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  “Sure,” he said, and had to wonder if he was lying through his teeth.

  “Try?” Another voice intruded.

  Both Hawkins and Dylan turned to look at Alex Zheng.

  “There won’t be any try to it,” the secretary continued, his voice shaking, his face livid. “She’s crying in there, and as of right now, Ms. Dekker is strictly off limits to you both. I know all about you, Mr. Hawkins. Straight from the ‘junkyard dog’ herself, and she’ll have you keelhauled if you set so much as another finger on her daughter.”

  “So you know the senator?” Hawkins asked. Cool. Calm. Professional.

  “We’re like this,” the secretary said, holding up two entwined fingers as he came to a stop in front of the two men, his small frame trembling with anger. “My job is to keep Katya safe at all costs, and that stunt you pulled at the Botanic Gardens and the shape you’ve brought her back in is enough for me to get assault charges drawn up.”

  It was a ridiculous threat, but it still rankled the hell out of him.

  “So who do you take your orders from?” Cool. Calm. Nonconfrontational. That was him—until he decided he needed to kick Alex Zheng’s ass.

  The secretary drew himself up to his full five feet, six inches in height. “My authority comes directly from Senator Dekker herself, and your associate is absolutely correct. She is not to be messed with—by anyone. So I suggest you leave the premises, before I call her and she has you arrested.”

  “Been there, done that, Alex.”

  “And I’m sure, from what I’ve been told, that it was an experience you would prefer not to repeat.”

  To hell with being cool, calm, and professional. He was going to kick Alex Zheng’s ass right here, right now.

  “Actually,” Dylan interrupted, before he could deck the sucker, “I think Mr. Zheng might have a point.”

  Now what in the hell did that mean? he wondered, glaring at Dylan. Then he saw her, his attention caught by movement in her bedroom doorway.

  Alex was giving Dylan a rather smug look, while Katya was looking at her secretary from across the apartment, her expression one of utter betrayal, and yes, he knew the feeling well enough to recognize it in someone else, even at a distance. She’d just lost her best friend—to her mother.

  “I have more than a point, Mr. Hart,” Alex said. “I have a senator on my side, a senator who will be in Denver tomorrow morning to kick off her new campaign.”

  It was the last straw for Tinkerbell. Bringing her hand to her mouth, she turned and disappeared into the bedroom. A few seconds later, he heard it: the sound of someone stepping onto a fire escape.

  Holy shit.

  “Okay. You win this one, Mr. Zheng,” he said. “But don’t think that I won’t be back.”

  Alex’s surprised expression at winning so easily quickly turned to satisfaction. The guy was obviously too full of himself to notice the sound of Katya’s escape.

  Hawkins turned and headed for the door. By the time her secretary noticed she was missing, he’d have her long gone.

  “So how long have you worked for Marilyn Dekker?” he heard Dylan ask Alex behind his back, running interference.

  As soon as he cleared the door, Hawkins broke into a run. He slid down the stairs, vaulting the rail at every turn, doing the five floors in one tenth of the time it had taken on the elevator. He saw a back door next to where the stairs ended, and he was through it in record time—in plenty of time to watch her make her painstaking way down the fire escape.

  The alley was poorly lit and quiet enough for him to hear her swearing and crying the whole way down. She’d taken off her four-inch heels, thank God, and had them in her hand, but it still seemed like an eternity before she finally got to the bottom.

  The fire escape didn’t reach all the way to the ground, and as she shimmied herself over the final platform—truly a sight to behold—he moved into place.

  She slid into his arms, still cussing and crying and starting to hiccup again, and without setting her down, he hefted her back over his shoulder and started walking down the alley.

  Roxanne was just around the corner, parked in front of the gallery, and Steele Street was just a few blocks north, and the whole night was stretching out in front of him with nothing but trouble in sight.

  AS soon as he closed the door behind Dylan Hart, Alex headed for Kat’s bedroom, checking his Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol. He had to get her out of the apartment and someplace safe.

