by Tara Janzen
Regan wasn’t so sure. Not anymore. She’d met Quinn Younger once that summer, if one awkward encounter constituted a meeting, and despite his subsequent rise to fame and glory, the image of him as a shaggy-haired, sixteen-year-old car thief with coolly assessing eyes and a slyly artful grin was the image lodged in her brain. Looking at Cisco did little to change the impression. Neither did the cryptic message she’d found written on her grandfather’s desk calendar, the message that had sent her halfway across Colorado to this nowhere spot in the road in Utah.
“Hell.” She didn’t know what to think. She looked over her shoulder, back the way she’d come. There was nothing but desert scrub all the way to the horizon.
With an exasperated sigh, she returned her attention to the buildings. The town was eerie, damned eerie, but she’d come a long way, and the least she had to do was check the place out. If Wilson or Quinn Younger were there, or had been there, she was going to know it before she left.
Ignoring her unease and a good portion of her common sense, she put the car in gear and pulled back onto the road, heading for the gas station.
* * *
“She’s stopped in front of Burt’s old place,” Peter “Kid” Chronopolous said, looking through his scope.
Quinn glanced up from under the hood of the ’69 Camaro parked in the barn and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Stopped?”
All kinds of people drove by Cisco. Every now and then somebody pulled over to the side of the road and got out their map to figure out where in the hell they’d gone wrong. Damn few people pulled into town and stopped – with good reason. Out of the seven buildings still standing, not a one of them looked anything less than forbiddingly deserted. Other than the shop and living space built into the barn, they were deserted.
“Yep,” Kid said, his gaze still trained on the gas station through the scope. “And now she’s getting out and going in.” The younger man’s voice stayed calm and steady, but Quinn sensed his heightened sense of readiness. Most lost tourists, especially lost women tourists, would not go wandering into Burt’s place. Most, however, wasn’t all, and Quinn wasn’t inclined to jump to conclusions. Not one damn thing had happened in Cisco in the two weeks he and Kid had been stuck there. A woman in Burt’s didn’t mean their luck was changing or that the action was picking up, not by his standards.
“Take her picture and send it through the computer,” he said, returning his attention to the Camaro’s engine. The car was barely street legal as it was. Finishing up the nitrous oxide system pushed it over the edge. Speed and torque, that’s what he’d wanted, and that’s what he’d bolted into the ride—in spades. Kid could have his fancy Porsche. Quinn was putting his quarter-mile money on the Chevy.
“I’m on it, but I think you better take a look,” Kid warned.
Quinn lifted his head again, looking over the engine at the twenty-three-year-old ex-Marine. Kid—who for numerous reasons was also known as ‘Kid Chaos’—was definitely jazzed. His eye was glued to the scope; his body was tense and alert. Of course, the boy had been roughing it with Quinn since the middle of June. Possibly, it was merely the sight of a woman, any woman, that had gotten his juices going.
Or maybe the bad guys had tracked them down.
Setting aside his wrench, he straightened up from under the hood. As had become habit over the last few weeks, he tested his left leg before trusting it to completely hold his weight. When it held, he limped across the shop floor and turned on the laptop Kid had rigged up to half a dozen cameras around Cisco.
Despite a serious addiction to fast cars, extreme sports, and general mayhem, Kid was a certifiable electronics wizard. He’d wired the ghost town to within an inch of its life for twenty-four/seven surveillance. In their line of work, taking a little time off was a slippery concept. Getting hurt in that line of work came with a few interesting consequences, the least of which was Kid watching over him like a mother hen, and if lately Quinn had been feeling like he’d washed up on the wrong side of thirty with not much to show for it but a friggin’ barn to live in and a busted leg, well, he had no one but himself to blame. He’d made some bad choices—especially that last damn choice he’d made in the rail yards on the west side of Denver.
Quinn typed in a couple of commands, activating the cameras in the buildings. When the camera in Burt’s came on, the image of a woman filled the screen.
His brow furrowed. The only female assassin he’d ever seen had been sleekly fit and buffed on steroids. She’d also moved with the prowling gait of a hungry panther. Not this woman. She was randomly picking her way through the dust and the tumbleweeds inside the gas station, peering over countertops and around half-fallen beams. A broken chair caught her unawares in the shin, and she swore under her breath.
Colorful, he thought, his lips twitching in a brief grin. Definitely lost tourist material. No trained hunter would swear because of a measly shin hit. No truly trained hunter would have run into the chair in the first place. After rubbing her leg, she continued on, looking around with curiosity and caution, but not with deadly focus—and not with a weapon in her hand or visible anywhere on her body.
