by Tara Janzen
Worse, immeasurably worse, his voice cracked when he said it. Geezus. His voice hadn't cracked since he'd been sixteen.
“Hey,” she said, her voice sweet and cool, like liquid silver.
He didn't believe in love at first sight, honest to God, but something really awful and wonderful was happening to him on that porch.
“Nikki McKinney?”
“As charged.” She offered her hand, her voice still very liquid and very cool.
She didn't look like her sister, nothing at all like her sister. She couldn't have been over five foot two or a hundred pounds. Her hair was black . . . and purple, cut short and spiky. Her eyelashes were black, and long enough to cast shadows at the corners of her eyes.
And her eyes—he swallowed softly—her eyes were the clearest, most crystalline gray he'd ever seen, like river water with sunlight shooting through it.
He suddenly remembered she was holding her hand out, and he finally took it with his own. She had delicate bones, a single silver band around her middle finger, and paint caked into her fingernails, electric blue and glitter green. Her skin was soft, her hand very small inside his, but she was stronger than he'd expected. Her firm grip on his hand was proof of that. He looked back to her face—and swallowed again. God, she was beautiful. Not pretty. Not cute, but freaking fucking beautiful, like a Victoria's Secret model, but without the push-up bra.
Without any bra.
His mouth went a little dry at the realization, and he had to force his gaze back to her face—which was no hardship. She had a smear of electric blue paint on one cheek. He had a serious urge to lick it off, but—God—if he ever once got his tongue on her, it was a pretty sure bet he was going to lick more than her cheek.
“And you would be?” she prompted with just enough amusement in her voice to let him know how long he'd been standing there with his tongue hanging out.
“Kid . . . uh, Peter Chronopolous,” he stammered.
“Chronopolous,” she said, his name sounding lazily silken on her tongue. “Also known as Kid Chaos?” One dark, winged brow arched in question.
“As charged,” he managed.
“Regan called a little while ago. She said you were coming. She said Grandpa was fine, camping out in Lafayette.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
Those crystal-gray eyes held his for a long, considering moment. “She said I should be careful with you.”
“With me?” People weren't careful with him. Some people might be careful of him, but not with him. That was his job, to be careful with people, to make sure they didn't get killed—except when he was on the other side of the equation, when his job was to make sure someone did get killed.
He was good at both. The best.
“She told me you were a sniper, an ex-Marine with a gun,” Nikki McKinney said. “Very dangerous.”
Well, hell. He never knew what to expect from civilians, but this was his least favorite response. He wasn't only a sniper.
Who the hell would ever have thought the retrieval operation for a bunch of guns would come to include someone like Nikki McKinney—this incredibly gorgeous, black-Lycra-miniskirted woman wearing a tiny, torn white T-shirt, who was currently short-circuiting his brain and whose hand he'd been holding for far too long—and whose sister had told her he was dangerous. Given the way he'd met Regan McKinney, she could have said worse. Hell, she probably had.
“Actually, ma'am, I'm the least dangerous person with a gun you are ever going to meet.” It was the truest truth he knew, and he knew it down to the marrow of his bones. No one had more respect for the killing power of a gun than a Marine sniper.
“She said to let you in.” It was a simple statement, but Kid got the feeling the question was still under debate in Nikki McKinney's mind.
“I would appreciate it.”
Still she hesitated.
“Sooner rather than later would be better, ma'am.”
MA'AM. Nikki wondered if Kid Chronopolous knew how somber he sounded when he called her ma'am. She wondered if he knew how incongruous his frat-boy party looks were with what her sister had said about finding him armed and dangerous with Quinn Younger in Cisco.
He didn't look dangerous, though his duffel bag probably held the gun Regan had warned her he'd be bringing with him. Nikki supposed it only made sense that a sniper would have a gun. She didn't like guns, but neither was she going to make a fuss over it. Regan had been very insistent that she treat Mr. Kid Chaos Chronopolous with a healthy measure of respect. He was wearing a pair of wraparound Oakley sunglasses, and she wondered if his eyes would be dark like his hair, richly dark.
