Crazy Sweet (13 page)

CHAPTER

16

S
HE WAS ON her second bottle of booze.

He was on his first.

Smith looked at the shot’s worth of gin in the tiny bottle in his hand. She’d kept the bourbon for herself. She’d said gin made her excitable, whatever the hell that meant, and he’d agreed that maybe it was better if she didn’t get too excited.

They had enough excitement.

It was a funny thing about explosions. People knew they were dangerous, but that didn’t send them running in the other direction for very damn long. Within minutes after the explosion over by the marina, people had started flooding into the streets, most definitely getting in the way of the emergency response crews, and as of a few minutes back, maybe starting to riot.

Standing off to the side of the broken windows, he twisted the lid off the tiny bottle of gin and watched a group of young men gathering in front of the cantina across the street. It wasn’t full out yet, not even close, but the crowd was shifting, and he was expecting it to be one damn long night. One damn long night trapped in a hotel room with Honoria York-Lytton.

He glanced back toward the bed, and his gaze slid over her, top to bottom.

Excitement. Right. He wasn’t too worried about an ounce of gin getting him going, but the odds were growing damn short on the polka-dot dress since she’d taken off her jacket.

There was no back to the dress. None. It was open clear to her waist. The straps of the halter top buttoned at the back of her neck, very classy, two red buttons that were the same size and color as the polka dots. He guessed you could call it camouflage, sorority girl camouflage.

Yeah, a person could call it something all right.
Geezus
. He grinned. No wonder the family nun had run away.

Red Dog would have called the buttons too damn cute, which wasn’t exactly a compliment coming from the bad girl. But Red Dog was all edge, a sharp, dark edge, and Honey—God, he had to love that name—Honey was all curves, one right after another, all of them sliding together inside that dress where she was sitting in the middle of his bed going through her pile of junk.

Kee-rist
. He tossed half the contents of the little bottle back, then finished it with another swallow and looked down at the book in his other hand—and he grinned again. It was impossible not to.

The Sorority Girl’s Guide to Self-Help Sex
—with her photograph on the back.

His grin broadened.

He knew a little about self-help sex. Some months he knew a little more about it than he liked to admit. He even knew a little about sorority girls, but none of the ones he’d ever dated had looked like Honey. They’d been college girls back when he’d been a college boy, and Honey York was no girl. Age-wise, she was nearing perfection, which in his book meant somewhere over thirty. There was something about women’s bodies as they got older, a certain lushness that a guy could really get lost in, which was reason enough in his book to let women over thirty rule the planet. God knew, he’d been ruled by a few, even a couple when he’d been in his twenties, and one when he’d been nineteen, and yeah, that had been a real education. He still kept in touch with Caroline.

But it had been a while since he’d been in touch with any woman.

His last girlfriend had left without a forwarding address when he’d missed one too many flights home to Denver. Work had kept coming up in Central America, and he’d kept taking it. That was the way it was with guys like him. No commitment. No hard feelings. And eventually, no girlfriend.

The pattern had never failed him.

He wondered what Honey’s story was, if she was as single as she looked. There was no triple-digit-carat ring on her finger, and she still had the family name—and here came his reality check: Those were probably the only two things they had in common. He wasn’t married, and he hadn’t yet disgraced himself so badly that the old man had disowned him. Not hardly. A policeman in Little Rock, Arkansas, Jack Rydell was damned proud of his oldest son. The admiration went both ways.

“I don’t know how you missed me,” Honey said, continuing their conversation after taking a moment to unbuckle the ankle straps on her shoes and slip them off her feet. “I was on the cover of
Ocean
magazine, and on the front page of every tabloid in America for three months, with headlines like
Shameless Sorority Sex Games
.”

He didn’t know how to tell her that he’d never heard of
Ocean
and didn’t spend much time reading the tabloids, but he couldn’t deny that if he’d seen it,
Shameless Sorority Sex Games
might just have been his ticket into dropping a couple of bucks on a grocery store rag.

“I’ve been out of the country quite a bit this last year.” And the year before that, and the year before that.

“The book really isn’t about sex games.”

And this was practically a fantasy come true, to have a hot, barefoot blonde in his bed, talking about sex games.

“And it’s
not
about masturbation. I got a lot of that, because of the title.”

O-kay. They were headed into
serious
fantasyland now.

He looked at the empty bottle in his hand, wondered if she had another, and decided he’d probably had enough. No matter what she ended up talking about, he had a job to do, which was to get the two of them through to sunrise, which, as long as they stayed put in the Palacio, shouldn’t be too damned difficult, especially since she was no longer the focus of anyone’s attention. Everyone had moved on to explosions and street action, and moved away from slightly notorious, but not very famous, tawny-haired blondes.

“The publisher picked the title, not me. If you look at the chapter headings, you’ll see what the book is really about.”

He’d get right on that, sure, as soon as he figured out what all those young men were up to over at the cantina. They were starting to mill around and band together, to form up.

