by Tara Janzen
Yeah. A brief grin curved his mouth. Definitely top ten material—unless she'd bound and gagged the woman the way she had Travis. Binding and gagging were for-sure turnoffs in Kid's book. The other angels were all flying free, but she'd definitely headed into some new territory tonight.
He was only going to give her about another ten minutes. He'd done a couple of perimeter checks; everything had looked fine, but he wanted fresh intel, or he wanted out of the house.
So where in the hell were Quinn and the sister? An hour at the most, Quinn had said, and they were kicking that hour in the back. Kid checked his watch. Ten more minutes max, and he was putting in a call.
“Have you been there?” she asked.
“Ma'am?” He looked up to the platform where she stood behind her bank of cameras. Whatever else Nikki McKinney was, she was a bona fide gearhead. A snake pit of cables and cords connected her to the ton of equipment stacked on the platform, and she ran it all from a handheld control board.
Sweet. Very sweet. He was itching to get a better look at her setup, find out who had built it, and probably improve it. That ought to impress her.
Or not.
He'd never met anyone like her. Never even imagined anyone like her. He didn't know what in the hell impressed somebody who painted calendar boys on her living room walls and tied up guys like Travis on Friday nights.
“To hell and back with your eyes wide open,” she said.
See, that's what he meant. Who in the hell asked questions like that?
“Yes, ma'am,” he answered after a slight hesitation, because to deny it would have been to deny who he was. Still, he had no intention of elaborating.
“And what do you think? Am I close?” She gestured at the scene she'd created with the backdrop and Travis, with all her ropes and wings and paint and complicated lighting.
He followed the gesture with his eyes, looking the whole thing over, then told her straight-out. “I think you're naive.”
Incredibly naive.
“And you're not?” she asked with more curiosity than heat.
“No, ma'am. I'm most definitely not.” Long, hot, strange night, all right, he thought. The guys back in the 24th would never believe it.
Without a word, she ducked under the black cloth hanging off the back of the biggest camera and began setting off her show. She had eight versions of the lighting rigged up and went through them one by one, taking what she wanted. With the lights set, she sent some heavy punk rock music blasting through the sound system, four tracks of it all at once, two of them playing backward, fighting it out. Then she started the fans blowing—thank God. They were all drenched in sweat, and he figured she'd done that on purpose just to add another level of misery to Travis's appearance.
He didn't know why the guy did it, not even for a hundred bucks an hour. Double the going rate, Travis had told Kid, but then Nikki asked for a lot.
With the studio lights dimmed, Kid slipped off his sunglasses and stuck them in his shirt pocket.
“Travis,” Nikki said from under the cloth. “Whenever you're ready, I'm good to go.”
Kid had to give the guy credit. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was naked, and for someone who had been tied up, blindfolded, gagged, and raised and lowered half a dozen times while she'd finished setting everything up, he was amazingly loose, amazingly calm—until she told him she was good to go.
Then he started changing, slowly and torturously, from a laid-back Boulder slacker dude into a fallen angel being pulled into the eternal sucking vortex of the inferno, lured and beset by the wretched demons flying off the canvas backdrop, bound by hopelessness. It was weird, watching it happen, knowing the guy was faking it and yet believing.
In his real life, Travis had told Kid, he was an EMT with the Boulder County Search and Rescue Squad. Given the pay scale of the job, modeling for Nikki was how he paid the mortgage on his place up the canyon.
Kid hoped to hell Nikki McKinney was getting what she wanted out of him, because this shot—Geezus—this shot made the fillet-o'-fish Narcissus pose look like a piece of cake.
Cameras were going off all over the place, at least two of them eating a constant whir of film, and Kid was mesmerized. For the first time since she'd opened the front door of her house, he wasn't focused on her. And as he watched the whole endless ordeal, with the music screeching and screaming and the lights flashing, with the wind blowing hot and acrid and Travis disintegrating in pain and despair, he realized her version of hell was closer to his than he'd thought.
It was the red paint. It looked like blood, as if the angel had been tortured.
Shit. Kid felt his jaw tighten. He was starting to feel a little fucked by her game. Where in the hell was Quinn? It was time to get out of there. He suddenly felt it down to his bones.
FROM beneath her black cloth, Nikki tripped her shutters again and again, over and over, capturing Kid Chronopolous completely. She had five cameras on Travis, who was worth far more than she paid him—and two cameras on the ex-Marine, who was giving her everything for free.
Travis was amazing, and later, she would go through the whole session frame by frame, both video and stills, and print what she needed for the piece of work she had in mind.
But the ex-Marine. She watched him through the zoom on her Nikon, working carefully, breathing softly. She'd thought she'd take a few shots of him, record his reaction, take his portrait for her studio wall, all standard stuff—but there was nothing standard about him. He'd taken his sunglasses off when she'd started the show, and suddenly she was seeing him for the first time, really seeing him, and she couldn't tear her gaze away.
His eyes were dark hazel, bordering on brown with streaks of moss green, and so very serious, so very watchful of everything going on around him.
So very fierce.
