Crazy Sweet

by Tara Janzen

  “Yes, sir,” Zane said. “The photographs were taken this morning.”

  “And Manuel just decided to send them now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sir. That was goddamn right. He may have recruited his slag heap of operators out of the gutter, but by God, they either called him sir, or he called them out.

  Zane handed him another photo, a long shot, and the full extent of the damage to his million-dollar property and the solution to a whole lot of his problems over the last two years suddenly became crystal clear.

  “The stupid bitch.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He glanced at Zane and found his beast grinning.

  Zane had problems, psychological problems, but nothing that interfered with his job. Quite the contrary. Sadism was one of Royce’s preferred qualities in a job applicant. Not that any of his men had applied. Hell, no. He’d searched each one of them out and offered them the opportunity of a lifetime, to be part of an elite team of international drug-runners with the connections to broker deals and deliver smack from one corner of the earth to another, seamlessly, flawlessly, and by the hundreds of kilograms. Royce was the middleman to the middlemen, with the added bonus of offering a cartel-connected cocaine pipeline into the world’s most lucrative markets, and supplying a full line of special-use, high-tech pharmaceuticals guaranteed to blow the head off anybody unlucky enough to end up on the wrong end of one of his needles, a niche market he filled through his private medical staff in Thailand.

  Other people could fight for justice, freedom, and the right to vote. He knew what the world wanted. The whole goddamn world wanted to get high, with or without a side order of democracy.

  Bangkok, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Vientiane, Rangoon, and Bogotá, he’d known where to find his men, all American expatriates, all floating in black money, all connected to the global, underground economy of illicit drugs and mayhem for hire.

  He looked back at the photograph, looked at it through his one pale blue eye. The other had been cut out, sliced right out of his fucking head by a blond bitch with a big knife. Skeeter Bang was still at the top of his hit list, but right under her was the bitch who called herself Red Dog.

  The first three times she’d fucked with him, the only thing she’d written in her goddamn red paint was his name, Royce. That was all, just Royce, which had gotten him nothing except pissed off. Two months ago, though, in Uzbekistan, she’d given him “Red Dog,” and it hadn’t taken him too damn long to find out the only Red Dog on the planet with the skills to screw up one of his deals was a shadowy figure with an attitude. A woman, more than one source had decided when pressed, a woman with a badass Knight SR-25, and both she and the rifle were for sale to the highest bidder on a job-by-job basis—which still had not explained why she was on his ass and on his deals.

  But he had a feeling it was all going to become clear real damn soon. She was baiting him, the fool, and he was only too happy to bite.

  She’d ruined the paint on his Mercedes in Miami with her goddamn paint and screwed a million-dollar cocaine deal in the process. In Uzbekistan, she’d gotten to Gul Rashid, a warlord he’d been doing business with since the beginning of his now defunct career with the CIA, and somehow gotten Rashid to back out of delivering the ton of Afghan opium Royce had promised to a buyer in Marseille. Then she’d had the balls to leave her calling card in red paint on the sheets in his hotel room: Red Dog.

  Now she’d gone the extra step. Red Dog 303—that’s what she’d painted on his million-dollar villa last night, right on the goddamn walls.

  He hated women.

  And this one, this goddamn Red Dog, he was starting to hate her worst of all.

  He stared at the photograph and knew Las Vegas was going to have to wait. She’d pushed him too far.

  “Where is area code three-oh-three?” he asked.

  “Denver, Colorado,” Zane said.

  Denver?

  Jesus. He looked up from the photograph and pinned Zane with his steely, pale-eyed gaze.

  “You know who’s in Denver.” Goddamn Skeeter Bang and her goddamn husband, Dylan Hart, and their whole goddamn crew of Special Defense Force operators—especially Christian Hawkins, the one they called Superman. Shit.

  “SDF,” Zane confirmed.

  “Get on it,” Royce ordered. “If it’s Bang, I’m dropping a bomb on seven thirty-eight Steele Street.”

