by Tara Janzen
CHAPTER
17
TRAVIS’S GAZE went back to the closet door for about the hundredth time. He had a pretty good idea of what was going on in there. He’d seen the look on Kid’s face and known exactly what he’d come for: his woman, any way he could get her, even if it was in a damn small, overcrowded storeroom-cum-closet, during the middle of the biggest night of said woman’s life.
If it had been any other guy, he wouldn’t have worried. Nikki was tough. She always held her own—but not with this guy. Kid Chaos had sliced and diced her heart. Travis had been hearing about it every day for the last two months. Nikki McKinney, the oldest living virgin in Boulder, Colorado, had finally given it up for a Marine sniper on a hot summer night in June, and the guy had walked out on her.
Travis couldn’t have called that one. Hell, no.
Kid had broken her heart and confused the hell out of her—even though he’d apparently left because of some mission he’d been on. Travis had dissected the whole encounter with her, from the first kiss to the postcoital drift into sleep, and he’d assured her nothing had been wrong—except for the guy leaving while she was asleep. He’d figured the sex had gone okay without her telling him everything. He knew Nikki better than anyone, well enough to know she was at heart a sensual creature, and he’d figured the guy couldn’t have been a complete klutz. But she’d been glad to get the reassurance, and God knew she’d wanted to talk about it—over, and over, and over.
He was fine with that.
Kid had given her a great orgasm, and Travis had to admit he liked the guy for that. Her first time, and she’d come. That was great, a classy move. It wasn’t always easy for a woman her first time—or even her hundred and first, if it came to that, unless a guy cared enough to figure it out and take his time. And it was never easy for a guy to take it slow his first time with a woman. The excitement level was usually over the top before he even got her clothes off.
Yeah, those first times tended to get wild real quick.
But this dragging her into the closet after two months without a word, because the guy was hurting over his brother dying, he didn’t know about that. There’d been nothing but pain written on Kid’s face tonight, but man, that was a lot of freight to drag into a closet with a condom—and Kid sure as hell had better have a condom.
Travis felt for the guy, really, but he loved Nikki. They were soul mates on the artistic plane. They’d taken each other places no one else would ever see, unless someone caught a glimpse of it in Nikki’s paintings, and the look in Kid’s eyes tonight had told Travis he was bordering on dangerous, that he was living up to his name—Chaos—in spades.
But hell, he still couldn’t convince himself to go over and knock on the closet door.
He swore softly and forced himself to look somewhere else. It was a strange night all the way around. Alex Zheng, the gallery guy, was so wired that Travis was afraid he was going to explode, or disintegrate, or something. The guy was a nervous wreck, and Katya Dekker, the world-famous, highly influential, very-important-to-Nikki’s-career Katya Dekker, had been a no-show. That had freaked Nikki a little.
Hell, it had freaked her a lot. But given the disaster at the Denver Botanic Gardens last night, no one was really surprised Katya hadn’t made it. Some guy had been murdered during the art auction, and Katya had lost an Oleg Henri painting.
As for himself, he’d been hit on so many times tonight, he’d been ready to leave, until Kid had shown up. He couldn’t leave now, but he sure wished a lot of these people would understand that just because there were about fifty life-size, nude paintings of him hanging off the walls and from the ceiling, he wasn’t for sale.
What he and Nikki did—it didn’t have anything to do with sex, except for pieces like Narcissus by Night. But even Narcissus was about private sex, internal sex, a sexual state of mind—not the deed.
So he was doing his best to look interested in paintings of himself, which was nothing short of weird, and trying not to make eye contact with anyone, which meant he’d been spending quite a bit of time looking at the walls and daydreaming about going climbing in the morning. He might just head up to the Flatirons tonight, camp at the base of some gnarly pitch, and be ready to go at first light.
Yeah, that sounded good.
He looked around the gallery again. There was an old elevator toward the back of the gallery, and a door leading to the alley next to it. Something about the door had been drawing his attention all night. Maybe it was the potential of it, the potential of escape.
