Crazy Sweet

by Tara Janzen

  “The Sorority Girl’s Guide to Self-Help Sex,” she said.

  Okay.

  Take a breath.

  Don’t grin, or God forbid, laugh out loud.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  She slanted him a narrowed glance, a very narrowed glance. “It was a best-seller.”

  He just bet it had been. He bet every fraternity boy from L.A. to New York had bought that one, every college boy, every high school boy, hell, every guy in America had probably bought it.

  Except for him. Somehow he’d missed—

  Oh, hell.

  He looked at her again, and he couldn’t help himself. He grinned.

  “I think my little brother has a copy.”

  The look she gave him was pure “I told you so,” which only made his grin wider.

  “You’re good,” he said. “You are very, very good, and I almost believed you. The whole nun thing is classic, and the orphanage is a really nice touch, but by God, The Sorority Girl’s Guide to Self-Help Sex puts you in a class all by yourself.”

  She’d had him going there for a minute. He hated to admit it, but it was true. Something about her just made a guy want to believe she was telling the truth. It was a special something all the best liars had.

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  He hated doing it, honest he did, but reality had a way of biting a guy in the butt if he tried to duck from it.

  “In spades,” he said.

  Another cloud of smoke came his way. Then she turned and bent over the bed—a second notation on his list of the night’s blessings.

  After a few seconds of rummaging around through her stuff, she turned back to him and handed him a book: The Sorority Girl’s Guide to Self-Help Sex.

  Written by Honoria York-Lytton.

  With her photograph on the back.

  Fuck.

  And he really meant it this time.

  CHAPTER

  14

  GILLIAN PENTYCOTE. Royce repeated the name in his mind for about the hundredth disbelieving time, flipping through the thick sheaf of papers Zane had handed him when they’d first gotten on the plane. It took a hell of a lot to shock him, but the information in the papers had done it.

  She’d survived.

  Not only had she survived, against all odds; she’d thrived.

  His man had worked fast and unearthed an amazing amount of data between the time Royce had given the order for Denver and when they’d left for the airport. He had names, dates, times, places, blood tests, and psych reports. He even had her goddamn address, complete with a map marked with the route from the airport to her apartment in Commerce City.

  Geezus. Under any other circumstances than what he’d found in the papers, the girl would have been breathing her last.

  Beast with a brain, that was the summation of Zane Lowe’s resume, but the man had truly outdone himself this time. “Red Dog” in and of itself had offered damn little in comparison to “Red Dog 303.” Tying the for-hire sniper to Special Defense Force in Denver had been the key. Locking in on her home ground had opened up her past like Pandora’s box.

  And what a past.

  Royce seldom felt excitement, but the information in the papers had lit him up. Millions of dollars were at stake, and nothing excited him more than money. One other thing came close, but now that the whole goddamn world had been handed to him on a platter, he was going to have to forgo his previous plans. There would be no pretty Thai syringe in Red Dog’s immediate future, no woman screaming her heart out for him, and no Zane with his knives.

  Women and knives, it was such a cliché, and yet there was something in the purely predictable outcome of that particular combination that never failed to make his blood run hot.

  But not tonight.

  He’d been handed the future, and its name was Red Dog, case number WR8864XS, the bitch formerly known as Gillian Pentycote—and he’d done that for her. He’d made her what she was, a warrior of world renown.

  And if he’d made one, he could make another.

  A smile curved his mouth, an actual goddamn smile.

  Red Dog. Red Dog. He’d let the name eat at him over the course of the last two months. He’d dwelled on the death of the shadow called Red Dog, turned it over in his mind, devised it and revised it for maximum effect, and now he’d changed his mind. He wasn’t going to kill her.

  He was going to dissect her—piece by careful piece, never taking too much of her at a time. She’d be alive. There was no reason for her to die for a long, long time. He and his Thai medical staff could keep her breathing for as long as they needed.

  Tissue samples, that’s all they’d take.

  And blood.

  And maybe a few microscopically thin slices of her brain.

  He was the one who had chosen the XT7 for her that night two years ago. Dr. Souk had laid out a whole array of psychopharmaceuticals and at one point offered the tray to him. Hart, he knew, had been given NG4, so he’d chosen one of the blue syringes, the XT7.

  And look what it had done.

  He turned to page seventeen of the sheaf of papers, the beginning of the medical report Zane had coerced out of a source Royce had cultivated years ago at Walter Reed Medical Center, report number WR8864XS.

  The little piece of auburn-haired fluff had been turned into a killing machine—hard, fast, ruthless, skilled, expensive.

  Geezus. If that’s what XT7 had done to Gillian Pentycote, think what he could get by starting with better base stock. Someone like Skeeter Bang would become unstoppable, superhuman.

  They’d have to run tests, check dosages, collate results. They’d need test subjects, but human life could be had pretty damn cheaply in Southeast Asia, especially women—and he needed women.

  He’d watched Dr. Souk administer XT7 to men a number of times on the island of Sumba, under Hamzah Negara’s watchful eye—and they’d gotten much of the same response as with the NG4 and the XXG2. Some guys died, some guys didn’t; they’d all suffered profoundly for a long, long time.

