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  Oh, no—She brought her hand up to her head. Toussi’s. She had a showing tonight. Nikki McKinney’s.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, dreading the rest of the day and the thousand things she needed to do. How had one margarita done so damn much damage? And how was she going to elude her mother, fire Alex, finish getting ready for the show, and survive when her head was cracking apart eight ways from Sunday?

  “It’s not going to work, Kat,” her most immediate problem said calmly. “You and me, we’re a team from here on out. You don’t leave my side. I don’t leave yours. Not until we find out who was behind the mess at the Gardens last night.”

  From another man, such concern would have been sweet. From Hawkins it was downright daunting. She didn’t want to be a team with him. She didn’t have the strength for it. Not today.

  “Thanks, but it’s—uh—no big deal. Honestly.” She finally got both feet on the floor, which really wasn’t an improvement. “I’ll call my insurance company, my lawyer, and the Botanic Gardens, for goodness sakes. Find out what in the world they were thinking with those fireworks. They’ve probably already called Oleg, the artist whose painting I had donated. We’ll get it all worked out.”

  “I’m afraid it’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “Complicated?” She peeked through her fingers, and inadvertently, her gaze drifted over his face, over the fall of his silky dark hair, the hard angle of his jaw, before finally coming back to his eyes, so intensely dark, so intensely focused on her. She’d fallen in love once with those eyes, with the way he’d looked at her, and with an awful, sudden certainty she knew it wasn’t impossible for it to happen all over again.

  Please, no. Falling in love with him again was simply not an option. It was too crazy. It didn’t make any sense. She’d gotten over him. She’d made a life for herself.

  “Here, have a drink,” he reminded her, lifting the cup to her mouth.

  She took a sip, and it was warm, and soothing, and wonderful—but it wasn’t enough to keep the tears from filling her eyes and spilling onto her cheeks. She didn’t have time for this. Honest to God, she didn’t.

  She watched him track the first wet streak down her cheek, saw the utter resignation of defeat come over his face. He swore under his breath as he looked away.

  “You can’t do this to me, Kat. Please.”

  It was a plea, nothing less, and hearing it from him only made her feel worse. He’d been right. She was bad luck for him. Bad luck to the core.

  CHAPTER

  12

  DAMMIT, Hawkins thought. He was trying to be professionally disengaged here, but she was undermining him at every turn. Crying already, and he hadn’t even gotten to the tough part.

  He wiped his hand across his mouth and looked back up at her. Yeah. The tough part. He was going to have to get to that pretty quick, but not yet, and he couldn’t just sit here on his heels and watch her cry.

  Rising to his feet, he leaned down and scooped her up in his arms, making sure to snag a blanket as he did.

  “I’m going to set you up over here by the fire, while I take a shower, and I want you to promise to drink your tea and eat the toast. I’ll leave the aspirin for you. Do yourself a favor and take three. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she whispered, which was good enough for him. It had to be.

  They needed to move quickly. Linebacker Dekker was probably halfway to Denver by now, and the last thing he needed was a senator on his ass while he tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Skeeter had spent half the night getting him an updated list of the Prom King Murder boys, and all but two of them still lived in Colorado, most of them either in or near Denver, which made them all look as guilty as hell in his book.

  Eight boys in the alley that night. Two of them dead. That left six to shake down—more than a day’s work after a night spent cruising the streets, hitting the Gardens and coming up empty, and three hours spent stretched out on his couch, trying to sleep instead of think about the woman in his bed.

  He’d spent time with J.T.’s dad this morning as well, and hell, compared to what had happened in Colombia and what Kid was going through down there, he was working a cakewalk. A shower could only help put it all into perspective.

  KATYA watched him leave the room from over the top of her mug of tea. He was beautiful, yes, in that rough-edged way he’d always had, but he looked almost as bad as she felt, like he hadn’t gotten any more sleep than she had gotten.

  Bad luck—that’s exactly what she’d been to him, and once, a long time ago, he’d been everything she’d ever wanted.

