by Tara Janzen
He’d been covered in it.
Drenched.
At the end, when it was finished, Creed had come over, taken one look, and helped him to his feet. “Good work” was all he’d said.
No questions. No doubts.
With Creed, like with Kid and Hawkins and Quinn, it always came down to one simple thing—winning the fight. It was a good lesson to learn, to win at all cost, at any cost, no compromise, and the thing that amazed Travis the most was how easy the lesson had been to learn, even for a guy who had taught graduate-level courses in the art of compromise.
The two things were not mutually exclusive, the art of killing and the art of compromise, but there were situations that simply could not be mediated, not in the real world. There was no negotiating with evil. Until the night Nikki had been kidnapped, he hadn’t realized how closely evil could linger, undetected, or how quickly it could strike.
Still, he’d killed three men in Colombia, which brought him up to six, and yeah, he had a feeling he was the only guy at SDF counting bodies, and typically, for a goddamn philosophy major, there was no way for him not to have to think and work his way through the facts of his last mission—something he wouldn’t have had time to do if he’d gotten killed in a freaking Honda Civic on his way to the hotel from the airport.
Geezus. Red Dog needed to come with a warning label.
He let out his breath and took another, trying to ease his way into a calmer state, to ease himself away from the sharp pain in his side. She’d jacked him up with that last blast of near-death experience, and it was going to take a moment or two for him to come down and find his balance, a moment for the underlying dull ache in his stitches to dissipate. He knew what had happened. He’d gotten whacked by her book, and now he hurt like hell—dammit.
“Mr. James?”
He took another breath.
He wasn’t answering to “Mr. James.” Someone who had almost gotten him greased could at least call him by his first name.
“Travis?”
That was better, but he still wasn’t inclined to break his concentration enough to reply. He needed to breathe himself through this. The car had stopped moving, though, and that was a good thing, very helpful.
She turned off the engine, and that helped even more.
“Sir?”
Oh, hell, no. He wasn’t going to answer to “sir,” not this side of the grave she’d almost put him in. His heart was actually racing, and that pissed him off a little. He’d already been fried before he’d gotten on the plane, let alone in her car. He’d had a helluva week. His resources were low, and he needed to get back up to speed. He had a job to do tonight.
He heard her shift her position on her side of the car, felt her move closer.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered—and that didn’t sound good. “You’re bleeding.”
That sounded even worse.
He opened his eyes and found her looming over him, her gaze riveted to the left side of his chest.
“Oh, my God,” she repeated.
He glanced down and blanched.
Fuck. He was bleeding, all right.
“I need to get you to a hospital.” She started to slide back behind the steering wheel, but he grabbed her before she could get too far.
“No.” He wasn’t doing it. He wasn’t letting her start the damn car again and take another shot at doing him in. “It’s fine. Really.”
“No, it’s not, you’re—”
“Bleeding. I know. I had a couple of stitches put in last night, or this morning, actually, and I just got hit by the book you wrote, that’s all, during the last turn, into the parking garage.”
While he was in the middle of explaining his version of events, a version borne out by the book still in his lap, the corner of it angled toward the bloody smear on his T-shirt, his phone rang.
It could only be one person.
“Travis,” he said, answering.
“Stay put.” Skeeter cut right to the chase. She sounded breathless as hell. “We’re done here. Whitfield’s is one big amazing mess right now, and we’re getting out of it ASAP.”
“Are you okay?” He could hear all sorts of commotion going on in the background, sirens and, if he wasn’t mistaken, maybe even gunshots.
“We’re good. I’ll explain more when we get there. Just stay put at the hotel. We’ll come to you.” She hung up, and he did the same.
Then he glanced at Gillian, and she looked guilty as hell.
“I am so sorry,” she said when he’d finished slipping his phone back in his jacket pocket.
“Don’t be. I’ll live.” As long as she didn’t restart the car and go careening off again.
“I know, but I—oh, I have a first-aid kit,” she said, her voice brightening, which suited him a whole helluva lot better than her feeling guilty.
“Great idea.” First-aid kit, sure, he could do it, let her patch him up a little. “If you’ve got some gauze pads or something.”
“I do. I know I do.” She leaned back between the seats and started digging around through her stuff, one knee on the console, her tush in the air—and suddenly he felt better. A lot better.
She had very nice legs.
And the shoe that had come untied? He was very tempted to push it off her foot and let it fall to the floorboards, just sort of help her come a little more undone. That’s what he needed more than another gauze bandage—somebody soft and warm and supple wrapping her legs around him. It’s what he’d wanted all day.
Okay. For weeks.
And weeks.
Geezus, he had such a one-track mind.
But, my God.
She leaned farther into the backseat, and a sigh lifted his chest. This was great. This was amazing—the lovely curve of her thigh just inches from his face, the hem of her skirt barely keeping her modest. He knew if he leaned forward even the slightest bit, he could probably see her underwear, but he didn’t do it. The whole underwear thing, and how much of it he ever got to see, was strictly her call—and he knew it was the last thing on her mind right now, even if it had just become the first thing on his.
