by Tara Janzen
Goddammit.
“What are you doing?” he asked Hawkins.
“This is your chance to be the good guy, Dylan,” Superman said. “Run with it.”
The last thing Dylan heard over the phone was Hawkins hanging up.
Run with it. Right.
She started across the drag strip, her strides long and forceful, her hips swaying inside the little scrap of black leather she called a skirt, and he swore again. Face time had not been in his plan. But she was going to be in his face in sixty seconds or less, with the high ground in her favor if he didn’t get out of the car.
Dammit. He shoved Roxanne’s door open and slid out from behind the wheel. When Skeeter stepped off the pavement, he was ready, standing next to the Challenger, waiting. He was the boss, he reminded himself. He was the adult, and he was in charge.
“Sir,” she said, coming to a stop in front of him and, of all the unexpected things, sticking her hand out.
“Uh, Skeeter,” he said, taking her hand in his and giving it a firm shake. Sir? From the girl who not an hour ago had told him to go screw himself?
“Superman said you wanted to see me.” She took an at-ease stance that only upped his unease. Hip-shot attitude was her normal pose.
But he could live with this. Sure he could. As a matter of fact, he liked it—a lot. Polite condescension to his authority was exactly the right mind-set for her to be cultivating. She was a smart girl. He should have known she would figure it out. She’d just needed a little nudge in the right direction. Obviously, his ultimatum had been the perfect course of action to take. He’d finally gotten something from her he wanted—submission.
Yeah. He could live with that.
Feeling better about his decision to bring her in on the job, he allowed himself to relax half a degree.
“I gave the Godwin mission another look,” he told her. “And I can use you in Washington.”
Her reaction was instantaneous, and if at any time in the last three years he had realized what a magical effect those words would have, he would have been using them every day. He would have made stuff up just to say them, bent over backward to create all sorts of scenarios just so he could say “I can use you in Washington” and watch the world’s most amazing smile break across her face—those soft lips curving, a blush coming into her cheeks, her whole countenance suddenly and unequivocally radiating happiness.
Hell. Hawkins had been right. Being the good guy definitely came with some perks. He should have tried it earlier, instead of specializing in being such a coldhearted son of a bitch.
“That’s great,” she said, the breathless catch in her voice being another unexpected perk, the way it wrapped around his heart and slid down to his groin—which was exactly the kind of reaction to her he was trying to avoid.
“I’m glad you think so,” he said, allowing his smile to broaden even as he told himself to take it easy. A breathless and submissive Skeeter Bang was not a breathless, submissive, and naked Skeeter Bang—and it wasn’t going to be. Ever.
“I won’t let you down.”
“I’m sure you won’t.” And he was. She was perfect for the job. “I need a driver.”
“A driver?” She sounded somewhat surprised.
He nodded, damn pleased with his solution to tonight’s mess. “You’ll be responsible for all our transportation in Washington—from the airport to the hotel, to the Whitfield mansion, where you will station yourself with the car for surveillance of the area while I lift the Godwin file, and then from the Whitfield mansion back to the hotel, and from there to the airport. If things go as planned, we should be home sometime late tomorrow night. You can also drive us from Steele Street to Denver International.” He added the last as a bonus. She deserved it.
“You want me to drive you around Washington, D.C., and wait in the car at Whitfield’s?”
“Yes.” He nodded again, figuring that pretty much summed it up. “You will, of course, be armed.” Another little bonus he felt justified in offering. The girl knew her way around a pistol. That was for damn sure.
“I see,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder for a brief second before bringing her attention back to him. “And you’re sure I can handle all this?”
“Absolutely.”
“Because I wouldn’t want you to have any doubts.”
“I don’t,” he assured her.
“Well, good. That’s great, Mr. Hart,” she said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes from where she had them tucked into her belt and knocking one into her hand. “But I’ve got to confess, I have a couple of concerns.”
