by Tara Janzen
She nodded again.
God, she was so beautiful, and he could hear footsteps in the snow behind him, closing in. He pulled her against his chest and pressed his mouth to her cheek, and tried to think of all the thousands of things he wanted to say.
But it was too late.
“You saved me,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
And it was over.
“Creed.” It was Dylan.
He slowly turned around, letting her go.
There were half a dozen people besides Dylan and Skeeter. One man stepped forward and cuffed her. She didn't look at him, and that was for the best, but he didn't take his eyes off her, not until they put her in a car and drove off.
He waited a minute, and then he turned to Dylan. “Call Lieutenant Loretta. You've got a book at the library reserved in your name, and it needs to be picked up now.”
Both of Dylan's eyebrows rose.
“She hid the map in the library?”
“Right in the stacks.”
“Son of a bitch.”
C HAPTER
31
L EAVENWORTH WASN'T such a bad place. As a matter of fact, it was about Creed's favorite place, especially the private visitor's room reserved for special prisoners and their special visitors.
It had taken him eight weeks to get his butt in here the first time, eight weeks of him and Dylan bribing every person they knew and threatening some of the people they wished they didn't know. General Grant had been a big help in the latter department. A general's threats had a way of getting people's attention, and Grant had been glad to throw his weight around. His team had saved the world from rogue nuclear destruction. His stock at the Pentagon was riding higher than a duck in the water. Nobody was saying anything about moving his office over there, but there was hope.
The secretary of defense was happy. General Grant was happy. Dylan was happy, and Creed was happy, or as happy as he could get until he could finagle his way into the extra-special visitor's room—the one with privacy and a bed.
“Conjugal,” he said. “I'm lobbying the President.”
She blushed, which he loved.
“You are not,” she said, but the way she said it sounded like she had just enough doubts to worry her.
“I know you think the job is all about domestic policy and world domination, but the President actually has quite an interest in the conjugal affairs of certain high-security detainees in federal prisons.”
He was so ridiculous, she laughed, and that had been the point. Prison wasn't easy. He didn't care how high up the ladder a person's crimes landed them.
She had shackles on her ankles.
He tried not to think about it.
“Dylan says one more month, on the outside.” He was holding her hand. That's about all he ever did, and kiss her when he thought he could handle just kissing her, but he was careful with the kisses. They weren't alone, and the way he felt about her wasn't anybody else's business. His life had been irrevocably changed on that cold January night, and it hadn't been a fluke, or some crazed adrenaline junkie sex fixation. Time had proven him out.
She didn't respond to his announcement. She never did. She was careful with her hope, but he always let her know, and he always let her know that he believed she would be released. She'd saved the world. She was one of the good guys. The laws she'd actually broken were minor in comparison to what everyone had thought she'd been doing. In time it was all going to get sorted out. Time just wasn't moving fast enough, no matter what Dylan did. But Creed believed in Dylan, too.
“I took your mom to lunch last Wednesday,” he said, saving the best for last, and then just basking in the transformation of her face. There was nothing like taking a woman's mother out to lunch to make her happy. Fortunately, for him, her mother was a really nice lady, and as an added bonus, if he held his head to one side and squeezed his eyes shut just so, she looked quite a bit like Cody. Consequently, her mother seemed to think he had vision problems. She'd asked him once if everything was okay, and he'd tried to be a little more discreet after that.
“Oh,” she said, excited. “Where did you go?”
He plunged into the story, trying to remember all the details, which was incredibly difficult. Guys ate lunch. Women expected a whole helluva lot more from the hours between noon and two, especially if they were with a friend.
Cody hadn't been with a friend in a long time, but he was learning to be her friend. She'd told him all about what had happened in Prague, how the visit to find the father she'd never known had turned into the visit to the father she'd wished she'd never known. Life was funny sometimes, difficult, and sometimes really good—like now. Two months without her, and three weeks of twice-weekly visits with a woman he was so hot for he'd had to drain the jungle pool to keep from hurting himself, and he spent their time together chatting.
It wasn't even talk, what women did. They chatted, and it was an art, and he was getting it down, this way of weaving a whole bunch of things together until it didn't even make sense anymore and neither one of them could even remember where they'd started—chatting.
She loved it, and he loved her, but he was keeping that to himself, too. She didn't need his painfully desperate declarations right now. She needed his friendship. She needed to be able to count on him showing up every Monday and Thursday at eleven o'clock without fail.
And she needed to know he and Dylan and General Grant were dealing her an unbeatable hand. She was going to be released. She had to be.
Hell, the job he and Dylan had pulled in Thailand last month should have already gotten her out. Nobody had wanted to touch that gig, with good reason. It had been wet work and politics, and nothing was more dangerous or more likely to backfire on the world stage.
When the guard cleared his throat, Creed knew his time was up. He wanted to throw himself on the floor, but he didn't.
“Hey,” he said, leaning down and giving her one brief kiss on her cheek. “I'll see you on Monday.”
