by Tara Janzen
She needed to call Alex and make sure he was okay, but she hadn’t seen a phone in the back rooms at Doc’s, and her cell phone was still in her purse back at the Gardens.
Hawkins had a phone. She’d seen him using it while Doc cleaned her face, and as soon as he got in the car, she was going to ask to borrow it.
He’d said he was working for the Department of Defense, not her mother, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow her mother had made a horrible mistake and accidentally hired Christian Hawkins as a bodyguard, and then by some horrible coincidence, he’d been forced to leap into action—which, admittedly, he’d done very well.
Exceptionally well. She’d barely landed on the ground before he’d been on top of her, shielding her from danger—which seemed to be his specialty.
Of course, if she remembered correctly, her specialty was ruining his life.
Swearing softly under her breath, she brought her hand up to cover her face.
She was in trouble. Oh, man, was she in trouble, but she wasn’t going to give in to panic. Later, she could panic, but not while she was sitting in his car.
Lowering her hand, she took a deep breath and another look around. The alley where he’d parked emptied out on Seventeenth Street. Her gallery was on Seventeenth Street in LoDo, a couple of miles west, just up from Union Station, which didn’t mean diddly-squat, because she wasn’t going to leap out of the car and escape, bust out, make a break for it. If it had been anyone but Hawkins, she might have walked away, but she wasn’t going to walk away from him. She couldn’t.
What she was going to do was apologize to him, so help her God, and try to ease the weight of her guilt a little, before it crushed her where it had lain so heavy on her chest for thirteen years. Apologies were kind of her forte, her trump card, her secret way out of all sorts of sticky social situations, and she’d never been in a stickier social situation or owed anyone an apology more than she owed him. Getting the words out could only help her breathe a little easier here tonight. Then, when they got to her gallery, she would thank him at the door, lock herself inside, and just give herself over to panic while she waited for Alex.
She was not putting herself in his custody and just disappearing with him, no matter who he worked for or how many paintings had gone up in flames and fireworks. She and Hawkins had disappeared together once before, for a month in a two-room suite at the Brown Palace Hotel, living on room service, sleeping late, and partying even later. He’d shown her places in Denver she’d never known existed.
It had been the wildest time of her life. She still daydreamed about it sometimes, about him, though she was pretty sure tonight’s events were going to blow those fond moments of idle introspection straight to hell. He’d been a great fantasy, all hormones and heartbreak, and she’d been so crazy in love with him. Insane, really, her mother had been so kind to point out. Unbelievably, irresponsibly insane to throw her whole life away, right into the gutter, the very gutter, by taking up with a street thug. It was more than her mother could bear—and this from a woman who bore the weight of the Free World on her shoulders every single day of her life, a woman who was proud to do so, a woman who had fought long and hard for the privilege of bearing the weight of the Free World.
Pride. Now there was a word. Didn’t Katya have even an ounce of pride? A shred? Hadn’t she learned anything from her parents? Especially her mother?
Well, yes, she had, but it was all kind of hard to put into words. So she’d bitten her tongue and weathered the awful storm, and been sent to Paris—as far away from Denver and drug murders and car thieves as her mother could get her.
And now she was back, right smack dab in the middle of a full-blown disaster, the whole damn night about as bad as it could get.
Her gaze inadvertently went to the two men in the alley, and she swore softly under her breath, reconsidering her last thought. The night could easily get worse—much worse.
Hawkins hadn’t changed, not nearly enough to suit her. It was all too easy to look at him and still see the nineteen-year-old avenging angel who had appeared from out of nowhere and saved her. Except now he was an avenging angel in an expensively tailored suit with an unnerving quietness about him—a beautiful angel, his face more angles than curves, his silky dark hair brushing the collar of his shirt. He was broader through the shoulders than he’d been as a teenager, possibly taller, still lean, but more solid.
She’d felt safe in his arms, but then she’d always felt safe in his arms, from the very first time he’d held her until the last—which was as far as she needed to go with that train of thought. He was a stranger now, and she didn’t need her mother to tell her that’s exactly what he should remain.
Still, she was as curious about him as she’d ever been. She should ask Alex to do a background check on him. Sometimes her secretary amazed her with the kind of connections he’d forged as an L.A. cop. Alex could find out all about Christian Hawkins, if she wanted him to—unearth his secrets and his sins and hand them all over to her in a sealed manila envelope.
It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had somebody dig through his life. Of course, Alex was bound to do a better job than the private investigator she’d hired years ago, who’d taken a whole lot of her money to tell her Christian Hawkins still lived in Denver and sold cars for a living.
At the time, she’d just opened her new gallery in L.A. and felt like she’d finally left her past behind, overcome it and gotten on with her life—and she’d needed to know he’d done the same. He’d already been pardoned, but she’d needed to know he was okay. The information the investigator had come up with had fit, so she’d paid the price and let it go.
But he was no car salesman.
Light from the doorway spilled over his face, contouring his features with shadows, the square angle of his jaw, harder than she remembered, the straight dark lines of his brows, the seriousness of his gaze—and the world’s most amazing mouth. Or so it had seemed thirteen years ago, when she’d been very young and naive.