  But no superheroes had come out of the mix.

  He looked around the plane, at the five men sitting closest to him.

  Thugs. There was no other word for them. Even Zane was a thug at heart, but for the right price, they were his thugs, strong, solid, dangerous, perverse, and reliable.

  But women. Hell. One of the things Royce hated about them was their faithless, twisted hearts. He also hated their goddamn unpredictability. He hated having their goddamn emotional presence anywhere in his life, and he didn’t even want to think about their physical presence, other than to unequivocally categorize their bodies as vile.

  And now he needed one of the goddamn things. He needed Red Dog alive, at least for a while. She still owed him for Uzbekistan. He wouldn’t forget, and once he got everything out of her he needed, he’d kill her. Of course, by then, she’d probably be begging him to kill her—which meant that one way or the other, even if it took months longer than he’d anticipated, he was going to get everything he wanted.

  Life was good.

  CHAPTER

  15

  GILLIAN KNELT on the roof of a warehouse a block away from the SDF garage, hidden in the shadows, watching the night. A storm was moving in from the north. The temperature had dropped, and the wind was blowing softly against her face, the air cooling her skin.

  Five and a half minutes, that’s what it had taken for her to scale the three-story building with a friction loop she’d slipped around a downspout.

  Her adrenaline must be up, she thought. It usually took her six.

  She’d chosen her IFP, Initial Firing Position, to align herself between an air-conditioning unit on the northwest corner of the warehouse’s tarred roof and her front door, where Royce’s men would probably show up first. Dressed in a pair of sleek black leather pants and a black shrink shirt, with an olive green assault vest over the top, she was invisible in the urban landscape—and so she would remain, all night long.

>   She had a gift for stealth. It was her most valuable tactical skill, the ability to acquire a target, move undetected into position, make the kill, and evaporate into thin air. It was what had made her reputation, what had made her second life possible.

  But her second life was coming to an end. She felt it with each passing day. Something was happening to her, something to do with the XT7. The incidents with her arm were increasing in frequency. The flashbacks to the night in the white room were crashing in on her more and more often.

  She wasn’t going to make it through to a better end. She knew that now, had known it for weeks, but she wasn’t going out alone. She was taking Tony Royce with her—one way or the other. That was the bitch in her, demanding justice, demanding revenge, but God, it was costing her.

  She slipped her hand inside her assault vest and pressed it against her sternum, trying to ease the ache she’d had since she’d left her loft. It was just her breath, caught in a stream of regret—she knew that. Just her heart realizing what she’d done.

  Angel . . . she’d let him go.

  For the last time.

  So it was, and so it had to be.

  But God, it hurt.

  Rising to her feet, forcing herself to focus on the mission, she slid her hand deeper into her vest and checked her gear. The Contender with its fourteen-inch .223 barrel was loaded and secure in a holster on the inside left panel of the vest. The .44 barrel assembly was in a sleeve sewn into the inside right panel. Her initial ammo supply for the weapon was in the cartridge cuff cinched around her right forearm—ten rounds of .223 and five rounds of subsonic .44.

  The warehouse was an excellent shooting platform for the long-range pistol. A low wall around the rooftop gave her perfect cover. The corners had one-foot-square cutouts, designed to allow water to run off into the downspouts, and she knew if she dropped flat, each one would give her a protected, narrow line of sight to a section of the outlying area. She could make a shot through one of the cutouts and remain concealed and covered from return fire.

  Such had her life become. The only life she knew: concealment, cover, taking the shot, making the kill, egress. There had been something else before, something softer, more emotionally complex. Without Angel, she feared she might feel nothing at all. He was the touchstone, the path—and he was gone.

  A short, sharp breath left her, sudden, unexpected, a sign of pain. Her hand went back to the middle of her chest, and she pressed again, easing away the ache, and when it was gone, she let it all go.

  There was no other way.

  She had her mission and thirty pounds of gear to achieve the night’s two objectives: Kill Royce; survive.

  There was nothing else.

  The TC Contender inside her vest was a purely offensive weapon. For defense, she had her .40 caliber long-slide Glock holstered on her hip and two hundred rounds of ammunition in her magazines and stowed in her pack. And if things really didn’t go her way, she had a Tanto combat knife in an upside-down sheath secured to the front of her vest. Even if it came to a knife fight, though, she wouldn’t count herself out. She’d been taught by the best, Creed Rivera.

  Creed had taught her a lot of things, and warned her about others—Take care, Roja, Red . . . take care that you do not become what you’re sworn to destroy. There is a damn thin line between darkness and evil.

  Razor thin. She knew the importance of taking care. He’d made damn sure she knew. He’d lectured her, backed her up against a wall and gotten in her face one night when he’d thought she’d come too damn close to going too damn far. No one at Steele Street walked the edge of darkness more carefully or with a surer step than Creed. No one else needed to, and he understood that about himself. He understood it about her, too.

  Take care, Roja, or you’ll be lost.

  “I’m already lost,” she’d told Travis later.

  “Not in that way,” he’d said. “We all work close to the line, but we’re still the good guys, Gillian. Creed knows how easy it would be to take the last step, and he knows there isn’t any coming back from it. Once you cross over that way, you’re his enemy. You’ll be your enemy, too. You’ll be what Royce has become.”

