Crazy Sweet (7 page)

She’d never said.

Never said what had happened on the hit. Never said what had happened during the goddamn month that she’d been gone.

But Travis knew.

He knew it in his heart.

Fuck.

He opened his mouth on her throat, grazing her with his teeth and licking her skin. There were reasons he’d been so good at being the dark angel for Nikki Chronopolous, a lot of reasons, and the bad girl Red Dog brought all those dark reasons to light, every one. He never hurt her, had never left a mark on her. The ropes were tight, but not brutal. He saved that for the job. She was stretched out and strung up, sure, but in a minute, he’d be kneeling at her feet, and once he released the slack he’d built into the rope at the floor ring, he would come up between her legs and she’d be sitting on his shoulders with his face between her thighs. It was a sweet trip to that point, and he enjoyed every inch of it.

But it was when he was there, with his tongue sliding into her soft folds, and his fingers pushing up inside her, with her tightening around him and her body arching against him, that the last of his tension began to lift.

Red Dog was his.

He always made it good for her in bed, but this was where he laid his true claim, when she gave it up for him in the lost darkness of her mind, poised on the promise of pain, but finding pleasure instead. No one could take this journey with her to the strange edges of her psyche better than him. He pushed her boundaries, and then pushed farther until the abyss opened up and swallowed her whole—but he never let her fall alone.

Never.

Her muffled groan sounded above him and a shudder went through her, the tremor of it running the length of her body.

Oh, yeah
. He opened his mouth wider and slid his tongue over her, again and again. He knew. He knew her every reaction went straight to his groin and made him hot, made him feel heavy. He knew she tasted like heaven and an ocean of pleasure, and he knew how to get exactly what he wanted.

He slipped another finger inside her, stretching her, sliding smoothly in and out and putting pressure where she needed it the most. There was a place deep inside her imagination, a place where sexual fantasy and fact melted into one, and the path to it began here, inside the silken softness of her vagina. It wasn’t enough to make her come. He’d done that for her in bed. What he needed now, what she needed, was for him to make her come apart…completely, totally apart.

He reached for the rope at her back with his free hand, taking hold of it just below her waist, and he pulled, stretching her tighter—and he teased her with his tongue, teased her until her groans became a sob, a soft sound of distress and longing.

Ah, Gillian…so sweet.

So sweet and starting to come undone for him.

He felt her first contraction, and gave the rope a short tug, freeing the hand he’d tied at her back. She immediately brought it around to the back of his head, tunneling her fingers through his hair and holding him closer, pressing herself closer, begging him to do what he was doing, only faster, only harder, and to please, please, please…
suck on me.

He heard her in every cell, heard her in the back of his mind and on the tip of his tongue, and when he did it, it was all over for the bad girl. Her body went tight, her head went back, and release flooded through her, making her skin hot. He let her ride her wave of pleasure to the end, let it break over him and drive him goddamn crazy.

Fuck.
He wasn’t in control of this.

He wasn’t in control of any goddamn thing with her, and that kept him hooked, heart and soul.

He pulled the rope and felt it loosen, felt it slip and slide and pool onto the floor, felt her do the same, her body suddenly going limp. He didn’t let her fall. He never let her fall.

Never fucking ever.

He held her, keeping her close. When she was in his arms, he pulled the gag down, and with the taste of her still warm in his mouth, he kissed her, long and deep and slow, letting her taste herself, letting her know she was his…
only and always his
.

CHAPTER

8

S
OONER OR LATER, something had to give, and C. Smith Rydell hoped to hell it was the bad guys’ attention span before it was the cupcake’s knees. He didn’t know how in the hell somebody could shake that badly for as long as she’d kept it up and still be standing, especially on those little white platform heels.

He let his gaze run over her again where she was plastered into the corner. Cupcake was right, double frosted with sprinkles. That had to be a tough way to live, so freaking helpless, with one damn .45 cartridge to your name and not even being able to hold on to that. If she’d been his—and she wasn’t—he’d teach her how to protect herself. The task would be at the top of his damn “Things to Do Today” list—teach Cupcake how to use a handgun. It was the only hope someone like her had in the big bad world.

Geezus
. He stepped back over to the door. Something had to give, all right—and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be him, not an inch.

Pressing his ear to the wood panel, he listened. Royce’s men were still out there on the veranda, deciding what to do next, then silence, quickly followed by a hurried scuffling of feet.

Party time.

He moved back away from the door and the sudden, heavy pounding on the other side.

“Abra la puerta! Hazlo ya!”
someone challenged—
Open the door. Now
.

“Mierda!”
Bullshit, he yelled, giving his best impression of a surly Latin drunk, which, under the circumstances, wasn’t too damn hard.
“No me moleste!” Don’t bother me
.

“Buscamos a la rubia…la gringa! Abra!” We’re looking for the blonde…the American. Open up.

Open up a solid two inches of jungle hardwood set in a wrought-iron frame lag-bolted into the Palacio’s eight-inch-thick masonry walls and secured with two steel dead bolts?

Smith didn’t think so.

He took two steps back along the wall and leveled his Sig at the unhinged side of the door frame.

“Oígame, pendejo!”
he said, coarsening his voice and slurring his words.
Listen, asshole
.
“Si estuviese una rubia aqui, yo le cogería, no hablaría contigo! Ve te!” If I had a blonde in here, I’d be screwing her, not talking to you. Go away
.

