by Tara Janzen
“Well, since she and this guy disappeared into the storage closet. People are asking for her. A lot of them came just to meet her, and Rocky, of course.”
Travis straightened up, curious. Nikki didn’t disappear with just anybody.
“What did this guy look like?”
“Tall, short dark hair, serious.” She slanted him a small grin, which he was glad to see. “Seriously cute. Not like anyone else here. Watchful. Extremely aware. Maybe some kind of bodyguard. Does Nikki have a bodyguard?”
“If she did, that would be the guy. Kid Chaos Chronopolous,” Travis said, not knowing for sure what to think. He knew the more time those two spent together, the better off they were going to be, but not if Kid was a marked man. Skeeter was afraid he was, complete with a bounty on his head, which didn’t freak her out nearly as much as it did him. SDF wasn’t a social club, she’d told him, then offered to take him up on the firing range again tomorrow.
For a dyed-in-the-wool pacifist, he was amazed how much he liked shooting, amazed at how much he liked all the stuff Skeeter showed him when she wasn’t busy drawing him, all the hand-to-hand combat and tactical pistol techniques, how to call the wind for a rifle shot at a thousand meters. Cool stuff, deadly stuff, the kind of stuff that Nikki had witnessed firsthand last night.
Man, he’d lived his life on the soft side. That was for damn sure. He doubted if a bunch of twelve-year-olds could have tied up Kid Chaos, which was something he’d been thinking about all day, ever since he’d seen those sketches and asked the age-old guy question: Could he have done what Kid had done?
Could he have saved Nikki from those men?
Could he have saved himself?
The verdict was still out, but he was hoping the answer was going to be “not yet,” rather than “no.”
Skeeter could have done it. He knew that much. The girl had mad, mad skills.
“Does Nikki need a bodyguard?” Jane asked. The question had a real curiosity behind it, almost like a professional curiosity—this from a girl who ran wild on the streets of Denver alone in the middle of the night with a silver switchblade in her pocket.
“Maybe.” And he hated even thinking it.
Someone jostled him from behind, and at the same time, a man walked between them and stopped, completely unaware that he was literally in the middle of their conversation.
Travis grinned at her over the guy’s shoulder, and for a second, she grinned back. Then the man moved on, and her smile faded.
She was definitely nervous around him, and not in a good way, he didn’t think.
“There are way too many people in the gallery tonight,” she said, looking around, scanning the crowd.
Travis followed her gaze. She had a point.
There were a lot of people in Toussi’s, some of them on the strange side, but in truth, nothing wilder or more outlandish than at a few of the parties he and Nikki had gone to in New York and L.A.
“Yeah, there’s a lot,” he agreed.
“Raymond is here. Outside,” she said, then gave a small shrug, as if the news wasn’t as awful as it sounded. “That’s why the Rats are inside. They’re scared.”
“Are you?” He remembered Fast Jack talking about Raymond, the gang leader he wanted Jane to meet with tomorrow at Connie’s Bagels.
“No. Concerned,” she said. “But I wouldn’t mind if there was some professional muscle around.”
Travis brought his gaze back to her. Something told him she was more than “concerned.” He remembered one night on the street when he’d wished he’d had some professional muscle around.
“If it’s Kid with Nikki, he’s about as professional as it gets, and he’ll be armed.”
“Skeeter Bang carries a pistol, too,” she said. “I noticed the other night, and she’s here.” She was still scanning the crowd, checking things out—avoiding his gaze.
Yeah, and Skeeter could kick butt, but if the night had reached a point where Jane thought she needed Kid and Skeeter to kick butt, it was time for a reality check.
“Katya and Suzi usually have a rent-a-cop at these things. Do you want me to go find him?”
“And what? Tell him there are Parkside Bloods cruising LoDo in black Escalades?” She let out a little snort. “There are always Parkside Bloods in black Escalades on the streets. The cops probably know where they are better than I do.”