Trouble, he decided a moment later, when he saw an AK-47 snugged up against one guy’s body.

He started across the room, heading for the large chest of drawers pushed against one of the walls.

“Slip your shoes back on and get over here,” he said, getting her
out
of his bed, which was just plain stupid. But he needed her. “Help me with this.”

He didn’t care how cute she was; when men started showing up with AKs, everyone had to pull their weight.

Or not, he realized a moment later, after he’d directed her to one side of the chest he wanted to move in front of the broken windows. The chiffonier was pure jungle hardwood, and big, which made it perfect, and perfectly heavy.

Too heavy for Honey to even give it a budge.

“Are you back there?” he asked, dragging the damn thing across the floor, but not feeling much push with his pull.

“Yes,”
she gasped, and he looked around the edge of the chest to see if she was okay, and immediately felt foolish.

Hell. He’d been spending too much time with Red Dog. That girl could have moved a jungle hardwood chiffonier with her will and one damn cold look from those spooky golden eyes.

Honey couldn’t have moved it with a crane. But it was cute to see the way she’d put her shoulder into it, and how the position curved her back and made her butt stick out, and how it made her dress ride up, and how she planted her platformed feet to give herself some leverage.

“You don’t work out much, do you.” It wasn’t a question.

“Not…much,”
she admitted, gritting her teeth and still pushing for all she was worth.

Halfway across the room, she changed positions, putting her back into it, not that it made a damn bit of difference. She wasn’t complaining, though, and he appreciated it, and she didn’t give up, which impressed him. Trying that hard and being totally ineffective would have depressed the hell out of him. He expected results from everything he did, whatever it was, and he got them, every time.

So he pulled, and the damn thing moved, inch by inch, until he got it situated in front of the windows. The instant he stopped pulling, he realized his mistake.

He heard the plop of her butt hitting the floor just half a second before he heard her cry out.

“Oh,
ow
.”

“Sorry.” He should have warned her.

“Oh,
ow
. Oh, I…oh,
ow
. I—”

Then it hit him like a train wreck.
Shit
.

“Don’t move,” he said, stepping around the chiffonier and kneeling down next to her. Sure enough, she was sitting in broken glass.

“Owww.”
The word came out real soft and real slow, like it really, really hurt. Then she looked up at him, and he could tell it hurt. Her face was sort of scrunched up, and she was holding herself really still. “Oh, Mr. Smith, I-I…
ow
.”

“No Mr., remember, just Smith, and don’t move. Just let me pick you straight up.”

“M-my shoes slipped.”

Of course, they had.

He slid one arm under her knees and the other around her back.

Her bare back.

Without hesitation, her arms went around his neck, and as carefully as possible, he shifted his weight and scooped her up—and she melted into him.

It was amazing.

It was the softest lamination of his life. Every curve she had found a place on his body and molded itself to him.

“Ow,”
she said again, real soft again, her voice little more than a sigh against the side of his neck, her breath blowing along the edge of his ear.

Sex.

It was the only thought he had for a couple of eternal seconds, during which he didn’t move, just stood there like a pole-axed idiot and thought sex. Nothing specific, just sex, the whole thing.

“I-I think I’ve got glass in my butt.”

Yeah, he was pretty sure she did, too.

And he had nothing for brains. He was running on empty, which was just about the stupidest damn thing that had ever happened to him—getting pole-axed by a woman named Honey in a polka-dot dress with glass in her butt.

CHAPTER

17

G
ET A ROPE ON HER,” General Richard “Buck” Grant growled over the phone, and Dylan couldn’t help but agree. It was a damn good idea.

“We’re on it, sir.” Or as “on it” as he could get at the moment. Steele Street was a little shorthanded. Hawkins had left for the airport. Skeeter was manning the communications, and he was taking orders and gearing up to ask a favor. This shit with Royce had gone on long enough.

Too long, actually. Dylan didn’t give a damn whose career was hanging in the balance over at the CIA. He didn’t give a damn how much dirt Royce had on some of those higher-echelon types, or who needed the asshole alive. He hadn’t cared in two years, not since Royce had revealed himself as a traitor. He wanted the man dead.

But except for one small window of opportunity directly after the night Gillian Pentycote had been abducted, when Royce had been fair game, Dylan’s hands had been tied. Tony Royce was off limits, on orders of someone he didn’t dare cross. The price for disobedience was the existence of SDF. Dylan didn’t know who had put the pressure on White Rook to draw SDF off Royce’s trail, but he knew that if they didn’t obey the command, Rook could and would bury the whole team and shut down 738 Steele Street so tight it would take a presidential order for the place to ever see the light of day again.

The party would be over.

Dylan knew it. Grant knew it. And Red Dog knew it. Dylan had been very clear on the subject.

