by Tara Janzen
Whatever she’d been doing in El Salvador, she’d made damn sure Tony Royce would come for her.
“Call Superman. Warn him she’s up on that building, probably with her crosshairs on her own goddamn door.”
“And Travis?”
“Yes.” The Angel Boy needed to know his sweetheart had crossed the line. “Can you text her?” If she wasn’t answering her goddamn phone, maybe she’d at least read a message.
“Sure,” Skeeter said. “But if I do, she’ll get an audio cue and maybe toss the damn phone down a drainpipe. Then we really won’t be able to track her.”
“Key this in, then, but don’t transmit it until I say so,” Dylan said, printing rapidly on his notepad.
Skeeter looked at the brief message, nodded, then started entering it into her computer.
“Blade Runner, her favorite movie,” she said. “The director’s cut. It’s not like you to get sentimental.”
“She’s got six guys out there who want to kill her, and two who don’t want to, but . . . shit.” More than anyone at Steele Street, Dylan knew what she’d gone through, but he couldn’t allow her actions to stand. She either called herself off, or he was going to do it for her.
Skeeter typed, and Dylan read the message as it showed up on the screen: ROYCE PLUS 5 IN DENVER. BUT REMEMBER, IF YOU’RE NOT COP, YOU’RE LITTLE PEOPLE. CALL ME. LET ME HELP. DYLAN.
CHAPTER
20
MEN: SHOULD WE, or Shouldn’t We? Vegetative Deities of the Male Pantheon”—okay, Smith was going to skip that chapter, the same way he’d skipped “Sacred Blood: What It Means to You—Transformative Powers of Menstruation.”
Chapter Four, “Postorgasmic Mindstate: Getting There Is Half the Fun—Enlightenment Through Bliss,” looked promising, but he wasn’t putting a nickel on finding any shameless sorority-girl sex games in it.
He closed the book and turned it over in his hand, looking at the cover one more time. Talk about a marketing scam. This thing had probably been thrown against the wall in every fraternity house in America.
He had figured out why there wasn’t a ring on her finger, though—Chapter Six. “Marriage: Why and Why Not? Sanctioned Oppression in Patriarchal Societies.”
He’d been married once, briefly, very briefly, apparently just long enough to oppress the woman he’d loved before she’d thrown him out on his ass.
“So what do you think?” she asked, bending over her foot where they were sitting on the bed with their backs propped against the wall with pillows. His Sig was cocked, locked, and loaded. There had been some gunfire coming from the Palacio’s courtyard earlier, and he was ready to rock and roll if the party started to move to the third floor. She, on the other hand, had a tiny brush in her fingers and was ready to dab a little polish on one of her toes.
Apparently, at some point during the evening, she’d chipped a nail.
He hadn’t noticed, and for the love of God and everything sacred and feminine in the Universe, he didn’t know how in the hell she had, either. With all the shit that had hit the fan since he’d seen her out in front of the Hotel Palacio, how in the mother-loving hell had she noticed a chip in the polish on her toenail?
It was the biggest goddamn mystery of the whole friggin’ night as far as he was concerned.
Sanctioned oppression—God, that ate at him.
“It’s good. Really good,” he said. “Inspiring, actually. I’m thinking of writing a book of my own now.”
“You are?” She looked up with a warm smile, which almost instantly turned wary. Smart girl. “What kind of book?”
“I haven’t thought of a title yet, but I’ve got the first chapter heading—‘Women: Should We or Shouldn’t We? And How Many Should We, Before We Don’t Anymore?’”
“Jerk.”
Whatever.
“Did anybody ever write you and demand their money back?”
Her silence was answer enough.
“So what do you do? Send them a money order?”
“I don’t think you actually read the text.”
“Well, I’m going to, right after I finish writing my own chapter on marriage.”
