by Tara Janzen
This had been their whole problem the whole time they’d been together: Peter “Kid Chaos” Chronopolous was the most buttoned-up man she’d ever met.
Men gave it up for her—always, every time. She took off their clothes, put them under her lights, and deconstructed them, and up to a certain point, every man she’d ever painted or photographed had been glad to do it. After that “certain point” they all balked, except for Travis James. Her angel model simply didn’t have anything to hide. But balk or not, she had never let a guy get away from her without giving up at least some of his secrets. More often than not, she got more than they ever meant to reveal.
Except for Kid Chaos.
He was incredibly self-contained. So self-contained, there wasn’t room for her, except in his bed.
Damn him.
Two people could not make a life out of just sex, not even the kind of sex they had. In all the nights they’d spent together, there had been only one where he’d opened up, the night he’d gotten back from Colombia with his brother’s remains. The experience had been shattering. He’d hurt so badly that night, and she’d hurt for him. But for all they’d shared, by morning, he’d had himself back under control.
He was the Ice Man, glacially cool Kid Chaos. In his line of work, that was probably considered an asset, but in a relationship, it was a definite obstacle.
Adjustments had to be made.
She’d show him adjustments. She was going to “adjust” herself back to Denver in the morning, and if anything he’d said to her tonight had been true, he wouldn’t be too far behind.
And if he was too far behind, that would be the end of it, because she’d be gone.
KID knew three things the moment he woke up: Nikki wasn’t by his side; he was crazy in love with her, which under the circumstances was a goddamn awful thing to have to admit; and something was wrong—more wrong than just Nikki not being next to him.
Sure, when he’d gone to bed, he’d wanted to be alone, but he didn’t now, especially when something didn’t feel right.
He pushed himself out of the bed, soundlessly, and slipped on his pants. Reaching for his pistol was automatic. Racking the slide and chambering a round was deliberate, something he usually did before he fell asleep. But last night he’d fallen asleep with Nikki in his arms, and he’d forgotten, which he hoped to hell wasn’t indicative of the way things were going to be, that he’d be so sex-addled around her, he wouldn’t be able to think straight. Guys like him did not fall asleep without their guns cocked, locked, loaded, and less than an arm’s length away.
Yeah, he was hoping there was some way for them to work through this mess, despite that goddamn ring on her finger. A future together, that’s what he’d been thinking, and he kept right on thinking it up until he got outside and had to face the fact that she was thinking something else.
There was light coming from the kitchen, illuminating the front half of the courtyard, and her hot pink mock-croc leather suitcases were stacked next to each other on the patio, both of them packed, zipped, and ready to go.
It didn’t even take a second for what it all meant to register, and he couldn’t believe it. She was walking out on him. In the middle of the night. What the hell part of “I love you, Kid. Oh, God, please, I love you,” had he misunderstood? Or had all that just been the heat of the fricking moment?
Because there had been heat, searing, consuming heat when they’d made love. He’d been reborn in it, felt hope in it, up until he’d seen her ring—and now the suitcases.
Goddamn. This couldn’t be right. It couldn’t end like this. Something huge had happened to him when he’d seen her at the Sandovals’. Suddenly he’d seen a life for himself again, something beyond the day-to-day battle of staying alive, and for him, for the last seven months, it had been a battle every single fricking day. Somebody was always out to grease his ass.
He started toward the door into the living room, determined to do something, say something, anything, to make her understand, to apologize, whatever it took—and then he saw the body, a crumpled form in sequins and feathers lying next to the garden wall, drenched in blood.
Half a gallon of adrenaline instantly drop-loaded into his veins, switching on every survival instinct he had. He tightened his hold on the .45, wrapping his right hand around his left on the gun’s grip, his gaze raking the yard. The dead person wasn’t Nikki. He’d known that immediately. The body was too big, all long legs, muscular arms, and broad shoulders—the exact opposite of everything that was Nicole Alana McKinney.
The rest of the yard was clear. He ran his gaze over the body again, saw the mutilation that told him just exactly how much fucking trouble he was in, and all the while, he listened.
