by Tara Janzen
He glanced at the woman in the seat beside him. Dealing in hot dinosaur bones was hardly up Roper Jones's alley. In fact, it didn't make any sense at all, but Regan McKinney had ended up on his doorstep, looking for Wilson. Hell, something was going on.
He slanted Regan another glance. He'd been thinking about lace bras and sex before he'd gotten sidetracked by hit lists and guns, his body reminded him. Reminded him also of what a pleasant diversion it all could be. Of course, actually having sex with the grown-up version of a man's most treasured adolescent fantasy shot things way past diversion.
God, she was pretty, and soft, and still wondrously wet.
He shifted uneasily in his seat and forced his eyes back to the road.
“So, are you still married?” he asked. He was beginning to think not, but he had to ask. He had to know. Married women normally didn't live with their sister and their grandfather, and usually they took their husband's name, and just about all the time, they wore a ring. Regan was looking good on all counts.
Her silence gave him another excuse to glance over at her, and he had to wonder if she had the strength to white-knuckle-grip the door and the gear console all the way to Denver. Even at one hundred and twenty miles per hour, it was going to take a while to get there.
“How . . . how did you know I was married?”
Breathless, wrung-out, tense, and defensive—it was nice to know he hadn't lost his touch with the fairer sex.
“Wilson told me you were getting married the day I was at the house. There were dresses everywhere.” Small mountains of baby blue dresses and one big white one with pearl buttons running all the way down the back. He'd never been so tight-jawed in his life as he'd been standing there saying good-bye to Wilson and looking at that dress.
He'd wanted it, by God, he'd wanted it and the woman who went in it. He'd wanted them for himself. Isn't that what he'd been working his ass off for—so he could have a chance with the granddaughter of a friggin' college professor, a Boulder-bred, pink-pantied virgin who was so clean it made him ache? That summer at the dinosaur camp, he'd watched her on and off as she'd come and gone, and fallen more in love and lust every day. He never had gotten up the nerve to talk with her, but he'd listened when she'd talked to Wilson and his grad students. With every word she'd proved herself to be way out of his league. She'd intimidated the hell out of him, which had only made him want her all that much more.
He'd been such a cross-eyed romantic sap at sixteen—and at twenty, when he'd been standing there looking at her wedding dress. He'd been so fucking galled by the situation, and it had only gotten worse in the following weeks, a whole helluva lot worse.
“Yes, well, the dresses. That was . . . uh . . . sort of a high point, the dresses,” she said, a small catch in her voice, her gaze glued to the road.
“So marriage is a rough go, huh?” Considering who she'd married, he wasn't surprised to hear it. Fate had definitely been fucking with him when it came to Regan McKinney.
“Rough?” she repeated, and gave a short laugh, which broke her single-minded concentration on the road—and that's when he got her attention, all of it. Her head came around, and her eyes narrowed in an offended glare. “My marriage isn't any of your—”
“Business. Right,” he said, cutting her off. “I'm just trying to figure out what's going on here, trying to figure out why a man would send his wife to Cisco alone, and—”
“I'm not a wife,” she interrupted him. “I don't have a husband. I make all my own decisions, including the very bad one to come to Cisco so I could get my car ‘dumped' somewhere and be practically kidnapped by a couple of—”
She cut herself off, obviously thinking better of what she'd been about to call him and Kid. He didn't care. He'd gotten the answer he'd wanted. It was all he could do not to grin.
Things were looking up.
THINGS were going downhill fast, Regan thought, sitting back into her seat, her arms coming up and crossing over her chest. In truth, they could hardly look worse. She'd lost her car and was at the mercy of a . . . a speed freak in a muscle machine.
And to make things just that much more awful, he'd brought up her marriage.
Her defunct marriage, she reminded herself. Under normal circumstances, remembering she was divorced was usually enough to give her spirits a lift.
These were not normal circumstances.
She slanted the speedometer another glance, then wished she hadn't.
“Let's talk cars,” she said abruptly. Cars were her business with Quinn Younger, cars and Wilson.
