Crazy Sweet

by Tara Janzen

  “Good.”

  “She’s sweet.”

  “Very,” Travis agreed. Lydia Shore was a very sweet woman, but maybe she was starting to hope too much, expect too much.

  Gillian had survived the night in Commerce City, but the week since then had been full of ups and downs.

  “I’m not sure about that guy she hangs with,” Gillian said, then lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. A small grin curved her lips. “I think she’s doing him.”

  Travis grinned with her. “You mean that guy we call your father?” His grin broadened. “Yeah, I think she’s doing him, too.”

  A nurse came in then, and Travis stepped aside. It was something he’d been doing all week—stepping aside.

  She was a hard woman, and she pushed him.

  He heard Dr. Brandt come in, but he stayed at the window, looking out over the capital. Washington, D.C., wasn’t such a bad city. He actually liked it, even if this time he hadn’t gotten much beyond Walter Reed Medical Center.

  Gillian had changed. Things were happening in her body and in her mind, and no one was placing any bets on how it was all going to turn out. She seemed to have gone to an entirely new level of strength and power and speed—and she remembered her mother.

  Maybe that would help, Travis thought. Having something as sweet as memories of Lydia Shore in a person’s brain had to be a help. Maybe inside that goddamn convoluted space called Red Dog’s mind, Lydia could fight some of the battles that raged.

  Royce was dead. Gillian knew it, and somehow, maybe, that was bringing her some peace.

  Two days, that’s how long she’d been physically comatose, while every machine they’d had hooked up to her had been going crazy, straight off the charts. Dr. Brandt had tracked every second of those days, charted them, studied them, been fascinated, and sometimes, secretly, Travis had wondered if the good doctor wasn’t also just a little afraid—not of Gillian, but for her.

  Then she’d “woken up,” and the dark weight that had been crushing the life out of him had lifted.

  Fuck.

  She wanted to get back into the gym, back out on the range. She wanted to work. She wanted to run, and shoot, and probably to goddamn fly.

  She was a hard woman.

  “Angel?”

  He turned at the sound of her voice. The nurse and Dr. Brandt had left, but probably not for long. Red Dog’s hospital room was like Grand Central Station.

  “Yeah, babe.” He walked back over and sat down in a chair next to the bed.

  She took his hand, which he didn’t mind, and she leaned close, which he didn’t mind too much. He’d been trying not to get too close.

  “Want to help me escape?”

  Two weeks ago, they would have done it together, made their escape, but now . . . but now he didn’t know which end was the fuck up.

  But she was close, and he was such a goddamn fool.

  Leaning closer, he kissed her cheek, once, lightly, then rose to his feet and went back to the window.

  He couldn’t do this.

  “Angel.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “Just don’t.”

  She tore him up, and sometime, someplace, at some goddamn moment, a guy had to cut his losses.

  He knew now.

  Dylan had been investigating a man named Sir Arthur Kendryk. The guy was actually an English lord, Lord Weymouth, and Travis knew now where Gillian had been that month when she’d fallen off the radar. Kendryk had been tied to the hit in Amsterdam. Apparently, he’d been after the same thing SDF had been tasked with acquiring: the death of a man, the shutting down of one path of terrorism that had threatened the United States and one of Kendryk’s business deals.

  Survival—they’d all been trained for it, trained to do whatever it took to survive.

  Fuck.

  He dragged his hand back through his hair and watched the cars driving by outside.

  He had not been able to sort things out, and maybe he never would, not as long as he was with her.

  “Travis?”

  He hadn’t heard her get out of bed and cross the room, and now she was way closer than he thought he could bear, coming up behind him, wrapping her arms around him, sliding up under his arm.

  He couldn’t do this.

  He started to unwrap her from around his waist, lifting her arms away, but she stopped him with a word.

  “Please.”

  Yeah, that was a good word.

  Please don’t cheat on me.

  Please don’t lie to me.

  Please don’t—just fucking don’t.

  No doubt about it, please was a helluva word. He knew another helluva word, and with her way too damn close to do anything but remind him, he laid it out between them.

  “Kendryk,” he said, looking down and meeting her gaze straight on. She was his lover, yes, but she was also his partner, and she’d lied, by omission if nothing else. It was unacceptable.

  And she knew it all, understood it all. Everything he was thinking was reflected in her golden-eyed gaze, along with a measure of regret that really didn’t do a damn thing to make him feel better.

  “A means to an end,” she said—which also didn’t do a goddamn thing to make him feel better.

  “Bullshit,” he said and looked back out the window. “You weren’t that hard up for help.” You had me, he wanted to say, and probably back her up against the wall and get in her face while he did it.

  She’d had him, goddammit, and she’d known it. She’d known it from the start.

  “I got hurt in Amsterdam. Kendryk’s men found my position. They found me. He knew someone else was tracking his target, and he didn’t want any interference, so he sent a team to take me out.”

  And they’d failed.

  “How many were there?”

  “Two in the first group. Four on the team that finally captured me.”

  Captured. His jaw hardened.