“Go ahead and tell me,” she said with a long-suffering sigh, dabbing an extra bit of lacquer on her baby toe, which as far as he could see had already been adequately covered with candy-apple red polish, the whole freaking square quarter inch of it. “I can tell you’ve got something you’re just dying to get out.”
“‘Marriage,’” he said. “‘Collusion or Delusion?’”
She put the brush back in the bottle and looked up again. “Rough divorce?”
How incredibly insightful.
“She took my socks. My socks.” He still didn’t understand that part. “I came back from Panama to an empty house and an empty sock drawer. So you tell me who was oppressed.”
“How long ago did this happen?”
A legitimate question, but he kind of hated how calm she was about it. He was still pissed about his divorce.
“Sixteen months and two girlfriends ago.”
“Whirlwind courtship?”
“A hurricane.”
“Read Chapter Seven, ‘Hormones and Pheromones: Love or Lust? Emotional and Biological Responses to Sexual Stimuli,’ and every place it says ‘woman,’ put the word ‘man,’ and every place it says ‘man,’ put the word ‘woman.’”
“Men and women are not interchangeable.”
“Oh, pul-lease,” she said, rolling her eyes at him.
Oh, pul-lease. God, what gall.
Even worse, now that they were both on the bed, and it would be most helpful for her to be looking her sex-kittenish best, she was coming damn close to actually looking like a feminist. She was wearing his clothes, for crying out loud, men’s clothes, and they were sagging, and bagging, and practically falling off, but not nearly falling off enough to suit him.
Biological Responses. He knew a little about biological responses. He was suffering through a biological response, and it wasn’t doing anything to improve his mood.
Love or Lust?
No contest, it was lust all the way, baby. Dammit.
“How hot do you think it is in here?” she asked, dropping the bottle of polish into her tote and rummaging around for God only knew what to play with next—and he didn’t know why in the hell it couldn’t be him.
Plenty hot.
“We’re pushing a hundred, easy.” With the broken windows barricaded with the chiffonier, even though there was open space above it, there was damn little breeze getting into the room. The electricity was still out, so the fan wasn’t working. They had two candles burning, and by his guess, they were each putting out about a thousand or so calories of added heat with every minute they were lit—and she was sitting on the bed with him.
Hellishly hot.
“And one of us obviously gets a little crabby in the heat,” she said, still rummaging.
It wasn’t the heat making him crabby. She didn’t want to hear about what was making him crabby.
“How’s your butt?” It was a legitimate question, he didn’t care what anybody said.
“It hurts,” she said, and stuck her tongue out at him—and he came that close to jumping her. Right then. Right there.
If she wanted to stick her tongue out at him, she could at least stick it where it—
“Here you go,” she said, handing him a juice box and interrupting his train of thought.
“You’ve got juice boxes in there?” He hadn’t noticed them when all her junk had been piled on the bed. Of course, it had been an amazingly big pile of junk, and there had been all that money jumbled up in all of it.
“And chips. Do you want a bag of chips? Or a granola bar?”
No. He didn’t want to eat, he wanted to—
“Chocolate? It’s melted, but it’s still in its wrapper, so you can lick it off.”
Yes. Licking sounded good. Too good. What in the hell was wrong with him?
Not enough danger
, he decided. Yes, there were a few explosions here and there, and some semiautomatic weapon fire going off out on the street now and then—but none of it was directed toward them. There were dozens of people staying at the Palacio, and he bet every single one of them was doing what he and Honey were doing: waiting out the night, knowing the Palacio had held up through countless coups, innumerable guerilla and terrorist attacks, and a couple of outright wars.
No doubt, the damn place would still be standing come morning.
“I know why you’re angry.”
No, she didn’t. He never gave anything away, not in word or deed, and she couldn’t read his mind.
“I’ve confused you.”
Okay, maybe she had something there.
“You’re a guy, and when guys read the title of the book, they expect something light and maybe a little racy,” she said.
More than a little racy, he could have told her, and sex was not a subject that guys took lightly, ever.
“And maybe they expect some real ‘nuts and bolts’-type material.”