“You mean the cars I stole from Vince Branson and sold to your grandfather?” he asked, downshifting around a curve in the road.
“Yes. Those cars,” Regan said, gritting her teeth. She couldn't help herself, as they went into the turn she clutched the door panel and held her breath, but the car stuck to the road, all four tires gripping asphalt, and she had to wonder how in the hell he managed to do it. He shifted up again, bringing them out of the turn, and by the time they hit the straightaway, he was running the Camaro at full throttle.
God, he drove like a . . . a fighter pilot.
Of course, she thought, the realization coming to her from out of the blue. Whatever kind of lousy, low-life car thief he'd become—if that's what he'd become, and the jury was still out on that one—he was still one of the most highly trained and highly skilled pilots in the world. Surely he could drive a car better than most, even at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.
“What kind of cars were those again?” he asked, ratcheting the speed up another notch, so help her God.
She dug her fingers into the car's upholstery. “Huh?”
“The cars I stole, then sold to your grandfather.”
Oh, right. “A . . . uh, 1967 Dodge Coronet, with red paint and a red leather interior with hot pink piping.” Nikki had loved that car. Regan had thought it looked pretty cool, too, just not cool for her seventy-two-year-old grandfather who seemed to be losing track of some of his marbles. “And the Porsche he disappeared with, a silver one with a black interior. He only had the Coronet for a couple of days before trading it in on the Porsche.”
“Hot pink piping?” he repeated, sounding a little incredulous and none too pleased with the color scheme.
“It had a lot of power. He liked to sit in the driveway and run the motor.” What in the world had Wilson been thinking? she wondered for about the millionth time, to drag home a candy-apple-red car to their sedately historical, upper-middle-class neighborhood and then sit around in the driveway revving up the engine like some sixteen-year-old kid. It had been embarrassing and distressing at the time, but now she wished she were sitting in that driveway again, listening to the neighbors complain. She'd rather be embarrassed than dead, and that's what she was going to be if Quinn didn't slow down. She'd also rather have Wilson back. “The Porsche was a little quieter.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice tight. “It would be. So what tipped you off to Cisco?”
Okay, she thought. It was time to put her cards on the table, or rather her card. She'd only had one reason for coming to Cisco. Lifting her hips off the seat, she searched in her pocket for the piece of paper that had sent her on her doomed mission. Unfolding it, she smoothed the page open on her leg.
“This is from Wilson's calendar, a page from June. At the bottom, on Saturday, it says ‘Pick up Betty. Contact Quinn Younger, Cisco, Utah, for nine-one-one.'” She glanced up at him. “That's the kind of Porsche he went off in, a nine-one-one.”
“A nine-eleven, yeah,” he said, his expression growing even darker.
She hated to ask the next question, but she had to know. “So . . . uh . . . do you know this Betty lady?” As impossible as it had seemed, she hadn't thrown out the possibility of seventy-two-year-old hormones being the catalyst for the crazy happenings in her grandfather's life.
“Betty,” Quinn repeated with a short laugh, giving his head a disbelieving shake. “Betty is the candy-apple-r
ed Dodge with the pink piping.” And it was SDF's baby, the most cherried-out machine in their Steele Street garage, a car so reeking of girly-girlness, the only one of them with enough balls to drive it in daylight was the boss, Dylan.
Son of a bitch, Quinn silently cursed. Dylan really had done it. He'd contacted old Doc McKinney and brought him in on the operation—for reasons Quinn was damn well going to find out—and then he'd paid McKinney off with free rides in Betty and one of the Porsches.
And the 911? He wasn't going to tell her, but “Contact Quinn Younger in Cisco, Utah, for 911” didn't have a damn thing to do with a Porsche 911 and everything to do with what the old man should do if he found himself in trouble and needed help. Dylan was the only one who could have told Wilson about Cisco.
He'd been wrong. Things weren't looking up. They were going straight to hell, and if they all weren't damned careful, they were going to take Regan McKinney, her grandfather, and her kid sister right along with them.