He checked his watch. He’d give Kid and Nikki half an hour—okay, forty minutes—and then he was going to check on her. If she was fine, great. He’d go back to Boulder alone.
That settled, he found his gaze going back to the door yet again—but this time it opened.
The gallery was air-conditioned, and the air from the alley was still supercharged from the sweltering day. It flowed into the room like a river of heat, cutting through the chill, and winding its way across the gallery, riveting him to where he stood. It smelled like the city, all hot bricks and steam, and it had brought a messenger.
One hell of a messenger.
She stood in the doorway, backlit by a street lamp, the glint of metal following the curve of her hip.
Chain mail, he realized. She was wearing a chain mail miniskirt over a pair of black silk tights, with a metal knife sheath in place of a zipper. The tights were rolled up on the bottom, revealing four inches of bare leg above a pair of thick-soled, brown leather work boots. She had a black ball cap pulled low over her face, a pair of mirrored sunglasses, a Chinese tattoo on her upper right arm, and a silver ponytail that came out of the back of the cap and fell down the front of the skintight black muscle shirt molded to her curves. A pack of cigarettes stuck out of the hip pocket on her skirt, and she had one cigarette hanging from between her lips. As he watched, she struck a kitchen match off her chain mail and lit up. He could almost hear her inhale, and when she exhaled, she did it through her nose.
Man, she was all smoke and mirrors and so not his type, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why his gut was clenching at the sight of her.
She looked around, cool like ice, checking out the whole gallery scene, before she made her move, and unbelievably, her move was to head straight for him.
He felt her gaze lock onto him from behind her mirrored shades, and he got an odd impression of handcuffs, for no reason he could logically explain, any more than he could explain the odd thrill heating his skin.
HE was so fucked, Hawkins thought, reaching up into Roxanne’s back window for the container of crab wontons. He had shrimp dumplings and noodles with sesame sauce balanced on the console, spring rolls in the front seat, which he could just reach, if he stretched his arm around by the driver’s door, and a container of jumbo prawns on the floor along with cashew chicken and tofu with vegetables. He’d done quite a bit of damage to all of it, propped up in the backseat with a pair of chopsticks in his hand and Kat sleeping on his chest.
But he was still screwed.
I love you, Kat? Where had that come from? And why had he felt so freaking compelled to tell her?
It defied all logic.
She mumbled something unintelligible, turning her head the other way and readjusting herself on top of him, and he looked down at her, a sigh lodged in his chest. Wasn’t it the guy who was supposed to fall asleep after sex, while the woman lay awake analyzing and worrying the whole thing to death?
Yes, it was. He knew it without a doubt. What he didn’t know was why it never worked out that way between the two of them.
She was limp, draped over him like an exhausted kitten, her mouth partly open, her lipstick gone, her mascara smudged beneath her eyes—the whole of her so lovely it broke his heart. Five feet, two inches of golden curves and a tiny tan line across her ass.
Hell. He checked the wontons, counted only three, and put them back in the window. She probably loved crab wontons, an
d her stomach had been growling for the last fifteen minutes. He went instead for the shrimp dumplings, stretching the chopsticks over to the console and snagging the little wire handle on the container.
He’d just put one in his mouth when he felt her stir again, as if this time she might be waking up.
Chewing slowly, he watched and waited, practically holding his breath—just one more act of pure idiocy he was at a loss to explain. He always kept breathing, always, under the worst of conditions, under fire. He breathed.
But oh no, not with her. She was a threat of unknown capabilities, unknown force—and he’d told her he loved her.
Geezus. What if he really did? What then, Superman?
She yawned, her warm breath making a hot spot on his chest—and yeah, that’s about all it took for him to start getting real interested in her waking up, and with both of them naked and her on top of him, there was no way to hide it.
Damn.