Listened for a breath, for a step, for any little snick of sound that would tell him where the killer was, where Nikki was, tell him she was still alive, still here.
Please, God. If she’d been taken from the house, the odds against them got so much worse. He wasn’t even going to consider the possibility of death—not hers, not tonight.
Then he heard it, the scrape of a chair and the clink of a cup being set on the kitchen table.
The assassin heard it, too.
Kid saw a shadow slide across the window in the other bedroom, and he moved to intercept, silently, quickly, from the patio into the main bathroom. He was waiting for the bastard, his knife in his hand, when the killer came down the hall.
Shooting him at close range with the .45 would have been effective, easy—and loud. The five-inch, razor-sharp Spyderco blade was just as effective and far quieter, but it came at a cost when the man instantly countered Kid’s attack and fought back, blocking Kid’s first strike.
Kid would have fought, too, if someone had been trying to slip a knife up under his skull to sever his brain stem, or stab him in the neck to slit his throat. He would have fought like a sonuvabitch, and the guy was—fighting for his life. The assassin got in a good hit with his elbow, catching Kid right on the mother-fricking bullet wound in his side. Pain, white hot, flashed over him like a strobe light on speed. Stars flashed in front of his eyes, but he didn’t make a sound, didn’t let go, and didn’t let up. The guy kicked and squirmed, until Kid body-slammed him hard into the doorjamb and stunned him enough to wrestle him to the floor. He got in one deep cut to the guy’s gut and jerked the blade upward—hard.
As added insurance, Kid took the assassin’s head in his hands and twisted, hard and fast, breaking the guy’s neck. The sound was unmistakable. He heard the snap loud and clear.
So did Nikki.
Her gasp brought his head around.
She was sitting at the table in the kitchen, on the other side of the living room, staring right at him, frozen in shock. The look of horror on her face did absolutely nothing to ease the rush of adrenaline coursing through him, jacking him up. He knew how he looked: frighteningly fierce, kneeling on a guy he’d just killed with a knife—killed, he might add, with a fair amount of skill. The guy had gone down, and except for whatever screwup had alerted the guy, and the resulting grappling around, Kid had taken him down almost without a sound. If there were other gunmen in the house, they didn’t know he was on the hunt.
But they knew someone was in the kitchen, someone who gasped out loud, and clinked her cup, and didn’t have a clue what kind of danger she was in.
Kid knew. He heard the soft crunch of a footstep on the grass runner in the hall behind the kitchen, and drew his pistol, his knee still firmly in the dead assassin’s back.
Nikki’s eyes widened, the blood draining from her face. In another life, he would have told her, “Honey, when a guy points a gun in your direction, duck, dive, run, anything, just move and keep moving.” But it was all over before he could have even gotten the word “honey” out of his mouth. The other killer cleared the hall; Kid covered him and squeezed the trigger twice, rapid-fire, on his Heckler & Koch .45—body shots. The guy dropped like a stone behind her.
Perfect. Now eve
rybody in a five-block radius knew somebody was shooting something. More likely, if Juan Conseco had sent more than two guys to murder him in his sleep, and they were paying attention, they knew el asesino fantasma was shooting something, probably their guys. The man he’d strangled had been carrying a silenced semiautomatic pistol. The guy he’d shot had been carrying the same, and he’d just squeezed off two full, hot loads with plenty of bang.
Aiming at the dead guy’s head, he rose to his feet and, standing between the man and Nikki, fired off another hollow-point bullet. He wasn’t taking any chances. He never took any chances.
He was across the living room and had Nikki by the arm and out of the chair before she could even get her mouth closed, let alone wipe the stunned expression off her face. Holding her close, he shielded her off to his right side as he put another bullet in the other killer, head shot. Neither of the bastards was ever getting up again. When Kid cleared a room, it stayed clear.
Turning her around, he hustled her back out the door to the patio. The house had been made. He’d been made, and that left only one thing to do: run like hell.
