Crazy Sweet

by Tara Janzen

  And she wanted back in—back into Saks and valet parking, back into cosmopolitans, one of which she could use right now, and most immediately back into the safety of her suite at the Royal.

  Relative safety, she reminded herself between short, shallow breaths she was doing her damnedest to slow down and deepen. The explosion last night had been less than two blocks from her hotel. The burned-out hulks of the two cars that had been set aflame two nights ago were still smoldering in the San Luis Yacht Club’s parking lot.

  “Wh-what is your name? Your real name?” She really should know, just in case she survived.

  He shook his head once and turned his attention back to the door, and she decided he probably could read her mind, because she’d sure as hell just read his. His name wasn’t any of her business, not for love or money. Five minutes, five hundred dollars, and then she was on her own.

  In El Salvador—oh, God, what was going on out there? Where were those men? The ones with the really big guns? She’d heard them come into the hotel behind her, talking, one guy shouting orders and scaring the holy crap out of her. She’d all but flown up the stairs, and practically fallen right on top of—him.

  Her gaze dropped down the length of her “bodyguard,” from top to bottom, then went back up: camouflage boots, baggy cargo pants, and the rest of him, all wrapped in a faded and worn gray T-shirt and a once-upon-a-time-blue parrot shirt—shoulders, chest, arms.

  Especially shoulders.

  And chest.

  And arms.

  He worked out.

  A lot.

  Messy haircut, scruffy stubble along his jaw, short nose, small mouth, high cheekbones, dark eyebrows, and Ray-Bans, aviator style. Slouched in his chair in front of the cantina, a beer bottle dangling from his fingers, he’d looked like a thousand other slackers she’d seen in dozens of other tropical beach towns all over the world.

  But standing in a grade D hotel room with no air-conditioning, with his gun drawn, he looked like the Great Wall of China, like it would take more than a horde of Huns to get through him, and with that realization came another: He really was a bodyguard.

  For real.

  Kip-Woo had a gun. He’d even taken her shooting and shown her how to use it before she’d left Puerto Vallarta to come to San Luis. But even with a gun in his hand, and even at six feet two, Honey doubted if it would take much more than a disgruntled guest or a drunken bar patron to get through Kip.

  Mr. You Don’t Need to Know My Name wasn’t six feet of anything, but he was built like the Rock of Gibraltar, steady and solid from the inside out, and suddenly, for no other reason than that, she knew she was going to get through the next five minutes, no matter what those minutes brought.

  After that, she’d be on her own again, but as long as he was standing there, willing and able—obviously very able—and ready to put his life on the line for five hundred dollars, she was safer than she’d been since she’d left the family mansion in Washington, D.C., with a quarter of a million in cold cash hidden in the lining of her Louis Vuitton luggage.

  Kip knew what she’d brought with her. He was the only one who knew, and to his credit, he’d done more than warn her off El Salvador. He’d begged her not to go, especially smuggling contraband, and she wouldn’t have, not in a quarter of a million years, except for Julia Ann-Marie York, the black sheep of the York family and the only sister she had.

  CHAPTER

  7

  GILLIAN STOOD NAKED in the shadows behind the open set of French doors in her loft, looking out over the garage’s second-floor garden. Lush greenery and the kaleidoscopic colors and sweet scents of hundreds of flowers in full bloom filled the rooftop.

  The sun was sliding behind the mountains, the air cooling and blowing gently across her skin, the quiet before the storm. Sometimes, every now and then, when she least expected it, all the jumbled-up pieces of her past would streak like a bolt of lightning across her brain, frying synapses and circuits, and throwing her into an abyss of chaos.

  Tonight that was not going to happen, because something else was. She felt it. There was blood on the wind.

  She took a long, steady breath, letting it spiral into her body, lazy and gentle, and fill her lungs. Tonight there would be death. Here.

  Before . . . before the night in the white room, she didn’t think she’d known things, not the way she knew things now. XT7, the drug she’d been given, was complicated, its effect on women untested and undocumented except on her, and it had fucked her up good. Her memories had been wiped clean. Other portions of her brain were walled off. She could feel the walls, but she couldn’t get around them.