Sir and Mr. Hart. There had been a time, a brief time last January, when she’d called him Dylan, but he was willing to pay the price of familiarity if it kept her safe.
“And what would those be?” He watched as she put the cigarette in her mouth, tucked the pack of Faros back into her belt, and then struck a match off her knife sheath. Cupping her hand around the flame, she held it to the cigarette and inhaled.
It annoyed the hell out of him, the whole damn smoking thing, and he was just about to mention it, politely of course, when she looked up and exhaled a small, perfect smoke ring right at him. It floated through the night air, getting bigger and bigger, until it wreathed his face and broke up.
Geezus. A smoke ring. In his face.
He was no longer annoyed. Oh, hell no. He was so relieved, it was all he could do not to grin. Drag-strip girls blowing smoke rings were not girls on the verge of tears.
“I think it’s important that we trust each other,” she said, finishing her exhale and flicking the short end of ash off her cigarette.
Trust? Now, there was a double dog dare if he’d ever heard one.
“Trust each other’s decisions,” she continued. “If we’re going to be a team.”
“I trust you.” And he did—to drive him around Washington, D.C., and drive him crazy. If that was the dare, he was in, probably in over his head, but as long as she wasn’t crying, he could take a little craziness.
Geezus. A smoke ring.
“Good. That’s good,” she said, her gaze straying over his shoulder. She gave someone a quick lift of her head, and he got a bad feeling—a feeling that only got worse when he heard some monster engine start up down the line.
“And your other concern? You said you had a couple.” It took everything he had not to look and see who she’d signaled.
She paused for a second before speaking. “I think you’ll feel more comfortable working with me if you concentrate on my skills rather than my age, if you just forget how old I am.”
Not bloody damn likely. Not with that face.
“Sure. Good idea.”
“And you shouldn’t think of me as a girl. Ever,” she said, looking him as straight in the eye as someone in mirrored sunglasses could, which was surprisingly straight. He could feel her gaze holding his. “I don’t want you trying to take care of me when you need to be taking care of yourself.”
Not think of her as a girl.
Right.
Using every ounce of restraint he had, he kept his gaze from dropping down the front of her, down the curves of her breasts, down her slim hips, down the endless length of her legs, and he was still doomed. He’d worked with women in the field and never given sex a thought, but he wasn’t going to forget Skeeter Bang was a girl—ever.
“Do your job. Drive the car. And we won’t have any problems,” he said, his voice calm and steady, so steady, he almost believed it himself.
“Great. Then we’re okay to go.”
“Okay to go,” he agreed. “We’ll have a mission briefing at eight o’clock. In the morning.” That was early…but maybe not early enough. “With a prebriefing meeting at seven-thirty.” That was really early. Honestly, she should just pack up Mercy and go home, which had absolutely nothing to do with her age or gender, or how much he trusted her.
Liar. He didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her right now, not with the big boys
starting their engines and Mercy sitting on the other side of the strip, looking like she could eat every car at the Doubles and still have room for dessert.
But he didn’t think leaving was what Skeeter had in mind.
Her next words proved it.
“I’ll see you at the office, then, seven-thirty A.M. sharp.” She stuck out her hand again, and he took it for another firm shake, working hard not to just pack her up and take her home. “Thank you for the opportunity, sir. You won’t regret it.”
He already did, but before he could voice his concerns, she was off, striding back toward Mercy.
He did look over his shoulder then, and sure enough, there was a guy down the line with a shit-eating grin on his face, watching her, a big guy in a muscle shirt, with a bald head. The man was leaning on a cherry red, 1970 Hemi ’Cuda, and when he straightened up and opened the hood, Dylan’s bad feeling got even worse.
He knew what was going to happen next, and every one of his instincts told him to stop it, to grab her and stop it before it got started.
“Hey, Johnny!” he heard her shout, her voice unmistakable.
He turned back to the strip and saw her walking up the double yellow stripe running down the middle of the road, one long-legged stride after another, headed for the Nova.
