Crazy Cool

by Tara Janzen

  By then, he’d been released from prison, and Ray’s story about a bunch of guys in tuxedos and a girl in a pretty dress had mirrored his own story of the night he’d saved Katya, except in Ray’s version, the girl had died—so no, Hawkins hadn’t thought publicly promoting Ray’s story would do him much good. He’d always known he’d been railroaded into taking the fall for Traynor’s murder, but when it came to putting Ray Carper on the witness stand, he figured his lawyer had probably made the best decision.

  But now Ted Garraty had been murdered, and Mickey had thought of Ray, and Hawkins had to wonder if they’d all missed something in Ray’s drunken ramblings. And then there was that piece of material they’d found in Garraty’s pocket—which just set Hawkins’s teeth a little harder on edge. If someone wanted to fuck with him, he’d prefer they did it face-to-face and left Katya out of it.

  He lost sight of her for a second as a waiter carrying a large tray of food passed between them, and when he saw her again, a little warning bell went off in his brain.

  She wasn’t moving, not at all. She was staring straight ahead, her gaze narrowed, her face flushed, her body positioned on the barstool with all the precision of someone who knew she was in danger of falling off.

  He looked down at the bar in front of her, and sure enough, her hand was still wrapped around the evidence: an empty margarita glass. One of Rick’s empty margarita glasses, the condensation rolling down the side and making a little slough of the salt.

  Daniel’s ass was grass. Rick’s margaritas had a way of blindsiding a person, especially if Daniel had ordered her a house special.

  Great. Now he not only had Bad Luck on his hands, he had Drunken Bad Luck, which sounded like an ancient Chinese curse to him. As a matter of fact, he was pretty sure it was an ancient Chinese curse.

  “Hey, babe,” he said, leaning on the bar and putting himself in her line of vision. At this point, he knew she was going to be real careful about moving her head too fast, if at all.

  “Hey.” Her voice was kind of weak, kind of soft, as if she didn’t want anything accidentally ricocheting around inside and bouncing off her skull.

  “You okay?”

  “I-I was fine . . . and then . . . and then I wasn’t.”

  Yeah, just like that. One minute a person was fine, and in the next second, wham, they’d been coldcocked from the inside out, thanks to the mezcal from across the border that put the “special” in Rick’s “house special” margaritas.

  “I thought I’d take you home now.”

  She made the monumental effort to shift her gaze and make eye contact. “Roxanne again?” She didn’t sound too thrilled by the idea.

  “I’ll drive like your grandmother,” he promised. “You won’t feel a thing.” Easy enough for him to say. She wasn’t feeling a thing now. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  He carefully moved the glass out of her hand, not realizing it was the only thing holding her up until she started sliding off the stool. He caught her in his arms. Probably not his smartest move, but he was willing to give her a chance to find her feet.

  It took a long time.

  A very long time, in which she just lay there against him, all curves and heat, her face pressed into the middle of his chest, her breath getting his shirt wet.

  Just part of the job, he told himself, staying calm, keeping cool, despite the fact that her hands had moved to his waist and were fisted into his shirt and holding on to him like she was never going to let him go.

  Yeah, despite all that, he was cool. Getting a little turned on, but staying cool. Because the truth was, she wasn’t coming on to him. This was one of those “any port in a storm” situations, and he was a big enough boy to understand the difference. Plus, he reminded himself, this kind of discomfort in her presence was nothing new.

  But that was all in the past and would have stayed there, he was sure, if she hadn’t gone and done the damnedest thing. Still clinging, still plastered against him, she tilted her head back, sending a long fall of golden hair sliding over his suit jacket, and she looked at him, caught his gaze with her own, and slam-dunked him for the score. If his timing had been even a fraction of a second better, he could have averted his eyes and been fine. But he hadn’t, and he wasn’t.

  She was locked onto him like a tractor beam, and he couldn’t look away. His body grew very still. His pulse picked up speed. Warning bells, big loud ones, started going off all over in his brain—“Danger, danger, Will Robinson!”—and he still didn’t move. Oh, no, not him. That would have been too easy. He went the hard way, letting his gaze slide slowly over her face, letting his awareness of her body seep past his barriers, letting the first rush of arousal run amuck.