  And another part of her brain had been opened up, unblocked, let loose: prescience, a stream of it, not always good for anything, but sometimes good for what she needed. Like tonight.

  She let her breath out, slow and easy, and softened her gaze. The EI Salvador mission had been flawless. She’d been like a cat in the dark, and before she’d been a cat slipping over Royce’s walls, she’d been the bad bitch Red Dog. Those poor little mareros, the gang-bangers, in Mara Plata had never imagined anyone like her. They’d never imagined the promise of their lousy lives getting even worse.

  She wasn’t a social worker. She wasn’t out to save tattooed teenage boys with ink on their faces, and ink on their arms, and no prospects beyond the trinity of dots they wore like a badge on their skin: hospital, prison, and the grave. Anyone who dealt with Royce was her enemy.

  Everyone who dealt with Royce was her enemy.

  The Central American gangs were violent in the extreme. Those boys expected to die badly. She couldn’t scare them with death—so she’d found the one gangster at the top of the San Luis heap with the pull to make a decision, and she’d given him the name of a buyer he would want to deal with more than Royce, the buyer she’d given to everyone she’d wanted to take away from the ex-CIA agent.

  Fuck. She knew some bad people. She’d killed some, manipulated others, and did business with one: Sir Arthur Kendryk, Lord Weymouth. Kendryk ate gangs like Mara Plata for his noon luncheon. In the month he’d held her captive, she’d seen him do it, wipe a Third World network and power base right off the map with a sweep of his hand.

  The San Luis mara would never know what hit them, if they screwed with Kendryk, or if they didn’t meet their quotas, or if he simply decided he no longer needed them. The Lord of Weymouth did not leave loose ends—except for her.

  For her, he would take the Mara Plata deal, the way he’d taken the other four deals she’d ruined for Royce. In the realities of Kendryk’s world, Mara Plata barely registered on the scale, and then only if the whole, international scope of the gang was taken into consideration.

  For her, he’d dealt with the Uzbek, Gul Rashid, and given him a premium price on a shipment of Afghan opium.

  For her, he’d broken his golden rule—he’d felt pity, then suffered as pity had turned to empathy and the death stroke of love. Nothing about the fact made him happy. So he fought it with the arrogance of his wealth, with the power of his intellect, and with the icy coolness of his most disdainful regard.

  And yet he was there, always . . . for her.

  Behind her, she heard Travis rise from the bed. The angel didn’t know about Kendryk. No one did, not Skeeter, not Kid, not even Superman.

  But it was the angel who would be hurt the worst.

  She let her eyes drift closed and took another soft breath.

  She could still feel him, still feel where Travis had been inside her, could still feel the pleasure he’d given her. No one made love like the angel boy, and certainly not the devil named Kendryk.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . For a moment, no longer, she halted her breath, held it inside, then released it gently back into the night.

  And yet Kendryk was a part of her, too, for better or for worse, and there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that it was going to be for worse, that someday he would demand a price it would kill her to pay—and she would pa
y it anyway.

  She took another breath and slowly opened her eyes. The shadows were deepening across the garden, melding into one darkness, the veil of night spreading out from the horizon.

  Sometimes she didn’t like herself very much, and the weeks she’d been with Kendryk had been the worst of those times. She didn’t know for sure, couldn’t know for sure, but she didn’t think the woman she’d been before the XT7 would have made the choices Red Dog had made. Or maybe the will to live that beat so strongly in her heart had always been there, the bone-deep conviction that she would do anything—anything—to survive. Having “died” once, it was not an experience she wanted to repeat.

  So she’d done what she’d had to do. She’d made her deal, sealed the pact, and reaped the unexpected rewards of having Sir Arthur Kendryk at her back.

  Smoothing her hand low across her belly, she let out a sigh and waited. Travis moved quietly, but she could sense his growing nearness, sense the warmth of his desire and the warmth of his body reaching out to surround her. When she felt him come to a stop behind her, when she felt his hand slide around her waist and draw her close, another, softer sigh left her.