CHAPTER
6
WORK, WORK, WORK. They were going to work him to death—and it would almost be worth it. He had a whole warehouse full of dinosaur bones to catalogue and identify.
Wilson McKinney hummed to himself as he moseyed from one plaster-covered fossil to the next, his glasses low on his nose, checking the numbers against his clipboard.
The men running around had really gone after the femurs and the tibias, looking for their missing guns. Yes, he'd figured that much out, that the guys at the warehouse had lost a bunch of guns, though why in the hell they thought someone would be hiding guns in dinosaur bones was beyond him.
Foolishness, pure foolishness. It was a good thing they'd called in an expert—namely him.
Of course, it was too darn hot to really be working with nothing but a darn fan blowing on him. All a darn fan did was blow the darn air around. Air-conditioning was what the darn warehouse needed. Air-conditioning.
Not that he couldn't take it. He'd been in a lot hotter places than a warehouse in . . . in—well, wherever the hell he was. Hell, yes, he'd been in hotter places than this. Spent his whole darn life in hotter places, digging up bones.
Though, swear to God, he'd never dug up anything even half so interesting as the three-hundred-pound peach of a fossil he'd found over near the generator, on table four.
His face split into a broad grin. Just wait until Regan got a look at number 42657. By God, he ought to just give her a call—and he would have, by God, if his darn phone worked, but he'd forgotten the darn charger. There was a phone in the warehouse. He heard it ringing every now and then, but he hadn't figured out where the darn thing was. He would, though, and by God, then he'd give Regan a call.
Oh, well. He'd be home soon, and he could tell her all about it. He ought to be telling a lot of people about it. There were still a couple of folks left in the warehouse, and if he could remember any of their darn names, by God, he'd call them over and show them a thing or two about dinosaurs.
But who could remember names, when it was too darn hot to remember anything?
A particularly round specimen caught his eye on table seven, and he wandered over to give it a closer look. He was sure he'd opened it up, but he'd better check it, just to make sure.
SO you did sell him the cars?” Regan asked, and Quinn found the disappointment in her voice heartening. Somehow, after the last wild hour, she must have still been harboring a hope that he wasn't quite as bad as he seemed.
Interesting.
He shrugged. “Let's just say he got to borrow Betty for a while.”
“And who would let him do that, if it wasn't you?”
Quinn wasn't about to give her Dylan's name, not yet.
“One of my partners” was all he said.
“Who?” she demanded, but he just looked at her. “Okay, then what about the Porsche?”
Yeah, what about the Porsche. He was still thinking about the Porsche, too. “We did have one we were looking to unload, but your grandfather isn't exactly a regular on our client list.”
“Of course not,” she said, sounding thoroughly offended again. “He never—” She stopped suddenly when the computer came to life.
A series of numbers flashed on the screen. Quinn hit a key, and a message scrolled across the monitor at the same time as it came through a speaker.
“Skeeter here. All clear in Boulder,” a young voice said.
Quinn adjusted the volume. “Did you get a visual?”
“That would be affirmative.”
“Nikki's fine,” he interpreted for Regan. “Skeeter, I need you to call Superman, tell him we're coming in. I'll call the boss myself.” Or not, he thought, already knowing what Dylan would think of him and Kid breaking cover.
“Copy that.”
Quinn hit another key. “Kid. What's your ETA?”
“Seven o'clock tonight.”
“Great.” A quick smile curved Quinn's lips. “I'll have Regan call you in.”
At least that had been the plan, but when he glanced over at her, she didn't look in the mood to cooperate.
“Skeeter is our . . . office manager,” he said with a smile. An encouraging smile, he hoped. “The computers are Kid's. Something he's been fooling around with, a wireless laptop with internal cell phone components on a closed satellite network with GPS. Do you want to call Nikki and tell her Kid Chronopolous is going to stay with her until you get home?”