CHAPTER
4
Denver, Colorado
LIFT YOUR SIDE about two inches,” Travis James said, leaning back a bit from his ladder to see if the painting was lining up on the wall.
“Cripes, Travis, two minutes ago, you told me to lower it two inches, and it’s the middle of the freaking night,” his friend, Skeeter Bang, bitched.
“Hey, babe, you knew the deal,” he said, adjusting his side of the seven-by-five-foot painting after she moved her side. Then he tied it off.
The “deal,” when they’d negotiated it, hadn’t specifically included hard labor all night long, but Skeeter knew things didn’t always go as planned when a person was hanging a show for Nikki McKinney. This wasn’t pottery they were arranging. Nikki’s paintings—most of them of him, naked and in angel wings—ranged from large to extra-large.
It was tough work, yeah, but no tougher than Skeeter. She wasn’t going to walk. She needed him. For every hour she slaved for him, helping him put up Nikki and Rocky Solano’s show in the Toussi Gallery, he was going to slave for her—bare-chested and shrink-wrapped in blue Lycra tights, a mighty sword in his hands, Japanese kangi tattoos running down his arms. Tattoos that were damn hard to get off, and that she got to choose. And she chose the good stuff, just what he wanted on his body—Blood Warrior, and Scream Reaper, whatever the hell that was, and Dagger Death, real weird shit. She’d let him choose the first time she’d drawn him, but then complained that Peace, Love, Compassion, and Joy had thrown her off her vibe.
He thought her vibe was off all by itself, without any help from him. The character she had him playing, Kenshi the Avenger from her Star Drifter series, was not him. She was thinking of somebody else. He didn’t know who, but it was somebody who’d been places he couldn’t get to even in his imagination, which was strange. Nikki took him straight to hell most of the time, and he didn’t have any trouble getting there.
“How many more paintings are there?” she asked.
“Eight, and don’t get your panties all in a wad. Just be glad Rocky’s stuff is up.” Rocky Solano’s fabric art pieces were triple-extra-large, damned heavy, and unwieldy until they were in place. No place mats for that boy. No way.
“I . . . I feel faint,” she groaned, stopping halfway down the ladder and resting her head against a step.
“Oh, right. Faint.” He let out a short laugh. “You could kick my butt from here to Boulder all night long, which is why I called you. And you need me, which is why you’re here. You can’t afford to feel faint, Skeeter, and neither can I, not tonight.”
SKEETER made a face behind his back, the slave driver. But he had a point. She did need him, if she was ever going to get her Star Drifter series finished, and he definitely needed her, if he was going to get this show hung before Nikki got home.
His other helper, a small piece of crumb cake curled up in a corner of the gallery, sound asleep, wasn’t proving to be much help at all.
“What’s her name again?” she asked, gesturing at the girl.
“Jane Linden,” he said.
“And how much does Nikki pay her to sleep on the job?” The girl had been asleep since Skeeter had gotten to Toussi’s.
“She doesn’t work for Nikki. Hawkins hired her to help Katya around the gallery. She’s staying in the apartment upstairs.” The gallery was in LoDo, a restored historical neighborhood in Denver’s lower downtown, the place where Katya Hawkins had launched Nikki McKinney’s career last summer, super-launched it. Nikki was going places, and Skeeter was keeping tabs—not for herself, but for Kid Chronopolous, the poor sap. She loved him, but he was being a total idiot when it came to Nikki McKinney, who’d turned around and thrown a real wrench in the works by getting herself engaged to Rocky Solano. Skeeter’s own love life was far from perfect—well, actually, it was far from even existing—but even she knew you couldn’t hold on to a lover by completely ignoring them, and Kid had completely ignored Nikki McKinney since he’d left for South America last September. It was now March. Seven whole months.
“Street kid?” she asked, tilting her head toward the sleeping Jane.
“If Hawkins hired her, you know she’s got to be a certified juvenile delinquent with a rap sheet a mile long.”
