by Tara Janzen
Lucky for her, she wasn’t hungry.
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” she said, throwing Doreen into park and just letting her miss and hiss, and choke and rumble. God, she wished they were at Steele Street, with all those floors of sleek and mean automotive muscle. “You’re going to stay in the car, and I’m going to fix this piece of junk in fifteen minutes or less.”
She leaned over the seat, into the back, and pulled one of the UMP45s out of her rucksack. In this neighborhood, a subgun seemed like the minimum requirement for getting out of the car in the dark.
“No, you’re not,” he said, pushing himself upright. A wince crossed his face. “Stay put. I’ll take a look under the hood.”
She let out a small snort and changed the magazine on her .45.
“What?” he said, clearly offended. “You don’t think I can fix the car?”
“Given enough time, enough tools, and enough parts, sure, you could probably fix the car.” She slipped her Para back in its holster, then met his gaze straight on. “But I can do it without any of those things—no time, no tools, and no parts, and that’s what we’ve got.”
She reached for the door handle, and he reached for her, his hand going around her wrist.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
The hell she wasn’t. “Look, Dylan, five years ago, maybe you could have given me a run for my money with a box-end wrench and a thirteen-millimeter deep socket—but not tonight. Not on this street, with this car, in your condition.”
She started to pull away, but he tightened his hold—and her patience snapped.
“Dammit, Dylan…sir. We don’t have time for—”
And he kissed her, just hauled her across the seat and laid his lips on hers and kissed her.
She saw it coming. My God, she saw it coming a mile away, and if she’d had an ounce of sense, she would have shut him down like a bad day at the track, but no, she let the train wreck happen, the whole thing in Technicolor slow motion—his mouth hot and wet, his desire for her overwhelming any common sense she might have thrown into the breech. He wanted her, and she’d wanted him for too long not to indulge herself.
Just once, she swore, letting his arms close around her, letting his hands slide all over her and trip her switches. He had good hands, strong, sure—and kind of fast. He was molding her to him, pulling her into his lap, and she decided, for a moment, to just let it all happen, because he was Dylan, and the night had gone all to hell, which she hated, and he was still all jacked up with NG4 and antidote, and she was more than a little scared for him.
So she opened her mouth over his, pushed her hands up into his hair, and kissed him for all she was worth. Because this was it, the chance she hadn’t taken in the vault, and he was heaven to kiss. Absolute heaven. Nothing in her imagination had ever come close to the bone-deep thrill of actually having his mouth on hers, his tongue driving her to distraction and beyond. He was so intensely male, more than her fantasies had ever conjured, the taste of him, the feel of his skin along his jaw, the bare roughness where he’d shaved. She wanted to remember it all. She slid her hand into the open front of his shirt, because for just once, she could, and oh, God, she really wanted to remember this part, how he felt, his muscles hard, the hair on his chest soft.
She moaned, an inadvertent sound, touching him, and wishing she dared to touch him even more, knowing that soft dark hair covered him all the way to his groin. She’d seen him naked in the pool at Steele Street one night, coming across him by accident, one of the most amazing accidents of her life. She hadn’t really stood there and ogled him, but she had looked, and lusted, and wanted him so badly it had hurt.
He was so heartbreakingly beautiful. There were no other words for him. He wasn’t all rugged angles and tattoos like Hawkins, or one of People magazine’s Fifty Sexiest people like Quinn. He didn’t have any of the boyishness that still lingered in Kid’s face. Nor was he wild around the edges like Creed.
Unlike all the other chop-shop boys, Dylan Hart had nothing of the street in him, and nothing “wild.” He was cool, calculating, always in control. If Hawkins was the muscle of SDF, Dylan was the mastermind, and yet, physically, he had the same raw presence as Superman, all of it sculpted into layers of muscle and sinew—the power of long legs, corded arms, broad shoulders, and a back designed by God and perfected by lifting iron, getting strong, then getting stronger, getting tough, then getting tougher. It’s what they all did. It’s how Hawkins had trained her, how the guys stayed alive in the places they went, in doing the jobs they were tasked to do. And all Dylan’s strength and power were finally in her arms, surrounding her, warming her skin on the outside and causing a meltdown inside.