In short, she did not look like a killing machine. What she looked like was a schoolteacher—the luxury model. And oddly, for someone who didn’t know many schoolteacher types, she looked faintly familiar.
Her honey blond hair was piled into a ponytail on the top of her head, but a lot of silky swaths had tumbled back down, giving her a mussed up, just out of bed look. She wore a soft-looking lavender shirt and a pair of jeans, both of which appeared to be standard mall issue, and both of which revealed a perfectly average, if decidedly nice, and very nicely endowed female form.
Plenty there for Kid to get excited about, he thought. Maybe even something there for him to get excited about, if he’d been in the market for that kind of excitement, which he wasn’t. Lost tourists did not turn into lovers, ever, not in his game book. The only female in Cisco Quinn was interested in fooling around with was the one he’d named Jeanette, she with the supercharged 383 LT1 stroker under her hood, and the smartest move the woman in Burt’s could make would be to get back in her car and get out of town, an option specifically denied him by his boss, Dylan Hart—his soon to be ex-boss, if things didn’t start shaking loose. Going AWOL out of Utah was starting to take up way too much of his creative thinking.
“Yeah, right,” he muttered under his breath. The chances of him burning rubber out of Cisco and leaving Kid to take the heat were damn slim, at least today. If nothing broke by tomorrow, though, he wasn’t making any guarantees.
“Have you got that picture yet?” he asked Kid, who had moved to the computer in the back of the shop.
“Running it through now, Captain.”
Quinn let the rank slide, though he hadn’t been a captain since a surface-to-air missile had taken him and his F-16 out over Serbia. Still, he had been a captain in the United States Air Force for a hell of a lot longer than he’d been a cripple holed up in Cisco.
Two weeks. Shit.
Dylan couldn’t expect him to lay low forever. He could only take so much sitting around listening to the wind blow through this nowhere town—and what he could take could be measured in hours, not days. Roper Jones was still out there, and Quinn needed to be out there too. He needed to be back in the game.
He rolled his shoulder. It was healing. His leg half-worked. And he had a fucking vendetta with Roper Jones’s name written all over it.
On the screen, the woman picked up a dusty pile of papers and looked them over, giving him a better view of her face. She was fine featured with a dusting of freckles across her nose, pretty in a quirky way, not elegant, but cute, her eyebrows surprisingly dark in contrast with her hair. Her chin was delicately angled, but definitely set with determination. Her eyes were light, the color indiscernible on the screen. At odds with her all American looks, her mouth was lush, exotically full, and covered with a smooth layer of plum-colored lipstick.
Okay. She was nice. Very nice.
The whole package was nice.
“Not a known felon,” Kid said from the back of the shop.
Quinn absently nodded. He would have been damned surprised if the woman’s picture had matched that of a known criminal, especially given the kind of wiseguys in Kid’s current files.
“Try the official data base,” he said, knowing it was another long shot. Despite his niggling sense of familiarity, the chances of the woman in Burt’s being part of an officially sanctioned United States government service were exceedingly damn low, and she sure as hell didn’t belong to Steele Street, the quasi-governmental agency housed in Denver that wrote his and Kid’s paychecks.
“Already on it,” Kid confirmed.
Quinn kept his gaze glued to the woman. Where in the hell, he wondered, had he seen her? He didn’t forget faces. He didn’t dare, and he knew hers.
Or had known her.
“Son of a bitch,” Kid swore behind him, showing more emotion in the one small phrase than he had in the whole two weeks they’d been camped out in the desert.
“You’ve got a match?” Quinn asked, looking over his shoulder in disbelief.
“No, but it looks like we’ve got more company,” Kid said, striding back toward the scope.
Quinn looked through the far window and saw what Kid had seen, a blue sport vehicle coming off the top of a rise in the highway—and slowing down, way down.
Son of a bitch was right.
“Two men, no visible weapons, but they don’t look happy,” Kid said from his position at the scope. Quinn watched him quickly scan the rest of the horizon and come back to the SUV. “They’re checking out the woman’s Ford... and... they’re... well, hell. They’re heading out of Cisco. What do you make of that?”
“A coincidence? Or maybe Cisco has just gotten real friggin’ popular.” Quinn limped back to the Camaro and picked up the 9-mm Beretta he always kept close by.
“Maybe,” was all the ex-Marine conceded as he checked the load on his rifle, a highly “accurized,” sniper’s M40.