Boy Wonder, Regan had called him, and he was a boy wonder—a wonderful, beautiful boy, a psyche on the cusp in a body fueled by pure testosterone. Perfect. Or at least he looked perfect standing on her front porch. She wouldn't really know until she got him out of his camouflage pants and rumpled blue parrot-printed Hawaiian shirt. It would all have to go, including his scuffed sneakers and black T-shirt, until she had all six feet of him—six feet of warm, smooth skin wrapped around converging layers of ironbound muscle, sinew, and bone—naked and under the lights.
Then she would unwrap him, layer by layer, through her lens and beneath her brush. For model material alone, she decided to let him in.
She loved Regan, but anyone who knew her older sister knew Regan was wound a little tight, especially when it came to her and Wilson. In Regan's view, Grandpa was too old to get anything right and Nikki was too young. Between the two of them, they'd formed a silent pact not to panic every time Regan had a meltdown.
Like last night, when Regan had found the entry on Wilson's desk calendar.
Nikki had stayed cool. Wilson wandered. That's what he did. All summer long. And if he had run off with a woman named Betty, all Nikki had to say about it was “Great.”
She wasn't flippant about her grandfather's welfare. He was getting old. He needed a little looking after, but he was far from incompetent. He could handle himself.
When she'd called, Regan had said there was some kind of trouble, and Nikki didn't doubt it. Trouble was everywhere, expected and unexpected. Her big sister had spent a lifetime building walls around herself to keep the trouble out.
But every wall Nikki had ever tried to build had crumbled, every single one, leaving her naked and unprotected. So she'd long ago learned another way.
“Would you like some iced tea?” she asked, stepping aside, the movement inviting him in. It was still hot, pushing a hundred, and she knew he had to be feeling every degree. She and Travis were melting in the studio.
“Yes, ma'am. I would.”
“I have some work to finish up before Regan and Captain Younger get here. There's a small kitchen in the cottage, well stocked, if you're hungry.”
“Thank you. I made a pretty fast run from Cisco. There wasn't time to stop for . . . uh . . . dinner.” He'd come to a halt in the entryway, his gaze ricocheting from one corner of the living room to the other, his mouth agape.
“I call it Narcissus by Night.”
Kid called it incredible, stunning, and the strangest freaking thing he'd ever seen in a living room. Someone had stretched huge sheets of canvas on the walls and had been painting on them. Someone damned good with a brush, and who had a fixation on men—totally ripped, bare-assed naked men. They were everywhere, each one partially painted, partially composed of line drawing, all of them exuding strength and a real out-there sexuality—especially Narcissus, who bore a striking resemblance to the naked angel on the doorbell, from his broken nose to his six-pack abs.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—Kid felt like he'd just walked into a cathouse, a tomcat house. The Narcissus guy had one wall all to himself, stretched out on his side along the length of a dark pool with thunderclouds and bolts of lightning all around. He was gazing into the water, just the way old Mrs. Vernon had told the story in tenth grade English, except old Mrs. Vernon hadn't said anything about the guy's hand sliding along his thigh.
There was no doubt what this Narcissus was thinking, or which direction his hand was heading. It made Kid nervous as hell to be looking at him while he was thinking it and getting ready to do it—not the act, but the rawness of the desire behind it. The artist had stripped him bare, filleted him like a fish. The guy was more than naked, spread out there on the wall like that. He was way too hot for himself, sexually desperate—which was more than Kid wanted to know about the guy's problems, and a whole hell of a lot more than old Mrs. Vernon had ever told them.
So who had dreamed up such a masochistic, homoerotic twist on the story?
The answer hit him before the question even finished forming in his mind.
She'd done it. Nikki McKinney.
I call it Narcissus by Night, she'd said. It was her work.
Quinn had said she was an artist, but sweet Christ. He slanted her a look out of the corner of his eye. She didn't look old enough to know anything about what he was seeing on the wall.