“Pop the hood and break out the ice!”
Ice. Goddammit.
“What about the meats?” Johnny hollered back, and Dylan could have wrung his neck.
“Change ’em,” she said.
Dammit.
She’d come ready to tear the place up, with ice to cool down her intake, and Mercy’s slicks to put more rubber on the road, and he was going to have to stand there and watch it all happen. Trust, she’d said. Trust her to make the right decision—like eating a goddamn Hemi-powered Barracuda at the Midnight Doubles.
CHAPTER
4
HE WANTED a driver? Well, hell, Skeeter would show him a driver. She’d take Mercy and drive Rob North’s ’Cuda straight into the ground.
He wanted her to sit and wait outside Whitfield’s while he did the mission alone? Well, hell, nobody did sit and wait better than she did. She’d been sitting and waiting for seven months for a chance like he’d just given her.
And she wasn’t going to blow it. Hell, no. But neither was she going to roll over and play dead. He was going to have to get another girl for that gig—like one of his MBA, Ph.D., fashion model look-alike girlfriends. He had a million of them, without a street rat in the bunch. There were no bad girls in his lineup, only the cream of the American social strata. And that was the reality check she needed. Dylan Hart was never going to be hers.
Never.
But from the first moment she’d seen him, when she’d still looked like something out of a freak show, with the stitches running across her forehead, her one eye blackened, and her lip swollen, and him looking like a poster boy for a polo club, she’d been in love—stupid, calf-eyed, unrequited love.
He was the most physically arresting man she’d ever seen, his face the stone-cold definition of hard-edged elegance, his dark hair silky and always perfectly cut, the broadness of his shoulders accentuated by the lean musculature of his body. He was the brains behind SDF, the boy who’d started the chop shop on Steele Street with a crew of teenage car thieves. He was the boss, and he was a mystery, his past nonexistent. There was no Dylan Hart, no birth certificate, no medical records, no Social Security number, no anything anywhere before he’d been sixteen and gotten arrested for grand theft auto—nothing except a faint trail she’d followed to a name, five million dollars, and a seventeen-year-old scandal.
The name was Liam Dylan Magnuson, the money had never been found, and the date coincided with when Dylan had shown up in Denver, but she had not been able to make a positive connection between Liam Dylan Magnuson and her Dylan Hart, nothing she could take to the bank, or to Superman for confirmation.
Her Dylan Hart—she let out a small snort. He wasn’t ever going to be hers. Not in this life, and probably not in the next.
Cripes. Just what she needed, more bad news.
She dropped her cigarette on the asphalt and ground it out with the toe of her boot. He’d made it clear what he thought of her—incompetent. Geez. Sit and wait in the car while he stole the Godwin file.
He either hadn’t been listening back at the office, or he didn’t want to believe she’d comported herself with commendable professionalism her first two times out with Superman. He saw her as a child, but if he stuck around, that was going to change.
No child could have built Mercy. No child could take Rob North in the quarter mile. It took more than guts and speed to get the Nova to the finish line in one piece and ahead of the competition. It took skill and the lightning-quick reflexes she’d honed against Superman. It took some brains.
She checked the ice pack Johnny had put on the intake, then knelt next to him at Mercy’s left rear wheel to help with the lug nuts. After they’d switched out the tires, she started her final check of the car.
THE half inch of Scotch in the bottom of Dylan’s bottle wasn’t nearly enough to get him drunk, which was fine. No matter what happened in the next twelve seconds, he still had to drive home.
Twelve fucking seconds—or less. He knew what Mercy could do.
The Nova and the ’Cuda were on the line, clouds of smoke lingering over the tires the drivers had heated up during their burnouts, the engines rumbling, chassis shaking with barely suppressed energy. There were no lights at the Doubles. Cars staged on a white stripe painted across the asphalt. They launched at the drop of a flag.