He and Kid weren’t getting paid to take chances. Not today. Keep your heads down and don’t get your asses shot off had been Dylan’s orders. A couple of weeks ago, when his body had still been pretty messed up, Quinn had been willing to follow orders. But he was mobile now. His stitches were out, and he was ready to do the job he was getting paid to do—take Roper Jones down. If the unhappy guys in the four-wheel drive were part of that job, great. He just had to get little-miss-tourist out of the way, if she was a tourist—and the odds on that were dropping dramatically, despite the lack of a match in their files.
Damn. In about five minutes, if she was an innocent civilian looking for ghost town junk, she was going to wish she’d driven right on by Burt’s old place and Cisco. What he didn’t like to think about was that niggling sense of familiarity and the possibility that what she was looking for was him—though God knew how a woman could have tracked him down in Cisco. Or why. He’d stopped attracting the groupie set years ago, about six months after he’d been rescued out of Serbia. Funny how that had worked out. It was about the exact same time his publicity value had dropped back to normal, which was zilch.
“Call Denver,” he said to Kid. “Tell them we’ve got company. I’ll go get the woman.”
“No,” Kid insisted, quickly coming around the desk at the back of the shop. “I’ll go get her. You... uh, should be the one to call.”
Quinn narrowed his gaze at the younger man and was gratified to see him falter just a bit. It took a lot to make Kid Chaos falter.
“What I mean is, Dylan would rather hear the... uh, details of the operation from you. I’m sure,” Kid added the last bit at the end after a short pause, though he didn’t sound too damn sure to Quinn.
“Dylan’s in Washington D.C. Skeeter is manning Steele Street, and we don’t have an operation yet,” he explained.
“Well, see, there you have it.” Kid kept moving toward the door, each step slower than the last, until he finally came to a complete stop under Quinn’s unwavering gaze.
Quinn knew the distance between the barn and the gas station. A hundred yards. “I can handle it.”
Kid didn’t look convinced. “Maybe she’s a decoy. Roper Jones is not going to give up, Quinn. Not until you’re dead, or Hawkins gets him.”
“Roper Jones is not stumbling around in Burt’s Gas Emporium. A woman is, and I’m pretty damn sure we better find out why.”
With a reluctant nod, Kid finally agreed.
Quinn turned toward the door, slipping the Beretta under his shirt and into the waistband of his jeans. Hell. He wasn’t making it easy for Kid to play bodyguard.
Bodyguard. Christ. He’d always been his own damn bodyguard, and done a damn good job of it—up until two weeks ago in the Denver rail yards.
The memory gave him an instant’s pause.
Okay, he admitted. The Roper Jones heist had gone down bad, real bad, and Hawkins had literally had to scrape him off that friggin’ back alley where he’d ended up, but he’d gotten what he’d been after that night and was healed now. He was ready to get back in the game. More than ready.
He slanted the computer screen a quick glance as he passed by. Plum lipstick. Lavender shirt. Golden ponytail.
Hell. She didn’t look like she was ready to get in the game. She didn’t look like she’d ever even heard of the game—but ready or not, she was about to get her first taste.
* * * * * *
Read on for an excerpt from Crazy Kisses, a hot, sexy Steele Street novel.
Crazy Kisses
"Sultry sex, harrowing adventure, and fantastic characters—what more could you ask for?" — Fresh Fiction
Chapter One
Panama City, Panama
There 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 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 swimsuit 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 them 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, two baths, a 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 stuff, girl stuff, piled up on his dresser and draped ov
er the chair, filmy stuff, bright colorful 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 and left the heavy stuff to settle.
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.
He turned to leave, when a small torn white T-shirt hanging off the doorknob caught his eye, a plain white T-shirt with a paint smear on it—electric blue paint.
Everything inside him froze, except his heart, which plummeted into the pit of his stomach.
Impossible. It was absolutely impossible—but he knew that T-shirt, knew that paint smear.
His gaze slid to the clothes draped over the chair, and he saw something else he knew: a purple silk robe with a letter “N” painted in pink on the pocket. Geezus. He looked around the room, at all the stuff. But it wasn’t just stuff, and it wasn’t just any girl grenade that had gone off in here. It was a Nikki McKinney grenade.
He picked up the robe, brought the silky material to his face—and her scent flooded his senses. Hot sex, warm love, all the memories were there, so close to the surface.
Too close.
Nikki was here, and suddenly, he was in over his head. Way over.
Why in the world would Nikki be in Panama City? And had she brought the freakin’ fiber artist with her?
Geezus. He couldn’t take that. No way in hell.
He looked up from the robe and checked the room. No, this was a one-person disaster, from the Panama hat and pink-and-green-striped sunglasses on his dresser to the pile of underwear on the bed. This was all Nikki, every square inch of it.