He groaned, half lifting her, moving her across his lap, his mouth sliding to her neck, where he licked her skin, then sliding back to her mouth and sucking some more. It was the hottest, sweetest sensation, having him practically devour her, but no—oh, freaking dear no. Kissing him was wonderful, but straddling him was not a good idea, not a very good idea at all.
But his kisses had this way of disorientating her until she couldn’t think straight, and he had a way of moving her to suit himself, lifting her and shifting his hips, and with her knee sliding one way, and her common sense going the other, she somehow ended up exactly where he wanted her, and it was amazing, and a little scary, and utterly mesmerizing to feel him between her legs.
She flashed hot, then cold, overwhelmed. He was fully, undeniably aroused. Dylan Hart, for her, and it made her head swim, and while that stunning information was transmitting to every cell in her body, he all but drowned her with a whole new database.
With more single-minded purpose than she would have thought he could muster, he started undoing his pants.
She felt his hands go between their bodies, heard the slide of his zipper.
“Dylan, uh…”“Stop” was the word she wanted.
Right. She was going to put a stop to this. It was insane to even be kissing him. Anything else was completely out of the question. They were in the parking lot of the freaking George’s Gas & Grub, for God’s sake, which was exactly what she was going to tell him, she was sure—except his hands were moving faster than she could get her thoughts to line up, and before she knew it, he’d pushed his pants and briefs down off his hips.
And he was hot, very hot, and very hard, and very naked, and very, very much between her legs. Her knees were on either side of him, the bottoms of her thighs were resting on the tops of his, and if it weren’t for the incredibly annoying barrier of her uniform, they’d already be doing it.
Doing it with Dylan.
A frighteningly delicious shiver went straight down the middle of her and settled between her legs, right where they touched. It stole her breath. It made her consider crazy, crazy things.
No, she told herself. Get a grip.
“Dylan,” she whispered against his mouth. “I…I…” She couldn’t take advantage of him this way. He’d never even noticed her until they’d been standing on that street corner in Georgetown, and he wasn’t himself, not with the NG4 and that damned antidote in his body, but she didn’t know what to say, and…
“Shhh,” he murmured, stretching up to bite her lips, so gently, again and again. “You’re thinking too hard. You don’t have to think. I’ve got this covered.”
Oh, right. He had it covered.
He was naked, and she was dying inside.
And neither of those facts were the ones she needed to address. She needed to address the fact that…he was drawing her tongue into his mouth and playing with her, sucking on her again—oh, yes, she really needed to talk to him about that, and she would, she swore it, as soon as she stopped melting, as soon he was finished doing it.
Doing it.
With Dylan.
Oh, geez.
And all the while he was slaying her with his kiss, his hands were unzipping her pants, helping her move her leg, sliding the pants down, slipping one leg off ov
er her shoe, and then his hand slid back up her leg and slipped inside her underwear. He moved the tiny scrap of material aside, teased her, and oh, God, this is what happened when a girl’s last line of defense was four square inches of black silk—surrender.
“Dylan,” she gasped, and tightened her hands on his shoulders, which didn’t slow him down in the least. “I’m not…sure about this.”
“I am,” he said without hesitation, his voice a soft growl.
He moved his hips underneath her, fitted himself to her, and any chance she had of salvaging a thought after that dissolved into a wave of anticipation and pleasure. She knew what was going to happen next. Of course she knew what was going to happen next. She wasn’t an idiot or a virgin, and she knew she needed to get off of him now, before anything happened, because…because…
He pushed, and it was all over.
Heat. A tidal wave of it suffused her.
His head went back on the seat with a soft groan. His hands went to her hips, holding her to him, and he filled her, completely, hotly, sweetly.
“Dylan,” she sighed his name, and a sob broke free from her throat.
“Ah, don’t cry. Don’t cry, sweetheart,” he murmured. “This is good…all good. I swear, just don’t…move. Not yet. Just let me…”
She wasn’t going to cry, not really, and she wasn’t going to move. She could hardly breathe, she was holding on to him so tight.