“Why shouldn't I call the police instead?” she retorted, sounding like her mind was already made up, lifting her chin just enough that she could look down her nose at him, and suddenly he was back in that tent in Rabbit Valley. She'd been surprised when he'd walked in on her, but no more surprised than he'd been, and he never could have said who had recovered first—though his money had always been on her and the princess-to-pauper gaze she'd leveled at him. She hadn't been frightened. He'd realized that real quick. Badass jokers on the streets were afraid of him—but not the professor's granddaughter. No, she'd just looked down her prissy little nose and stared at him.
He'd loved it, absolutely loved it—there she'd been, practically naked and giving him attitude. He'd noticed her before, had been watching her, but that was when he'd fallen in sixteen-year-old love. Letting his gaze take a quick trip down her body and back had turned that split-second, initially pure and breathless feeling into molten lust. For an encounter that couldn't have lasted more than a minute, it had had one hell of an impact on him.
He'd pretty much ricocheted between love and lust the whole rest of the summer. Both reactions had made it impossible for him to work up the guts to talk to her. Every time he'd seen her, in his mind he'd seen her naked.
Some things never change, he thought, mildly disgusted with himself. He wasn't a kid anymore, and she certainly deserved better than him continually imagining her without her clothes on, but there it was anyway.
Her skin was amazingly soft, though. Any guy who had touched her would notice—which made him wonder what had happened to her husband, a story he probably wasn't going to get any time soon.
“I asked you a question.”
“Yeah, you did,” he said, stalling until he could get his mind back on what she wanted to talk about. “Why shouldn't you go to the police? Because the police don't have a clue where your grandfather is, and I do.”
The answer to her question was as simple as that. He hadn't known before—not about the doc and not about the contents of those crates—but Betty had clinched it for him. Old Doc McKinney was working for SDF. There had been dinosaur bones in those crates, and Dylan had gone to the dinosaur man for help.
“So where is he, damn it?” she demanded. “Is he okay, or what?” The faint tremor in her voice stole some of the force out of her question and made him feel guilty as hell.
“If he's where I think he is, he's fine.”
She was quiet for a long minute on her side of the Camaro, but he could feel her looking at him.
Turning his head, he slid his gaze o
ver her. Her hair was falling down all over the place, her lips were pale, and her skin was flushed with heat. Most women would look like train wrecks under those circumstances. He'd never seen anything more sexy in his life.
“And if he's not where you think he is?” she asked.
“Then I'll find him.”
And that was a promise.
WELL, that settles it, Christian Hawkins thought, slipping his cell phone into the back pocket of his jeans and pulling out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. His whole day had just gone to hell. His boss at SDF, Dylan Hart, had just confirmed it.
Leaning back against the old warehouse where he was working with Doc McKinney, Hawkins, sometimes known as “Superman,” knocked a cigarette out of the pack.
Uncle Sam was pulling the plug on them. Dylan's trip to Washington, D.C., to plead SDF's case on a bunch of dinosaur bones had come to nothing. Not even General Grant had been able to save the mission. Hell, Quinn had almost died stealing the damn things, and now the government didn't want them—not that Hawkins blamed them. Who the hell would want a bunch of old dinosaur bones, except old man McKinney?
Guns. That's what they had been looking for in the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe rail yards two weeks ago. They had been looking for a stolen shipment of cutting-edge military assault rifles commissioned by the Pentagon.
Hawkins bent his head low over the flame of his lighter and inhaled until his cigarette was lit. Then he snapped the lighter shut and shoved it and the pack back in his pocket with his phone. He took a long drag and looked over the warehouse's parking lot. The place made him uneasy, and not because of the rusting piles of gutted cars, abandoned shipping crates, and junkyard trash.
The warehouse was too isolated. They were sitting on the interstate with Denver twenty-five miles to the south, Boulder fifteen miles west, and nothing but endless prairie to the east. A single FBI agent was inside the building, watching Doc McKinney sort his way through all those tons of bones. Two weeks ago they'd had three agents working in shifts around the clock, and in about five more minutes, they weren't even going to have the one.