Crazy Love

by Tara Janzen

  “Underwear?”

  “Lots of underwear.” She nodded, and a small smile curved her lips. “She seems to like it. She always takes it, but she won’t let anyone get too close to her, not physically close, and not emotionally close, either.”

  What an opener she’d handed him. This whole getting-close thing was his problem, the real reason he’d come home.

  “I have a woman I’d like to get close to, emotionally and physically.”

  Her smile slid away, along with her gaze. “You never did before.”

  No, he hadn’t. Not ever.

  “Well, I think that’s because I’ve had this ongoing conflict with my mother—” He stopped cold, more than a little surprised at himself, not quite believing he’d actually said that.

  “Who you haven’t seen in seventeen years, but I can understand that,” she said, her voice softening.

  “It must have been a shock when she married so quickly after your father’s death.”

  And he really couldn’t believe she’d said that.

  “A bit,” he agreed, and wondered if it was getting warmer in her apartment.

  “Liam Dylan Magnuson, that was your father’s name, right?” She looked up, her one eyebrow quirked in that way that made her look cutely confused.

  “Right.” Very right.

  “Your name, too, right?”

  Yes again. She was batting a thousand.

  “He was the second Liam Dylan Magnuson. I’m the third.” Or rather, he had been. He’d left that behind him a long time ago. “You really shouldn’t know all this, Skeeter.” The greatest investigators on two continents didn’t know this stuff—and they’d been looking.

  “If we’re going to have any chance at all, Dylan, I need to know everything.”

  She was right, but he was still a little shocked about how much she already knew. The whole “if we’re going to have a chance” thing sounded good to him, though. Damn good.

  He looked down at her very demure, librarian-approved, short-sleeved, white cotton shirt with its little stand-up collar. It was amazing, really, how sexy a librarian-approved shirt could look when paired with black patent-leather boots and a black patent-leather miniskirt. She was every boy’s bad-girl fantasy—and if she thought they had a chance, he was taking it.

  He’d been crazy to leave.

  “I’m an idiot.” Hindsight was so perfect.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to agree with everything I say?” It was an interesting possibility.

  “No.”

  “Can we finish this fight in bed, then?” He didn’t mean to be obvious, but that’s exactly where this was headed, sooner or later, and he was pushing for sooner.

  “I’m still angry with you.” And she had every right to be. He was angry with himself, too. But she smelled good, and felt better, and he’d been with out her for two months.

  “We could be angry in bed,” he said hopefully, slipping his other hand under her right knee and lifting it to his hip, pulling her closer to the edge of the desk and making room for him between her legs.

  A small laugh escaped her, which he took as a very good sign.

  “Are you listening to yourself?” she asked, her arms sliding up around his neck, her right leg tightening around his hip and sending a hot thrill straight to his groin.

  “No.” He was beyond listening. All he wanted now was her. So he kissed her, softly at first, loving the feel of her mouth, the sliding of her hands through his hair, and absolutely loving that her prim little shirt had only four buttons, four, inconsequential, easily done away with buttons.

  He smoothed his free hand up the satiny skin of her torso and cupped her breast. Her bra was lace. He could feel the delicacy of it with his fingertips.

  “We should talk,” she whispered.

  Of course they should.

  His mouth came down on hers again, open, his tongue delving deep as he took her in a hot, heavy kiss, a wet and wild kiss.

  “Good idea,” he said when he lifted his head. “Let’s talk in bed.”

  Swinging her up into his arms, he headed up the short flight of stairs to the platform where her bed was perched like a…like a he didn’t know what.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “A 1960 Chrysler 300F Letter Car. Johnny and I chopped it, and I had a custom mattress made to fit the interior.”

  Which was exactly what the contraption looked like, amazing, all sweeping fins, chrome grille, whitewall tires, red taillights, and Mardi Gras green paint—and like a lot of fun with the right girl.

  Lucky him, he had the right girl in his arms.

  Then he remembered the ring.

  Damn. How could he have forgotten the ring?

  He stopped what he was doing, and she looked up at him, breathlessly beautiful. He had one hand up her skirt, her blouse was already unbuttoned, and her white lace bra was so sheer, he could see through it—and he’d stopped. Was he nuts?

  No. He wasn’t nuts. This was important. The whole thing was important. Doing it right was important.

  He let her feet slide to the floor, and she gave him a quizzical look.

  “What?” she asked.

  Okay, this was it. Now he was nervous.

  He pulled a small velvet box out of his pocket.

  “Dylan?”

  He knew it was crazy. She was Baby Bang, the Goth princess of every dark street in LoDo. She was chain mail and black leather, switchblades and trouble, and so help him God, she was supposed to be his.

  He opened the box, and the light hit three carats’ worth of diamond set in platinum. It was the most traditional wedding ring in the world. It reeked of stability and fiftieth wedding anniversaries. It proclaimed itself to the world as the rock upon which vows were never broken. It was a testament of his love. Proof of his commitment.