He shifted beneath her and let out another groan. “Jesus, you are so perfect.”
Perfectly undone.
Perfectly insane.
His eyes drifted open, and his gaze met hers in the dim interior of the Impala.
“Skeeter Jeanne,” he said softly, and pushed deeper.
Oh, God. He was a force of nature, a reckoning she had wildly underestimated in her fantasies. Neither of the boys she’d been with before had felt anything like this—but they’d been boys, not men. The difference was astounding. So help her, she could feel the echo of his heartbeat pulsing deep inside her, and it made him feel like a god.
“I’m…I’m overreacting.” Synapses sizzling, sweat breaking out on her brow, hands trembling. Nothing should feel this good, this mesmerizing, this intense.
“No such thing,” he said, reaching up and cupping her face with his hand. “Not for what we’re doing. Do you know how long I’ve wanted you? Like this?”
She shook her head. No, she didn’t know. She didn’t have a clue, but if she’d had to make a guess, she’d guess from about the time the damned drugs had drop-loaded into his system back in the vault at Whitfield’s—about an hour ago, max.
“Forever,” he said. “Always.”
Okay, that was considerably longer than she would have thought, especially considering that they had never hardly gotten past “Hello”—not that she really cared, not now, not when he was inside her.
With steady deliberation, he unbuttoned her uniform jacket for the second time.
“Demi-bra,” he said when the jacket fell open and revealed the scrap of silk and hot pink lace. A smile curved his mouth.
She was coming undone. He was undoing her, inside and out, and it was better and more awful than she ever could have imagined. Better in the sheer, mind-blowing eroticism of having him look at her, of being with him, and worse in what she was afraid it was going to cost her.
“You’re thinking again.” He kissed her breast, ran his tongue over her, took her in his mouth, and she knew he was wrong. She wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t thinking at all—except about what he was doing to her.
Oh, God. She slid her hand up the back of his head, tunneling her fingers through the dark, silky strands of his hair, holding him to her breast, and she let her gaze drift over the planes of his face. He was so elegant—the refined shape of his nose, the clean, chiseled lines of his cheeks and brow.
Dylan. He rocked his hips up beneath her, and she slid down on him, the rhythm coming so naturally, the heated give and take of seduction.
Very heated. God. The last solid brain cell she had melted in the heat. Nothing she’d done had ever felt like this. He thrust into her again, his soft groan of pleasure washing through her, turning her on in places she hadn’t even known existed.
“I…I think we’re making love on the astral plane,” she whispered. There was no other explanation for this otherworldly pleasure that was turning her inside out. It was so far beyond what she had imagined.
“Yes,” he agreed, the word spoken against her skin. “Absolutely. On all the planes.”
He was such a beautiful mess tonight, his clothes half off, which she loved, being able to run her hand over the soft hair covering his chest, to feel the hard layers of muscle underneath, to finally, after all these months and months of wanting him, have her hands on him.
Dylan. She leaned over him, releasing a sigh, letting her hair fall around them like a silver veil. She could feel him everywhere, buried so deep inside her, his mouth teasing her nipples, his chest beneath her hand—and his heartbeat everywhere, pulsing, sending a message to her soul.
She was going to regret this later, when he came out of his drug-induced haze and realized what they’d done. It was going to be impossible to be around him and not be able to have him like this, again and again and again, whenever she wanted, which was going to be a lot.
Oh, God, yes. She was going to want this a lot. He smelled like sex, and felt like sex, and he was consuming her.
She would have to leave SDF, leave Steele Street and Superman, and Kid, and Creed. She’d seen the type of women Dylan dated on those rare occasions when he was in Denver, and she couldn’t guarantee that the next time he brought one around she wouldn’t accidentally snap her pretty little neck.
His dates were always beautiful, and always brilliant. It’s like he put them through an IQ test or something.
But tonight he belonged to her, Skeeter Bang, street rat, gear head, computer nerd. He belonged to SB303, the spooky girl who loved him.