  She’d been captured once before, by Negara and Souk and Royce—and they’d tortured her.

  “You said you were hurt,” he said, the deeper question implied.

  “Roughed up during the initial fight. No other harm was done, not in the whole time I was there.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure. A castle in the woods. It could have been anywhere. I was released in London.”

  “And Kendryk?”

  “I . . . I thought . . .” Her voice trailed off. After a moment, she let go of him and turned away. “I thought I could use him to get to Royce, and—”

  “And you got used instead,” he cut her off, his voice not nice. But shit. He didn’t need to know the details, not from her. The thought of her being with another man was enough to make him sick, and nothing would change the facts.

  “No.” She shook her head, still faced away from him. “I got what I wanted. I got the Uzbek, and the Miami deal, and the rest of them, and now, because of what I did and how I did it, Royce is dead. It’s just that—” She wrapped her arms around her middle, and suddenly she looked so alone, so singularly and frightfully alone. “It’s just that the price is always high in this business. No matter how you try to cut your losses, you end up paying more than you want, no matter what you win, and every time, you tell yourself it was worth it anyway.”

  She was right, but that really didn’t make him any less angry.

  “It’s all big boy rules out there,” she continued, making a gesture toward the window and the densely packed metropolis of Washington, D.C. “There are no dispensations for being a girl, Angel, not in the work we do.”

  She was right again. He hated it, but she was right.

  She lifted her shoulders in a small shrug, and he saw her wipe at her cheek with the back of her hand.

  The gesture riveted him in place.

  In two years, he hadn’t seen her cry, ever. Red Dog didn’t cry. It was part of what she’d lost. It was in her charts and records, an emotional dysfunction.

  “I’m stronger now than I
was before,” she said. “Not so desperate, not so willing to make sacrifices.”

  And you’re crying, he thought, still held solidly in place.

  “No matter what happens from here on out, I’ll find another way, Travis. I won’t give in to fear. Never again.” She turned her head and looked up at him from over her shoulder.

  And it had been fear motivating her, the morbid, self-destructive fear of Tony Royce, and of her own inconstancy, her own vulnerability, all the crap she couldn’t control. He knew her better than anyone, and he knew that—and he was still so fucking blown up by the whole goddamn mess.

  It would be so easy to throw it all away. To walk out the door and not look back, and just let the world know she’d done him wrong, the bad girl with the heart of steel.

  So fucking easy.

  And so impossibly hard.

  So impossible.

  He was tougher than that. Tougher than her.

  Goddammit all anyway.

  He looked at her where she was standing in front of him, looked down at her “wind tunnel” hair and warm golden eyes, and he knew he was doomed.

  Geezus. He hadn’t known love could be so goddamn demoralizing.

  She wasn’t that big, that tall, but what she had was power. It pulsed through her in a steady, unending beat.

  Thank God. It’s what he needed to know. That she would go on.

  “We’re going to make it this time, right?” she asked, and he could tell by the tone of her voice that she wasn’t at all sure.

  But he was. This time.

  “Yes.” The answer was so simple, and right there in his heart. He hadn’t had to go looking for it.

  Because no matter what happened, he didn’t want to live his days without this feeling, without the connection between them, the hot, dark sweetness of it running through him with every breath, of being part of her, of her being part of him.

  Sliding his hand up around the back of her head, he gently pulled her in closer, bringing her against his chest. A sigh left her, and her arms tightened around his waist.

  She was a hard woman, but that was good, because he was a hard man.

  CHAPTER

  34

  THIS COULD BE your worst idea ever,” Gillian said, looking out over the crowd of professors, alumni, and benefactors of the University of Arizona filling up the ballroom of the exclusive Kittredge Mark Hotel on the outskirts of Phoenix.

  “No,” Travis disagreed. “I’ve definitely had worse.”

  “None involving me.”

  He grinned, without conceding anything.

  “Come on,” he said, directing her down the stairs to the main level. “This is therapy.”

  “This is nuts.”

  “Let me know if you recognize anybody.”

  Unlikely, she thought. Everyone looked alike, the whole crowd of people, the women in long dresses, the men in black-tie, the caterers in white, the small orchestra in red jackets and black pants. The colors were all different, the styles and shapes of their clothes, some more elegant than others, but the ease with which it all was worn looked the same: They belonged.

  She did not.

  Angel did.

  No one wore a tuxedo with more style than Travis James, especially one of Dylan Hart’s Armani tuxedos. He was by far the most outrageously handsome man in the room. He was also, without doubt, the deadliest, and yet nothing in his demeanor gave him away.

  She felt exposed, like a walking advertisement for the killing arts. Nothing about her fit in with the people around her.

  Everyone else looked satisfied, in their place, in their element, all of them buzzing around each other and the buffet tables laden with a dazzling assortment of food and lush bouquets of flowers. She did not “buzz,” ever. She was always in stealth mode, a shadow, but it was damn hard to maintain that illusion dressed in red Versace and four-inch heels.