  It was going to take him years to forgive himself for losing her at the Botanic Gardens—if he ever forgave himself. He’d gone soft, gotten too used to never having to protect her from anything more than a bad-news rock-and-roll boyfriend or the other shoppers at a Neiman-Marcus shoe sale.

  But tonight. Christ. Tonight had been insane. Ted Garraty murdered. Christian Hawkins, so help him God, whisking her away. Bits of her prom dress flying around like so much confetti. The damn tiara.

  And the photographs.

  Somebody was going to pay for the photographs. If Christian Hawkins didn’t get to him first, Alex was going to take the bastard apart.

  It was nothing short of a miracle that Hawkins and Hart had given her up and left. Invoking the senator’s name was something Alex usually avoided at all costs, having spent most of the last five years with Katya trying to distance himself from the woman who had actually hired him, but it had been effective.

  At least that’s what he thought until he entered her bedroom, saw the open window, and instantly knew he was screwed. A soft curse left his mouth as he raced for the window. One look down into the alley proved he was too late.

  Damn, oh, damn. He didn’t waste a second dwelling on the awfulness of her disappearing again, but turned and ran for the door. When he reached the street, all he could do was stand there and swear. The chop-shop boys had aced him again. Dylan Hart, Hawkins, Katya—all of them were gone.

  Muttering every curse word he knew under his breath, he reached for his cell phone. How a couple of ex-car thieves had turned into the kind of men with the security clearances Dylan Hart had flashed at the Botanic Gardens was beyond him. He only hoped they’d moved fast enough to catch her. The last thing he wanted was Katya on her own tonight. Just the thought was enough to make his blood run cold.

  Hart had given him a business card before he’d left, and he punched the top number into his phone.

  The call was picked up on the first ring.

  “Hart.”

  “Zheng,” Alex shot back, irritated as hell. “Where’s Katya?”

  “Under the protection of the Department of Defense.”

  “So you’ve got her?”

  “Not me. Hawkins.”

  Alex bit back another curse, told himself to stay calm, and tried to take a nice, deep breath. This was his fault, he knew it, but he couldn’t help but think that Senator Dekker and her staff had dropped the ball on these boys. He’d been briefed ad nauseam on the Jonathan Traynor III murder when he’d been hired, been given a folder on Christian Hawkins that was four inches thick, which had included profiles on all the boys who’d gotten busted with him out of the chop shop on Steele Street when they’d been teenagers.

  A few of them had joined the military, a couple had gone to college, and two of them had been written off as basically harmless car salesmen—Dylan Hart and Christian Hawkins.

  Jesus. Had anybody taken a look at these two guys anytime in the last five years?

  They weren’t car salesmen—and deep breathing wasn’t working.

  Marilyn Dekker was connected all over the Department of Defense. Someone on her staff should have been paying better attention. He should have been paying better attention.

  “I want her back.” And he wanted the tiara and the photographs back. Letting Hawkins get away with them was just one more big mistake on his part. At the time, all he’d been thinking was how glad he was Hawkins was leaving.

  “She’s with the guy who headed up the Personal Security Detail for the Sec
retary of State when he did his tour of the Middle East last year,” Hart said, his voice coming over the phone in clipped tones. “If you want to worry about something, worry about who shot Ted Garraty.”

  The click in his ear told Alex the conversation was over.

  Fine, he thought, snapping his phone shut and shoving it in his pocket. He took a deep breath, then another, watching the traffic go by and trying not to panic—but he could tell it was going to be a losing battle.

  CHAPTER

  10

  TROUBLE. God, he was in trouble here.

  Stretched out in one of the chairs in front of his fireplace, Hawkins had a straight line of sight to his bed, where he’d put her. There were no walls in his Steele Street loft, just three thousand square feet of wood floors and a hundred feet of fifteen-foot-tall windows looking out over the city. He’d left her dress on, but it wasn’t covering a whole hell of a lot, and she kept kicking the sheets off the rest of her.

  She was tossing and turning—and talking in her sleep, and man, oh, man, was she pissed off at her mother. But that was Linebacker’s problem. His problem was the whole crazy night and how easily he’d lost control of himself.

