by Tara Janzen
But her past was behind her, the disaster of it, the pain of it. She only hoped the best for Ken and his new wife, and the child they had on the way. Divorce happened. People moved on, and she, for one, had finally stopped moving in circles.
A boy—that’s what Ken and Kimberly were having, a baby boy.
Gillian blinked, then blinked again. She’d stopped crying, too. Oh, man, she’d way stopped crying, given it up months ago. Thank God.
She blinked one more time, pushed her glasses up again, and went back to doing what she was getting paid to do tonight—find an angel.
It didn’t take much looking around at this crowd of washed-out, run-down travelers to realize there wasn’t an angel anywhere in the—
Holy Mother of God. Her heart caught in her throat, and she tightened her hand on her bag.
Angel at two o’clock, coming around the baggage carrel, coming out of the crowd—and moving in slow motion, she swore it. Everything suddenly seemed to have slowed down, except her pulse. Her skin flashed hot, then cold, and she gripped her messenger bag tighter. An edge of dizziness threatened to take hold. Then she realized she was holding her breath.
Breathe, Gillian Pentycote, she admonished herself. Breathe.
But so help her God, it was Travis James. She didn’t have a doubt in her mind. Six feet of power and grace and blond hair pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. Gray pants, white T-shirt, black jacket, and incredibly blue eyes—Caribbean blue. And the face, so help her God, chiseled, beautiful, the shadow of a beard across an elegant jaw.
Skeeter should have warned her, should have said something—something more than “angel.” “Angel” could mean anything: kind, warmhearted, a comfort in a time of need, somebody with wings. There was nothing about the word that implicitly implied drop-freaking-dead gorgeous.
But he was, completely gorgeous, completely unexpected, and he most definitely looked like a comfort, one of those seriously dangerous and dangerously addicting comforts she hadn’t had in a very long time.
God help her.
He stopped and leaned over to lift a large backpack off the conveyor belt. A woman bumped into him, turned to excuse herself, and instead all but melted into a puddle at his feet. Gillian saw the whole thing, the cool apology ready on the woman’s lips, the stunning moment of awareness, and the complete and total capitulation of her common sense.
Then the angel smiled back, and every synapse Gillian had blew—like fuses.
Sex. That’s what his smile said. Hot sex. All over you sex. Inside you sex.
Her mind was suddenly so utterly blank, she was lost. She couldn’t remember her own name. One breath passed, then another, and she was still riveted in place, trying, frantically, to reboot her brain.
TRAVIS hadn’t been in Washington, D.C., for a few months, but nothing had changed, not in Dulles. It was still crowded, still hectic, still exactly like dozens of other airports he’d been in and out of lately. He looked around the baggage area, looking for five feet five inches of bright-eyed serious in sensible shoes, with red hair.
He almost instantly spotted a likely candidate, but the woman didn’t look particularly bright-eyed or serious. Her wire-rimmed glasses were slightly askew, and she looked a little shell-shocked behind them. He dropped his gaze to her feet and reconsidered. The shoes were right, athletic wear, very sensible, except one of them was coming untied—and the legs were nice, what he could see of them peeking out from under her sensible just-above-the-knee khaki skirt, which matched her sensible tucked-in-at-the-waist khaki shirt, except the shirt was coming untucked, and both items of clothing had a number of cargo pockets stuffed to the gills with pens, pencils, scraps of paper, small notebooks, and even smaller electronics, which gave her kind of a loose-around-the-edges look. Wires snaked from a couple of the pockets to a few others, which gave her kind of a miniature-suicide-bomber look and made him wonder how in the hell she’d gotten into the airport, and made him hope she wasn’t Red Dog.
Starting forward anyway, just in case she was his ride, he sidestepped a couple of young boys wrestling their way through the unclaimed luggage. When he looked up again, the woman’s gaze was clearing and was definitely focused on him.
Well, hell. Just his luck. She was Red Dog, even though her hair wasn’t red, not in a carrot-top way. It was auburn, chin length, and more than a little tousled, like it had gotten away from her during the fixing stage, the same way her sensible clothes were getting away from her. Or maybe there was a gale-force wind outside the terminal.