Definitely on the nuts and bolts.
“And maybe some photos.”
Double definitely on the photos.
“But then they read the chapter headings, and the book starts looking like a feminist manifesto with no nuts and bolts and no photos.” After more rummaging, she finally pulled out a small bag of potato chips and a melted candy bar. “But until you read the actual text, you can’t have a clear idea of the message I built my thesis on, so if you haven’t read it, you don’t really know how it all turns out.” She carefully opened the candy bar, then tore open the bag of chips.
“How does it turn out?” He watched, slightly fascinated, as she took a chip and scooped a little melted chocolate onto it.
“Well, with what you’ve read, it wouldn’t be out of line for you to think I’m an antiman, anti-heterosexual sex, hard-core, women’s studies lesbian.”
A shiver of alarm went through him, his first of the night. Guys shooting at him, he could deal with. Guys shooting at each other, he understood. Bombs and riots, no problem. But the thought of Honey York being a lesbian rattled his internal gyroscope.
“I’m not,” she assured him, lifting the chocolate-dipped chip to his mouth. “Open up.”
He did, and in went the salty, sweet treat with the tips of her fingers brushing against his lips.
Heat, the good kind, instantly grabbed him in the gut and groin.
“I like heterosexual sex,” she said, and ridiculously, the heat spread to his brain.
“Good,” he said, as if that was an astute comment to the best news he’d had all night. She liked sex with guys. He was glad to hear it. Damn glad.
“I’m not saying it’s a cure-all for the world’s problems. I know it’s just one part of life, but I can’t help but believe, and what I put in the book, especially in the concluding chapters, is that if every now and then you can just jump into bed, or up on the kitchen table, or into the back seat of your car with your sweetie-pie and make love until you’re completely wrung out and you’ve both melted into puddles on the floor, that you can face the rest of life’s problems a little easier. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes,” he answered, his gaze riveted on her. His wires were crossed, his blood rushing around inside him in all the best ways—and his answer was an unqualified yes.
“It’s more of a sexual partnership philosophy,” she said.
Yes. Full-speed ahead on sexual partnership philosophy, and that was another first for him. He couldn’t remember ever getting too damn philosophical about sex before. It seemed to negate the whole point of sex, which for him—and he thought he was speaking for quite a few guys with this—was basically not to have to think for a while, about anything, except sex.
“All three locations,” he added, just to make things absolutely clear. He was on board for the bed, the table, and the car.
Anything.
Everything.
With her.
Four hours ago, if someone had told him that he’d be completely turned inside out and on by somebody named Honoria York-Lytton who would be feeding him chocolate-covered potato chips while they were sitting on the bed in his dumpy hotel room, he would have said they were certifiable.
Instead, it was him who’d lost his ever-loving mind.
A point that really hit home when her phone rang.
It was a jazzy ring tone, a tune he almost recognized, and it was coming out of her giant tote bag.
A friggin’ phone.
Fuck. He groaned. What in the ever-loving hell had he been thinking?
Honest to God, somewhere between when he’d grabbed her on the veranda and when he’d gotten so cozy with her on the mattress, he should have thought to ask her if she had a phone.
Sure, he’d been a little busy with the glass and the gunmen, and with securing the room and trying to keep his brains above his belt, but he still should have thought to ask.
She dug the phone out, a pink phone, of course, and flipped it open. “Bonjour.”
And of course with the “bonjour.” Geez.
“Hey, Mitzi . . . sure, that’ll be great . . . okay, then, next Wednesday.” She flipped the phone shut, and he stared at it for a couple of long seconds. Mitzi.
“Where did Mitzi call you from?” he finally asked. In his experience, there weren’t too many women in El Salvador named Mitzi.
“Washington.”
“D.C.?”
“Um-hmmm,” she said, scooping chocolate on another chip and holding it up to his mouth.