“‘On it’ isn’t good enough, Dylan. I don’t want to lose her because of goddamn Tony Royce, not when we should have taken him out years ago,” Grant said. “But if she’s lured him to Denver and is out there gunning for him, then we’ve got a rogue operator on our hands, and the shit will hit the fan all the way to the Potomac. If she can’t put the welfare of the team ahead of her personal problems, I can’t protect her, and neither can you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” He did. He understood perfectly. “I won’t know for sure what happened in El Salvador until we make contact with Rydell.”

“Then do it.”

“We’re trying.”

“Do better than try. If she wasn’t within a thousand miles of Royce’s place in San Luis, and it’s just one big, goddamn coincidence that the two of them are ending up in Denver on the same goddamn night after a little sojourn in El Salvador, well, then we’ve got nothing to worry about. What about her? Have you been able to contact her yet?”

“No. Skeeter has tried her cell a number of times, but Red Dog isn’t answering or returning calls,” Dylan said. “Can you contact White Rook? See what he can get us. Authorization to kill Royce and anyone in his employ would cover Red Dog’s ass.”

There was a moment of silence.

“And yours. You know it’s never been that simple, and it’s no simpler now than the last ten times you’ve asked for the same goddamn thing.”

“This is different. He’s here, and he’s a threat to one of our contractors.”

“And as always, you are within your rights to take appropriate exigent measures to neutralize an emergent threat.”

“Screw ‘emergent.’ I want the right to track him down and kill him, Buck.” There was more to it than Gillian, a lot more. Royce had been after him the night she’d been abducted. He’d been behind Dylan’s kidnapping and subsequent torture in Indonesia, and Royce had been SDF’s CIA contact for the mission that had gotten J.T. Chronopolous killed.

They all wanted him dead for that.

“I’ve put two calls in since we started this conversation, Dylan, and if I can get you a finding to sanction his termination, no one will be happier than me. Who’s with you in the Bat Cave tonight?”

“Hawkins is on his way to the airport. He’s going to tail Royce into town, see where the bastard lights, and Skeeter is here.”

“I thought Chronopolous and James were back from Thailand today.”

“Kid stayed in Los Angeles. His wife is having a showing of her work there.”

“She paints naked men, right?”

“Uh…right.” Dylan guessed that was one way to sum up a singularly brilliant career in fine art.

“Never did understand that,” Grant said. “Naked women I could understand. But men…hell, who wants to look at a bunch of—hell, whatever. What about Travis James?”

“He’s my next call. Chances are, he’s with Gillian.”

“Then we don’t have a problem. Right? Travis can keep her under control.”

“Right.” At least he hoped to hell he was right. Red Dog and the Angel Boy had a connection that—hell, that Dylan wasn’t sure he understood, or that he even wanted to understand. She was a hard woman. She’d push any guy, and any guy besides Travis James would probably get pushed too far.

But Travis was different from all the other hard-ass chop-shop boys. He’d been a silver-spoon Boulder slacker-dude, majoring in feminist studies and conflict resolution, or some such damn thing, before he’d come on board at SDF. He more than carried his weight on the team, or Creed would have lost him in the jungle a long time ago, but the guy couldn’t port a head or bolt ten pounds of boost onto a car—any car. Dylan wasn’t sure Travis knew how to change the oil in a car—any car. He drove a crapped-out Jeep that Quinn wouldn’t even let him park on the second floor where Quinn kept his Camaros.

And he meditated. Full-out. Dylan had seen him do it, in a goddamn Lotus position no less, wrapped up like a freaking pretzel.

And he posed nude for Kid’s wife, Nikki, completely bare-assed nude, sometimes wearing angel wings, sometimes bound and gagged for hours on end, and he did it without an ounce of self-consciousness or panic, and he brought that same level of coolness under pressure to his job at Steele Street.

The guy was fucking imperturbable.

It’s why he had a job at Steele Street, that and the fact that he could shoot, the fact that he would and did shoot. Nothing about the man had surprised Dylan more than his willingness to kill when it was required, without hesitation and with the skills to hit who he aimed at, every time—and it was always a “who” when it counted, never a “what.” Range practice was great. Dylan was all for it, but if a guy couldn’t hit a target that was looking back at him, he was worthless. Less than worthless. He was a danger to his team.

“Get on the horn,” Grant said. “Make sure he’s with her, and when you get ahold of Rydell, let me know what the hell is going on.”

“Yes—” Dylan looked up as the door to the office opened.

Fuck.

They were in trouble. Big trouble.

“—sir,” he finished and hung up the phone, then watched the night head toward hell in a handbasket as Travis walked in and gave Skeeter a big hug.

He didn’t mind the hug. Hell, no. But Travis was alone, and he for damn sure minded that.

Gillian was on her own, on the loose, and the only thing that could save her butt now was C. Smith Rydell. They needed a situation report on what had happened in El Salvador and how much trouble she’d really started. Smith had been in San Luis all day, so why in the hell hadn’t he checked in with Superman? Just what in the hell was he doing down there?