetness still there. Damn little, but it might come out with the right woman, who would not be Dominika Starkova. Cripes. Her underwear. Geez, for herself, Skeeter managed to remember the freakin' days of the week without having them embroidered across her butt.
“You wanna give me those names again?”
“Bruno Walmann,” Dylan called out, opening each wallet in turn. “Edmund Braun. Ahmad Hashemi. Qasim Akbar.”
Okay, so Creed had tagged two of those guys and bagged one. That still left Walmann as a very nice lift.
“Check. Check. Check. Check.” She liked working with Dylan. They made a good team, and she'd been wondering like crazy if he'd noticed.
“Two sets of car keys.”
“You want them to go to Lieutenant Loretta?”
“No,” Dylan said, shaking his head. “I'd love to, but all this stuff will go to Royce.”
“Why?” She looked up, surprised.
“It's a nuclear bomb we're looking for, Skeeter, not a couple of homeys with a gang vendetta. Loretta got to first base with Braun and the Iranians, but Royce will have them out from under her in less than an hour. He needs this information.”
Well, that all sounded damn generous of him.
“And it'll get him off our ass.”
Now that made sense.
“So we give him the trinkets, but we keep Dominika Starkova?” she asked.
“Until we hear from General Grant.” He picked up the next item on the desk. “One tracking device.”
“Chee-eck.” One razzle-dazzle, supercalifragilistic, totally sick tracking device with the receiver embedded in a teeny-tiny pair of earrings which Creed had regretfully dropped down a heat vent in South Morrison. Dropped them and lost them.
Except, of course, it was impossible to lose an operating tracking receiver, and if somebody wanted to find those teeny-tiny earrings—well, there was the thingamajob that could do it. Sitting right in the palm of Dylan's hand.