  His hands tightened around her arms where he held her. Hell, he didn’t need this, he told himself, not for a minute, but God, she was beautiful, and she was in his arms, all warm and lovely and drunk, with sea-green eyes and a mouth that had been his undoing from the first moment he’d ever kissed her.

  Kiss . . . her lips parted as if she’d read his mind, and his brain started shutting down, all his energy focusing on her. There’d been a time when he would have given everything he had just to kiss her again. A time when he would have given his last days of freedom, if she would only come and see him, come and make love with him, come and make him . . . make him . . .

  He’d been one badass heartbroken boy, and here she was, practically his for the taking, no money down, no freedom lost.

  He was so tempted—and might have followed through on it except for the slight tremor that went through her body. His gaze instantly narrowed. As promising as a little trembling sometimes was with a woman, he instinctively knew this was not one of those times. Then she went and proved him right. Tears suddenly filled her eyes, and in the next second she was crumbling, starting to cry.

  Ah, hell, he thought, it was déjà vu all over again.

  “I’m sorry, Christian.” Her voice was barely a whisper, her words a little muddled and filled with remorse. He knew exactly what she was sorry for, and frankly, it was the last damn thing he wanted to talk about with her. The last thing he needed tonight or any other night was a sobbing confession designed to ease her guilt and make him feel like shit, but he was going to get one. He could feel it coming in the tightening of her hands in his shirt, in the way she was pressing herself against him, making sure she had his undivided attention.

  She did.

  “When you were . . . I wanted to—and then I missed you,” she started on a hiccupped sob. “I tried, but the whole mess was . . . and then I was in Paris, and—”

  Well, this was priceless, Bad Luck and hiccups, and what she’d said was just swell. She’d gone to Paris, and he’d gone to the penitentiary.

  “—and I couldn’t get in touch with you, and the money, and the letters I sent—”

  That was interesting. He’d never gotten any letters, and he sure as hell had never gotten any money.

  “All back. All of it—and Margot . . . Margot told me about the cigarettes, so I really, really wanted you to have the cigarettes. So no one would . . . oh, God, Hawkins, I am so sorry.”

  Well, now she was starting to hit nerves, and fuck Margot, whoever the hell she was. He could just imagine what the girl had told Bad Luck he could buy with cigarettes. You couldn’t buy a goddamn thing with cigarettes, not on the inside, not anything that counted.

  “Y-you shouldn’t have ever even,” she said, not making much sense, but he understood her.

  “I-I told them it wasn’t you. Not you.” She gave him a little shake, as if he were the one who needed convincing, and he was convinced, of her sincerity if nothing else. She looked miserable, beautiful but miserable, the tip of her nose turning pink, her lashes getting all stuck together with tears. “All the other boys. I told them, the knife, everything, about the knife and Jonathan, and how you saved me.”

  And the boys had told the cops about his threat—instant Kiss of Death, but he didn’t hold it against he
r. He’d told the cops the same thing.

  “I told my mother, too, how you’d saved me, b-but she didn’t care. She was so . . . so—”

  And this was the part he really didn’t want to hear, the part about Linebacker Dekker, and how she’d thrown her weight around because she’d been so . . . so—pissed off, he figured. Shocked. Stunned. Outraged. The list was probably endless.

  No, he didn’t want to hear it, but he didn’t stop it, either—and he could have, easily. But the conversation was starting to take on all the fascination of a train wreck.

  “So . . .” Bad Luck said again, struggling to find the right word, as if she really, really wanted him to know how her mother had felt, but was being extra careful not to hurt his feelings.

  How sweet, he thought. How utterly absurd.

  How utterly pressed against him she was, like a hot lamination.