It had taken him less than a week in the Brown Palace to change the naive part.
God, what she hadn’t known.
A blush stole up her cheeks, and she had to admit that besides being half scared, half guilt-ridden, and half worried sick about what had happened at the Gardens, she should probably be at least half embarrassed to see him again.
Yes, that was a lovely mix: fear, guilt, worry, and mortification.
She watched him step off Doc’s back stoop and head toward the car, and thanked God she wasn’t eighteen years old anymore.
He slid in behind the steering wheel and glanced in her direction.
“How’s your headache?” he asked.
“Better. Thank you.”
“Doc said he gave you aspirin.”
“Two, and an ibuprofen.” Oh, this was perfect, so polite. She could do polite all night long. It was right up there with apologies on her list of social survival skills.
“He’s gotten pretty conservative in his old age. If you’d like something stronger, I’ll get it for you.”
“No. Thank you. I’m fine.” And she was fine, practically. Her headache had eased half a degree from wretched, and she’d gotten her panic down from a wailing screech to a low, manageable hum. Christian Hawkins was polite, and she was fine, and everything was perfect except for whatever the hell had happened at the art auction, and the fact that for some reason two men possibly—or improbably—from the Department of Defense had been at the party, and one of them—unbelievably—was a car thief she’d once been in love with, who had gone to prison for the murder of her ex-boyfriend.
“Great. I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he said.
Well, gee. It didn’t get any more polite than that.
Taking another deep, calming breath, she readied herself to say something sincerely remorseful, something tinged with years of hard-won wisdom about the regretful failings of youth—and, so help her God, she would have gotten it all o
ut, if he hadn’t started his monster muscle car and forced a quick shift in her priorities. She grabbed for the door with one hand and the seat with her other and held on for dear life.
HAWKINS slanted her another glance and noticed her white-knuckled grip on the door handle. He didn’t blame her for it. They’d had a wild ride from the Botanic Gardens—not that he had any regrets. Given Dylan’s news, they hadn’t moved any faster than necessary.
“I talked with my partner while you were with Doc, and he cleared me for taking you home. He and your secretary are going to meet us at the gallery.” That should make her feel safer, knowing she was only minutes away from a reunion with her dweeb boyfriend.
“Alex is all right, then?” She turned sideways in her seat, a concerned look on her face. “He wasn’t hurt?”
“He’s fine, very worried about you.”
Relief instantly softened her features, though she didn’t loosen her grip on the car. “He’s the world’s worst worrier, such a fussbudget. Of course, that’s what makes him great at his job.”
Fussbudget? That didn’t sound like a boyfriend. It sounded like a roommate.
“Did you tell him I was okay?” she asked.
“My partner did,” he assured her. A roommate as gay as he dressed, he decided, giving her a discreet once-over. No sane straight man could share her bathroom on a platonic basis—and that was pure experience speaking. Living with her for a month in the Brown Palace had been his own personal, excellent adventure into the never-never land of girls and girl stuff. He’d loved all of it: silk demibras hanging from the towel rack, hand-washed underwear, eight kinds of lotion, necklaces draped over the mirror, a perfume for every mood, sex in the shower, the whole sensory experience intensified by the warm humidity and small space of the bathroom. The only place he’d liked better was the bed with the window open and a summer night breeze blowing over their bare skin.
Admittedly, he’d had kind of a one-track mind at nineteen, but he didn’t now, and all his other tracks were telling him to get off that one track—get off it, and stay off it.
He cleared his throat. “Only one person was injured at the Gardens.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. Dead was about as injured as a person could get.
“Who?”
“I don’t have a name yet,” he said, sliding Roxanne into reverse. “Did you know anybody at the auction?”
“A few people. It was a society event, and I . . .” Her voice trailed off, but, yeah, he knew why she would know a few people in the Denver Social Register. More than a few.
“Who was there that you knew?”
She thought for a second, but just a second. “Well, you, of course.”
Of course, he silently repeated, and wondered why her inclusion of him among people she would admit to knowing gave him even a hint of satisfaction.
“And Vickie Martin,” she continued. “We were debs together. She was there with her third husband, whom I hadn’t met before, and Brenda Kaplan was there, and her mother, Mary Anne Parfitt, and Ted Garra—”
Her voice came to a dead stop.
“Garraty,” he finished for her. So she’d seen him, too. Ted Garraty had been one of the boys in the alley that night. Their names had all come out at his trial, all the rich boys with no manners who hadn’t done an hour’s worth of time for terrorizing their little prom queen. There had been no charges pressed against the Wellon Academy boys, not a single one—but when Jonathan Traynor had shown up dead in that back alley, every one of those bastards had pointed their finger at him and declared him a murderer. “Did you talk with him?”
“N-no,” she said, her face suddenly pale. “I was avoiding him, but you, me, and Ted all in the same place—that seems a . . . a little odd, doesn’t it?”
Yeah. And seeming odder all the time—and if the stiff turned out to be Garraty, he probably wasn’t going to be getting back to South America anytime soon, which didn’t do a damn thing to improve his mood.
He had pulled his cell phone out of his pocket to punch in Dylan’s number when it rang.