  “And if it’s not?” Zane asked.

  “Then it’s some new bitch they’ve got on board. No one of that caliber is working out of Denver without Hart and Hawkins knowing about it. Pull up everything you can find on SDF, including their stringers. We’re heading to Denver.”

  Red Dog 303—the skanky bitch was just begging to be taken out.

  After another long moment of staring at the picture, Royce decided he could do a little better than that, even. It had been a while since he’d had some fun. He was due.

  He was overdue.

  With just a little extra effort, instead of a nice clean hit, he could give her something special. He never went anywhere without a few of his Thai goodies—and while she was screaming her brains out, he could have her sliced and diced.

  Zane was the master.

  CHAPTER

  5

  TRAVIS SMOOTHED Gillian’s hair back off her face, his fingers sliding through the wet auburn strands, his palms cupping the sides of her head. Her face was tilted toward his, waiting for his kiss. Water from the shower sluiced over them.

  He loved her like this—naked, and warm, and safely in his arms.

  He lowered his mouth to hers and felt her tongue slip inside. God, she was always so hot, so ready. She never just kissed. She moved into him, dark and sweet, pressing against him in a way that instantly went to his groin.

  It was crazy to love a woman who didn’t know her own name. He’d seen the blankness that sometimes came into her eyes, and the flash of fear that always followed. It scared her, those moments when she became unmoored, far more so than when her arm locked up. She was so tough, so deadly when she needed to be deadly, and yet she was too damn fragile for the job. He’d seen it happen only once while she was working, when she’d gotten “lost” for a brief space of time and failed to pull the trigger when she’d needed to, but once had been more than enough for him. She’d survived, but that failure should have gotten her permanently deactivated, and if she’d been a full-time member of SDF or any other government service, she’d have been out of a job a long time ago.

  But she was independent, a contractor, a player who analyzed and determined her own comfort level of risk.

  Hers was off the chart, and a whole boatload of otherwise tough guys wouldn’t work with her because of it. Hawkins didn’t have a problem with her. Hundreds of hours of drills and endless rounds of repetition had hardwired the girl to obey him on command. Kid had the same advantage. C. Smith worked with her, because according to him, even with her little “problems,” she was far more reliable than a whole helluva lot of DEA and FBI agents he’d been teamed with—and don’t even ask him about the CIA jerks he’d suffered through. It was no surprise to Smith that Royce had been recruited, trained, and employed by the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Travis hated working with her, but he’d always rather it was him than anyone else. It didn’t matter that she had the skills to do the job. There was a part of him that never forgot she’d been Gillian Pentycote before she’d become Red Dog, and Gillian couldn’t have “smoked” a man at eight hundred meters to save her life.

  Red Dog could—and did—routinely, without even having to work at it.

  Hell, Gillian couldn’t have done it at ten meters—and that was the third strike against her as far as he was concerned, right after her “lost” moments, and her damn arm.

  Failure of will got more people killed than equipment malfunctions. Red Dog knew the price of failure and had the single-minded will to win every single time, always acting without hesitation or mercy. But Gillian would
hesitate. She would think instead of act, wondering if she was doing the right thing. In one of those unpredictable split seconds of indecision, he could lose her—and nothing in the last two years had convinced him that Gillian wasn’t still there, a sweet but deadly softness somewhere within the psyche of the hard woman called Red Dog.

  Especially not the way she made love.

  Her hand slid down between his legs, and she cupped his balls, playing with him as she sucked his tongue into her mouth.

  Oh, yeah. That was definitely getting him where he wanted to go, especially when she slid her hand back up and started stroking him.

  The girl had good hands, and he let her set the pace and tease him, because the longer he waited, the more of her he got. At least that had been his first thought, but with each stroke, with every time she tightened her palm around him and drove him a little closer to the edge, he remembered how long it had been since he’d been with her, and his thoughts, first and otherwise, started focusing on having something sweeter and more intense on him than her hand—and lovely girl, she was thinking the same thing. It was easy to tell.