“Here it is,” she said, a note of triumph in her voice.
She moved into her seat, the kit on her lap, and he slipped out of his jacket, tossing it over the back of the seat. Then he reached for the bottom of his T-shirt.
“Oh. Oh, my goodness,” she said, as he carefully pulled the T-shirt off over his head, revealing the extent of his bandages. “Wh-what happened to you?”
“Classified.” He really couldn’t tell her, and working for General Grant, he knew she would understand. But the knife cut started on his left side, under his arm, and curved around toward the front.
There was blood on the bandages, not a lot, but enough to have soaked through in spots and stained his T-shirt.
“If you’ll just put another piece of gauze over this, I think that’ll be good enough for tonight,” he said, looking the situation over. He’d see Doc Blake tomorrow, back in Denver. Tonight, he had a job to do.
When she just sat there, the first-aid kit clutched in her hands, he glanced up.
Okay, he thought. This is good.
She had that shell-shocked look on her face again. It wasn’t the first time the sight of him half-naked, or completely naked, had put that expression on a woman’s face. It happened all the time. It was why Nikki painted him, and why those paintings sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Mostly he liked it. Sometimes, rarely, it annoyed him. And sometimes, every now and then, it really worked for him.
This was one of those times.
Red Dog was damn cute in a tousled, repressed, coming undone sort of way, and up close, in the shadows and the half-light of the parking garage, with the little piece of tape on her glasses barely discernible, she looked damned cute in a very exotic way. She had an elegant nose, and one of those mouths where the upper lip was only slightly less full than the lower, a sensual mouth—and her shirt was gaping open where she’d
buttoned it wrong, and she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from his naked chest.
Still, he knew better than to kiss her. So he took the first-aid kit out of her hands, and that broke the moment, and between the two of them they decided to just go ahead and change the whole bandage, and put on another layer of antibiotic, and put on a double layer of gauze, and extra tape, and why they hadn’t just gone up to the hotel room to do it all, he didn’t know, except it was very quiet and very private in the garage, inside her Honda, where they had to work in very close quarters.
Very close.
She was practically on top of him the whole time, and he was loving it just a little too much—the whole thing, with her hands on him, and her voice close, and her fingers smoothing down the edges of the tape and sliding over his skin. Her elbow would brush against his forearm. Her knee touched his. Every now and then, he would feel her breath on his shoulder. With every moment of contact, the heat in the front seat rose another degree.
It was wonderful, and fascinating, and absolutely riveted his attention.
“So how does a woman named Gillian Pentycote end up with a handle like Red Dog?”
A brief smile curved that sensuous mouth. “You’ll have to ask Skeeter. She’s the one who started calling me Red Dog, and my name is going to be Gillian Shore as soon as I get it changed back.”
“Pentycote was your married name?”
“Was,” she confirmed, tucking her hair behind her ear before she tore off a new piece of tape. Her smile had disappeared.
Interesting, and very self-explanatory, but he went ahead and did the dance, mostly out of true curiosity, but also out of habit. People liked to talk about their problems, and he liked listening.
“How long have you been divorced?” It was an easy question to ask, the obvious question, but he’d never had anybody give him anything but a hard answer.
“The final papers were signed four months ago.” She laid the last piece of tape across his bandage and very gently pressed it to his skin. “And Ken, my ex, is…uh, having his first child with his new wife any minute now.”
Another hard answer to the question—one of the hardest.
“I’m hoping I can sleep better once the baby comes,” she continued, running her fingers over the tape again. “That must sound pretty odd.”
“Actually, it makes perfect sense.” And it did. “Considering the timing, and the infidelity, and the pregnancy making the whole thing incredibly public, it will probably be a huge relief when that part of it is finally over.”
Her smile returned in a fleeting curve, and she gave a slight shrug of her shoulders.
“Do you have any children of your own?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “Ken always said the timing wasn’t right, and for the most part, I agreed. We were busy doing research and trying to get our first book published.”
And then old Ken had gone and gotten some other woman pregnant. No wonder she couldn’t sleep and could hardly say the word “sex.”
“Not much of a deal. She gets the baby, and you get a book.”
A short laugh escaped her. “You’re the only guy who’s ever said that to me.” She glanced up and met his gaze. “My women friends say it, especially my sisters-in-law, but a lot of my colleagues at the university seemed to think I did get the better part of the deal, getting published instead of getting pregnant.”
Then a lot of her colleagues at the university didn’t understand women.
“What university?”
“Arizona.”
Bingo. The map in the visor was marked with her escape route.
“So you drove all the way out here from Arizona a month ago, but never quite finished unpacking the car?”
Her smile came back, and he realized it was something he was really starting to enjoy—making her smile.
“I guess I’m waiting to see if it’s going to work out.”
He reached down and lifted an item out of the box at his feet. “And until you commit, the egg beater stays in the Civic?”
That got him another laugh, a better laugh, and if he wasn’t mistaken, a slight blush.
“You know a lot for someone who’s so young.”
