Crazy Kisses Page 8

  And he didn’t. The one-way conversation had bottomed out for him as soon as “art show tonight at Toussi Gallery,” had turned into “art show tonight at Toussi Gallery with Rocky Solano.”

  But she still had a bloody handprint on her dress, and he was just going to have to tough it out.

  “Kid, I need to know what . . . what those men—” She stopped, met his gaze, took a breath in readiness to start again, but he slowly shook his head, no, stopping her.

  She did have one other subject she wanted to talk about—but he didn’t want to talk about it. Ever. Especially in Rueben’s with the bar owner coming in and out of the office. The less she knew about Juan Conseco and the two assassins he’d sent to Kid’s house tonight, the better.

  “But you’re hurt,” she whispered. “Bleeding.”

  He shook his head again. He didn’t care. They weren’t talking about it here.

  The look she sent him was full of frustration, and anger, and sadness—which pretty much summed up how he felt, too.

  “Th-the Tulsa commission was so cool,” she continued haltingly, abiding by his unspoken rule. “Anyone else might have stuck with the cliché, done the whole rainbow thing, but Rocky took the medium through the message, not the other way around, and not beyond the message—but through. He didn’t lose anything in the execution, which for an artist is so important. It’s a brilliant piece, absolutely brilliant.”

  Now Kid did know that, because apparently everything Rocky Solano did was brilliant.

  “The Tulsa gays just love him.”

  Of course they did, and he loved her. Loved her because she was doing as he asked. Loved her simply because she was Nikki.

  But God, he needed a drink. Badly. He needed two.

  Okay. That was a lie. He needed five.

  Five shots of premium tequila would almost make this bearable, this sitting across from her and listening to her rattle on and on about the guy she was “no, not really” engaged to marry, and even worse, knowing that because of him, her life had been in danger tonight.

  Stone-cold sober, both those facts were killing him.

  He wanted her out of Panama.

  “Did I tell you Rocky’s mother, Marcela, is a potter?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding and giving her a small smile. “Something about the glazes.” He reached for his soda and lime.

  “Well, she’s always been known for her glazes, but over the past year she’s created this . . . this—” Her voice suddenly broke, and his gaze instantly narrowed. She covered her face with her hand, her shoulders shaking, absolutely silently, absolutely awfully.

  He steeled himself and prayed.

  She was struggling, working so hard not to break down and cry, and he was rooting for her. Goddamn, he was rooting for her.

  After a couple of tense seconds, she dragged in a shaky breath, rallying, pulling herself together. And she started talking again, slowly at first, but letting her words pick up speed.

  “Well, it’s this . . . this new technique of getting a really cool, utterly translucent layer on her pieces”—she paused for a second, using the back of her hand to wipe at her cheek—“a—a special glaze over the top of the color that you can just see right through. I don’t know how much you know about pottery and the whole firing process—”

  Somewhere between damn little and not much, he could have told her.

  “—but what Marcella has discovered, this secret formula of hers, is a revolutionary step, an amazing step, really.”

  She was amazing. He knew how tough the night had been on him, and he knew it had been a hundred times tougher on her. He knew she had a thousand questions about what had happened, and he knew he was never going to answer a single one.

  “It makes every vase, every platter, every piece of work seem to be floating in a rim of light.”

  He nodded and took another sip of his soda, and let himself wish for just a few seconds that her idea of stress relief was a little more physical.

  Okay, a lot more physical, something more along the lines of what they’d been doing four hours ago on his bedroom floor would work real well for him, not that there was any place for making love at Rueben’s.

  There wasn’t.

  So forget about it.

  He shifted in his seat, took another sip of soda, and tried to take his own advice.

  Shit.

  “Rocky and his mom did a show together last fall. It was so cool, with these long drapes of soft texture swirling around all these gleaming, hard curves of clay. I think . . . well, really, I think this new glaze thing is going to make her famous.”

  Rich and famous, Kid thought, like her son.