She looked to be in her early thirties, which even at twenty-four, he normally considered a very nice age for a woman—very nice, for all the right reasons. But Red Dog wasn’t quite fitting into his very-nice-thirty-year-old-woman category. She was fitting into his probably-perfectly-nice-thirty-year-old-urchin category—and she had the lock on it, even with those legs.
But he was here, with Skeeter to hang out with, and he had a driver, and he got to work with the boss, Dylan Hart, which beat the hell out of being home alone and thinking way too much, so things were good.
He’d done his homework on the plane, and the Whitfield/Godwin part of the mission didn’t look too risky or difficult, not with Hart pulling the heist. But the Hamzah Negara crap was nothing but bad. If Skeeter was right, and the Negara boys had followed Dylan to Washington, D.C., this thing could be a goatfuck waiting to happen.
And she’d called him to help out, not Creed, not Kid, who, admittedly, was in Paris, or Quinn, who wasn’t, and not Hawkins, who was still in a cast, but him, the FNG. He liked that, and he wasn’t going to let her down. It didn’t matter that he’d been put on active duty ahead of her, he knew who had the maddest skills.
The urchin was moving toward him now, too, and at about forty feet and closing, he started reevaluating his first impression. She was a bit of a mess, sure, but she was a bit of a cute mess, and very bright-eyed behind her caddywampus glasses, just like Skeeter had said. At thirty feet, he admitted that he liked the way she moved. For someone who wasn’t very big, she had a strong, purposeful stride. At twenty feet, he could tell her eyes were a warm, amber brown. At ten feet, he noticed how sweet her mouth was, very expressive and curving into an unsure smile. At five feet, he could see that she’d missed a buttonhole on her shirt. There was a small gap where the extra buttonhole curved out, and another gap where she hadn’t quite gotten the zipper on her skirt completely closed, and during her short walk, her left shoe had come completely untied.
He liked women, loved them, especially when they were coming undone—and she was, one little loose edge at a time. He smiled, which made her cheeks turn pink, which he loved even more, and at three feet, at a standstill with his hand out, he found himself smiling down at her and wondering what it would take to get a perfectly nice thirty-year-old urchin into bed. He didn’t consider himself a player. He wasn’t a player—but he wanted to play with her.
Nothing could have surprised him more. Not only wasn’t she his type, but with her pockets full of papers and wires, and with—no kidding—a small piece of white first-aid tape holding the corner of her glasses together, all of it making her look like Gadget Girl, she was the complete opposite of his type.
“Red Dog?”
“Mr. James.”
“Travis.” He took her hand when she extended it. He also especially liked smart women, gravitated toward them, but he’d never been sexually attracted to the goddess geeks and nerdettes of the world.
Never.
“Thanks for coming down to pick me up,” he finished.
Except once. Regan McKinney, the love of his life, who had married another SDF operator, definitely qualified for royal geekdom. She’d recently finished her doctorate in Geology and spent her days scraping away at dinosaur bones for a natural history museum in Denver, and he knew for a fact that she liked all things that had to do with science, all kinds of science, but especially dinosaur science. The thing with Regan, though, was that she looked like
every guy’s favorite sex fantasy, blond and built, with elegant cheekbones, long bangs, and a soft, full mouth. She did not look like anybody’s idea of a dinosaur doctor.
“It’s my job, Mr. James…um, Travis, and I’m very happy to be doing it,” Red Dog said, looking very serious behind her crooked glasses, and still shaking his hand.
And Regan had underwear, a whole wardrobe of it, sheer silk and lace, in every color of the rainbow. He’d never actually seen Regan in any of her underwear, except in one notable photograph her sister, Nikki, had taken, but he’d seen the underwear. In fact, he’d spent some of the most formative years of his life ogling Regan McKinney’s underwear while it dried on the towel bar in the upstairs bathroom of the McKinney house in Boulder, Colorado. Old Doc McKinney should have charged him rent for all the time he’d spent up there.
“Skeeter left some things for you at the hotel,” Red Dog continued. “We’ll stop there first, and then I’ll take you over to Senator Whitfield’s. So, if you have all your luggage…?”