She wanted to tag him, mark him, claim him as hers for all time.
His hair was sinfully silky. He was usually so impeccably groomed, but not tonight. Swaths of dark, silken strands fell straight down on either side of his face, almost to his cheekbones. It was so sexy. He looked so rock-star cool.
Then he lifted his head from her breast, and she realized there wasn’t a cool cell in his whole body. He was all heat.
For a moment, she simply held his gaze, his eyes so perfectly gray, his lashes so thick. In her comic book drawings, he was Kenshi the Avenger, a powerful dragon lord and wizard. For one solid year, she’d drawn Travis as Kenshi, and for one solid year, the character had been wrong. Travis had told her as much, but she hadn’t been able to see it, until the night she’d darkened Kenshi’s hair and turned it from a tawny mane into a straight fall of black silk, until she’d turned Kenshi into Dylan.
Travis didn’t have a dark side, but Kenshi did, and so did Dylan Hart. What had happened to Wes Lake, a man incarcerated in the state penitentiary at the same time as Superman, had been a dark deed of justice wrought by a dark, ruthless hand, Dylan’s hand. Even Quinn and Creed thought Dylan had contracted the hit that had killed Lake before the man could carry out his sworn vow to either sodomize or kill Hawkins, but she knew Dylan had done the deed himself, a promise kept.
She knew him, and she would have loved him for that one deed alone, for doing what had needed to be done, for saving Superman. It had been such a dark time.
In turn, years later, Superman had saved her, and tonight…
Tonight she didn’t know who was saving who, but she felt redeemed from the hundreds of lonely nights she’d spent wanting him—and with him loving her, his body moving with hers, taking her someplace she’d never been, never imagined, to a completion she felt building to a peak under the knowing touch of his hands, the utter seduction of his mouth, and the naked, untempered physicality of sex, of him sliding in and out of her, deepening their connection with every stroke…with hi
m loving her tonight, he looked like the very soul of salvation.
She let her head fall to his shoulder, felt him turn and open his mouth on her neck, his teeth grazing her skin, his tongue tasting her.
“I love you,” he said, his voice hoarse with need. “I love you so much.”
“Yes.” She knew he did. For now, in this moment, he loved her. She felt it everywhere.
And when his love and his body finally took her over the edge, the sweet release of it stole her breath. It tied her to him with a power that went far beyond the boundaries of their skin, beyond the boundaries of reason.
CHAPTER
22
PIRATES, Hawkins thought, Jai Traon. He’d gone up against Indonesian pirates once before, on an oil rig in the South China Sea, and all he could say was that these boys had obviously been out of their element on dry land—either that or they’d had the crap jet-lagged out of them. The Jai Traon on the rig had fought like sons-of-bitches and slid around like shadows.
Tonight, all the odds and determination had been on his and Creed’s side, especially after Hawkins had gotten a look at the papers he’d found on the Jai Traon they’d left under the COPO Camaro.
He waited, utterly still, utterly silent, watching Creed make his move on the last pirate. Out of the four men who had broken into Steele Street, two were dead, one was under Hawkins’s knee, out cold and flex-cuffed, and the fourth was drawing his last breath.
Hawkins couldn’t read Indonesian, but a few things defied translation and had to be written out in their original language—things like names. Like the names of everybody who lived at Steele Street, including the names Katya Hawkins and Cody Rivera, two names guaranteed to bring out Creed’s finest qualities and most lethal skills. Hawkins had quietly suggested that they not kill one of the bastards so they could interrogate him, and the guy under his knee had pulled the lucky number.
Pirate number four was going to come up short in about five seconds.
Actually, it only took three. The man went down under Creed’s knife in a classic Wingate maneuver. It was very smooth, very quiet, and very, very violent, Creed’s killing strike coming out of the darkness, his right hand grabbing the guy around the face, his fingers spread, the strength of his hand and arm jerking the man’s head to one side, laying wide the back of his neck and the small area where Creed silently jammed his knife up into the man’s skull, severing his brain stem.