  Another tear rolled down her cheek, and she silently swore at herself. She’d turned into such a baby, which wasn’t like her at all.

  But the man undid her. He simply undid her, and she needed to figure out why. It couldn’t be love. That was too absurd.

  She took another drink of tea and forced herself to take a bite of toast. She needed to get herself together and get the hell out of his loft while the getting was good.

  She shook four aspirin out of the bottle he’d left, then tossed them back with another swallow of tea. If her luck held, four aspirin on an empty stomach would outright kill her, which would solve a whole lot of her problems.

  Wrapping the blanket toga style over one shoulder and under one arm, she forced herself to her feet, then almost fell back into the chair. After a second, she found her sea legs, so to speak, only to look down and realize she wasn’t exactly dressed in her dress. Her four-hundred-dollar designer knockoff was little more than a rag held together by two shoulder straps and a matched pair of safety pins.

  Well, hell. She couldn’t catch a cab half naked or wrapped in a blanket. As a matter of fact, she probably couldn’t catch a cab at all.

  She had no purse, no credit card, no money, no identification—no dress—and no shoes. No keys to her gallery. No cell phone. No brains to have gotten herself into such a fix, and no clue as to what to do next.

  Hawkins, on the other hand, had all those things, including brains and clues. All she had to do was find what she needed and borrow it all for a bit.

  Great. Borrowing brains. She’d hit a new all-time low, and given the sheer awfulness of her months in Paris, when she’d hit rock bottom and then some, that was saying a lot.

  Okay, she was exaggerating. As bad as this was, Paris had been worse, much worse. She might have lost a few brain cells last night, but she hadn’t lost her mind, and she’d come damn close in Paris, all thanks to her mother. How one woman could do so much damage in the name of love was beyond her.

  Just the thought of her mother was enough to spur her into action. Dipping her toast in her tea, and eating as she went, she shuffled—carefully—across the loft, dragging her blanket along with her and trying to jar herself as little as possible.

  God, she was pitiful.

  And he was amazing. Looking around, one thing was becoming glaringly apparent: He had incredible taste. The color scheme in the loft was muted, but not without its high points, and the art was stunning. She knew art. She’d found her salvation in it at the Louvre and the Sorbonne, and she was in the home of a serious collector—with money.

  Two huge, abstract Caldwells flanked the sides of his carved oak entryway door. The door itself she recognized as the work of a local artisan, Tomás Alejandro, a guy whose studio was just a couple of blocks from Toussi’s. Hawkins had a matched set of John Frank sculptures in front of the windows, and two huge panels of stained glass taking the morning light and painting the room in shades of yellow, blue, and green on one side, and red, rose, and orange on the other, with nothing but the sky and the Denver skyline in the middle. He did have an iron balcony running along the outside of his loft, and it was jam-packed with plants, potted trees, and cascades of geraniums and petunias, ferns, paintbrush, ivy, and violets.

  She could live here, she thought, happily, comfortably. His home was richly complex, but with ideas rather than stuff. There was a simplicity in
its relative emptiness, all the open space, with his bed off to one side and the open galley of his kitchen off to the other, the clean wood floors, the great expanse of windows. Of course, this was from a woman who lived, literally, under the aegis of “King Julio” in gilt-edged clouds of garish color. Anything looked good compared to Suzi Toussi’s apartment.

  She heard a shower start up, the sound coming from behind the kitchen. So the bathroom was back there, and maybe his closet, because she didn’t see any clothes anyplace else, and a man’s closet was probably where he kept stuff like a very expensive black suit jacket with over five hundred dollars in one of the pockets.

  She wasn’t going to feel guilty about the money. She was simply borrowing it, not stealing. The same way she was hoping to borrow a shirt and maybe a pair of pants she could roll up.