She had the most amazing way of making him feel like an idiot and incredibly naïve about how her life worked, with Rats and Raymond and street gangs.
“I have a friend, a cop in Boulder. I could call him if you like, tell him what’s going on. He won’t ask for incriminating details, but he can tell us what he thinks.”
She didn’t say anything, just shrugged again, which left the field wide open for him to compound his idiocy.
“Or would you rather I minded my own business and left you alone?” He truly didn’t know. She’d kissed him, yeah, but that was just one kiss, one moment of acknowledging his existence out of weeks of completely ignoring him. Maybe, for that one moment, she’d thought he was somebody else, somebody who ran from the cops and hid in old buildings, somebody living on the edge of danger, though he hadn’t found Weisman to be all that dangerous.
“No, I don’t think we should call your friend,” she finally said. “The cops and I—well . . .” She let her sentence die unfinished, but he got the gist of it. What he had to offer didn’t have any worth in her world, and if he’d just get a clue, he could figure that out.
It frustrated him, this culture gap that seemed to open up and swallow him with damning regularity every time he tried to get close to her.
“Jane, I don’t go around bullying children, or trying to shake down old people on the street, and I have never once in my life hit someone with violent intent, but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand the problem you have here or that I can’t help you with it. I may be a regular, boring, nice guy, but guys like me make good friends.”
Her gaze finally shifted to meet his. “You’ve never hit anybody? Ever?” She sounded dumbstruck by the concept.
Well, now he’d gone and done it, he thought, confessed all his sins and shocked her with his lack of depravity. Christ. Didn’t she know any regular, nice guys? Or were all the guys in her life Fast Jack hustlers and capped homies? He hoped not. She deserved better. He knew she wanted better for herself, or she wouldn’t be here tonight, trying to do her job, trying to fit in. She’d be out on the street, running with the Rats and trying to stay out of Raymond’s clutches.
God, he hated the image that conjured up.
“Never,” he admitted, then added fuel to the flames. “The Violins for Nonviolence in the Home concert Jack found the ticket stubs to in my wallet? I was one of the sponsors of the event. No kidding. I give money to people to promote not hitting each other. Crazy, huh? I mean, you’ve seen my car. I’m not exactly rolling in cash like this guy Raymond who you’re telling me has a whole bunch of Cadillac Escalades so he can drive around in luxury while he terrorizes little kids.”
“Raymond isn’t my friend. He’s more like an enemy.”
“And I’m so boring, I don’t even have an enemy.”
“You’re lucky.”
“I’m lonely.” It was the truth, and he couldn’t stand there looking at her, wanting her, and losing something he’d never even had without telling her. She’d kissed him, and all those fantasies that haunted his nights had paled in comparison to the reality of holding her in his arms. “I’ve been lonely since the first time I saw you, Jane. It’s crazy, I know, but it’s the truth.”
And how was that for laying his guts out on the line? He’d never done that before. He was usually a little smoother, not much, but a little.
“Last night,” she started, then paused, trying to continue holding his gaze and failing. “The kiss, it was nice.”
Nice?
He was doomed. He’d just confessed his undying fascination with her, and she’d dismissed his kiss
as nice.
“But if you knew me better,” she continued, “you wouldn’t have done it.” She paused again, her color deepening with embarrassment. “If you knew me at all, you’d wish you hadn’t.”
Talk about laying your guts out on the line. Every instinct he had told him she’d just made a confession far worse than his. She’d just left out the facts.
“Skeeter told me all about the drug dealing,” he said. “The whole Castle Rat thing when you were a kid.”
“But I bet she didn’t tell you about the man I killed.”
Uh, no.
For a moment, all he could do was stare at her.
“It’s why I got sent up,” she said. “Hawkins knows. He’s the one who got my conviction reduced for self-defense. He’s the one who arranged for me to do my time at the Immaculate Heart School for Young Women in Phoenix.”
“You killed a man.” He was dumbstruck.