Yeah, Skeeter knew. That’s what she’d been when Christian Hawkins, a.k.a. Superman, had pulled her in off the streets and given her a chance at a new life. Now she was a certified computer geek with a deadly roundhouse kick and a Heckler & Koch 9mm who did race-quality tune-ups on sixties-era muscle cars on the side.
She’d come a helluva long way in the last few years—and Travis was right, at five feet eight inches tall, and benching one seventy-five, she probably could kick his butt all the way to Boulder and back. It wasn’t that he wasn’t in shape. The guy was ripped—and plenty hot, with his golden, wheat-colored hair pulled back in a low ponytail, and ocean-blue eyes girls and gays seemed to just drown in—but he was also really, really nice, gave great neck massages, did yoga, for crying out loud, was a good listener, and believed with all his heart in conflict resolution, not confrontation.
In other words, he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the places she’d been.
“Should we wake Jane up and put her to bed?” she asked. The girl looked a little crumpled and darned uncomfortable where she’d fallen asleep across a couple of upholstered chairs.
“I don’t, well, uh, let’s just get finished here first.”
It was a subtle thing, just the barest hint of hesitation in his voice, but it was more than enough to fire up Skeeter’s imagination. Fighting a grin, she slanted her gaze back to Travis. He was sweet on the crumb cake.
Fascinating.
Women mobbed Travis James. A couple of women had actually followed him home from Nikki’s last show, presented themselves en déshabillé on his doorstep, and basically freaked him out. The risk was inherent. Over half of Nikki’s work featured him, in angel wings, in agony or ecstasy, either descending or ascending, and always completely in the nude. When Nikki painted him in Hell, he was post-Apocalyptic, shattered from the inside out, his wings in shreds, his body bleeding. On his way to Heaven, he was a rising god, pure as the driven snow, nearly transparent with bliss and light—and looked good enough to eat, which she was sure was exactly what those two women had had in mind.
Nikki McKinney was a genius, and Travis was the muse.
Skeeter knew that in comparison she was just a graffiti artist who’d taken her stuff off the city’s walls and thrown it on paper. But, hell, Travis inspired her, too, along with everyone else she knew. Unlike Nikki, she had a whole bunch of people she drew all the time, though a couple of them didn’t know it.
“Eight more paintings, huh.” She shifted her attention back to the stack against the wall. It was fine with her if he wanted to let the crumb cake sleep. Skeeter couldn’t see her face, but from the size
of her, she didn’t think Jane could haul eight more paintings up on the walls.
“Three of them are a triptych,” he said, as if that helped. “We’ll hang them last.”
Triptych, diptych, there were still eight paintings left to be hung.
“I’m going to need food.” Carbs, herbs, protein bar, a triple-whipped-cream mocha latte with chocolate sprinkles and an extra shot—anything.
“There’s a few things over on the table, next to . . . uh, Jane.”
Sheesh. She didn’t even bother to hide her grin this time. The guy was smitten.
Stepping down off the ladder, she went over to see what Mr. Twigs and Leaves might have brought for snacks. Skeeter liked an organic smoothie as well as the next person, and had more than one herbal concoction she swore by, but Travis was from Boulder, home of free-range supplemental fungi and antioxidant algae, and sometimes his idea of food looked more like compost to her.
And sometimes it looked darned good. On the table, she found a bag of tortillas, a container of organic herbal cheese spread, and a bunch of grapes—which solved her hunger problem beautifully.
Curious, she checked out the girl while she fixed herself some food. Jane had silky dark hair that fell halfway down her back. It was very shiny, and straight as a stick. Her shoulders were narrow, her butt definitely curvy under her designer jeans, and she had on a blue silk sweater to match her blue high heels—very uptown. She definitely looked expensive, at least from the rear. Travis seemed to have excellent taste in reformed delinquents.
Skeeter was halfway through her first tortilla and reaching for the grapes, when Jane stirred in her sleep. Taking another bite, she glanced over at the girl again—and came to a full-out stop in mid-chew.
Jane had rolled over onto her other side, revealing her face—and oh, cripes.
Oh, brother. Oh, cripes.