His gaze went from the muscled skinhead piloting the ’Cuda to Skeeter in Mercy, and something tightened in his chest. She was otherworldly beautiful, sitting in the black beast, her skin porcelain in the glare of a hundred headlights, her expression calm, her focus unerring. The ball cap and her sunglasses had been jettisoned in the pre-race preparations, allowing him a rare and wondrous glimpse of what she really looked like—and she looked like an angel, her face framed by platinum blond bangs chopped into half a dozen different lengths, the rest of her hair bluntly cut in longer and longer layers until it all went up into the ponytail that hung over her shoulder. But it was her face that did him in, every time. He lusted after her body, but he was a fool for that face, the innocence and the violence of it never failing to turn him inside out.
And she was ready to rumble, one hand on the wheel, the other on Mercy’s shifter.
Trust, he thought, taking another swallow of Scotch.
Trust her not to annihilate herself.
The flag dropped. His heart stopped. Time slowed.
He felt the roll of the throttle in his pulse, felt the power surge of 427 cubic inches of displacement let loose. The ’Cuda’s tires spun for the barest fraction of a second, and the race was lost. Skeeter’s launch was solid, pure. She hit sixty miles per hour in under four seconds, over a hundred miles per hour well before the finish line, fast enough to give the spectators whiplash. She held to her lane like an arrow, so straight, so clean, so motherfreaking quick, like a cat off the line, the Hemi ’Cuda on her ass the whole way.
There was no luck involved.
It was all engineering, mechanics, skill, and nerve, the last of which he seemed to have in damn short supply when it came to watching her race. Jesus. The hand he had around the bottle was shaking. He’d rather endure the elevator trick five times a day than see her go up against some unknown street delinquent again, ever.
He needed to find her another hobby—like covert ops.
Okay. That was good. That plan was already in place. Taking her to Washington and parking her in a senator’s driveway was probably as close as he was going to get to keeping her out of trouble.
Great.
He took the last swallow of Scotch and headed back to Roxanne. For once, it seemed he’d made the right decision when it came to little Miss Hell-on-Wheels.
CHAPTER
5
>
OR NOT, Dylan thought for the hundredth time in the last ten hours—including all the wee hours of the night during which he’d gotten damn little sleep and a little too much of his second bottle of Scotch.
He was sitting perfectly still at the conference table in SDF’s main office, waiting for the briefing to begin, his sunglasses firmly in place, trying to keep his head from going off like a Titan missile, and trying to keep from staring at Skeeter as she downed her third doughnut.
He was failing on all counts, and the whole doughnut thing was making him queasy, not to mention the fact that she hadn’t gotten home until four o’clock in the morning.
Four o’clock A.M.—ante meridiem.
He’d left her at the Doubles about ten o’clock. So what in the hell had she been doing between ten and four? And how in the hell did she look so fresh and rested—and did he really want to know the answer to either one of those questions?
No, he decided, because she obviously hadn’t been up all night drinking Scotch and worrying about somebody. That’s what he’d done, and he looked like hell.
Christ. He’d been insane to give in to all that juvenile angst at the track last night. He had no business taking her anywhere.
And now she had sugar on her nose, and on her lips. It was enough to fry a couple more dozen of his brain cells—and his brain cells were in damn short supply this morning. Great. Running out of brain cells, running out of nerve, he should never have come home.
“Goddammit, Dylan,” Hawkins said from across the room. “Goddammit.”
Well, that didn’t sound very auspicious.
With effort, he slanted his gaze toward the fax machine, where Hawkins was reading a transmission as it came over the line.
Superman did not look happy.
“It’s a goddamn commendation from the secretary of defense.” Hawkins pulled the fax free, still reading. “A goddamn commendation.”
Shit. That’s all he needed at eight o’clock in the morning.
“Jakarta…Jemaah,” Hawkins muttered, scanning the page. “Valor in action under the direst circumstances…tenacity…subsequent es—”