  The event was fund-raising at its highest end, an auction for the benefit of the Environmental Sciences labs at the university, where she’d worked before she’d gone to Washington, D.C. and taken a job with General Grant. There were cruises to be had, one to Antarctica; lots of European travel; plasma televisions; lots of high-tech goodies; two automobiles, one with four-wheel drive; and one painting—a very large painting, which had been donated anonymously and sold for an outrageous amount of money and which would soon be hanging in its new home, on permanent display at the university.

  Gillian wasn’t sure what had compelled her to do it. Part of the healing process, Dr. Brandt had suggested, an honest gesture made in an effort to reach out and reclaim part of her past, but Gillian didn’t think that was quite the reason behind her generosity.

  She and Travis had toured the Environmental Sciences labs earlier in the day, along with the other benefit attendees, and nothing had sparked a memory, not the facility or any of the people, including a man named Ken, who had apparently been her husband at one point in time, before he’d left her for a very pregnant, blotchy-faced woman named Kimberly who had also not registered anywhere in Gillian’s mind. Gillian had done her research before she’d come, and this was Ken and Kimberly’s second child they were expecting. A lot of people had been on the tour, too many for either of them to easily approach her, but she’d known they were watching her, slightly confused, and wondering who she was, really.

  She understood. She’d seen pictures of herself “before,” and there was little left. Nothing in her bone structure had been altered, but without a certain softness in her face, without a certain air of scatterbrained preoccupation, there was no Gillian Pentycote. She was all Red Dog, from the top down.

  And she’d donated a very expensive painting of her very naked boyfriend to her old university. She had some mental quirks, no one could deny it, and that was one of the quirkiest. She was sure the gesture was Freudian as hell.

  “I know this is real important to Dr. Brandt, this whole retracing-my-life schtick, but . . .” She’d had enough.

  “But we’re moving on,” Travis agreed.

  She knew he understood. In the last few months, they’d visited just about every place Gillian Pentycote had ever been. But she was done. She had enough of her past to get by.

  “And we’re going to keep moving,” she said.

  “Work hard, work fast, babe.”

  “Stay low.”

  “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”

  “Keep your powder dry.”

  “Yeah, that one, too.” He grinned, then bent down and pressed a soft kiss to her face. “Here’s to the future.”

  “That’s where we’re going, right, Angel?”

  “Oh, yeah. You can count on it.” He kissed her again, moving his mouth over her face, sliding his lips across her skin, holding her hand tight. “We’re going into the future, baby . . . at light speed.”

  My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on the limb All I remember is thinking I want to be like them.

  —“Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Writing the CRAZY books has been a great ride from the minute I buckled into Jeanette the Jet and realized how much power and growl there could be in three hundred and eighty-three cubic inches of displacement hooked up to a pair of headers. Along the way, there have been some very talented and generous people in the shotgun seat.

  My thanks and love go to Stan, as always, for being the bedrock. Thanks, also, to Nigel, who so kindly shared his encyclopedic knowledge about classic American muscle cars. Cindy Gerard—well, it’s hard to adequately express what a huge impact she had on the books, from conception, inception, incubation, and making damn sure I toed the line. I owe her more than thanks. Rebecca flat-out deserves sainthood.

  And then there are the wild boys and the gun diva—sometimes life hands us an unexpected gift. I got three when I walked into Colorado Gunworks wondering what it actually felt like to hold a pistol in your hand: Cullen “you had me at hello” Honeycutt, whose knowledge and generosity have been e
xceeded only by his kindness; the smokin’ hot Tel Gallegos, gunpowder therapist extraordinaire; and Karl Kirov, who stopped by the shop one day and immediately started teaching me what I didn’t know.

  He’s still at it.

  All the mistakes in the books are mine, especially the one about the Glock in Crazy Love. As for Steele Street and SDF, look for more books about the chop-shop boys, beginning with On the Loose.

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  “Edgy, sexy and fast. Leaves you breathless!”

  —Jayne Krentz

  Regan McKinney, a studious paleontologist, isn’t exactly accustomed to a life of high crime. But when a mysterious note from her missing grandfather leads her to a secret surveillance site maintained by a notorious special-ops task force, and headed by Quinn, a smoldering ex-fighter pilot, even Regan can’t resist the chase.

  Quinn was once on the fast track to a life of crime himself . . . until Regan’s grandfather rescued him. Now Quinn owes it to them both to find the old guy. But throw in a deadly terrorist and some hot dinosaur bones, and a man could get himself killed . . . or fall crazy in love.

  NOTHING MOVED in the shimmering heat.

  Good God, Regan McKinney thought, staring over the top of her steering wheel at the most desolate, dust-blown, fly-bit excuse for a town she’d ever seen. The place looked deserted. She hadn’t seen another car since she’d left the interstate near the Utah/Colorado border, and that had been a long, hot hour ago.

  Cisco, the sign at the side of the road said, confirming her worst fear: She’d found the place she’d been looking for, and there wasn’t a damn thing in it. Unless a person was willing to count a broken-down gas station with ancient, dried-out pumps, five run-down shacks with their windows blown out, and one dilapidated barn as “something.”