  Rocky Solano was loaded, which was just one more cross for him to bear.

  He couldn’t see the damn ring with the way she was clutching her purse and had her hands wrapped around the handle, but he remembered every frickin’ detail. The diamond had been huge, probably two carats, and it was surrounded by a bunch of colored gems, rubies and emeralds, sapphires, a couple of other precious stones. The whole thing had been very artsy, perfectly Nikki, and had torn his guts out.

  “Did I tell you we met through Rocky’s dad? Thomas? I already knew his older sister, Lucia. We’d taken a class together at the university, and I knew she had a brother—and a dad, of course—and one day I just sort of ran into Thomas at the photography place where I buy my darkroom stuff, and I don’t know who said something first, but then somebody said his name, and it just struck me who he was: Thomas Solano. The Thomas Solano, and . . .”

  He was listening. He swore he was, but she’d gone through these parts of the story before, about the dad and the sister, and how the whole freakin’ family was just one famous artist after another. Apparently, there were another couple of sisters and a brother. Somewhere, someone was a lesbian in a long-term, committed relationship, which was so important. He’d kind of lost count of some of the other stuff, but he got the picture. Nikki was marrying into One Big Happy Family.

  She deserved that. She needed that, and he had damned little to offer in that area. The brother he’d loved was dead, and he didn’t think his dad was ever going to recover from the loss. His mother had left a long time ago, when he’d been about eight, to make a half-assed attempt at a Hollywood career that had gone exactly nowhere, and his oldest brother was practically a stranger, living in Ohio, doing some corporate geek job.

  He reached for his soda again, discreetly checking his watch, and he let her run on and on and on, because there really wasn’t any other option.

  He’d had one bit of luck tonight, though. C. Smith had already been on his way to Panama when Kid had called. Their buddy Miguel had been flying him up from Covenas, a town on the coast, and if Miguel’s plane had held together, C. Smith should be walking through Rueben’s door any minute, and any minute wouldn’t be a second too soon. Kid was starting to feel a little sick—lovesick, heartsick, and plain old “I got gut-punched in my stitches and I’m bleeding all over my shirt” sick.

  Fuck.

  The last report he’d gotten from the DEA guys standing guard down in the bar was that the police and a couple of agents were still at his house and still searching the neighborhood. If by some chance Conseco was in Panama City, they wanted to know it sooner rather than later. There was nothing any of them would like better than to catch the sonuvabitch outside of his fortress in Medellín. Dozens of law enforcement agencies in half a dozen countries would love to be the ones to take Juan Conseco down.

  C. Smith wouldn’t want to miss the chance, and neither did Kid, but if everything went according to his plan, Smith was going to be hell and gone out of luck.

  “. . . and I guess, well, I guess that’s what it comes down to.”

  Wait a minute. Kid sat up straighter, refocusing his attention on her. She’d actually been leading up to a point for the last half-hour, not just rambling, and he’d missed it? Unfuckingbelievable.

  “I mean the two of you are so different.
Rocky never could have killed those men, not in a million years,” she said, leaning closer, lowering her voice, and breaking the hell out of his rule.

  Then Rocky would have been dead, he could have told her, and her right along with him.

  “But you did, and I don’t know how. I mean I saw the whole thing, and I still don’t—”

  “Nikki, don’t.” He shook his head, warning her to stop, but she was having none of it this time.

  She leaned even closer. “The killings—what you did, I never knew anyone could be so . . . so . . . savage.”

  Savage.

  That was it? Her whole point? That he was a savage and her fiancé wasn’t?

  He was stunned speechless.

  Fortunately, he didn’t have time to dwell on her misinformed, misplaced, mis-everything-wrong-about-it freakin’ opinion, because someone was coming up the stairs.

  Ignoring the pain in his side, and slipping real damn easily back into “savage” mode, he rose from his chair and crossed the room. He had his .45 drawn, racked, and ready to fire before he cleared the desk. Chances were it was one of the DEA guys, but it was the off chance where Kid made his living.