Yes, he did. He knew she hadn’t moved back to her seat, even though they’d finished playing doctor, and he knew her blush was deepening, and that she was having a hard time holding his gaze. He knew that despite her best attempts, her attention kept straying to his chest and his abs, and down the length of his arms.
He knew she looked like a woman who had not been held in a long time.
“I’m not that young.” Not when it came to soft blushes, soft mouths, and sweet women who were coming undone—but not quite undone enough.
Not when it came to what he had in mind.
“You missed a button on your shirt.”
“Oh.” She reached for it, paused with her fingers almost doing the deed—unbuttoning and rebuttoning her shirt in front of him—then reconsidered.
He should have reconsidered, too, but he didn’t. He reached for her instead.
It was crazy.
He was crazy, but there she was, with her glasses resting a little crookedly on her nose, with her cloud of tangled hair and her pockets spilling over with notes and pencils, and he was going to kiss her. One kiss, that was all.
He slid his hand around the back of her neck and gently pulled her closer—and she let him.
CHAPTER
18
THE FIRST seven floors of 738 Steele Street were garages, and every garage was filled to capacity with cars—cars to drive, cars to race, cars to sell, cars to hide behind. Not that anybody was hiding behind any of the cars on the fourth floor.
Hawkins had flushed three men out of the bays and was systematically herding them to their doom down on three. Creed was waiting for them there.
They’d cleared the building from the top down and left one asshole dead up on five, under a COPO Camaro Skeeter was rebuilding, a dead Indonesian pirate with a Jai Traon tattoo on the back of his hand.
Hawkins had rolled him over, rifled everything out of his pockets, and wondered, really, what the guy had thought he was going to get away with, being in the wrong country, at the wrong time, in the wrong building, and going up against the wrong fucking guys.
There was never anything easy about hunting down men and killing them. Too many variables came into the mix. But doing it on home ground was as easy as it got. He and the other operators war-gamed Steele Street every week, in the dark, with and without night vision devices. Travis still stumbled over things sometimes, but he was the FNG, and he didn’t live in the building. For the chop-shop boys like him and Creed and Quinn and Dylan—hell, they could do it blindfolded.
Skeeter had done it blindfolded.
Kid did it like a Marine.
And J.T. had done it like a coyote, the trickster, “mining” the trail behind him, setting traps, making them think, forcing them to get ahead of the game, to try and get ahead of him.
Hawkins took a breath and let it out, not letting his concentration waver—but it still hurt.
None of them had ever gotten ahead of J.T. It was the one thing they all knew, that the best of them had died. Tonight, though, only the bad guys were buying their last ticket home. They were good, but not good enough, not even close.
Hawkins saw a flash of movement at the stairwell and knew one of the Jai Traon bastards thought he’d just made his getaway.
Fat chance.
He let the next one go, too, then adjusted his position to get a clearer shot. When the last pirate made his move, Hawkins pulled the trigger on his suppressed MP5 twice, and once more for good measure. Two to the heart, one to the head.
“Four clear,” he said into his comm unit. “Two to you.”
“Roger” came the whispered reply, and Hawkins moved out.
TRAVIS wasn’t going to kiss Gillian Red Dog Pentycote/Shore all night long, hell no, and he wasn’t going to ravish her on the
spot, not because by some fluke of an accident the two of them had ended up scrambled together in the front seat of a Honda Civic.
But neither could he quite convince himself to let go of her, not when kissing her lit up every cell in his body like the Fourth of July.
“I—you…we really shouldn’t be, umm…” she said breathlessly, her voice sighing in his ear, her heart pounding next to his as he ran his teeth over her neck, gently grazing her skin.
He understood. He shouldn’t have his hand under her shirt, and she really shouldn’t be kissing some guy she’d just met like her life depended on it, but she was trembling, just a little, and clinging to him, a lot, like she needed something solid to hold on to tonight.
And he was solid, all right, like a rock. It had happened so damn fast, and she was bound to notice any minute.
“Oh,” she said, even more breathlessly, if that was possible, and he figured that was it. She’d noticed.
“Everything is okay. Honest. We’ll be all right.” Whatever the hell that meant. He didn’t have a clue. “You’re in charge here, whatever you want.” Yeah, that sounded better, more of what he’d meant to say, and he meant whatever. He just didn’t want to stop what he was doing. He knew that for sure, and he sure as hell didn’t want her to stop what she was doing, so he slid his mouth over her cheek, heading back to her soft, soft lips.
This was all so very, very good, especially when she melted on top of him, letting go, making supergood body contact—and yes, it was that sort of response that had him thinking his dreams might come true.
He knew what he was supposed to be doing—and it wasn’t this—but he could really use five minutes of R&R to get his head together. Ten minutes, really, if he could get it.
And maybe to get laid, if that was at all possible.
Under any other circumstances, he would have said no way in hell, but geezus, she was sweet, and so unbelievably responsive that honestly, he figured anything could happen—and he really should try and find out if it could.
Five minutes. He swore that was all.
Or maybe ten.