  Kiss by soft, wet kiss, she worked her way down his body, until she was on her knees and had him in her mouth, her hand still stroking him, her tongue, hot and silky, snaking over the top of him. He reached behind her and turned off the water, and it was all so perfect, the heat and steam, the utter relaxation of his mind, and Gillian—going down on him.

  Sometimes the girl liked to be in charge, of everything, and he didn’t mind. Oh, hell, no.

  Leaning back against the shower wall, he thrust his hips forward, his hand gently cupping the back of her head. He thrust again, and she took more of him. Again, and he went even deeper. Geezus.

  Minute after endless minute of pleasure doubled over on each other, the rhythm of her mouth, the hot, wet glides of her tongue down the length of him and back up, and the sucking—God, he loved it. She didn’t stop, just kept taking him higher, winding him up tighter with her hands and mouth, until inevitably, irresistibly, she took him to orgasm. Braced against the wall, he went rigid and just let it happen, just the way she liked it, his muscles straining, his cock so hard inside the softness of her mouth, and pure, hot pleasure pouring out of him.

  She held him where he stood, until he was finished. When she released him, he bent his knees and slid down to be with her on the shower floor. Gathering her in his arms, he took her mouth in a deep kiss and slid one hand down between her legs. She was so soft to the touch, so beautiful, so wonderfully, erotically wet—and she could count on him, every time.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” he said, bringing her with him to her feet as he stood up. “Let’s go have some fun in bed.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  HONORIA “HONEY” YORK had been warned about traveling to El Salvador. Third World slumming, her father had called it, something best left to others, though he hadn’t named the “others.”

  He hadn’t needed to. Everyone knew the name.

  Not much shopping, her mother had cautioned, and therefore not much to do with one’s time.

  Her oldest brother, Thomas, had suggested his place on St. Barts, if she really felt the need to get away. Two of her other brothers had decided to take Thomas up on his offer and left a week ago with a few cases of Dom and a small posse of up-and-coming models. Her fourth brother was temporarily out of touch while on an expedition to the North Pole to draw attention to his latest political cause, global warming. It was working. He had a BBC crew with him, and an independent filmmaker who had cut a deal with the Discovery Channel for any exclusive polar bear footage that came out of the grand adventure, and a deal with Rolling Stone for any footage of her brother’s rock-and-roll-star girlfriend doing anything in fur and a pair of mukluks.

  Grand, outrageous adventures—that’s what the York family had, what they’d been having since the first York had left the family estates in England over two hundred years ago and braved their way to the New World and a whole new level of wealth and social notoriety.

  Yorks did not have dangerous encounters in pestilent hotel rooms with ill-kempt men carrying guns. At least no York in good standing ever had until today, a tricky designation at best, and no one talked about the Yorks not in good standing. There was only one, actually, the one who had gotten Honoria into hot water up to her neck again. Then she’d gone and all by herself made it so much worse.

  Oh, God. She should have known better than to take any advice offered by Elliot “Kip” Fletcher-Wooten III. Anyone who had graduated from Harvard and taken less than ten years to wash up in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, as the manager of a beachside cabana resort with a high-season rack rate of less than two hundred dollars a night was obviously from the shallow end of the Fletcher-Wooten gene pool.

  Actually, any male over the age of three who allowed himself to be called “Kip-Woo” had probably been doomed from the start. The same, she realized, might be said of any female over the age of three who allowed herself to be called “Honey,” and God knew, she was well over the age of three—and God knew, she was having a dangerous encounter in a pestilent hotel room with an ill-kempt man carrying a gun.

  Two guns, actually, his and hers.

  She stifled a groan. How in the world had she let that happen? And what in the world was going to happen next?

  Oh, God, she didn’t want to know.

  She was shaking so badly, and she could hardly catch her breath, and her heart was in her throat, which was a perfectly crappy place for it to be.