And who was the guy?
Kid wouldn't let anyone paint him with that look on his face. Hell, he couldn't even get that look on his face, not on command, not without some serious incentive, like having the woman of his dreams stretched out naked beneath him and the two of them well into the most incredible sex of his life.
Someone like Nikki McKinney ought to do the trick.
The immediate visual he got cleared up the mystery. All he had to do was put her naked in the pool, and suddenly the whole painting made perfect sense—unless the Narcissus guy was gay.
He could only hope.
“It's amazing,” he said, telling the truth. Subject matter aside, the walls looked like something out of a museum.
“Thank you.”
“So you . . . uh, know all these guys?” He had to ask.
“Not in the biblical sense,” she said in passing, throwing him a coolly artless look over her shoulder.
He grinned. He couldn't help himself. Then in the next instant, his grin faded completely away.
She'd walked on by, leading the way through the living room, leaving him to follow behind the black Lycra miniskirt, behind the languid movement of bare feet, bare naked legs, and the smooth rolling motion of her hips, behind the most perfect ass he'd ever seen—perfectly curved, perfectly tight. And he was dying, the awful, wonderful feeling from the porch rearing up again and swamping him in one big crashing wave.
Pure lust had never come so close to dropping him to his knees. Never. He could handle lust, so this had to be something else, but he'd be damned if he was going to put a name to it. He didn't dare. Whatever it was, it didn't relent, not all the way through the dining room, through the kitchen, or across the back porch and out into the yard. It was like a fist around his heart, a cold knot in his stomach.
She kept up a casual, mostly one-sided conversation about the weather. He heard himself agree—Yes, ma'am, it is definitely hot—all the time trying to tear his gaze away from the sway of her butt and the little scrap of black cloth trying to cover it—and failing. The only victory he could claim was the struggle he won to keep his hands to himself and his tongue in his mouth; he didn't jump her. Yeah, that was a victory, a pitiful, embarrassing victory.
She made him feel like a hound, and he'd never dogged a woman in his life. He liked to think he was a classier guy than that, smarter—but she was taking him down with every step she took.
They were headed toward the stone cottage he'd noted earlier. With an effort of pure will, he forced himself into sniper mode. He checked out lines of sight and potential weaknesses in the building. On the up-side, he didn't find many of the latter. The place was a fortress; the walls looked to be two feet thick at the windows.
Concentrating on the business at hand gave him a bit of a breather, eased up on the tightness in his chest. He started to relax just a little—right up until she opened the cottage door and he followed her inside.
Then all bets were off.
Work, she'd said. She had work to do. He'd seen the living room, seen the doorbell, and he should have been better prepared—but he wasn't. Nothing on earth could have prepared him for Narcissus in the flesh, in the raw, in angel wings.
SRCHN4U. He flashed on the Jeep in the alley and knew he'd just found the person with the ropes and gear, Nikki McKinney's favorite naked guy. The angel definitely looked like he could pull himself up the side of a cliff with just his arms and a solid finger jam.
Kid could do it. He knew what it took, and this guy had it.
Pushing his sunglasses a little more firmly onto his face, he checked out the rest of the studio. The place was a junk jungle: paint junk, camera junk, molds-and-plaster junk, computer junk, easels, frames, and rolls of canvas jammed in every cranny from the floorboards to the rafters. One wall was covered in black-and-white photographic portraits.
But inevitably, his gaze landed back on the angel. It sort of gave him the heebie-jeebies to know he'd practically seen the guy get off on himself. The sunglasses helped a little, like maybe he'd only half seen the guy's package.
Right, like if Narcissus turned around he wouldn't be staring right at it.
Geez. He'd grown up in and around Denver and had always heard Boulder girls were the wild ones, but this—this place, these guys everywhere, and Nikki McKinney the reason for all of it. This was really something else.
“Hey, it's looking good, Travis,” Nikki said, breezing into the studio.