But this woman, even with wanting to take her to bed, he wanted, somehow, also to straighten her up, had a real urge to tap a few pocketfuls of paper into a tidy stack, to clean the smudges off her glasses, to redo the buttons on her shirt, correctly, to zip her and tie her, and get her back into her clothes, before someone else noticed she was coming undone.
“This is everything, just the pack,” he said, finally releasing her hand, and not so absently wondering what kind of underwear a girl named Red Dog would be wearing underneath all that sensible, serviceable, and practically falling-off khaki.
CHAPTER
12
LEANING BACK against an empty Town Car parked in Whitfield’s driveway, Skeeter took one long, last drag off her cigarette before dropping it on the concrete and grinding it out with the toe of her boot. That was her last one. She swore it.
She popped a couple of cinnamon mints in her mouth and went back to doing what she’d been doing—watching and waiting, and biding her time. She’d already done everything else, including taking it a little too personally that Travis still hadn’t gotten to Whitfield’s. She didn’t need the extra aggravation. Dylan had been giving her plenty. Between him getting up, and getting his steak, and finally getting in the Mercedes, it had just been one argument after another tonight. But by God, she was right where she’d planned on being, or close enough, right here in the freaking senator’s freaking parking lot of a driveway, with dozens of other drivers and what seemed to be about forty frat boy valets.
Okay, it was a compromise, like wearing the cheesy chauffeur uniform Dylan had gotten her, instead of her very cool Versace gown, but at least she wasn’t sitting on her butt back at the Hotel Lafayette, or on her way back to Denver, and even though she was the one dressed like a nutcracker in a black suit with black satin piping, gold braid, and epaufreakinglets with red fringe, she had the satisfaction of knowing that Dylan, the world’s biggest Mr. Know-It-All, didn’t know nearly as much as he thought he did.
He didn’t know what was in the trunk of their car, which she’d parked on the street, down a ways from the mansion for a better getaway. He hadn’t taken the time or even suspected for a moment that he should look in the trunk, because he’d ass-umed that she’d followed orders instead of thinking on her feet, which is what she got paid to do.
Just as well. Mr. Know-It-All had enough on his mind without the burden of knowing she’d brought all her toys to the party—and then some.
A small smile curved her lips. She hadn’t confessed to half of the equipment she had stuffed in her rucksacks. She had flash-bangs and flashlights, tactical, high intensity—the kind where a girl could blind the bad guys and shoot them at her quick-fingered leisure. Dylan didn’t like her Tac II combat knife? Well, maybe if the going got tough, he’d prefer one of her razor-sharp, five-inch folding knives, or her “MacGyver” knife and gizmo tool. She had sling ropes, carabiners, pressure dressings—which she hoped to God she wouldn’t need—and a weatherproof notebook with plastic-laminated pages. In case she fell into a lake or had to ford a river. Here. In the middle of Senator Whitfield’s driveway.
Geez. Maybe she was overprepared.
Nah, she decided after a moment’s consideration. She’d nailed this gig.
The sudden vibration in her pocket was a good sign, something she’d been waiting for since before they’d left the hotel.
Pulling out her phone, she flipped it open and brought it to her ear. “Skeeter.”
“Hey, Skeet. Travis. I’m with Red Dog. Whoa…watch out for that…uh, truck…. Uh, Skeet, we’re heading to the hotel now. We’re still at least—oh, geez…”
There was a short pause.
“Half an hour out,” Travis said, sounding a little breathless.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m…” There was a long, pregnant pause, during which she could sense him holding his breath again. “…fine, just fine. Uh, maybe you should…”
“Should what?” she asked, when he didn’t continue.
“Uh, not you. Red Dog. Uh, Red Dog, why don’t you let me take that and…uh, put it over here…. No, honestly, there’s plenty of room.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Fine,” he answered, a little too quickly, she thought. “Just fine. Half an hour to the hotel, or less, and Red Dog says the Lafayette is just a few minutes from Senator Whitfield’s, so hopefully…damn…I can be there in under an hour.”
An hour. “Damn” was right. She hoped to be headed back to the hotel herself by then.
“We’ll stick to the plan,” she said. “With you coming to Whitfield’s ASAP. If Dylan and I get ahead of schedule on this end, I’ll call.”