  Shuffling along, soaking her toast in her tea, and knowing she looked like something even an alley cat would hesitate to drag home, she headed for the door past the kitchen, the one that didn’t sound like there was a naked man taking a shower behind it. Along the way, she set her teacup on the kitchen counter. Then she spied her black high heels, and as awful as the thought of putting them on was, she felt a little relief. At least she wouldn’t leave barefoot.

  When she finally got to the door and opened it, she realized she’d found his spare bedroom, not his closet. She flipped on the light. Whoa. He had a freaking arsenal filling up one wall. It was enough to make her feel a little dizzy.

  He had more guns than a midtown SWAT team, big guns, little guns, handguns, rifles, automatic weapons.

  All the more reason to get the hell out of here, girl, she told herself. Even after a whole night spent in his company, she didn’t know a damn thing about his life, or who he had become, or what he actually did for the Department of Defense—though the huge rack of guns was giving her a lot of ideas, all of them very bad news.

  Her hangover be damned, she strode over to a door inside his home arsenal and found what she’d been looking for: a walk-in closet. The black suit jacket was easy to find, and the five hundred dollars was still in the pocket. She borrowed two hundred and told herself not to forget to write him a note and leave it on his desk.

  She quickly riffled through his clothes, through silk shirts and hockey jerseys, elegant suits and suede pants that had to fit him like a second skin—which gave her a moment’s pause—before she found a beautifully tailored Italian dress shirt, hanging between an iridescent blue snakeskin jacket of indeterminate fashion nationality that had definitely seen better days and a denim jacket with the sleeves ripped out that looked even worse and had MARAUDERS embroidered across the back.

  Well, that was just great. She’d spent the night in the bed of a member of the Marauders, Denver’s most notorious motorcycle gang. No one but a member would dare to wear their colors, not and expect to live through the weekend, which gave his arsenal a whole new meaning.

  She definitely needed to confirm his employment with the Defense Department—and if she couldn’t, she was definitely in more trouble than she’d thought.

  Taking off her dress first she slipped on the Italian shirt and folded the sleeves back, then secured the French cuffs with a pair of onyx cuff links she found on his dresser. A pair of button-fly jeans went on next, the bottoms triple rolled.

  Shoving the last bite of toast in her mouth, she ran her fingers through his belts and found one with a big silver buckle to cinch around her waist. A sudden, searing pain somewhere deep behind her eyes brought her to a screeching halt. One hand went over her face, the other clutched the edge of his dresser.

  Good God, whatever Rick put in his margaritas, it was lethal. Slowly, carefully, she breathed her way through the agony, until she could get on with the job.

  She should have felt like a thief, pawing through his things and taking what she needed, but she didn’t. She’d get it all back to him. She should have felt a lot more uncomfortable invading his inner sanctum, but she didn’t. Mostly what she felt was curious, powerfully curious, and a little unnerved. He seemed to have a split personality, part biker-boy, part designer babe, part arms dealer.

  On second thought, she grabbed another hundred dollars out of his suit jacket. Good hotels didn’t come cheap.

  They really didn’t, and she couldn’t bear anything less than a four-star hotel, not today. She was going to need extensive room service—a massage, a jetted tub, perfect food and even better coffee, and she was going to need it fast. She and Alex and Suzi Toussi, not to mention Nikki McKinney and her model, Travis James, had been working on Nikki’s show all week, but there were always a thousand last-minute details. Nikki had promised to have Pathos VII finished for tonight, and it was going to have to be hung.

  And now there would be her mother to deal with—which she could hardly bear. And Alex to fire—which was even worse.

  On third thought, she stuffed another hundred dollars in her pocket for good measure. Then she shifted her gaze out the closet door and back to the racks of guns hanging on the far wall of his spare room. What, she wondered, did he do with all those guns? And after wearing a very expensive suit last night, what had he been doing wearing Chinese “Fuck you” this morning?

  Was he really a Marauder? And lived like this? she wondered.