  He was shameless, this boy who loved her. All of twenty-four years old when they’d met, he’d known more about her body than she had, known more about what she’d needed, more about what she’d wanted. To this day, he knew more about giving her pleasure than he should.

  “Close your eyes,” he said quietly, his mouth brushing across the back of her neck.

  Yes . . . she let her lashes fall and inhaled the scent of a thousand flowers.

  “Bow your head.” His voice was so sure, so gentle, and yet so undeniably male.

  She obeyed.

  “Submission,” he whispered with a soft laugh, and she felt his teeth graze her skin, so lightly at first, then harder, never enough to mark her, but enough to let her know he was there, in control, and that if he so chose, she would be helpless . . . helpless.

  Poor little Gillian Pentycote, so helpless, bound and gagged. So frightened. So terrified.

  The angel slipped a loop of soft rope around her wrist and drew it tight. Then he wrapped the rope around one of the brackets he’d set into the wall above the French doors and pulled, surely, steadily, until she was stretched taut with only her toes touching the floor, her arm raised above her head.

  “I’m not . . . I’m not sure I want—”

  “Yes, you do,” he said, his voice so calm.

  And he was right.

  The blindfold came next, tight enough for her to feel, tight enough for her to know it wasn’t going to accidentally fall off.

  There were no accidents in this game. Never.

  The cloth was soft. She felt the edges of it across the bridge of her nose and across her eyebrows, creating darkness, the place of fear.

  The loss of sight was complete.

  Her breath started to come short, running along the edge of panic, and his mouth came down on hers in a drugging kiss. Wet, serious, taking and wanting, his tongue pushing deep, again and again, consuming her mouth, demanding more, and she gave him everything she had. It was the only way. She slid her free hand up into his hair, tangling her fingers through the long strands, holding him close and moving her mouth with his, pressing herself against him, curves molding to angles, the firm softness of her body coming up against the rock hardness of his. The taste of him filled her, the gentleness of his breath against her skin, the strength of his arms around her.

  Then he was gone, and she felt a strip of soft cloth going around and around the bottom half of her face, covering her mouth, fitting snugly against her jaw, wrapping around the back of her head and coming up the other side, binding her, stealing her voice, enough cloth to keep her from being able to scream.

  Her heart started to beat faster, to race, and his hand was there, sliding up her torso and cupping her left breast, his palm warm, his fingers callused but gentle.

  Her panic eased, but an edge of fear remained and grew sharper when his hand left her and she felt him at her feet, tying her ankles together with the other end of the rope. It took some time, the intricacy of the knots and stringing the rope through the ring in the floor, to keep her from being able to move, at all, in any direction.

  When he was finished at her feet, he brought the same rope up and tied it around her waist. The tug of each successive knot tightened the one before, one after the other. She knew what came after her waist, and she started to fight, but he caught her to him hard, his hand capturing her free arm and holding it behind her back.

  He tied it there, tied her wrist to the rope at her back, and she was in bondage, in the limbo of the unknown. Fear and anticipation rolled through her, holding her in place more surely than the ropes, bringing her to a perfect standstill, balanced on her toes, her raised hand gripping the rope leading from her wrist to the bracket on the wall—and being careful to breathe, she waited.

  TRAVIS took a step away from her and dragged his hand back through his hair.

  Geezus. What a piece of work. Just looking at her was enough to make him hard again. The arch of her feet, the length of her legs, the incredible curve of her ass, her whole body licked with a sliver of light. She damn near shimmered, her skin was so pale. Full, lush breasts, wild hair, and two bands of black across her face—it was always like this between them, dark and sweet, so hot he ached even when he was inside her, and just a little twisted.

  Yeah, he needed a shrink, to love this the way he did, to love her the way he did.

  Yeah, Doc, I’ve got this girlfriend, you see, older woman, complicated, amnesiac, and so fucking beautiful—especially when I tie her up naked in the moonlight.