  He wouldn’t last long anywhere under those circumstances. Self-control was supposed to be his middle name. But damn, she’d pulled a number on him. No more, though. Not tonight.

  Pushing himself out of the chair, he headed across the living area to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. He had a long few hours ahead of him before dawn, and brooding about her wasn’t getting him where he needed to go. He’d called in Johnny Ramos, a kid who worked in Steele Street’s Commerce City garage, to watch over her for the rest of the night. Ted Garraty’s murder would be all over the papers in the morning, but he and Mickey were going to get it out on the street tonight, see if the news rattled anybody, see if anybody remembered the Traynor case, and see if they could find Ray Carper. Mickey hadn’t heard that Carper was dead, so chances were that the old guy was still hanging around somewhere. Hawkins also needed to go back to the Botanic Gardens. Poke around a little bit. See what he could find.

  Fifteen minutes later, he poured himself a big paper cup full of strong, black coffee and snapped a plastic lid on top. He’d changed into a skintight muscle shirt, gray with the Chinese characters for “Fuck you” silk-screened on the front, a pair of jeans so baggy they barely clung to his hips, and his favorite pair of two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar stolen Nikes. He hadn’t stolen them, but he’d bought them off the guy who had, a real deal at fifty bucks a pop.

  She groaned, and he went over to check on her. He took a sip of coffee, then knelt down next to the bed and rested his palm on her forehead. The coffee was hot, damn hot, and so was she, but not fever hot. He looked down the length of her body. A damp sheen of sweat covered her skin, from the backs of her calves, in the tender hollows behind her knees, up her thighs, and over the incredible curves of her ass.

  He wanted to eat her, to start at her pink-polished toes with his mouth and just not stop. Instead, he set his coffee aside, stood up, and shrugged into his shoulder holster. A well-worn black leather vest went over the top.

  He checked his watch, waiting for Johnny, then let his gaze wander the rest of the way up her body and her torn and bedraggled dress. He could have put her in one of his T-shirts, but he honest to God hadn’t trusted himself, and that was a hell of a thing, maybe the worst realization yet tonight. He wouldn’t take advantage of her, but he was on a damn thin line as to whether or not he would try to seduce her.

  Come on, Johnny, he thought, checking his watch again.

  He turned his attention back to Katya and noticed her shooting-star tattoo was gone.

  Perfect, he thought. It hadn’t been a real tattoo, just one of those painted-on ones, and now it was probably smeared inside the sleeve of his favorite two-thousand-dollar suit. Whoever had named her Bad Luck had hit the nail on the head.

  Oh, right, that had been him.

  Hearing the elevator stop, he snapped the sheet up over her again.

  “Hey, Superman,” Johnny said, coming through the door. “¿Qué pasa?”

  Johnny was a Hispanic kid whose older brother had died in a gang killing. He’d been in plenty of trouble in his seventeen years, and like Skeeter, he’d been on the street when Hawkins had found him.

  “Hey, Johnny. Thanks for coming up. This is Katya Dekker.” He gestured at the lovely lump in the bed. “I don’t want her leaving the loft. I don’t care if you have to tie her up. She stays here.”

  Johnny eyed the nearly comatose woman, then gave Hawkins a big grin. “Sure, Cristo. You can count on me, man. I can keep her here. As a matter of fact”—he leaned in for a closer look—“I think she’s out cold, hombre.”

  “She had a margarita at Mama Guadalupe’s.”

  “Just one?”

  “One.”

  “Oh, man.” Johnny rocked back on his heels. “Mezcal. Sure, man. I can keep her here. You don’t think she’s gonna be sick?”

  “Anything can happen,” Hawkins warned him. “The least of which is her throwing up. So you be ready. Look, she’s still here when I get back, and you’re still with her, you can have Roxanne next Friday night.”

  Johnny brightened. “Sure, man. I can handle her.”

  He didn’t want her “handled” at all and was just about to tell Johnny as much, when she let out a soft moan and rolled over, losing the sheet in the process.

  “Ay, caramba,” the boy whispered, his eyes glued to the naked curve of her hip.

