by Tara Janzen
At the front door, he pulled out his key to let himself in, a nice cheery “hello” ready to go so he didn’t scare the crap out of her, when he noticed her standing in the middle of the gallery, looking up at the triptych.
And looking and looking.
And looking—easily breaking the record for the longest time she’d ever spent looking at him in real life.
So maybe she liked him naked and going to hell—because that’s what was happening in the painting, without a doubt. Nikki was never ambiguous when she tortured him. She made him bleed. She tore him and his wings to shreds. The way she smeared the paint over the super-enlarged photographs she took of him in her studio made him look broken. People found the dark angel paintings disturbing. Some of them disturbed even him, like the triptych. It was especially raw—and Jane couldn’t take her eyes off of it, which just fascinated the hell out of him.
He wasn’t sure what it meant exactly, but it at least meant she wasn’t nearly as oblivious of him as she’d been letting on. He hoped. When he looked at Nikki’s work, he saw only what Nikki had created, which wasn’t really him. Maybe Jane didn’t see him either, but saw only Nikki’s creation.
Yeah, that was probably it.
Damn. There was just no way for him to make this work.
He lifted the key to the lock again, then stopped when she moved away from the large paintings to a smaller piece he and Skeeter had hung on the west wall. It was another of him, about six feet in height, more life-size than oversize, an ascending angel Nikki had printed in a creamy sepia and painted over in yellows, gold, and blues. He tended to like the ascending angels better, because at heart he was basically kind of an easygoing, “ascending”-type guy. Not too much angst in his real life, other than not being able to get laid by Jane the way he’d been fantasizing, but that was just regular guy stuff, nothing too life-threatening, no matter how much he wanted it. Or at least that’s what he’d been telling himself. The only thing he didn’t like about the ascending angels was that Nikki always made him look too good. In real life, he didn’t glow, his skin wasn’t perfectly smooth, and his face . . . well, his face really wasn’t angelic, not the way Nikki made him look.
Not the way Jane looked.
God, she was so wildly different from the other women he knew.
She stepped around one of Rocky’s fabric pieces to get closer to the painting, and his gaze slid down her body. Without a doubt, in anybody’s book, she had a world-class ass. He tried not to think about it too much, the same way he tried not to think about her breasts too much, because it was hard on him, but for someone who was kind of small everywhere else, she really filled out a sweater.
And here he was, half turned on and freezing his butt off. Typical. He ought to just go home and forget about his pack. There wasn’t anything in it he couldn’t get by without until Nikki could get it to him.
Slipping the key back in his pocket, he started to turn and go, when she did something that stopped him in his tracks.
She touched the painting, touched him, sliding her fingers over his eyebrows, down his nose, and lingering on his mouth, the tips of her fingers outlining his lips, which pretty much riveted him to the spot.
Painted angel or not, that was his mouth.
Slowly, she traced over his shoulder, following the curve of his muscle down to his arm, then traced the length of his outstretched arm to his hand. One by one, she set her fingertips to his, then pressed her palm flat against the canvas.
She was so close to the painting, he could almost feel her brushing up against him, how the softness of her sweater would feel against his chest, the texture of her jeans against his groin, and suddenly, even with the snow blowing around him, he wasn’t cold.
He took a breath and let it out, nice and easy. Ridiculously, this was working for him, the voyeurism of it all, watching her explore him, her hand so small against the lines of his body, her fingers so gently following the curves of muscle and ridges of bone beneath his skin.
She slid her hand to his chest and down his rib cage, continuing her journey, and then, just as things promised to get really damned interesting, she stopped.
It took him a second to realize she was walking away, he’d been so focused on all the possibilities of where her hand was going next. But it wasn’t going anywhere.
Damn. If he’d needed any more proof of how hard up he was, he’d just gotten it. He was so lonely for a girl, it was pitiful, and the one he was lonely for, the one he wanted, was her, the wild one who wouldn’t give him the time of day.
He watched her thread a path toward the back of the gallery, but when she got there, instead of heading up the stairs to her apartment, she reached for her coat.
Now what in the hell? he wondered, but not for very long.
Sitting down on the bottom step, she kicked off the heels she’d been wearing, slipped into a pair of boots, and started lacing them up.
He couldn’t believe it. She was going somewhere? In the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of lower downtown? Making three of the worst moves he could imagine in one fell swoop?
She’d told Skeeter she would take care of all the loose Castle Rats running around, but he hadn’t thought she’d meant tonight, in the cold and the dark and the damned dangerous. It was one thing for Skeeter Bang to cruise the streets alone. He knew she had a switchblade in a sheath on her hip, a Heckler & Koch 9mm holstered at the small of her back, and a reputation that guaranteed she wouldn’t need either, not in this part of town. If Jane had a weapon anywhere on her, he sure as hell hadn’t seen it, and he’d spent plenty of time checking her out tonight.
So this was perfect—perfectly bad, any way he looked at it.
She slipped into a black hoodie and put her wool coat on over the top. A black knit hat came out of one pocket, a pair of gloves out of the other, all of the gear telling him he was in for a long, cold hike somewhere. Damn. He zipped his coat up a little higher, pulled his own hat down lower. She didn’t have a car, so it wasn’t going to do him any good to fire up his Jeep again, and there was no way in hell for him to let her go out into the city alone, no matter how many little Castle Rats she had waiting for her somewhere.
