by Tara Janzen
CRAZY HEARTS
Dylan and Skeeter
Tara Janzen
www.TaraJanzen.com
Copyright © 2020 by Tara Janzen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Cover Design and Interior Format by The Killion Group, Inc.
Contents
Praise For…
Also by Tara Janzen
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Hello Dear Readers!
Bonus Story!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Epilogue
Want More…?
About the Author
PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF
TARA JANZEN
CRAZY COOL
“Wild nonstop action, an interesting subplot, a tormented-but-honorable and brilliant bad boy and a tough girl, and great sex scenes make Janzen’s…romance irresistible.”
–Booklist
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CRAZY KISSES
“Sultry sex, harrowing adventure, fantastic characters, what more could you ask for?”
–Fresh Fiction
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“The high-action plot, the savage-but-tender hero, and the wonderfully sensual sex scenes, Janzen’s trademarks, make this as much fun as the prior Crazy titles.”
–Booklist
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CUTTING LOOSE
“Bad boys are hot, and they don’t come any hotter than the Steele Street gang…This novel is smoking in the extreme!”
–Romantic Times
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“A non-stop thrill ride…Don’t miss CUTTING LOOSE.”
–Romance Reviews Today
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LOOSE AND EASY
“Sexual tension crackles and snaps…Crossing and double-crossing is on most of the characters’ agendas which keeps the pace fast and the action sharp… Janzen’s place in the romantic suspense pantheon is assured.”
–Romantic Times
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RIVER OF EDEN
“One of the most breathtaking and phenomenal adventure tales to come along in years! [Tara Janzen] has created an instant adventure classic. Make tracks and get your hands on a copy of this book today!
–Jill M. Smith for RT
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THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE
“Magnificent storytelling, complex, flesh-and-blood characters. The Chalice and the Blade is so compelling, I read it in one sitting.”
–Iris Johansen New York Times bestselling author
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“An enthralling, exhilarating rush of a read.
– Amanda Quick New York Times bestselling author
Also by Tara Janzen
THE STEELE STREET BOOKS
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Want more heart-stopping action,
sizzling suspense,
and breathless passion?
Read the whole Steele Street series!
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Crazy Hot
Crazy Cool
Crazy Wild
Crazy Kisses
Crazy Love
Crazy Sweet
On the Loose
Cutting Loose
Loose and Easy
Breaking Loose
Loose Ends
Crazy Hearts
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OTHER BOOKS BY TARA JANZEN
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River of Eden
The Chalice Trilogy:
The Chalice and the Blade
Dream Stone
Prince of Time
Chapter One
4th of July, 738 Steele Street, Denver, Colorado
Dylan Hart stood on the rooftop of 738 Steele Street, sipping a smooth, single malt Scotch and doing his damnedest to enjoy the sunset. It was spectacular, the craggy peaks of the Rockies backlit by a color–drenched sky streaked with clouds. Abso-fricking-lutely gorgeous – but not enough to hold his attention.
He shifted his gaze back to the city streets and the dark alley below, checking for trouble, looking for anything out of place or for anybody going against the grain. Two days back from their last mission out of Qatar, and he was still in battle mode, still on full alert, still ready and waiting for the worst of whatever happened next.
Right. Battle mode in a pair of flip-flops, board shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt. The only thing happening next was dinner.
“You’re thinking too hard, boss,” his teammate Christian Hawkins, a.k.a. Superman, said. “I can smell your brain burning from here.”
“That’s the steak you’re smelling, not my brain,” Dylan said, turning around to face the somewhat disconcerting sight of one of the world’s most kickass operators manning a barbeque grill and wearing a baby backpack complete with a baby, a bottle, and a binky. “Maybe it’s time for you to give those rib-eyes a flip.”
“They’re still mooing.” Christian poked the nearest steak with his finger, testing its temperature. In the backpack, the baby burbled and babbled and kicked. When one of his booties fell off, Dylan bent down to pick it up.
“Rare is good,” he said, wrestling the little knitted shoe back on Hawkins’s youngest, Hank. “Still mooing is even better.”
At five-months old, Hank was built like an Abrams tank - an Abrams tank wearing knitted palm tree booties, a teeny Hawaiian shirt to match his dad’s, and a sun hat that looked like a coconut on his head.
Geezus, Dylan thought. When had all this happened?
He looked around the rooftop at a sea of Hawaiian shirts, sarongs, orchid leis, and little kids, at tables laden with potato salad, vegetable trays, cherry pies and chocolate cake – standard operating procedure, SOP, for Steele Street’s Independence Day rooftop picnic. The tradition went back to their chop shop days, when, as a bunch of bona fide juvenile delinquents, they’d grilled hotdogs on the roof and hoped to score a couple of six packs to celebrate the Fourth of July. The Hawaiian shirts had come later, fifteen-year-old Glenlivet even later, and long after the shirts and the single malt, women and children and sarongs and binkies, unimaginable in the early years, had rolled into Steele Street like a runaway train.