“So how does it look?”
“Like a very big party. Nothing unusual…yet.” She wasn’t looking for trouble that wasn’t there, but she still had the same uneasy feeling she’d had this morning when she’d called in her equipment list to Red Dog, and that feeling said trouble was looking for her, or Dylan.
“Let’s hope it stays that way. I’ll be there as soon as I…whoa…can.”
Whoa can? What the hell was whoa can?
“Thanks. I rented you a tuxedo, the best I could get on short notice. It’ll be in the closet in my room at the suite. I’d like you to work the party from the inside.”
“How bad is the best you could get?” For a couple of seconds, he sounded skeptical, instead of breathless.
“You’ll be fine. You won’t stand out. I promise.” Skeeter wasn’t worried about the quality of the tuxedo. Travis James made everything look good. He even made nothing look good. Some people would say he especially made nothing look good, being the favorite nude model for one of the hottest rising stars on the American art scene—Nikki McKinney Chronopolous, a name that was a mouthful by anyone’s definition.
“Then I’ll see you as soon as I get suited up.”
She could almost see the smile she heard in his voice, and the unusual nervous edge that went with it—damned unusual. Nothing made Travis James nervous. He was the personification of the laid-back, Boulder slacker dude, imperturbable. Of course, he’d just gotten back from Colombia with Creed, and those missions sometimes slid toward a wild, dark side. She’d know just how wild when she saw him. None of the guys could hide anything from her—except Dylan. He was the boss, the loner, the brick wall she could never get around, which was damned inconvenient for a lot of reasons, especially tonight.
“Thanks. I’ll see you when you get here.” She hung up the phone and stuck it back in her pocket. Then she checked her watch.
She and Dylan had hammered out a schedule. Actually, Dylan had hammered out a schedule, while she’d held her tongue and silently fumed. She’d won the war, she told herself, she was at Whitfield’s, but she’d definitely lost the schedule skirmish.
The plan, according to Dylan, was that he would mingle and schmooze for an hour or two on his own and discreetly check out the lay of the land, including
spotting any added guards on duty for the party, or cameras that hadn’t shown up on the plans of Whitfield’s security system. Then once he’d made himself perfectly at home in the posh palace and practically invisible in the posh crowd, he would mosey on back to Whitfield’s office, jimmy open the door, use Whitfield’s fingerprints to open the safe, then grab the file and mosey back out to the party, and from there, back out to the Mercedes, while she stood around and stayed out of trouble.
Well, they were well into the mission, and she’d done plenty of standing around. She’d also mingled with the chauffeurs, schmoozed with the valets, discreetly checked the lay of the land, and located the outside door into Whitfield’s office, and she was ready to make her move, which was not leaning her butt against somebody’s Town Car and shining the side panels all night with her black satin piping. The Godwin file was as good as hers, and once she got it, she was calling Dylan on his phone and telling him to ditch the party, they were going home.
Then she was going after Negara. The research she’d done this afternoon on the drugs used in interrogations had scared the hell out of her. Dylan should have stayed on the U.S.S. Jefferson. He’d had no business coming home, and no business whatsoever in taking the Godwin mission tonight.
She didn’t want to think about the injuries she’d seen on his wrist, but she had been, a lot.
Yeah, Negara was hers, but it was going to take time. She’d need months of intel gathering and preparation for the mission, and she’d need Kid Chaos to make the hit.
She popped another couple of cinnamon mints in her mouth. She didn’t need anybody’s help to get the damn Godwin file. After Dylan had gone upstairs to pack this morning at Steele Street, she’d done a little packing of her own. For the most part, both hers and Dylan’s rucksacks—whether he’d claim his or not—were identically equipped, but she’d brought a few extra pieces to put in hers: a small biometric fingerprint pad no bigger than a compact, which it resembled, and her own version of a decoder ring—the DRSB303. The only biometric lock in Steele Street belonged to Creed, and she’d taken the damn thing apart and recoded it so many times, it was a wonder it still worked. Except, of course, she’d made damn sure it worked, even after the time she’d programmed it to open only when reading the print off her left butt cheek.