It fascinated her, his fierceness, the way the high arch of his cheekbones fascinated her, and the lean angle of his jaw. He had a short nose, which added an incongruous level of cuteness to his chiseled features. His eyebrows were thick, dark lines, his skin flawless, something she seldom saw even in her fashion work. His mouth was wide and firm, and made her wonder how he would taste—and that was the most disconcerting thought she'd had in weeks.
She'd been wrong about getting him out of his clothes. He wasn't one of her college boys, despite the similarity in age, not even close. He was carrying a gun beneath his rumpled Hawaiian shirt, not in his duffel bag as she'd supposed, and his expression was nothing short of a warning to beware. She'd set something off in him, something he didn't like—which was the whole point of the piece, Pathos VII. Everybody had their own personal hell.
She pulled back through the lens, bringing more of him into view. No, she thought, he most definitely was not one of her football players, mountain climbers, or starving-art-student models.
Sniper. Bodyguard. She could see those things in him now, the heightened awareness, the physical readiness, and the predatory alertness of his expression. He was tuned for trouble—and he was not to be fooled with, not to be unwrapped for mere artistic indulgence.
Which made her want to do it just that much more. She wanted to paint him, bad, even if she had to do it with his clothes on. It was a curse, her stubborn dedication to artistic impulse—and every impulse she had was telling her to keep him for a while, not to let him go until she'd had a chance to explore him more thoroughly. And that simply fascinated her. She didn't keep anybody, for any reason, for any length of time.
How much trouble could one seventy-two-year-old man have possibly gotten into? she wondered. Wilson had definitely lost a foothold on some of his memory banks, but surely he couldn't have done anything that required armed guards for the house. Nothing that could have required a warrior of Kid Chaos's caliber.
Yet there he was, a warrior in her studio, an avenging angel.
She'd never had one before, but as she watched Kid, she found herself wondering what it would be like to have him.
To
really have him.
And that was damned disconcerting.
Idle fantasy was not her realm. She imagined something; she created it. Going around imagining mak-ing love with an ex-Marine her sister had sicced on her for the night couldn't be good for her. Actually doing it—with a sniper, for God's sake—could lead to nothing but disaster, no matter how fascinating she found him.
Regan had been so wrong about him. He was no boy wonder, no boy.
He turned then, fixing his hawklike gaze on the Nikon's lens, and fearless Nikki McKinney, who had stripped down and painted over fifty men in her studio and never so much as blinked, felt an electric current of attraction sizzle all the way down from her head to her toes. Her cheeks grew hot, her heart damn near stopped, and she had to look away.
Ho-lee mo-lee. She stepped back from the Nikon and swore under her breath. Then swore again and quickly tripped the shutter, hoping like hell she hadn't missed the shot. Flustered, she forced her concentration back to the video camera she had on Travis.
Damn. Regan had been right about one thing: Trouble was definitely happening, right here, right now.
CHAPTER
12
WE CAN'T STAY here all night,” Regan said, sounding incredibly put out by the whole situation and still furiously angry with him.
Quinn didn't blame her, and, no, they couldn't stay parked on this nowhere dirt road under the pine trees all night. He had to stop at Steele Street and then take her to Boulder, where Kid would take over keeping her safe. If everything went according to plan, Roper would have his dinosaur bones back by midnight, and the heat would be off the McKinneys. She could go back to her nice, quiet life, and he could go back to looking for the Pentagon's guns, feeling like he'd just been hit by a cyclone.
Regan McKinney, good God. How in the world had his day come down to arguing in a car with Regan McKinney? And really being hot under the collar about it?
He let out his own to-hell-and-back sigh and cut his gaze across the Camaro.
“You're wrong,” he said, because he believed it. He'd been sitting there thinking it all through, and she was wrong. “I do know you.”
He might have been pissed off about the wedding, and freaked out by whom she'd married, but he hadn't risked ending up in the state pen for someone he didn't know.
He might not know the circumstances of her life, or whether or not she liked a venti soy chai latte or a fucking double-shot cappuccino.
But he knew her.
“No, you don't,” she said in her high-handed tone.
“An eye for an eye,” he said.
“What?” She turned and stared at him.
“An eye for an eye,” he repeated, reaching for the ignition. “He stole something from me, so I stole something from him.”
With a twist of the key, Jeanette roared back to life, the growl starting deep in the engine block and rumbling through the headers.
She instinctively clutched the door handle even though her gaze stayed riveted on him. He was pretty sure Scott Hanson had never stolen so much as a penny piece of bubble gum in his whole life, which left only one thing for her to think he was talking about: her.
“That's . . . that's crazy.”
He couldn't argue the point. Stealing the car had been crazy as hell, almost as crazy as giving it back, almost as crazy as caring enough to take the risk in the first place.
“The Mustang was never the same, after it was returned. Wh-what did you do to it?”
“I fixed it up for him.”
“Fixed it up?” Her voice rose on a doubtful note. “It wasn't even drivable after it showed back up in our driveway.”
“I drove it,” he contradicted her. “I drove it a lot. Made about twelve grand racing it around and up at Bandimere that year.” Which had covered his costs and then some. Then he'd given it back. Taken the Mustang up to Boulder one morning about two A.M. and parked it in Dr. and Mrs. Hanson's driveway.