“Can I borrow it?” he asked, then opened up and took the chip, just to feel the brush of her fingertips again. It was a cheap shot, but he loved it. “I have an important call I need to make.” That was one way to put it, he guessed, one kind of understated, incredibly stupid, oversimplified way.
“Sure,” she said, handing the phone over and fixing him another chip. “Just don’t talk long, if that’s okay. I’m running a little low on the battery, and Julia will probably check in with me sooner or later since I haven’t shown up at the church yet tonight.”
And she wasn’t going to be showing up at the damn church tonight, period. He’d thrown that damn plan out the minute she’d told him, when she’d first come out of the bathroom. Carting a quarter of a million dollars across San Luis in a fricking tote bag would be fine, if it was him doing the toting. But asking Honey to do it bordered on the insane, something he was going to make very clear to Sister Julia and Father Bartolo in the morning, when he would be the one toting and delivering the orphan money. He’d promised her, just to keep her from trying to do it on her own, and maybe just so he could sleep at night for the rest of his life.
Orphan money. Geezus. He was supposed to be down here tracking Red Dog, la cazadora espectral, and keeping tabs on Tony motherfucking Royce—not saving orphans.
And all he’d needed to do was make one lousy phone call to an annex of the Pentagon to confirm with a general of the United States Army that he’d tracked the general’s black ops contractor to the last goddamn place she should have been, and found out that the international criminal who had destroyed her life was not in residence, but that she’d left her address so he could look her up back home in Colorado.
General Grant needed to know it. Christian Hawkins needed to know it, and like it or not, Dylan Hart needed to know it—and once the information got to Hart, Smith could guarantee that Red Dog was going to wish she’d thought twice about those cans of red spray paint she’d used on Royce’s villa.
HONEY was running out of time and ideas. She really didn’t think she could put him to sleep with chocolate-covered potato chips and orange juice, but he’d turned down her offer of more liquor, and she didn’t have it in her to slip him a Xanax.
She just didn’t. Dammit.
She hadn’t lied to him, not really, but there was a bit more to Julia’s story than orphans, and his really sweet offer of taking the money to St. Mary’s in the
morning wasn’t going to work.
She had until three A.M. to get to the church, and not a minute later, or Julia would be gone, and she wouldn’t have her money, and Honey would never forgive herself.
C. Smith Rydell pushed off the bed and took her phone with him into the bathroom, but unlike her, when she’d secretly made her last three phone calls under the pretext of potty breaks, he didn’t close the door.
She was thinking he might have the instincts of a Rottweiler, or a bullmastiff, some kind of highly bred guard dog. Honestly, she didn’t know what would make him think he needed to keep an eye on her, or why in the world he would care what she did—but he was watching her like a hawk, like she might make a dash for it.
Which was exactly what she was trying to figure out how to do—to make a dash out the door, down the street, and into the god-awful fray to save the sister she loved.
Sometimes Honey hated her mother, and never more so than when Julia Ann-Marie was in trouble up to her neck and sinking fast. Maternal neglect had been the problem from the get-go. There were three brothers between her and Julia, but Honey didn’t remember ever paying the boys too much mind. They’d all gotten plenty of attention. They were the York-Lyttons who would make sure the world didn’t run out of York-Lyttons for at least another generation—God forbid. Sometimes Honey wasn’t sure the world was noticing nearly as much as her father thought or was hoping.
But then one day, something new had come into the York household, the softest, tiniest, pinkest bundle of baby Honey had ever seen, and everything in her ten-year-old heart had instantly fallen in love.
Julia had been hers from the first tiny spoonful of cereal Honey had put in her mouth, until Honey had pulled her out of that blood-splattered elevator in the Hotel Langston on the island of Malanca off the coast of Honduras two years ago. Julia’s husband had been crumpled in the corner, his body torn apart by the same kind of gunfire Honey could hear out on the street in San Luis.
That was the day Honey had lost her.
She was getting ready to lose her all over again, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. Talk about a goddamn hard lesson to learn.