  Geezus. Savage.

  He should have seen that one coming.

  He stationed himself by the door, ready for whatever came down next, but the voice that came from the other side along with a brief knock was thankfully familiar. He lowered his gun and reached for the knob.

  THE first thing C. Smith noticed when he entered the office was that Kid was wound tighter than an Arkansas tick. The second thing he noticed was the woman.

  She was also the third thing he noticed, and the fourth—Sweet Jesus. This was Nikki McKinney? The girl Kid Chaos had left behind in Denver?

  His gaze went over her again, strictly professionally, taking in the bloodstains on her dress, the tear tracks on her cheeks, the paleness of her skin—the shape of her legs, the curves of her breasts, and the wild, out-there beauty of her face. She was incredible, a guaranteed, ball-busting heartbreaker.

  “Cut it out, Smith,” Kid growled. Actually, snarled was more like it.

  Smith couldn’t help himself—he grinned from ear to ear. Kid had it bad.

  He turned back to his partner, and instantly sobered.

  “You look like shit,” he said, being kind.

  “Thanks.”

  He checked the boy out, saw the last damn thing he wanted to see, and swore under his breath.

  “I didn’t save your ass in Banco Nuevo so you could bleed to death in Panama City,” he said, switching the conversation to Spanish. The girl didn’t need to hear this. She looked like the slightest thing could push her over the edge.

  “There’s a clinic just a couple of miles from here,” Kid said, as if that made everything okay.

  Bullshit.

  “You need a hospital.”

  “There’s a doctor at the clinic, and he’s not going anywhere until I get there. Your guys made sure of it.”

  “Then why the hell aren’t you at the clinic?” Smith didn’t take kindly to losing partners.

  “Because I’ve been waiting for you to take over the security detail.”

  Oh, hell. His gaze slid to the woman again.

  “No way,” he said. The DEA guys downstairs had filled him in on the situation, and he wasn’t going to miss out on potentially the biggest bust of the century to babysit some girl—not even a drop-dead-beautiful one.

  “You’re the only one I trust to get her home. There’s a commercial flight out of Tocumen International in two hours. They’ve guaranteed us two seats, first-class. You came in at Albrook, right?”

  “Yeah.” But so what? He wasn’t the one who needed to get his ass out of Panama.

  “Here.” Kid pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I’ve already called.”

  Smith looked down and read what was on the paper: 738 Steele Street, Denver, Colorado. A code was scrawled across the bottom.

  He knew what it was, Superman’s private home address, and home of the Shadow, Dylan Hart, a guy buried so deep, Smith didn’t know anyone who had ever worked with him, or anyone who would recognize him if they saw him, except for Kid and the other guys from SDF, a special operations team notorious for their unorthodox methods and high success rate. Seven thirty-eight Steele Street had resurrected General Buck Grant’s career. It was where they made guys like Kid Chaos Chronopolous.

  “There’s a girl at SDF, at the Steele Street address, Skeeter Bang—”

  “Skeeter Bang?” he interrupted. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No.” Kid shook his head. “She runs things for SDF. Make sure she knows to keep Nikki at Steele Street, and tell Nikki to stay put until I get there. I don’t want her out of Skeeter’s sight until we know for sure who was behind tonight’s attack.”

  Nothing tricky there. It was all standard operating procedure. It just wasn’t his SOP, a fact sent doubly home when he glanced at Nikki McKinney.

  Okay. This wasn’t good.

  She’d gotten this look on her face like she was going to burst into tears any second, and he meant any second, which was just the sort of thing he took pains to avoid.

  Great pains. C. Smith Rydell and crying women were like oil and water. They didn’t mix, not even if you shook them, and he’d definitely gotten shook up with a few—more than a few, actually. Certainly enough to know this one didn’t want a thing to do with him, enough to know the only person who had a prayer of getting her to Denver without her falling apart was Kid Chaos, the guy she was looking at as if her life depended on it.