  “So—”

  He took a breath, and wished he had a margarita, because he couldn’t take much more of this. She was crying seriously now, hiccupping between words, the tears spilling onto her cheeks, smudging her mascara and giving her a slightly bruised and helpless, damsel-in-distress look that he seemed particularly susceptible to, the way other men were susceptible to the plague, or dengue fever.

  “So . . . so . . .” Her brow furrowed, her straight little eyebrows bunching toward each other.

  Okay, great. She’d lost her train of thought and was now stuck like a broken record. A nicer man would have helped her out.

  Hawkins was not a nice man. He helped himself.

  Bringing his hands up to her face, he smoothed his thumbs across her cheeks and wiped away her tears, and the next time she said “So . . . so . . .” in her softly confused voice, her gaze imploring him to understand, he leaned down and kissed her, opened his mouth over hers and took the zero-to-sixty-in-0.5-seconds-flat trip down memory lane.

  It was a helluva ride. Her breasts cushioned against his chest, her soft skin beneath his fingers, her mouth opening for him, letting him inside—and the sound of instantaneous surrender she made in the back of her throat that went through him with all the galvanizing force of a Top Fuel dragster on ninety-percent nitro. He felt the heat of her mouth all the way down to his groin, turning him on, stirring him up, when he had no business getting stirred by her at all.

  But, God, she was sweet, the taste of her damnably erotic, a little mezcal, a little salt from her tears, and all Bad Luck.

  He opened his mouth wider and shifted angles, so he could have more of her—more access, more of her tongue in his mouth, because it drove him crazy in the most exquisite way. She melted against him, opening herself even more to the kiss. It was such a tease of what he really wanted: more her.

  And what a damn god-awful thing it was to find that out. He’d wondered what it would be like to kiss her again. He’d been wondering ever since he’d first set eyes on her at the Botanic Gardens, and now he knew—incredible, everything he remembered and then some, the giving way of her body, the way she rose to his touch, the unconscious roll of her hips into his.

  Geezus. He was in so much trouble, and for a second, he thought about pulling away—and then he thought to hell with it.

  Oh, yeah. His first year in stir, he would have given everything he had, including the 350 Chevy Malibu waiting for him on the outside, for her to come and kiss him like this, and it would have been worth it. There’d been nights when he’d skated so close to the edge of the abyss, it had only been Dylan’s promises that had held him back and kept him alive—dark, fierce promises that had somehow kept him sane.

  All because of her. So was he crazy, or what?

  Probably, he admitted, because he wanted to kiss her anyway, despite the past and the havoc she’d wreaked on his life—all because he’d fallen in love with a crumpled-up little Tinkerbell who kissed like an angel. It was something he’d never quite understood. The last place he’d ever expected to end up in his whole life was in bed with a prom queen.

  It was exactly where he wanted to end up tonight, though, and what was wrong with that? He didn’t have to fall hopelessly, crazily in love with her. Hell, he wasn’t a teenager anymore. He’d made love with lots of women without falling in love. Okay, maybe “lots” was stretching things a bit. He tended to be very particular about his lovers. He liked women, loved them at their best and was fascinated by them at their worst, but he didn’t need to sleep with every one he met.

  He just needed to sleep with this one, Katya Dekker. He needed to sleep with her tonight.

  Closure, he told himself. That’s what he was looking for, and maybe some absolution. She could have saved him once, saved him in a thousand different ways, and she’d abandoned him instead, left him to suffer alone and commit his sins of survival.

  And he still wanted her, after all he’d been through.

  So, great. He’d take her to the gallery, let her grab a few things, talk to Alex Zheng—and then he’d take her home, home to his place, Steele Street. She needed to talk? Fine, he’d let her talk right up until he got her into bed, because that’s what he needed. Sex. With her.

  Hell, she’d practically fallen into his arms, so why not? It was the perfect plan. Straightforward, simple, with no complicated, extraneous objectives in mind, nothing to get all screwed up—especially his head. He wasn’t going to let his head get into this at all. It was going to be sex, pure and simple.

  CHAPTER

  8

  SIMPLE. RIGHT.

  Hawkins turned Roxanne onto Seventeenth Street and slowly motored up the block.