Life was good.
He took another sip of Scotch.
Maybe too good.
“Flip the steaks, Superman,” Creed Rivera hollered from across the rooftop, lifting his beer bottle in salute with a tow-headed, blue-eyed, eighteen-month-old beauty named Olivia sitting on his shoulders, her little fingers clutching handfuls of the Jungle Boy’s hair.
“Flip ‘em,” another of Steele Street’s kickass operators, Red Dog, added her vote. Dressed in a luminous blue sarong she only looked about half as deadly as usual. The girl had mad fighting skills.
A curvaceous, buxom blonde – with no fighting skills whatsoever - crossed over to the grill and stretched up on tiptoe to kiss Christian’s cheek.
“Burn one for me, babe,” Katya “Bad Luck” Hawkins told her husband. Two little kids trailed in her wake. At six years old, Alexandria was the “boss of everybody.” A position
hotly contested by her younger brother, three-year-old Wes. Hank had yet to complain about his older sister’s authoritarian streak.
And smack dab in the middle of all the action was Dylan’s own little brood, one sinfully gorgeous, long-legged blonde named Skeeter chasing a two-year-old, dark-haired cherub with Dylan’s independent streak and a little pair of eyebrows shaped exactly like his daddy’s - Grady Hart.
As always, just looking at the two of them made Dylan’s chest tighten in a slightly painful way.
That was what the good life gave a guy – heartburn. A world-class case of it.
He dug in the pocket of his board shorts and came up with a roll of antacids. Four of them went in his mouth. The rest he tucked into his shirt pocket, damn certain he’d need them all before the night was through.
He’d been home for two days and was leaving again in three. An old enemy had surfaced in Panama City, Vasily Nikolayevich, a former FSB agent turned illegal arms dealer. Dylan’s boss, General Buck Grant, and a whole lot of other people in Washington, D.C. wanted to know who the Russian was dealing with and what he was selling – and if necessary, how to stop him.
All Dylan wanted was to stay home with his son and make love to his wife, but he’d been tagged for the job.
Skeeter knew the score. She had her own place on the Special Defense Force, SDF, team, the group of black-ops shadow warriors housed at 738 Steele Street in Denver who specialized in doing the Defense Department’s dirty work.
Yeah, Skeeter knew the score, but being a mother had clipped her wings a bit, and she was getting restless.
Restless women made Dylan nervous.
A restless wife gave him heartburn.
Skeeter finally caught up with bad boy Grady, a.k.a Puppy, Bubba, Sweetie-pie, and Cutie-pants, when he scrambled into the wading pool. He was in good company. His best friend, Jesse Rivera, Olivia’s twin brother, was already in the water, splashing around under the watchful eye of his mother, Cody.
Honestly, there were so many kids at Steele Street these days, Dylan was losing count. Instead of SDF, he thought they should be calling themselves FERTILE.
Skeeter bent down and kissed the top of Grady’s head, but before Dylan had a chance to process the lovely vision of her long legs, silky sarong, and platinum blond ponytail flowing over her shoulders, and way before he got his Top Ten Favorite Bad Girl Fantasy list fired up, it was all over. She straightened suddenly, her gaze focused to the north, and he knew something had set off her spidey-sense.
He followed her gaze, and was clueless. The Georgia O’Keefe sunset stretched north along the Front Range all the way to the horizon and the cowboy state beyond.
“Wyoming?” he asked, crossing the rooftop to stand by his wife’s side.
She shook her head, her attention shifting slightly, to north by northeast, to the Great Plains and a clear blue sky. “Storm heading this way.”
Always, Dylan thought, not doubting it for a second.
Behind them, a cheer went up, and they turned to see a new batch of arrivals – Travis James, Red Dog’s “Angel,” was in the lead with a case of local craft beer hoisted on his shoulder, behind him, Quinn and Reagan Younger were bustling their brood of four up the stairs and onto the deck.
Quinn looked like he needed a shot of something, anything...maybe two. Dylan lifted his glass and Quinn grinned, holding up 3 fingers sideways.
Yeah, Dylan understood.
Dax Killian and Suzi Toussi came next, Dax with a panatela cigar clenched between his teeth, carrying four bottles of Dom Perignon to stick in the beer cooler. Suzi had brought a bottle of Campari and a crystal bowl full of orange slices and lemon peels to the party. The girl liked her Americanos.
Dylan felt the tightness in his chest relax a bit. It was a good day. More than half the crew had made it home for the 4th.
He glanced back at Skeeter, who was still looking out toward the horizon, and he hoped to hell whatever was heading their way could hold off for today. Just one day, that’s all he asked.