  It happened in their business, more often than anyone official would ever admit: trained operatives turning rogue, going for the money, or for the glory that was no longer legally sanctioned to be theirs. They got old, they got hurt, they got kicked off whatever team they’d given their life to, and some of them turned. The skills they had were a valuable commodity on the world stage, and crime paid top dollar to get them.

  Royce had been so successful; he was almost the exception to the rule. He didn’t work for an underworld crime lord; he was an underworld crime lord.

  She was doing the right thing.

  Killing Royce was the right thing, not just for herself, but for everybody.

  If she’d doubted it, even for a second, she wouldn’t have been standing on a rooftop alone, wishing for things she couldn’t have, that life had been different, that Angel was with her.

  Swearing under her breath, she wiped the back of her hand across her cheek. It came away wet.

  Geezus. She couldn’t be crying. Red Dog didn’t even know how to cry.

  CHAPTER

  16

  SHE WAS ON her second bottle of booze.

  He was on his first.

  Smith looked at the shot’s worth of gin in the tiny bottle in his hand. She’d kept the bourbon for herself. She’d said gin made her excitable, whatever the hell that meant, and he’d agreed that maybe it was better if she didn’t get too excited.

  They had enough excitement.

  It was a funny thing about explosions. People knew they were dangerous, but that didn’t send them running in the other direction for very damn long. Within minutes after the explosion over by the marina, people had started flooding into the streets, most definitely getting in the way of the emergency response crews, and as of a few minutes back, maybe starting to riot.

  Standing off to the side of the broken windows, he twisted the lid off the tiny bottle of gin and watched a group of young men gathering in front of the cantina across the street. It wasn’t full out yet, not even close, but the crowd was shifting, and he was expecting it to be one damn long night. One damn long night trapped in a hotel room with Honoria York-Lytton.

  He glanced back toward the bed, and his gaze slid over her, top to bottom.

  Excitement. Right. He wasn’t too worried about an ounce of gin getting him going, but the odds were growing damn short on the polka-dot dress since she’d taken off her jacket.

  There was no back to the dress. None. It was open clear to her waist. The straps of the halter top buttoned at the back of her neck, very classy, two red buttons that were the same size and color as the polka dots. He guessed you could call it camouflage, sorority girl camouflage.

  Yeah, a person could call it something all right. Geezus. He grinned. No wonder the family nun had run away.

  Red Dog would have called the buttons too damn cute, which wasn’t exactly a compliment coming from the bad girl. But Red Dog was all edge, a sharp, dark edge, and Honey—God, he had to love that name—Honey was all curves, one right after another, all of them sliding together inside that dress where she was sitting in the middle of his bed going through her pile of junk.

  Kee-rist. He tossed half the contents of the little bottle back, then finished it with another swallow and looked down at the book in his other hand—and he grinned again. It was impossible not to.

  The Sorority Girl’s Guide to Self-Help Sex—with her photograph on the back.

  His grin broadened.

  He knew a little about self-help sex. Some months he knew a little more about it than he liked to admit. He even knew a little about sorority girls, but none of the ones he’d ever dated had looked like Honey. They’d been college girls back when he’d been a college boy, and Honey York was no girl. Age-wise, she was nearing perfection, which in his book meant somewhere
over thirty. There was something about women’s bodies as they got older, a certain lushness that a guy could really get lost in, which was reason enough in his book to let women over thirty rule the planet. God knew, he’d been ruled by a few, even a couple when he’d been in his twenties, and one when he’d been nineteen, and yeah, that had been a real education. He still kept in touch with Caroline.

  But it had been a while since he’d been in touch with any woman.

  His last girlfriend had left without a forwarding address when he’d missed one too many flights home to Denver. Work had kept coming up in Central America, and he’d kept taking it. That was the way it was with guys like him. No commitment. No hard feelings. And eventually, no girlfriend.

  The pattern had never failed him.

  He wondered what Honey’s story was, if she was as single as she looked. There was no triple-digit-carat ring on her finger, and she still had the family name—and here came his reality check: Those were probably the only two things they had in common. He wasn’t married, and he hadn’t yet disgraced himself so badly that the old man had disowned him. Not hardly. A policeman in Little Rock, Arkansas, Jack Rydell was damned proud of his oldest son. The admiration went both ways.

  “I don’t know how you missed me,” Honey said, continuing their conversation after taking a moment to unbuckle the ankle straps on her shoes and slip them off her feet. “I was on the cover of Ocean magazine, and on the front page of every tabloid in America for three months, with headlines like Shameless Sorority Sex Games.”

  He didn’t know how to tell her that he’d never heard of Ocean and didn’t spend much time reading the tabloids, but he couldn’t deny that if he’d seen it, Shameless Sorority Sex Games might just have been his ticket into dropping a couple of bucks on a grocery store rag.

  “I’ve been out of the country quite a bit this last year.” And the year before that, and the year before that.

  “The book really isn’t about sex games.”

  And this was practically a fantasy come true, to have a hot, barefoot blonde in his bed, talking about sex games.