  Bodyguard was still a better answer, a bodyguard for the DOD, which meant high-security work for heads of state and ambassadors. But DOD work wouldn’t have paid for Tomás Alejandro doors and John Frank sculpture, let alone the Caldwells—unless he worked for some obscure section of the Defense Department she’d never heard about, the kind nobody ever heard about, the kind that operated without Congress’s approval and were bankrolled with slush funds . . . like, maybe, one buried in Denver, Colorado.

  Nah, she decided. Him working for a secret government agency was a little too far-fetched, even for someone who knew the government had layers that weren’t exactly what they seemed.

  So what had happened to him after his pardon? He’d been a car thief when she’d met him. A continued life of crime wasn’t completely out of the question, not with a room full of guns.

  She looked back at the top of his dresser. He’d emptied a lot of pockets onto it. There was stuff everywhere: tickets, bank cards, access cards, a movie store card, what appeared to be a few other types of ID, receipts, pieces of paper, a couple of envelopes—keys.

  No way, she told herself. Borrowing his keys was out of the question. She wasn’t getting anywhere near Roxanne’s ignition, but that still left plenty to explore.

  Curiosity overcoming common sense, she opened the closest envelope and peeked inside—two tickets for the opera next Friday night, Madama Butterfly, Puccini, her favorite, which surprised her and didn’t do a thing to improve her mood or her headache.

  It had to be a date. With a woman. She turned the top ticket to one side—a woman he liked enough to spend a hundred dollars a pop for dress circle seats. Attached to the tickets was a message slip written to Superman from Skeeter in a bold script confirming a dinner reservation for two at Club Dove—on the same night.

  Definitely a date.

  He was seeing someone.

  Someone he liked.

  Someone he probably didn’t call Bad Luck, and she’d bet the last hundred bucks she’d taken that he wouldn’t be wearing his Marauder jacket or his Chinese muscle shirt when he took this woman to Club Dove.

  Dammit. She didn’t even want to think about how that made her feel. Of course he’d gone on and made a life for himself, and of course that life would include women, and all that kissing last night had just been . . . incredible. Dammit.

  Dropping the opera tickets back on his dresser, she looked over some of the IDs. Slowly, her brow started to furrow. He had a library card, two platinum credit cards, and a card from the FBI that said he was Special Agent Christian Hawkins, complete with a photograph.

  Now why would he tell her he worked for the DOD, if he worked for the FBI? Of course, the next ID she picked up sa
id he worked for the State Department—in Saudi Arabia. There were two more credit cards issued from banks in France and Germany. The next few cards were bundled together with a rubber band, each of them confirming Christian Hawkins as a member of the U.S. armed forces—every branch. U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps. It was enough to raise her eyebrows all the way up to her hairline.

  Criminy. He even had one saying he worked for the National Security Agency. They all had his photograph on them, they were all current, and they all looked absolutely valid.

  Yessiree, it was definitely time to get the hell out of Dodge. Whatever he was into, and at this point she was guessing major felonies and quite possibly gunrunning for somebody, maybe even the DOD, she didn’t want any part of it.

  She dropped the cards back on the dresser and turned to leave, when something pink and sparkly on a worktable in the other room caught her eye. Her heart came to a sudden stop, and her hand came up to her mouth.

  Oh . . . my . . . God.

  Her tiara. She’d forgotten about it.

  Slowly, she walked out of the closet and over to the table. There had been a man with Alex last night, waiting in her apartment, and he’d given the tiara to Hawkins.

  How in the world, she wondered, had her tiara ended up in her and Alex’s apartment? And where had it been all these years?

  None of the Prom King boys had ever confessed to having it. So why was it here? Now?

  Fighting an awful premonition of disaster, she reached over the row of pistols laid out on the table and picked up the tiara. It was tagged and bagged like a piece of evidence and as she picked it up, the tag caught on a manila envelope underneath it. The envelope was from last night, too, she remembered. She tucked it under her arm as she looked over the tiara. When she turned over the tag, there was a note written in the same bold handwriting that had been on his dinner reservation: Superman, It’s clean as a whistle, no fingerprints. Skeeter.