“Monday,” she said, with way more hope in her eyes than he could handle.
So he got up and left, and he walked out without looking back, and he didn't swear when he heard the guard lock the door behind him.
No, he saved that for when he got in the car.
C HAPTER
32
Two months later
I T WAS A SHORT flight from Denver to Leavenworth, Kansas, and he'd done it God knew how many times in the last few weeks, but today was the last time he'd ever have to do it, and Creed was about ready to jump out of his skin.
He had a ring in his pocket.
He didn't know half the stuff Dylan had pulled to make this happen, but Daniel Alden, Director of the CIA, had sent Steele Street a bouquet of flowers that was so frickin' big, it took up one whole desk.
Dylan had done something, all right, and Creed didn't know what it was, and that bugged the hell out of him. He didn't know half of what Dylan was up to anymore, but whatever it was, it was keeping him busy. He hadn't so much as stepped foot inside Steele Street in twelve weeks.
Skeeter sure wasn't happy about it, and an unhappy Skeeter, he'd learned, was a dangerous Skeeter. Nothing worked in Steele Street anymore. The computers crashed, the elevators got stuck, batteries died, organic smoothies went bad in the refrigerator.
“Are you going to be okay while I'm gone?” he asked her.
They were under Mercy's hood, for no special reason, which seemed to describe most of Skeeter's actions lately.
“I'll be fine. Cripes!” She jerked her hand back.
“You have to keep your fingers out of the blower, Skeet.” He wanted to help her, but if Dylan didn't want to come home, there wasn't a damn thing anybody could do about it.
“I know. I know.”
Hawkins was coming home. He and his wife, Kat, had been traveling throughout the South Pacific for the last five months, on the longest honeymoon in the history of mankind, but they were settling back into Steele Street at least t
hrough the summer, until the baby came.
Babies. That was a whole other ball game. Creed could dig it, but first he had to get a wife.
He checked his watch and decided that getting to the airport three hours early was probably a smart move and not the sign of an overeager idiot. Visitation today. Release tomorrow. Never-ending paradise after that.
“You know how to get hold of me if you need me, right?” He and Cody were going to be gone for a long time, at least a couple of months, maybe even longer. They'd been planning the trip together. It had been something for her to hold onto, a fantasy to help her sleep, she'd told him.
The marriage idea was all his. He wasn't going to spring it on her all at once. He wanted to win her over first, cover his bases, that sort of thing.
“Homing pigeon. I got it the first time, Creed.”
“The guy's name is Javier Bernal, and he won't like you referring to him as a homing pigeon.”
“Hey. I saw the photo. That's all I'm saying. He looks like a pigeon.”
Crabby, crabby Skeeter. “Your earrings giving you any trouble?”
She smirked, but didn't rise to the bait. The ruby-and-diamond crosses really did look good on her.
“I love you, but I'm not going to miss you,” he said.
That finally got him a sincere smile.
She came out from under the hood and threw her arms around him. “Well, I'm going to miss the hell out of you. Say hey to Cody for me.”
“I will.” With luck, he'd be saying hey to Cody every day for the rest of his life.
C HAPTER
33
H EY.”
“Hey.” Cody smiled and rolled over onto her side, not bothering to open her eyes. She wasn't ready to wake up, but she was always ready for him, the jungle boy.
“The sun's coming up.”
“Hmmm,” she said, snuggling closer, not exactly amazed at his news flash. The sun came up every day in their lost-world paradise, and him with it. The jungles of Quintana Roo on the Yucatan Peninsula were always hot, steaming with humidity, and most days it rained in the afternoon. The weather was wonderfully predictable, day after endless sun-drenched day. They swam in the river, ate fruit off the trees, and lived in a tree house hidden among the overgrown ruins of an ancient civilization.
She felt his mouth on her cheek, the silky weight of his hair brushing her skin, the warmth of his body stretched out along the length of hers.
“You're naked,” she murmured.
He smiled against her mouth and slid her leg up over his hip.
“So are you.” He pressed against her, and she let her eyes drift open. She loved watching him as he entered her, the way his hair fell down around his face and his lips would part, the dark light that came on in his silvery blue eyes.
“I lost my clothes again last night.”
“Hmmm.” He moved over her, pressing her back into the soft disarray of sheets and cotton blankets covering the bed.
“I think they fell out of the bedroom.”
“Your clothes are always falling out of the bedroom,” he murmured against her skin, and then pushed up inside her.
It was the loveliest way to wake up, so hot and sweet, and at the end, so achingly intense. She'd never dreamed she could be so in love.
When she woke up again, the sun had risen well above the horizon. A warm breeze blew across her skin and ruffled through the curtains that were the tree house's only walls. Pink and saffron, each length of cloth lifted in the wind. Every morning she felt like she was waking up inside a flower.
She stretched lazily in the bed, watching the river flow past their small beach. They'd fallen into the most somnolent existence, sleeping, eating, making love. They fished. They explored. They canoed, and they talked, a lot.