Well, that shut them up, the sheer unvarnished common sense of it. But not for long.

He put his ear to the door when he heard their conversation start back up, and he had to admit that they had a pretty good plan—posting a man in the courtyard where he could observe the whole veranda, and sending two guys to the other side of the building, where they could access the balconies.

Like the balcony to his room.

Smith looked behind him at the open set of ceiling-to-floor-length windows he’d been sitting behind all day with his spotting scope. Yeah, it wouldn’t take much to get through those babies, but anybody who tried was going to wish they hadn’t. He could guarantee it.

“Get into the bathroom,” he ordered the woman. “Into the bathtub.” If all hell broke loose, the cast-iron tub was the best place for her, right after every other goddamn place in the world.

What in the hell, he wondered, was she doing in fucking
El Salvador
?

For that matter, what in the hell was he doing in fucking
El Salvador
, except preparing to get his ass kicked?

Gunfights, especially gunfights with four-to-one odds, were damned tricky things.

But not as tricky as explosives.

A deafening blast from the street suddenly rocked the room and lit up the night with a bright flash, shattering glass and shaking the plaster off the walls, and all-around ringing his chimes.

Geezus. Fuck
.

He instinctively turned in on himself, bringing his hands up to protect his head, too late, of course, if the bomb had been close enough to blow him to smithereens.

It hadn’t been, and in the seconds it took him to realize that he was still in one piece, that the hotel hadn’t collapsed, and even that there had been a bomb, the woman disappeared.

Oh, hell, yeah. Right off the map. Poof. The cupcake—gone.

He’d never heard of anyone being atomized by the concussion of an explosive device, but there wasn’t anything left of her, anywhere in the room, and the jungle hardwood door hadn’t budged.

And yes, he was really starting to like that door.

But the woman, hell—he raked the room with his gaze, and that’s when he spotted a swirl of tawny blond hair not quite held together anymore by a red polka-dot bow peeking above the rim of the tub in the bathroom.

Okay. That was skill, pure, mad skill, to be able to move and think when glass was breaking, and the walls were shaking, and your ears had to be ringing.

Mad skill.

On the other hand, anyone who looked like her had probably realized from a pretty young age that they were going to need to be fast on their feet.

Still, he was damned impressed.

“Vamos al cuartel! Rápido!”
The orders came from out on the veranda.
Back to the compound. Quickly.

Yeah, assholes, back to the compound, he thought, and he needed to get the woman back to her hotel.

“The woman.” Right. The woman probably had a name, and he definitely needed to ask her what it was. First, though, he crossed over to the broken windows, his boots crunching across shards of glass, and checked the street.

There were no body pieces anywhere, and he was damned glad of it, but the old Ford pickup that had been parked near Royce’s front gate had been reduced to a burning hunk of raw scrap metal. Pieces of it were everywhere. The tires were smoldering, the upholstery was on fire, and the gate had been demolished. The two halves of wrought iron were still there, but were twisted on their hinges.

Shit.
Dozens of men were racing around inside Royce’s compound, more than he’d thought were in residence, and they were definitely riled up and probably going to stay that way for the rest of the friggin’ night.

Dammit.
He’d come to San Luis looking for Red Dog, been tagged by his old buddies in the DEA to do some recon on Royce, ended up in the middle of some half-assed Central American turf war, and had a blonde in his bathtub—a tawny-haired blonde in a low-cut dress that fit like a coat of paint.

He didn’t know if it was dumb luck, or if he was just living right, or if he was fucked.

“What’s your name?” he asked, a little too loudly, because he could hardly hear himself think.

A pair of large designer sunglasses peeked up over the edge of the tub.

“Honoria,” she said breathlessly, and he could just imagine how fast her heart was beating. His sure as hell hadn’t slowed down yet. “Honoria York, but most people call me Honey.”

Yeah, he just bet they did, and for a couple hundred bucks an hour, he could probably call her Honey, too.

“Take off your glasses,” he ordered. He didn’t know where in the hell that had come from particularly, but when bombs were exploding, and cars were burning, and guns were being drawn, giving orders was what he did best.

Besides, he wanted to see what she looked like from the neck up, and the glasses covered half her face. Her hair was a mess. All those little bows had given up, and so had her bobby pins. They were sticking out of her French twist here and there, and every place where a pin had fallen out, there was a curl. She had definitely lost the sleek
Riviera
look and was heading toward the wild side.

She reached up to take off the glasses, but whether it was because he’d told her to, or because it had gotten dark outside and was definitely dim in the room, was actually a moot point.

It didn’t matter.

Not at all.

Because once the glasses came off, and he saw her face, he had the answer to his question. It wasn’t dumb luck or clean living that had put her in his bathtub. It was one of those cosmic laws of the universe that had kicked in and said, “Let’s screw with Rydell’s head tonight, just for the hell of it.”

Because she had a face guaranteed to bust him, a real heartbreaker, one of those little, goddamn pixie faces that had been his downfall more times than he cared to remember.

Honey
—yeah, he just bet.

“Stay put.” Another order, perfect, but it was for her own good—and his. Half a room away with a slab of cast iron between them was about as close as he wanted to get to her.

It was about as close as he dared, and that pissed him off in a way that having to face four gunmen had not. Because,
dammit,
his odds had been better against the damn gunmen. He was a helluva shot, and nothing but a sucker for a green-eyed blonde.