He was starting to feel uncomfortably vulnerable, something he would have thought it would have taken a guy pointing an AK-47 at him to accomplish—not one smallish woman whose only weapon was a one-way ticket to heaven.
Before she even opened her eyes, a slow smile curved her lips.
“Mmmmm. Food. Smells good.”
“Open your mouth.” God, how he loved those words.
She obeyed—which gave him a really nice feeling—and, using the chopsticks, he placed a dumpling on her tongue. She sighed in pleasure.
Oh, yeah. Open your mouth, Kat. Lick me. He sighed himself, but he didn’t think he’d be getting any of that tonight. He wasn’t going to ask, and he wasn’t at all sure it would cross her mind.
He wished it would, though. He really did. Just the thought of having her mouth on him was enough to make his erection complete, and given her position, there was no way for her not to know it. Perfect. Again.
So, he wondered, what, if anything, was she thinking now?
He didn’t have to wait long to find out.
“Do we still have some tea?” she asked, looking up at him from under a tangled fall of blond hair, her green eyes lazily slumberous.
Yes, as a matter of fact, they did. It had cooled down considerably, but there was still a Styrofoam cup full of the stuff in the bag on the floor.
He pulled it out, opened the lid, and handed it to her.
Rising slightly, she took a long swallow, then handed it back, and without so much as a subliminal suggestion on his part, she started sliding down his body, one of her hands going between his legs and the other sliding up his chest, under his arm, and over his biceps, where her fingers curled around him—as if she needed to hold him down to keep him from getting away.
Yeah. Right.
In fact, he had no intention of going anywhere. She’d pretty much frozen him in place with the possibilities of what she might have in mind.
She was cradled between his thighs, and he had a perfect view of anything she came up with. No, he wasn’t going to move, not an inch—at least that’s what he thought until she did exactly what he’d been dreaming about, starting with a kiss and then another, before her tongue came out and lit him on fire. Geezus. He braced one arm against the driver’s seat and gripped the backseat with the other, dropping the damn tea, his hips rising off the seat on a surge of pleasure so intense, if he’d been standing it would have put him to his knees.
Oh, God, be careful what you wish for, he reminded himself, his gaze riveted to the utterly compelling sight of her going down on him—her hand encircling him, her mouth all tantalizing softness and flickering movement. Her hair slid over his belly, the long blond strands catching on the dark hair arrowing down his lower abdomen, and as he watched, she ran her tongue up the length of him.
Good God. His hips rose again, and he gripped the seat harder. No wonder he’d fallen in love with her at nineteen. She was a witch, with a witchy, spellbinding mouth.
She was relentless in her tender onslaught, and he was very quickly floating somewhere near to where nirvana must be, his body suffused with pleasure, moving in rhythm with her, his thought processes on permanent vacation.
But there was a point where a guy had to interject a little reality check for a girl’s sake, and he’d reached it.
“Kat,” he said, his voice hoarse, his body strung tighter than a compound bow. “Kat . . .”
She had to know what was going to happen; try as he might, he’d hit an unmistakable rhythm—and it felt so incredibly good, so sweet and deep, his whole body alive like she’d plugged him in to a low-voltage electrical current.
“Kat . . .”
Her only answer was to slide her hand across his shoulder and up to his face. She gently traced his lips, silently telling him to shhhh, and he caught her fingers with his mouth.
It was irresistible. It was perfect, one of those physical fantasy moments where the brain and the body simply meshed. He sucked on her fingers, and she sucked on him, the current complete and completely sensual, the two of them so incredibly in tune, everything so sweet.
She had to love him. He felt loved—loved in every cell of his body.
Taking her hand in his, he slipped her fingers from his mouth and ran his tongue down the center of her palm. He sucked on the inside of her wrist, laved the tender skin of her forearm, and he kept pulling her up, until she had to release him and give him her mouth. He wanted her kiss like nothing else in the world. He wanted to be covered by her.
He slid further down in the seat, licking her lips, tasting himself on her, consumed by the pure eroticism of making love.