“Me and Sandman, yeah.” Her gaze never left the floor.
He remembered Fast Jack talking about Sandman.
“It was self-defense, a situation kind of like tonight, with too many Rats on the street and the gangbangers looking for trouble. They grabbed one of my kids, and by the time Sandman and I got him back, the gang guy was dead.”
She came to a halt and glanced up, and he knew it was his turn to say something—preferably something full of understanding and compassion.
But he was blown away for a second, and in the next second, she’d taken a step back.
“Jane.” He reached for her, feeling guilty as hell, but she stepped backward again, eluding him.
“You’re not a regular guy, Travis, not even close.” Something behind him caught her eye, her gaze flickering in that direction. When her attention returned to him, her expression was even more distressed than before. “You’re so much of everything beyond regular, it scares me,” she said, then turned and fled.
He watched her leave, completely nonplussed. Raymond was outside, dogging the streets for Rats, and she was afraid of him, a part-time emergency medical technician and sometimes nude male model? Well, that put him in his place. He was about to go after her, but someone caught his sleeve.
He turned around. Dammit. She could have warned him. But it was too late now. He was trapped.
“You’re Travis James, aren’t you?” the woman who had hold of his arm said. “I told my friends it was you.”
Her friends comprised a group of seven other women, a daunting group of well-dressed thirty-something professional women with a certain look in their eyes that told him they’d spent a little too much time looking at him naked.
He smiled on the outside, and swore on the inside, and wished like hell that he’d run off with Jane.
NIKKI had turned him to butter.
Kid had made a half-assed attempt to talk her into going back into the gallery and getting out of the closet, but instead, she’d sat him down in the chair and started rattling on about the massage techniques Travis used in his sexual imprinting business, and about how he looked a little pale and could probably use a little massage—whatever the hell that meant. He really didn’t have a clue. All he knew for sure was that she’d put her hands on the back of his neck and shoulders and turned him to butter.
Which wasn’t such a bad consistency to be, he realized, when she dropped her bombshell.
“I never slept with Rocky,” she said. “We never had sex.”
The closet hadn’t changed much. There was still a desk, a chair, a rack of clothes, and some paintings stacked against the wall, all of it crammed into a small space with a window facing onto the alley. Light from the street lamps on Seventeenth dimly lit the interior.
“No sex,” he said bluntly, getting a little of that “head-swimming” feeling he’d had last night again.
“I’m not going to tell you I didn’t kiss him, because I did, but—”
“No sex.” He hated to get stuck in one spot, but that couldn’t be right. “The guy asked you to marry him, Nikki.”
“I know he did, but—well, it’s been kind of a whirlwind since I met him, all the parties, L.A., New York, and he was in Paris for a while, and well, we just never got together.”
Geezus, she’d just turned him completely around again.
“Excuse me, but if I remember this correctly, it took us about all of five seconds flat to get together last night.”
Hell, more like two seconds, but who was counting?
He was, dammit. Two seconds and she’d been his, walking away from the poker table, holding on to his hand.
“Are you telling me the guy hasn’t had five seconds?” He didn’t believe it.
Her fingers stilled on the back of his neck.
“He’s in a wheelchair, Kid,” she said, sounding slightly exasperated.
“And if I was in a wheelchair, I would have my hand up your skirt so fast, it . . . it . . .” It would make her head swim, the same way his was swimming—in a big old pool of “no way in hell.”
How could the guy love her enough to marry her, and not love her like that?
“Sometimes he’s in pain,” she said, starting up again with the neck massage.
And he hadn’t been in pain last night? Hell, he was still in pain—patched up, sewn together, and Band-Aided.
“It isn’t going to work,” he said.
“Not if you’re going to get all tense. Try to relax your shoulders.”
Screw his shoulders. “I mean the whole he’s-in-pain Rocky thing. The whole goddamn engagement thing. Unless he’s going to be in pain forever, he’s going to want to make love to you, and when he does, I’m going to want to—” What? he wondered, stopping and asking himself the question of the hour. What was he going to do? Kick Rocky Solano’s ass?