She was right. The whole thing had been crazy. Going to so much trouble, all over a girl he hadn't seen since she'd been fifteen.
He hadn't seen her that night either, though there had been lights coming on in their house and every other house on the street as he and Rivera had roared off in Rivera's supercharged Chevy. There was nothing like 375 horses and a set of tuned headers to wake up a neighborhood at two o'clock in the morning.
“Scott's mechanic said it was dangerous to drive the way it had been altered.”
“And I bet he offered to buy it and take it off your hands,” Quinn said matter-of-factly. He knew mechanics, and there wasn't a gearhead in the world who wouldn't have salivated over the 466-cubic-inch 385-series block he'd dropped into the Mustang along with a Holley Dominator carb and a Hurst shifter. Altered didn't begin to cover what he'd done to that car. He'd out-and-out fucked with it, turned a classic pony into a street monster.
Yeah, it had been a lot of engine to handle, but mostly it had been too much engine for old Professor Hanson to handle—and that had been the point, the whole muscle-car metaphor taken to a new low. Not enough balls to drive the car, Prof? Then not enough balls to fuck the girl.
Quinn had wanted to fuck her. He'd wanted to make love to her. He'd wanted to roll over in his bed—just once, please, God—and have her lying next to him, all soft and blond and reaching for him. He'd wanted to take her dirty and take her sweet, take her any way he could get her and every way he could dream up—and in those four years between sixteen and twenty, he'd dreamed up plenty of ways and gotten off on every one.
And now she was here with him, and it was all coming back, how much he'd wanted her.
Hell, he still wanted her, bad, especially since she'd melted all over him back in Jake's parking lot. He wouldn't have given good odds on reality holding up to his fantasies, but the sweetness of her mouth and having her amazing body laminated up against his had definitely blown some of his fuses.
“Well, yes, the mechanic did want to buy the car, but Scott . . . Scott—” She stopped abruptly on an indrawn breath, then turned away, facing the side window.
He eyed her from across the front seat. Scott had what? he wondered. He knew for a fact that the professor hadn't totaled the car and died in a flaming ball of fire. Professor Hanson was still listed as faculty at the university. Maybe he'd only crashed, maybe just broken both his legs and been crippled for life.
“Scott what?” he asked aloud. Hell, he had enough sins and misdemeanors on his conscience without adding getting her husband hurt.
“I can't believe you stole his car,” she said, her voice shaking again. “I really can't believe you stole his car because of me.”
In the next second, she pushed on the handle and swung the door open, scrambling outside before he could grab her.
Shit. He jerked on the parking brake and leaped out his own side, ready to give chase.
But she hadn't gone far enough to need chasing. She was only a few feet away, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other covering her face in what he now recognized as the Regan McKinney classic pose of distress. He figured he ought to be ashamed of himself, and he was. They said no bad deed went unpunished, and eleven years after he'd stolen Scott Hanson's Mustang, the chickens had finally come home to roost. And after what had to be six of the most hellacious hours of her life, he was afraid he might have finally made her cry.
She looked very small, standing in a pool of moonlight and shadows with Douglas firs towering up on both sides. The road he'd followed into the trees had petered out into little more than an overgrown track, and farther up, he could tell even that disappeared beneath a covering of pine needles. They were definitely on a road going nowhere.
“I'm sorry,” he said, approaching her. “I'm sorry about the car. Are you okay?” God, he seemed to be asking her that a lot today.
The night was growing cooler. A mountain wind blew through the trees, soughing through leaves and pine boughs, while Jeanette rumbled softly in the background.
Then he hear
d her laugh, a short, breathless sound of disbelief, but definitely more of a laugh than a sob.
“You stole Scott's Mustang.” She suddenly turned and looked at him, dropping her hand to her side. “You turned it into one of your muscle cars. Drove it around for the better part of a year. Raced it at Bandimere Speedway, for the love of God. And then just dropped it off in the driveway in the middle of the night?”
Yeah, that pretty much summed up the whole episode.
“Because of me?”
Before he could say anything, she threw her hands up and stalked back to the car. She didn't get inside, though. She sat back against Jeanette's hood, her arms crossed over her chest, and stared at him with an utterly perplexed gaze, her eyebrows furrowed above her dark gray eyes.
“He had everybody looking for that car, every cop on the Front Range, and you drove it around right under his nose without getting caught?” She let out another disbelieving laugh. “What are you, the Shadow or something?”
“No,” he said, walking over to her. She was a little jumpy, and if she got it in her head to dash off again, he wanted to be ready to catch her. “I'm just careful, maybe a little lucky. So what did Scott do with the Mustang?” He really did want to know. After all these years, and despite thinking Scott Hanson had been nothing but a dirty old man for marrying a nineteen-year-old girl, he hated to think the guy had gotten himself hurt driving the car.
She gave her head a short shake. “In the end, he did sell it. He didn't want to, but he couldn't even get the damn thing out of the driveway without killing half the neighbors.” Her hand came back up to cover her face on a soft curse. “He always said I'd ruined his life, and you . . . you just had to go and prove him right.”
Now they were getting somewhere, he thought, though he didn't think much of where they were going.