She’d probably be damn hard to follow, but he didn’t see any way around it. The chances of her inviting him along were between slim and none, weighted heavily toward none.
He set off for the corner of the building. Even in his mountain parka, he could feel the cold. He hoped her hoodie and coat were a helluva lot warmer than they looked. At the alley, he waited, his body up against the bricks, until Toussi’s back door opened. For a brief moment she was silhouetted in the light, then the door fell closed. A second later he saw her take off, heading away from him, and he started out after her.
And this, he told himself, was what happened to guys who got badass crushes on girls who’d spent their formative years running wild on the streets. Those guys got curious about where wild girls went in the night, real curious, curious enough to follow them into the darkened alleys and deserted streets of lower downtown at four o’clock in the morning—common sense be damned.
CHAPTER
11
30,000 feet over the Caribbean Sea
WELL, IF THIS WASN’T the longest goddamn flight Kid had ever taken from Panama, he didn’t want to be on the one that was. His side was killing him.
Sure, Dr. Varria had given him a packet of Vicodin, but jacking himself up with narcotics wasn’t really an option, not on a commercial flight, not until he had Nikki safely at SDF headquarters on Steele Street in Denver.
Taking a breath, he tried to situate himself differently in his seat, tried to find a position that didn’t hurt like hell—and failed. So he raised his hand and signaled the flight attendant for another beer. He’d already had two first-class in-flight breakfasts and was thinking about ordering a third. Eggs and beer, it didn’t get any better than that.
Yeah, right.
He glanced
at Nikki, sleeping soundly in the seat next to him. Her empty wineglass was on his tray with a bunch of snack wrappers and beer bottles. After the night they’d had, he was glad she’d been able to unwind enough to get some sleep. It was better for her and easier on him.
The DEA guys had stuck with them until liftoff, so the dreaded I-know-how-angry-you-are talk had not taken place, which really was for the best, whether she knew it or not. The wine had done the rest.
He took a long swallow of the beer when it arrived, and then took a deep breath. He had to give her the gold wedding rings. It didn’t matter that she’d called him a savage. It didn’t matter that she honestly didn’t have a clue how pissed off he really was about Rocky Solano, or that he was probably way underestimating how angry she might be with him for not calling her since September.
Okay, that sounded bad. In the jungle, it hadn’t seemed so long. In real life, he figured it was long enough to win him the Jerk of the Year award.
Regardless, he’d half killed himself getting the damn rings, and he had to hand them over.
Just not yet.
The timing was bad, even if they felt like a lead weight hanging around his neck.
Yeah, he thought, taking another swallow of beer. This wasn’t the place. Being trapped on an airplane with a woman when you gave her the wedding rings you’d taken off her dead parents’ bones was probably not a good idea under the best of circumstances. Under the worst of circumstances, which they had, no thanks to him and the goddamn bounty on his head, it was just asking for disaster. Even if the circumstances had been better, Nikki deserved her privacy when she received the rings. He may be a freaking savage, but he did know that.
Yeah, she deserved a lot of things—probably none of them him. And wasn’t that the bottom line, the truth as best as he’d been able to see it for months? She deserved better. It was as simple as that, and Nikki being a smart girl, she’d gone and figured it out for herself.
And if he was going to get maudlin, he probably didn’t need any more beer.
He set the bottle down and signaled for the flight attendant to clear his tray. With luck, in a few more minutes, the alcohol would kick in and he could get some sleep, too. The cabin was dark, with just a few low lights on toward the front, and the sun hadn’t yet started rising over the Caribbean. There were two other first-class passengers two rows back. The rest of the plane wasn’t much fuller.
His gaze strayed back to Nikki. He’d bought her a silk T-shirt and a matching skirt in the airport and given her other clothes to the DEA guys. The blood on her dress had been Hernando Sanchez’s. The man he’d killed in the hallway had been Javier Mancos. Both bodies had still been in the house when the police had gotten there. Both had been positively identified by the Panamanian police as members of Juan Conseco’s organization. The police had picked up another man, too. So far, he’d told them nothing, but Conseco’s mark was on him, a tattooed C in the shape of a fer-de-lance, its fangs showing.
Kid was going to be watching his ass for a long, long time.
He started to settle in, when Nikki stirred in her sleep, a frown creasing her brow. Then, suddenly, she jerked awake with a gasp.
He caught her halfway out of her seat and got himself clobbered. Twice. Once with her knee as she twisted around, flailing, and once with her hand across the side of his face. The first injury damn near doubled him over, shit; the second woke him up the hard way.
Christ.
“Nikki. Nikki.” He grabbed her hands and pulled her close, trying to keep any more damage to a minimum. She was wild-eyed, her body stiff and unyielding. “Nikki, shhhh. It’s okay.”
“Kid.” Her breathing was ragged.
“You’re okay, Nikki.”