He stirred beside her, his hand curving around her waist. “I heard a jaguar last night.”
“Close?” She turned to face him.
“Not really. He was about half a mile north of the Achka temple, before the clearing where we saw the tapir.”
“And what were you doing half a mile north of the temple in the middle of the night?” He'd been by her side when she'd fallen asleep.
“Hunting,” he said, then nuzzled her neck.
He hunted a lot in the middle of the night, just like the big cat.
“What did you get?”
“Breakfast, lunch, and probably dinner.” He bit her, once, softly, on the neck, and then she felt him smile.
He'd gotten something big with his blowgun. She would have heard a shot.
“A deer.” She hoped.
“Um-hmmm.” His smile grew wider.
He still had nightmares about J.T., not so many. Sometimes he went hunting to work them off, sometimes he made love to her, and sometimes he just held her and they watched the stars.
“Where are we exploring today?”
“I think we need to go back to the Altar of the Moon,” he said, referring to another of the stone ruins they'd found hidden in the jungle. “I think we missed something, maybe a secret entrance, or a buried stela.”
He liked the adventure, and she liked him. It was more than love that bound them, more than the rings they wore on their fingers. Up until Prague, she'd lived her whole life in libraries, reading about what other people had done, all of her adventures coming vicariously. After Prague, and after Leavenworth, it would have been easy to crawl back into the safety of the book stacks and never, ever come out again.
But Creed lived, a hundred percent, every day, out in the world. When duty called, he answered. When things went bad, he survived and kept going, even when it was hard. She'd done the same thing after her father had died and her life had gotten so crazy—and the admiration Creed had for her was as important as his love. He made up adventures just to share them with her. He said it made them all worthwhile.
She felt the same way. Sharing with him, the nature child who never wore shoes, but never went anywhere without his Glock 10mm locked and loaded, had turned her whole life into an adventure.
“So you still think there's treasure there?” she mused aloud.
He grinned at that and let out a short laugh.
“Not really,” he said, pulling her closer and kissing her mouth once, twice, three times. “I just like hanging around the ruins, seeing what comes up, and seeing if I can get you to take your clothes off for me out in the jungle.”
“You are so bad.” She gave him a little push, and he caught her to him again, pulling her closer.
“One-hundred-percent pure badass to the bone, babe,” he agreed, kissing her on the cheek. Then he leaned closer and whispered in her ear, “But you are so damn good.”
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!
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C RAZY KISSES
Kid Chronopolous's story
ON SALE MARCH 2006
C RAZY KISSES
ON SALE MARCH 2006
Panama City, Panama
T HERE WAS A BIKINI bottom in his bathroom.
Curious as hell, Kid picked the tiny scrap of green and purple cotton up off the towel bar and turned it over in his hand.
It wasn't unusual for him to come home and find somebody crashing at his place. He'd known the instant he'd walked in that someone was there. The house in Panama City had belonged to his brother, and J.T. had always had an open-door policy.
But the bikini bottom was unusual.
Combat boots, surfboards, cases of beer—that's what he usually found. Not outrageously green bikini bottoms with purple palm fronds printed on them.
It was enough to make a guy think.
About sex.
And about death.
He swore softly and put the s
wimsuit back on the towel bar. J.T. had been the kind of guy who took care of people, a lot of people. Some of them had been women, mostly friends, but a couple of ex-lovers had shown up over the last few months. Kid didn't think he could face one of them tonight, and have to be the one to tell her J.T. was dead. He still felt about half dead himself.
Easing himself around, he limped back out to the living room. The house was pure tropical bungalow, with two bedrooms, a bath, kitchen and dining area together, and a living room that opened onto a palm-shaded courtyard. It had lizards darting around outside, a housekeeper named Rosa who held the place together no matter how many unexpected visitors showed up, and neighbors who liked to party—tonight being a case in point. A salsa beat was coming from both sides of the house.
After his and C. Smith's adventure on the Putumayo, two days in a Bogotá hospital, and two days of debriefing with the DEA and the Defense Department guys, he wasn't in the mood to party. All he wanted to do was sleep in a bed he called his own. He hoped the bikini girl had picked the spare bedroom and not the one he usually took.
The thought made him pause.
Geez. No wonder he never got laid anymore.
He shook his head and continued on across to the breezeway and the south bedroom, the one he preferred, and sure enough, it was definitely ocupado. There were clothes everywhere, and girl stuff piled up on his dresser and draped over the chair, filmy stuff, bright colorful stuff, bits and pieces. The girl's suitcases were on the floor in a corner, and besides being the most amazing shade of crocodile-patterned hot-pink leather he'd ever seen, they were overflowing with electrical cords, makeup bags, and shoes, like a girl grenade had exploded and sent her clothes flying in every direction.
That thought gave him pause, too, sort of reminded him of something else, but he wasn't going to spend the effort to figure out what. He was too damn tired to sort through anything tonight. All he wanted to do was sleep, and one bed or another didn't really make much difference.