  Yeah, Doc, you heard it right.

  And he meant tied. She wasn’t going anywhere until he released her. That was the point. No half measures would do for Red Dog. The girl worked without a net—all the time, every time.

  And every time, she pushed him straight to the edge. The gag and the blindfold kept him right there, balanced on the edge between his commitment and his conscience. It was a damned uncomfortable place to be—and yet it turned him on. Someday, he was going to look into that, kind of check himself out, see what the fuck was up with him; until then, he just went with it—to a point. He’d spent days designing the rigging, testing the knots, practicing tying them. Timing was everything with this gig, and when it was time to let her go, it was time to let her go. The knots needed to fall apart, and they did, every time.

  But until then, she was bound.

  Until then, she was his to do with as he wanted, and what he wanted was to start at the base of her throat and work his way down, all the way down, and halfway back up. That’s where she wanted him, and that’s where he wanted to be, at the soft, hot center of her with his tongue. She was so sleek, her body sculpted by lengths of hard muscle and the strength of the heart that kept her alive time and time again, and he loved her.

  He loved her with every breath he took, and a lot of what he loved was the mystery of her. Thirty-three years of secrets had been lost the night Souk had hit her up, but Travis didn’t think thirty-three years of Gillian Pentycote’s secrets came anywhere close to two years of Red Dog’s.

  He’d lost her once, for a month, and it had damn near driven him 0y, absofuckinglutely insane the way nothing ever had before or since. Those feelings weren’t ones he was ever going to forget. Thirty days without a word, coming off the tail end of a European job that had gone bad. The kill had been made, the mission accomplished, but it had been a mess—an incapacitating but nonlethal shot, where the guy had hung on for two days in an Amsterdam hospital before dying. And there had been collateral damage, of all the damn things, a bonus in General Grant’s book, one more terrorist asshole he didn’t have to worry about, but the general and the rest of SDF had wondered what in the hell had happened.

  She’d never said.

  Never said what had happened on the hit. Never said what had happened during the godda
mn month that she’d been gone.

  But Travis knew.

  He knew it in his heart.

  Fuck.

  He opened his mouth on her throat, grazing her with his teeth and licking her skin. There were reasons he’d been so good at being the dark angel for Nikki Chronopolous, a lot of reasons, and the bad girl Red Dog brought all those dark reasons to light, every one. He never hurt her, had never left a mark on her. The ropes were tight, but not brutal. He saved that for the job. She was stretched out and strung up, sure, but in a minute, he’d be kneeling at her feet, and once he released the slack he’d built into the rope at the floor ring, he would come up between her legs and she’d be sitting on his shoulders with his face between her thighs. It was a sweet trip to that point, and he enjoyed every inch of it.

  But it was when he was there, with his tongue sliding into her soft folds, and his fingers pushing up inside her, with her tightening around him and her body arching against him, that the last of his tension began to lift.

  Red Dog was his.

  He always made it good for her in bed, but this was where he laid his true claim, when she gave it up for him in the lost darkness of her mind, poised on the promise of pain, but finding pleasure instead. No one could take this journey with her to the strange edges of her psyche better than him. He pushed her boundaries, and then pushed farther until the abyss opened up and swallowed her whole—but he never let her fall alone.

  Never.

  Her muffled groan sounded above him and a shudder went through her, the tremor of it running the length of her body.

  Oh, yeah. He opened his mouth wider and slid his tongue over her, again and again. He knew. He knew her every reaction went straight to his groin and made him hot, made him feel heavy. He knew she tasted like heaven and an ocean of pleasure, and he knew how to get exactly what he wanted.

  He slipped another finger inside her, stretching her, sliding smoothly in and out and putting pressure where she needed it the most. There was a place deep inside her imagination, a place where sexual fantasy and fact melted into one, and the path to it began here, inside the silken softness of her vagina. It wasn’t enough to make her come. He’d done that for her in bed. What he needed now, what she needed, was for him to make her come apart . . . completely, totally apart.