“It was the . . . the gunshots, and . . . the blood everywhere. I was reading, no, having tea, the kitchen was cooler, and . . .” Her voice trailed off, as if she realized she wasn’t quite making sense. Then her gaze fell to his cheek, and he felt her soften in his arms. “Oh, Kid, I hit you.”
“It’s okay, Nikki. I’m fine.” And his face was fine. It was the rest of him that suddenly felt like pure crap again, inside and out. He knew which gunshots had woken her up. His. “You were having a nightmare. That’s all.” A bloody fucking nightmare about him blowing the hell out of Sanchez and Mancos.
“There was another body, in the garden,” she said, a tremor in her voice. “I saw it when we ran through the backyard. I think it was one of the guys who was singing at Sandoval’s, a man named Martin.”
Oh, Christ. She’d seen the transvestite.
“Those men you killed, I’m pretty sure they’d done something to him, to Martin’s face or something.” She ran her fingers up into her hair in an absent gesture, her gaze losing some of its focus, as if she was trying to remember—which he really wished she wouldn’t do. “It was dark. I couldn’t quite see, we were moving so fast, but something was wrong, very wrong. I felt it. When I fell asleep, I could see his face more clearly, and what I saw scared me. Then you were there, and”—she took a shaky breath, her gaze coming back to him—“and for a moment, I didn’t know who you were.”
More than the wind went out of him at her declaration. Everything went out of him, and he was suddenly, completely drained, especially of his anger.
There was no place for it here tonight, not with her, and there shouldn’t have been earlier, either, when the two of them had been lying in bed after making love.
Geezus. He really was the world’s biggest jerk.
“It’s okay, Nikki,” he said, lifting the armrest between their seats. “I saw the body, too.” And please, please, please don’t want to talk about it.
“You did?”
Hell. She was trembling, and she looked exhausted, with circles under her eyes and her skin pale. There were sleep lines on her cheek, where she’d been resting her head against the edge of her seat.
“Yes. I saw it before I came in the house,” he told her. “That’s why I was looking for those other guys.”
“With a knife.”
“Yes, with a knife.” And enough stone-cold deliberation to get the job done—and then some. Shit.
A heavy sigh went out of her, and he could tell she was still confused by all of it, still about half asleep. What she needed was to be completely asleep. Exhaustion on top of shock was a recipe for disaster.
Settling back against the window, he stretched his legs out and cradled her in his arms, and was incredibly grateful when she didn’t say anything else about what he’d done with the knife or question what he was doing now, but just went with it, getting closer, lying down with him. A soft breath went out of her as she relaxed along the length of him, which was exactly where she belonged—cared for, protected.
God, Nikki.
He kissed the top of her head.
Her hair was a mess, of course, silky and wild, black and purple, and she was right. The guy’s name had been Martin Chivay.
She relaxed even deeper against him on another sigh, and for just a moment, he thought she’d fallen back asleep.
“Kid?”
“Hmmm?”
“I’m angry, too.”
Perfect.
She let out a long yawn and snuggled closer. “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”
Sure. Great. Anything was better than talking about her anger or poor Martin Chivay.
“I flunked the third grade.”
She lifted her head up and looked at him. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“But you’re the smartest guy I know.”
Well, if she’d ever wanted to knock him over with a feather, now would be a good time. She lived with a college professor, her grandfather.
“How do you figure?” he asked, truly curious.
She gave a little shrug of the most beautiful shoulders he’d ever seen, before settling back on top of him. “You just know stuff, all kinds of stuff, and you’re really aware of everyone and everything around y
ou—way more aware than about ninety-nine percent of the people on the planet.”
He was a sniper, he could have told her. He’d been trained to be aware of everything, every sound, every scent, every shadow.
Yawning again, she rested her head back on his chest. “Tell me more. Talk me back to sleep, Kid, and don’t let go of me, just . . . just because.”
He wasn’t going to let go, no matter how angry they were with each other. This was too perfect, the way it should always be between the two of them.
“I’ve either skied or boarded every single run at Mary Jane and A-Basin,” he said, after thinking a moment. “From the bunny trails to the chutes, and I mean the badass chutes where only the big boys go.”
“And the big girls,” she murmured.
“What girls? There aren’t any girls up in big-boy territory.”
She let out a little snort. “They’re up there.”
“How would you know, Nik?” She didn’t ski, or climb, or kayak, or bike, or do too damn much of anything athletic. She ordered out pizza and painted her toenails to look like windows in a house. She sewed her own clothes and painted shooting stars on her legs. She played with makeup and broke his heart on every breath.
“I’ve seen them on TV, real girls on real mountains. So there.”
She painted Hawkins naked.
“I’ve . . . uh, always wanted to go camping in a yurt,” he said. “One of those ski-in and ski-out trips over the divide.”
Thank God, Creed had more sense.
“Too cold for me.”
“The yurts have stoves.”
“Still too cold for me,” she said, then, as if to prove it, snuggled even closer to him. “Tell me a deep dark secret.”
No way. His deep dark secrets were classified and guaranteed to give her more nightmares, but there had to be something.
There was.
Geezus, he couldn’t believe he was going to go there for her—but he was. Shit. He took a deep breath, then let it out.
“I’ve never seen a porno movie.”