  Yeah. He’d had it all worked out in the bar at Mama Guadalupe’s, but in his plan, she hadn’t passed out cold, all slumped down in her seat, her mouth a little open, her hair a tangled mess going every which way, the hem of her dress almost up around her waist, which he was trying very hard not to notice.

  One margarita. It almost didn’t seem possible for someone to pass out on one margarita, even one of Rick’s margaritas. She wasn’t very big, but it was still hard to believe that she was down for the count—and that he was hell and gone out of luck.

  Of course he was. What had he expected, really expected? She was Bad Luck, the stone-cold definition.

  In truth, it was all for the best, and he knew it. He couldn’t have had sex with her and walked away. He was stuck with her, he reminded himself. Through the weekend at least. And he couldn’t have had sex with her without his head getting involved, because there was a whole section of his brain with her name engraved on it.

  He pulled to a stop in front of the gallery and shut Roxanne down. The night was quiet, with just a few people cruising in and out of the Oxford Hotel, and a few more heading down to the bars on Wynkoop. The gallery was dark, and she sure didn’t have any keys on her. Hell, she barely had on her dress. So it was time for a little breaking and entering.

  She stirred beside him, rolling to her side as if she were snuggling in for the night, and he knew it would be easier just to call it quits and take her to Steele Street. He could bring her home in the morning. But he really did need to talk to Dylan, and even Alex Zheng. He’d know who in town she’d kept in touch with all these years. Ted Garraty had been at the garden party. Who else had been there? he wondered. Who else from the Prom King Murder was still in Denver?

  He used to keep track of the boys who’d been in the alley that night, but once he and Dylan had gotten involved in creating SDF, he’d become more focused on the future than his past, and gradually, he’d let them go. He’d have to get Skeeter working on tracking them all down again.

  “I don’t like you.” Her voice came across the quiet interior of the car, dead serious, even if her words were a little soft around the edges.

  He rolled his gaze in her direction. She was a heartbreaker, all right, but right now she looked like hell, sleepily drunk, with mascara tracks running down her cheeks and her lipstick smeared—what was left of it, anyway.

  “You’re not very nice, and I’m—I’m angry wi
th you,” she continued.

  Yeah. Furious. He could tell by the way she’d had her tongue halfway down his throat.

  “I think you’re real nice,” he said, and he did. Nice to kiss. Nice to get naked with—not that he was getting anywhere with that, which was fine, all for the best.

  “No, you don’t. You th-ink I’m bad luck,” she said around a yawn.

  “Yeah, well, that, too.” He knew better than to argue with a drunk.

  Her sleepy gaze locked onto his, still so very, very serious, and he felt all his old discomfort come back.

  “You th-ink I didn’t really love you.”

  Okay. Time to bail out on this particular conversation. He opened the door and got out of the car.

  Swinging around to the passenger side, he reached for the door handle, then stopped. He couldn’t leave her in the car. He knew that. But he needed a moment to remind himself—again—that she was just a job.

  Of course, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d ever kissed anybody on the job.

  On the other hand, just because it had happened once, didn’t mean it had to happen twice.

  Famous last words, he thought, when he opened the door and saw her doing God knew what in the seat. Stretching, yeah, that’s what it was called when a woman in a too-short dress arched her back and lifted her hands over her head, yawned, and pressed one of her four-inch heels into the floorboards.

  He called it stunning. Damn near paralyzing. She was nothing but silken, golden tan all the way up to her thong.

  Dammit. He’d been wrong. He couldn’t handle her underwear, not while it was still on her body, and he didn’t even want to think about it coming off. He didn’t dare.

  Steeling himself, he leaned down to retrieve a set of lock picks out of Roxanne’s glove box and unbuckle the seat belt, knowing he had to work fast or risk getting arrested—on both counts. It seemed damn near impossible, but he wore a forty-two-long suit jacket, and somehow there wasn’t enough of it to cover her up. She should have been swaddled in the damn thing, damn near swallowed up by the material. Instead, the only part of her he couldn’t see was her arms.