“Hawkins,” he answered, putting the phone to his ear with one hand and throwing Roxanne up into neutral with the other.
“Okay. It’s bad,” Dylan said.
“Garraty.” He knew it. He knew it down to his bones.
“Yeah. Garraty,” Dylan said. “And he had a piece of stained cloth in one of his pockets, and I’m not talking a handkerchief. The cops bagged it up as an unidentified textile, but when I looked it over, it reminded me a helluva lot of that piece of bloody prom dress they found in Jonathan Traynor’s pocket—pink and kind of gauzy.”
Everything inside Hawkins froze for one god-awful split second. Then he swore.
“That’s what I thought you’d say,” Dylan said.
Hawkins shifted his attention out the window and reached up to loosen his tie. Unfuckingbelievable. Another Prom King boy had been murdered.
Whatever was going on, Hawkins had a bad feeling he was in it up to his ass and getting set up for another fall.
“You check your horoscope lately?” Dylan asked.
Hawkins let out a short laugh. This was way beyond a bad horoscope.
“I don’t think it was me who got this all stirred up.”
“How long has Katya Dekker been back in Denver?” Dylan asked, reading his mind.
“A month. Long enough for somebody to decide they had some unfinished business.” That was his take on it.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Dylan said, then paused for a second before continuing. “We’ve got to make some quick decisions here.”
Yeah, Hawkins knew it.
“Our orders were just for the party, and the party is over,” Dylan continued. “Which means I’m free to go back to South America, right now, tonight—or I can stay and work with you on this, let Kid and the Marines finish up in Colombia.”
“I work fine alone, and you know it,” Hawkins said after a long pause. He didn’t like being within a million miles of this mess, but Dylan was right. He couldn’t just walk away from it. Not now. But he didn’t like Dylan going back to Colombia without him. With Creed in the hospital, he was the best jungle fighter SDF had left.
“Okay. I’ve got a call in to General Grant, and he’s going to go up the ladder on this one to see who made the initial request to have us work the party. He’ll contact you when he’s got something,” Dylan said. “I can be wheels-up to Colombia in three hours on a transport out of Peterson. I’ll give the NRF rebels one more day, and if they haven’t released J.T.’s body by then, we’ll go back in after them.”
“No.” Hawkins sat up a little straighter. “That’s no good.”
“I’d call in an air strike, if I could,” Dylan said, “but I don’t think the U.S. ambassador would back me on that. The oil companies probably would. They’d love to blow the leftist bastards to hell, but even though they own half the Colombian army, they don’t run it.”
“Our boy isn’t a hundred percent.” Hell, Kid might not be fifty percent by now. Or even ten, and he’d be running on bloodlust, not brains, which was a good way to get killed. He was young and tough and the best shooter SDF had, but they were bringing his brother home in a body bag—if the rebel forces would just give him up.
Hawkins needed to be in Colombia. He didn’t want Kid and Dylan going up against the rebels without him, especially with the Marines who had been down there ordered out. God, the mission was so far off the books, there wouldn’t be anybody there to back them up after the Marines left—and they would leave.
SDF operators were expendable. That was the whole point of their existence, but nobody could afford to have the Corps associated with a black ops mission where things had gone wrong.
“Maybe you should wait for me. This thing at the Gardens with Bad Luck, give me two days and—”
“Bad Luck?” Dylan interrupted on a short laugh. “Please, tell me you’re not calling her that to her face.”
Hell. He just had, but tha
t was beside the point.
“I could be in Colombia by Sunday night.”
“And Katya Dekker?” Dylan asked. “She’s in this up to her neck.”
“Simple. If we don’t have a suspect in our sights by Sunday morning, we turn everything we’ve got over to Lieutenant Bradley. I’ll have a little talk with Alex Zheng and put him and”—he paused for half a second—“Ms. Dekker on a plane to Washington, D.C.”
“Send her back to Mommy?” Dylan asked.
Basically, yes.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m sure the senator would make one helluva bodyguard.”
“Definitely up to the job,” Hawkins said. “Darth Vader in Chanel wouldn’t have anything on her.”
“Well, that’s a fascinating visual there—and amazingly accurate.” Dylan’s voice came back at him over the phone. “But I think you’re being overly optimistic about Sunday morning. You’re going to have to trust me and the Marines on this one, Superman.”
Superman. Right. Hawkins wished to hell he was Superman.
“You know I’ll bring Kid home,” Dylan continued.
“Yeah.” He dragged a hand back through his hair. “I never should have left him, though, not for this, no matter who was handing out orders.”
“We left a full squad of Marines with him—he’s not exactly alone. And if we don’t follow direct orders, you and I end up in Leavenworth with a rap sheet a mile long. You know it as well as I do.”
Yeah, he knew it. The chain of command for SDF was short, but it was as ironclad as that of any branch of the military, and saying “No, thank you” was not an option without serious repercussions.
“I’m going to talk with Lieutenant Bradley before we leave. Give me half an hour. I’ll stop at the gallery with Zheng on my way to Steele Street and let you know what she’s got, and you can take it from there. Do you want me to call in Skeeter?”