“Yeah.” Without turning around the angel stepped back from where he'd been painting a dark, ragged maelstrom on a canvas backdrop. He tilted his head to one side, studying his work. Shoulder-length blond hair slid over the high arc of one white-feathered wing. “Yeah,” he said again. “That's the best eternity-sucking vortex of hell I've ever seen.”
Kid had never seen anything like this just-shy-of-six-feet, blond-haired, naked angel with a paintbrush in his hand. He'd never seen a guy wearing nothing but white wings curving higher than his head and draping all the way to the floor, powerful, muscular arcs of feathers and form. He'd never seen a guy with electric blue and glitter green shooting stars painted on his body, with blue and green comets streaking down his legs and across his back—the same electric blue and glitter green paint caked into Nikki McKinney's fingernails. The same blue paint smudged on her cheek.
Damn.
He got turned on just looking at her, and she'd spent the afternoon finger-painting some other guy—not exactly a hit on his top ten sexual fantasies playlist.
Top forty, maybe, but not top ten.
Shit.
It was going to be a long, hot, strange night, and he had a feeling he was going to wish he had some backup before it was through.
CHAPTER
10
HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, Regan thought for the millionth time, working hard to keep from constantly looking over at Quinn while he drove. He'd kissed her, slanted his lips over hers, licked the inside of her mouth and consumed her, and she'd gotten wet. Instantly. Just like that.
She couldn't believe it.
Neither would Scott—not that her ex-husband was ever going to find out.
Five years of fantasizing about Captain Younger must have preconditioned her for a response. She couldn't explain it any other way. Five years of dreaming about his kiss, of imagining how it would feel to have his tongue in her mouth and his body pressing into hers, of how he would taste, had cross-wired her sense of reality—and reality had won, hands down.
In her fantasies, she hadn't imagined his mouth being so hot, or that the sheer physical heat of his kiss would wash down her body like a flood tide and make her ache for more. She hadn't known her breath would catch and her heart would race, that her hips would rise toward him and her body would yearn for his, before her mind had even registered the facts, let alone analyzed them and formulated a plan.
She needed to get a grip on her emotions—a highly unlikely occurrence when she was still using everything she had to keep her grip on Jeanette. Though he
'd slowed it down considerably, the Camaro was still eating up the highway, coming off the last mountain pass, sliding in and out of the lanes and cruising through the traffic. They were heading for Steele Street and the lights of Denver on the plains below, miles and miles of luminous lights spreading all the way to the horizon.
“So you work for the natural history museum,” he said, surprising her out of her thoughts. “With the dinosaur bones. That must be very interesting.”
The way he said “very interesting” sounded a little like “drier than dust,” but he was obviously too nice to put it quite like that.
Nice? She did a mental double take.
No. Nice was not a word she associated with him. Dangerous, devastating, an explosion going off in her life—that's what he was, not “nice.”
“It's quiet work, at least on my end of the museum.” Nice. My God. The man was carrying a gun. She must be crazy.
“Do you still go out to Rabbit Valley every summer?”
“No. Fieldwork isn't my strong point. I like working with the bones in the lab.” She liked it a lot, but had long ago learned that other people seldom shared her boundless enthusiasm for dragging the past up through millions of years of stone. Everyone loved the idea of bone hunting in the wilds of Wyoming or Argentina. Everyone loved the final product, a big dinosaur skeleton mounted in the hall of a museum. But the preparation of the bones, the scraping away of the rock with a dental pick, square inch by square inch, was not most people's idea of excitement.
They were wrong, of course. It was all amazingly exciting, actually riveting, watching the bones unfold from the stone.
“What are you working on now?”
She looked at him again. He was actually starting to sound pretty interested. That he was even attempting conversation was interesting. With Jeanette's low-pitched, rumbling snarl as background noise, there weren't exactly any awkward silences that needed filling. She could hardly hear herself think.
Of course, given the track of her thoughts, that had been a blessing. She'd practically devoured him when he kissed her. The more she thought about it, the more embarrassed she became all over again, which had made it tough for her to come up with anything to say or a good enough reason to say it.