Not very bloody damned likely.
“You’re getting all tense again.”
“You have to call it off.”
“I did.”
“No, I mean right now, tonight.” He was not going to stand by and let her marry the freaking genius fiber artist, or anybody else, for that damn matter.
“I did.”
“Geezus, Nikki. You’re in love with me, not him, and I think it’s time we just faced the facts and tried to—”
She’d called it off.
“When?” he asked, turning in the chair so he could see her.
“The night he decided he was feeling good enough to take our relationship to the next level, so to speak. The next day, I was on a plane to Panama.”
Good. That was very good.
“So why were you wearing his ring last night?” The damn thing had damn near given him a heart attack when he’d finally noticed it.
“Sandovals’ is a pretty flashy crowd,” she said. “Especially when Rico and Luis declare it a Carnival night. So out came the sequins and the tiaras and Rocky’s ring.”
Of course. He could have figured that one out for himself, if he’d been in a logical frame of mind. But his logic was never on the same page as his feelings for Nikki. Hell, he couldn’t even get logic and Nikki in the same book.
“You should have given it back the night you called it off. That’s the way I would have wanted it, a clean break.” Bullshit. He wouldn’t have wanted any “break” at all, and he bet old Rocky hadn’t, either.
“I tried,” she said, leaning forward and resting her knee on the chair, and giving him all sorts of ideas that did not in any way fit in with his plan to grow up and let her have Paris. “But he wanted me to keep it, until I had a chance to see you and find out how I felt.”
A pitiful, last-ditch effort, but Kid didn’t blame the guy. He would have tried every trick he had to keep her, too.
“So how do you feel?” he asked, trying not to sound too goddamn insecure.
“I don’t know, Kid,” she said, climbing into his lap and basically confusing the hell out of him. Settling in, she looped her arms around his neck. “I’m feeling a little hot. What about you?”
Definitely hot
.
Dangerously hot.
“Do you want to see something?” she asked.
Hell, yeah, he nodded, pretty much riveted in place by the possibilities of what she might do. When she lifted her hand to the top of her dress and released the first button, his Let Her Go To Paris plan started to smoke.
One by one, the buttons came undone under his gaze, until her dress fell partway open.
“Wow,” was the first thing to come out of his mouth, then, “You’ve got cleavage.” Nikki never had cleavage. Her breasts were small, sweet, perfect, but there wasn’t enough of them to make cleavage.
“Do you like it? It’s a push-up demibra.”
A freaking hot push-up demibra, cherry red lace with black satin ribbons.
He couldn’t help himself, he ran his fingers over the little mounds of her breasts, and Paris went up in flames. He’d never seen them like this, all pushed together and a little wobbly. It made him hot all over. “I love it, Nikki. It’s so sexy.”
“I wore it for you,” she said. “I was going to have Skeeter let me back into your apartment after the show, and wait for you in your bed wearing nothing but my undies.”
He looked up at her. All the time he’d been thinking he’d lost her, that he was going to walk away for good, she’d been arranging herself into a cherry red push-up demibra for him?
Geez, he was a clueless sonuvabitch.
But he knew what to do with Nicole Alana McKinney—what he never should have stopped doing, not for seven long and lonely months.
Reaching up, he slid his hand around the back of her neck and drew her mouth down to his. He kissed her softly at first, then more deeply, letting his tongue play inside her mouth, letting the taste and feel of her get him hard.
And she kissed him back, her hands in his hair, holding him. Her tongue slid across his teeth, exploring his palate, invading him on every front, and he gave himself over to it—soft lips crushed against his, her breath on his skin, the taste of her in his mouth. They kissed forever, deliberately, erotically, until he was drugged with the sensation of her body moving against his, pressing him back into the chair. She consumed him, kiss after kiss, until he was so hard he couldn’t think and all he wanted was to be inside her.