“Condom?” he whispered.
“No, not this time . . . please,” she murmured, rubbing herself against him, running her fingers through his hair, breathing on him—absorbing him. “You’re safe with me, Christian.”
And she was safe with him, or he never would have let her take him in her mouth. As for the rest of it, he trusted her, more than trusted her. She was a part of him. They were both sheened with sweat, their bodies so hot, he felt like they were fusing, melting into each other, a sensation that only increased when she slid down on him, taking him inside.
God. Kat on top. He pulled her mouth down to his and just lost himself in kissing her, in thrusting into her, in letting her ride him.
When she tightened above him, her cry caught in her throat, he still didn’t stop. He just kept going, pumping into her, holding her mouth to his for an endlessly deep kiss, until the wave of his release washed over him and dragged him completely under with her.
CHAPTER
18
ALEX ZHENG was beside himself, completely beside himself. He didn’t know where Katya was, and she wouldn’t answer her phone, and he seemed to have lost the artist—the artist, Nikki McKinney, the woman everyone had come to see, the new sensation all the dealers were here to meet, and then, just to make things worse, someone was smoking, smoking, in the gallery.
He couldn’t see the culprit, but he could smell the smoke, and it simply wasn’t allowed.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not even close.
How had he let Katya get away from him last night? And with Christian Hawkins of all people. He was dead—which brought him around to “the worst.”
He brought his hand to his chest and pressed on the sudden pain near his sternum. Heartburn or heart attack, it didn’t matter. By the time Senator Dekker got done with him, there’d barely be enough left to bury.
And she was coming, coming to Denver in the morning. He and Katya hadn’t planned on seeing Marilyn during her brief stop.
But Marilyn wanted to see him now . . . in chains.
Oh, God, the pain got worse, and he pressed harder. He wanted nothing more than to get on a plane to L.A. and go home to Max, beautiful Max, with his long dark hair, incredible mouth, and strong shoulders.
But not even Max could save him from Marilyn Dekker.
He’d called her; he’d had to, but that didn’t make having to face her any easier. Even wor
se, unbelievably, the Dragon had gotten the same manila envelope full of pictures that had been waiting in the apartment for him and Katya last night.
He didn’t want to think about it. Really, he didn’t. He’d been shocked enough for both of them. Not about the sex. There’d been nothing at all unusual about what Christian Hawkins and Katya had been doing, and quite frankly, Mr. Hawkins had been one very beautiful boy thirteen years ago—very beautiful. God, the tattoo on his back and the way it curved around his hips had been nothing short of mainline erotic. No, Alex had been shocked that the pictures had ever been taken and were circulating now, especially after what had happened at the Denver Botanic Gardens.
Someone was out to either get Katya or ruin her—and he’d lost her.
Shit.
And then the whole thing with Dylan Hart, whose security clearances had not only impressed the hell out of him, but also scared the hell out of him. Mr. Hart had made connections on a cell phone Marilyn Dekker couldn’t have made from a secure line in her office.
So who the hell was Dylan Hart? Or for that matter, Christian Hawkins? He knew what they’d been thirteen years ago, but as far as he could tell, the information that had been gathered on them since was worthless. The only chop-shop boy that anyone had kept current with was Quinn Younger. Of course, his face had been plastered all over every newsmagazine in the country when he’d been shot down in his F-16 over northern Iraq a few years back. With that kind of publicity, it hadn’t exactly taken a rocket scientist to follow his career.
And he’d been here tonight, in the gallery. Apparently, he was married to Nikki McKinney’s older sister.
Alex dropped his face into his hand and shook his head. Denver was such a small town. Practically inbred. He couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting one of these chop-shop boys, and he couldn’t get a damn bit of information out of any of them. He knew Quinn Younger knew where Christian Hawkins was—but the man had been completely closemouthed, very grim for someone at a gallery opening, and his wife, Nikki McKinney’s sister, hadn’t been much better. She’d looked quite sad.