  He glanced back at Kid, but his partner looked ready to bolt.

  Christ.

  C. Smith nodded in the girl’s direction. “You need to be the one taking her out of here,” he said, continuing in Spanish and pocketing the damn piece of paper. Not that he was going to need it. No way in hell.

  “No,” Kid insisted. “I need to get patched up, go back to the house, see what I can find. These guys are after me, and I need to do something about it.”

  All true, but Smith wasn’t buying it. The look on his face must have said as much.

  “Okay,” Kid gave in, his voice lowering, even though he stuck with Spanish. “I need a break.” He glanced at the woman. “She’s . . . she’s—”

  “Hot,” Smith supplied.

  “Screw you,” Kid said, barely managing a grin, which quickly faded. “She’s engaged.”

  “You told me that weeks ago.”

  “Yeah, well, things happened tonight.”

  “So?” Things happened all the time. It was human nature.

  “So, regardless of what happened, she was checking out of my place when Conseco’s guys showed up.”

  Oh, now he got it, and it sucked. Big-time. No wonder Kid looked like hell. Nothing took more starch out of a guy than making love to a woman he was crazy about only to have her split in the middle of the night. Man, that hurt.

  Kid was tough, as steel-bellied as the next Marine, but he looked about as broke up as the girl. Of course, having two dead guys bleeding all over your kitchen floor and one bleeding out in your garden made for one helluva night. According to the agents downstairs, the transvestite had been clean, no record, no previous arrests, no drug habit—just somebody in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Nikki McKinney had been in the same damn place at the same damn time. If he’d been Kid, he’d want her out of Panama, too, no matter who she was marrying.

  But what Kid was asking—damn. It was impossible. No way was Smith going to let his night take a nosedive on such a crappy plan.

  “I don’t do the crying thing,” he said, nodding in the girl’s direction.

  “She’ll be okay,” Kid was quick to promise—too quick.

  “I don’t think so, Chico.”

  “She’s just a little blown away right now.” Kid made a small dismissive gesture with his hand, his expression pained. “She’s been doing great, but it was, well, it was ugly. About as ugly as it
can get. I’m sure the guys filled you in.”

  “Yeah.” They sure as hell had, and he was impressed. Kid had kicked some major ass, but the boy was missing a major point here: Kid was the one with the half-million-dollar bounty on his head, and he was the one who needed to get his ass on a plane back to the States.

  “Sorry,” he said, eyeing the girl again. “But whatever needs to be done, I can guarantee she wants to do it with you, not me.”

  The office was pretty good-sized, but not big enough to keep Smith from hearing Nikki McKinney let out a little sob, which just proved his point and hardened his resolve. Spending the next nine hours with a crying woman was real close to the top of his “Avoid At All Costs” list, right under untimely death and a desk job.

  Kid took a deep breath, swore, then swore again.

  “All right,” he said, after a couple more long moments. “Sure. Fine. I can take her home. Have them bring a car around to the back door.”

  “There’ll be a Boy Scout badge in it for you,” Smith promised, not quite managing a grin.

  “Screw—”

  “Me. Yeah. I got it the first time,” he said under his breath, watching Kid turn back to the desk.

  CHAPTER

  8

  Denver, Colorado

  THERE WERE ONLY two things Travis didn’t either respect or admire about Skeeter Bang, and those were her sunglasses and her ball cap. The rest of her was extremely hot, extremely tough, extremely smart. Everything about Skeeter Bang was extreme—including her aversion to letting anybody see the scar that ran diagonally across her forehead and through one of her pale blond eyebrows.

  It wasn’t pretty, but neither was it as disfiguring as she seemed to think, and the ball cap and sunglasses she wore to hide the scar made it damn near impossible to read her sometimes.

  Like now.

  She’d gone very still, the envelope still in her hand.

  Then he felt it, a slow heat crawling up his spine, and he knew why Skeeter had gone so still.