Another cheer went up, everyone laughing, and Skeeter turned. Dylan checked his six just in time to see all of Quinn’s kids pile into the water, creating a sloppy ruckus of little heathens.
“Uh, babe,” he said. “We need” - a wave of water splashed over the edge of the wading pool and soaked his flip-flops.
“A bigger pool,” she finished for him, laughing.
Yeah, he thought, the toughest team of badass operators to ever come out of the Department of Defense needed a bigger wading pool.
Chapter Two
4th of July, Northeastern Colorado
Three hours out of Grand Island, Nebraska, racing across northeastern Colorado at 100 mph, Liam Dylan Magnuson knew he wasn’t going to make it. He was going to die out here in the godawful middle of nowhere.
Tightening his hands on the steering wheel, he pressed down on the Porsche’s accelerator and took the 718 Cayman up to 110 mph. He was flying through the night, the full moon rising behind him, the road stretched out flat and straight ahead of him, black asphalt and yellow stripes running under his wheels.
Every breath hurt.
His body ached.
Blood ran down the side of his face and half a dozen other places.
Nate Martell had beaten the hell out of him in Grand Island, hit him again and again, and his own damn stepbrother, Tommy Dunstan, had cut him across the arm with a damn Bowie knife, but Liam hadn’t given up the name or the place they wanted so goddamn badly.
“Where you going, boy?” Tommy had demanded, shoving Liam up against the side panel of Nate’s Escalade. “Who you running to? You better tell me, boy, or there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Ain’t telling you nothing, Tommy.” He’d kicked out, trying to break free, and Bobby Lee Raynor had shot him – a hot gash across the top of his thigh meant to wound, not kill, but he still hadn’t given them anything, not the name of the man he was chasing down, and not the place where he hoped to hell he could find him.
Fuck you, Big Jack Dunstan.
He should have ditched the car in Iowa, when he’d figured out Big Jack’s jokers had been tracking him since Chicago, but the Porsche was fast, really fast, and it had felt like his only chance. He’d been wrong, and he was paying for the mistake with every breath he took.
But the name, the name was still his to hold, the way he’d been holding onto it for his whole goddamn life. He’d never spoken it to another living person, no friend, no pillow-talk girl, and most of all, never to his mother, Momma Margot, or the corrupt southern bastard she’d married, Big Daddy Jack Dunstan.
He’d told his bandmates everything during their long nights on the tour bus driving from one gig to the next, the good and the bad of his poor-little-rich-boy life – but not the name.
The name was his to hold, close to his heart, a balm to his soul - and now, out here on the Great Plains, the death of him, if he couldn’t outrun his stepbrother, Tommy, and the rest of Daddy Jack’s men all the way to Denver.
He put his chances at less than even, at best.
Ahead of him, a sudden curve snaked out of the dark night. He hit it, and the Porsche skidded hard to the outside edge of the pavement, the wheels spitting up gravel, the chassis shaking. He held the car with every ounce of strength he had, foot off the gas, his hands locked onto the steering wheel, and thank God, the Cayman stuck to the road. A second later, he fed the beast more gas and accelerated out of the turn, not daring to slow down, no matter how fast his heart was pounding.
He was so damned lost.
Liam had thought he’d seen it all, London, Sydney, Hong Kong, New York, Chicago, L.A., but he’d never seen this much empty – 360 degrees of empty with a few lights scattered through the darkness.
The only clue he had to his location was the Colorado state highway sign he’d passed five miles back.
“California,” he’d said, spitting out a mouthful of blood, when Tommy had asked him for the third time where he was going.
The bastard had been chasing him down since the first time he’d bailed out of boarding school. He’d been fourteen years old, and it had taken Tommy two months to catch him down in the Florida Keys.
He didn’t know why his mother and Big Daddy Jack had bothered dragging him home every time just to send him away someplace else, someplace they thought could hold him. Hell, he hadn’t lasted a week in military school, and so it had gone, one school after another, until graduation, when they’d finally thrown up their hands, cut him loose, and let him go his own way.
But the game had changed when Tommy had shown up in Chicago, waving a letter from a New York City attorney about an inheritance. From that moment on, the game had gotten mean, and in Grand Island, out in the dark beyond the edges of an interstate truck stop, Tommy had taken it into the gutter.
Five million dollars could do that to a person.
A cool five million sitting on ice with Liam’s name on it.
Except it wasn’t his money, and the name on it, though exactly the same as his, wasn’t his. It never had been. Long before he’d come along, the name had belonged to someone else, a fifteen-year-old boy who’d done a helluva lot better job escaping Momma Margot and Big Daddy Jack than Liam had managed. That boy had disappeared and taken a new name, and Liam was racing toward Denver, holding it close, determined to find him.