  So help her God, if she got out of this alive, she was going to personally strangle Kip-Woo for hooking her up with Javier, a bellhop at the Royal Suites Hotel, who had hooked her up with Rey, a busboy at the Caribe Inn, who had hooked her up with Hector, the guy on the street who had cheated her out of two bullets. One block, that’s all she’d gone, one block into no-man’s-land, in a cab that had summarily deserted her at the first sign of trouble, to buy a gun to protect herself in a country where she had no business being in the first place.

  It was all so ridiculously clear now, the same way it was so ridiculously clear that she should have strangled Kip years ago, when his neck had still been small enough for her to get her hands around, before he’d grown up and become her coconspirator, confidant, and all-around idiot best friend with connections to unsavory people like Hector.

  The nameless one deserved house arrest, but house arrest had never worked on that one before, and she doubted if it would now.

  To his credit, Kip had warned her not to travel to El Salvador alone, especially to San Luis. Things had been a bit unstable in San Luis of late, he’d said; some bad elements had moved in.

  No kidding. She’d seen nothing but bad elements since she’d left her lovely hotel and gotten in that damn cab, which she shouldn’t have done. Hindsight was always so perfect. Any woman with an ounce of sense would have listened to Kip, or her father, or her debutante advisor from the year of her “coming out,” who had also warned her not to travel to El Salvador, especially alone. Her colorist had warned her. The valet at Saks had warned her. Never travel alone, they’d said, and never, ever travel alone when going abroad, which for her colorist meant any place other than Manhattan, L.A., or Washington, D.C., and absolutely everything below the Mason-Dixon Line.

  El Salvador was below the Mason-Dixon, far, far below, but technically speaking, as of one minute ago, she was no longer alone. She had a bodyguard with a gun who did not work for the State Department and whose name probably wasn’t John Roland.

  No wonder it was so hard to breathe.

  “If you pass out, that’s going to be a bad thing,” her “bodyguard” said without shifting his gaze from the door.

  Yes, she knew that, thank you. For one thing, it meant she’d end up on a very questionable-looking floor, because he did not look like he was going to take the time to catch her if she started sliding down the wall.

  He was too damn busy watching the door and waiting, foc
used, and looking damned deadly with the way he was holding his gun, which oddly enough almost made her feel safe.

  It shouldn’t. She’d been insane to let him drag her into his room. She wasn’t sure how she could have stopped him. He’d moved so fast, almost as fast as when he’d taken her gun, which still made her head spin.

  She’d thought she’d had a good plan, that she’d gotten her ducks in a row by arranging to buy some protection, but oh, hell, no. Her ducks were running around in circles, in a dead panic, breathless and terrified—exactly like her, except she was glued to the wall. He’d said not to move a muscle, and she hadn’t, not one since she’d plastered herself into the corner.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, slanting her a quick glance. “If those men come through the door, you’re going to get your money’s worth.”

  Somehow, that was not a very comforting thought, that he could deliver five hundred dollars’ worth of violence in five minutes or less, especially when the message was delivered in such a stone-cold tone of voice.

  “D-do you know them?”

  “Only by reputation.”

  And that didn’t sound good. Oh, no, not at all.

  “Wh-what kind of reputation?”

  His gaze slid to her again, his face grim, and suddenly—oh, quite suddenly—all she wanted to do was run.

  “Don’t,” he said, which disconcerted the hell out of her.

  “Y-you can’t possibly be reading my mind.”

  “I don’t have to. Every thought you have is written on your face.” He turned back to the door, and she heard him mutter something about “must be a goddamn awful way to live.”

  It was. She let out a shaky sigh, trying to buck up, think clearly, and trying very hard not to cry.

  “Do not cry,” he said very succinctly, shooting her another quick glance, his voice taking on a very cold edge.

  Damn him.

  “That’ll bring them right down on top of us,” he warned.

  And oh, God, she didn’t want to do that. She was so out of her element. So far out.