  Hawkins quickly got the sheet back over her. “Remember your honor,” he said, tucking the sheet in between the mattresses. “And hers. No toques.” Don’t touch. Don’t even breathe on her, baby-boy, or the mierda is going to hit the fan.

  Satisfied that he’d done all he could, and that things would only get worse if he stayed, and that he’d only get more screwed up, he straightened from the side of the bed. Checking to make sure he’d remembered to load his gun, he headed for the door.

  ONE more endless night, Nikki McKinney thought, glancing at the clock in her studio. Midnight had long since come and gone. Nothing unusual there. She always worked best at night. Returning her attention to her painting, she took a step back. The piece of canvas was large, eight by six feet.

  She let her eyes wander over the image she’d created, breathing softly, letting her mind slide into the emotions it evoked, drifting from one wash of color to the next, from curves of paint to the more startling photographic image beneath.

  Eventually, as always, she knew what to do next. Taking a piece of cardboard, she dipped the end of it in a tray of indigo blue paint, then lifted it to the canvas and scraped it in broad, dripping strokes down one side of a tortured angel.

  He was bound and gagged, and in agony, and he was beautiful, probably the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. He was also sound asleep over in the corner on her studio floor, stretched out in a pair of cutoff jeans and a T-shirt on a pile of blankets.

  The walls in her studio were covered in photographs and paintings of him, mostly as an angel, but sometimes as a demon, and sometimes just as a man. But she loved him best as an angel. She loved all her models best as angels. Travis James was her favorite, though, and had been for the last five years, ever since she was sixteen and he was eighteen and she’d first started painting him naked.

  He was exquisite, with his shoulder-length blond hair and lean, muscular, rock-climber’s body, the epitome of youth, man as God had envisioned him—both sexual and innocent, with a face designed for seduction and a smile that made the fall worthwhile.

  He wasn’t smiling in this painting, though. She’d put him through hell for this piece.

  Finished with the blue, she dropped the cardboard in the trash with a dozen others. They were only good for one run through the paint. She picked up another and dipped it in a tray of white and made one long, diagonal curve across the canvas, coming from the top of one battered wing, through the angel’s
right shoulder and down across the front of his body into the abyss rising up at his feet—and suddenly, the painting was complete.

  No fanfare sounded. It was simply done, just like that. Between one breath and another, two months’ worth of work finally reached its end—thankfully, in time for her opening at Toussi Gallery tomorrow night, in less than twenty-four hours.

  She should have been done with it weeks ago. She’d always planned it as the centerpiece of her whole show, the painting that would catch the critics’ eye and hopefully vault her to fame and glory, or at least into a showing in Los Angeles or maybe even New York.

  But life, and love, and heartache had intervened one hot, unexpected summer night in June, and she’d had a helluva time getting back on her feet, artistically speaking. Emotionally, she was still a mess.

  Chaos, that’s what had happened to her that night, Kid Chaos, and she’d barely begun to sort through the wreckage he’d left in his wake, which was utterly ridiculous. He’d walked into her life a total stranger, and eight hours later, he’d walked back out a lover. That alone should have been enough to fuel some serious soul-searching, but the rest of it was even worse. She hadn’t just fallen in bed with the man, she’d fallen in love.

  And he’d left her. Just like that. Without so much as a by-your-leave. Her—the invincible Nikki McKinney, the oldest living virgin in Boulder, Colorado, until Peter “Kid Chaos” Chronopolous had nearly gotten her killed and then turned around and stolen her heart.

  “Damn,” she muttered under her breath. Here she was, thinking about him again, a bad habit she’d had absolutely no luck breaking. Every thought she had turned to him, and she didn’t have a clue as to where he was, or what he was doing, or what had happened to make him leave her. Her only connection to him was through her new brother-in-law, Quinn Younger, who was sworn to some damn secrecy pact at the place they both worked. Even her sister, Regan, hadn’t been much help, telling her only that SDF was part of some government operation and highly classified. All Quinn had promised was to tell her if something happened to him, and Nikki could think of few things that sounded more ominous. The last thing she wanted to hear was that Kid had been hurt . . . or killed.