  And from the look on her face, he could tell it was absolutely exactly what she’d needed to get from him.

  CHAPTER

  29

  HOLY FREAKING cripes. Skeeter swore to God she was never going to move again. She was limp, worn-out, and completely in love, and she would have kept her promise not to move, so help her God, if he hadn’t hit the “shimmy switch” again.

  The old Chrysler roared into Magic Fingers mode, the whole mattress vibrating to the prerecorded pitch and rumble of the most perfectly tuned set of headers she’d ever heard, the pipes that had been bolted onto Jeanette the Jet, a long-dead but well-loved 1969 Camaro who had given her all one night in Denver’s old Stapleton Airport.

  “I can’t believe you did that again.” It was about his tenth time. “If you don’t stop, I’m going to be carsick.”

  He just grinned. “I can’t believe you hooked a giant vibrator to the mattress. It’s amazing.”

  “Didn’t you ever stay in one of those cheap hotels with the coin slot on the side of the bed, where it keeps shaking as long as you keep feeding it quarters?”

  She lifted her hand into the air and just enjoyed the absolutely spectacular sparkle and shine of a huge diamond set in platinum.

  Skeeter Jeanne Hart. Oh, yeah, she liked the sound of that.

  “Honey, I’ve never been within a hundred feet of a cheap hotel.”

  She slanted him a quick glance, her brain suddenly, acutely “on,” all traces of lethargy instantly banished. This was an opportunity. This was as good an opening as she was ever going to get. So with the two of them humming along with the Chrysler 300 and Jeanette, she asked the million-dollar question.

  Actually, the five-million-dollar question.

  “Whatever happened to the money from Magnuson International?”

  It was a bona fide bombshell of a question, and absolutely nothing happened when she dropped it, not for one long endless minute after another. He just lay there next to her, breathing softly.

  Thinking.

  He had to be thinking.

  Finally, when she couldn’t stand it any longer, she tilted her head to look up at hi
m.

  And he was looking back, a bemused expression on his face.

  “How long have you been carrying that information around?”

  “A while.”

  “You’re pretty good, aren’t you?”

  “Pretty good,” she conceded—carefully. He’d kept his secrets for seventeen years, and she’d been throwing them around pretty easily tonight.

  “Hmmm, Magnuson International,” he said, rolling onto his back and stretching out beside her.

  “That was a while back.”

  She wasn’t buying it.

  “It was also a helluva lot of money.” The bed finally stopped vibrating. “You couldn’t possibly have forgotten what you did with it.”

  “But you couldn’t find it?” He glanced over at her.

  She shook her head. “Nope, and I looked everywhere.”

  “You’ve been a busy girl, haven’t you?”

  She gave him a little lift of her shoulder, then looked at him from under her lashes. “I could get busier.”

  That got his attention. She could tell by the sudden darkening of his gaze.

  “How busy?” he asked.

  A grin tugged at her lips. “Pretty busy,” she promised, sliding her hand down the length of his chest.

  “Magnuson International,” he began, his own grin curving his mouth.

  “I want the whole story,” she warned.

  “Okay.” He started again. “The whole story. My father started the company in his early thirties, just before I was born, and by the time I was fifteen years old, I was practically his right-hand man. We spent a lot of time in Europe and Asia, with Dad putting together investments, evaluating companies, making money, and making his clients rich.”

  “Including White Rook,” she interjected, taking a pretty good guess. Some of the pieces at least halfway fit together, and White Rook had to come into the story somewhere toward the beginning. White Rook had been behind the creation of SDF. She knew that much.

  One elegant brow arched in disbelief. “You found White Rook?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. I know there is a White Rook, someone at the State Department, but I don’t know who it is.”

  He rolled onto his side, facing her, and propped his head up with his hand, giving her a very considering look.

  “Neither do I,” he said after a moment.

  No way.

  “You don’t know who White Rook is?”

  “He’s a phone number at the State Department, and a face I know by sight but never shows up anywhere officially, or unofficially, for that matter—and I mean never shows up. Believe me, I’ve looked. I was first contacted by him in Moscow, and couriered documents for him for over a year before the CIA got ahold of me. It could have been all downhill after that, but strings were pulled, and then I was released and turned over to General Grant.”

  “And started SDF.”

  He nodded. “Christian and I weren’t supposed to survive our first mission, a delivery into Beirut. The brass figured we could get in and hook up with the right guys, but that we’d get whacked getting back out.”

  The creeps.

  “But you didn’t.” Not her guys. No way.

  He laughed, a soft chuckle. “Christian had just barely gotten out of prison. To say his nerves were a little raw is an understatement. Those guys in Beirut couldn’t scratch their butts without Hawkins knowing two minutes in advance where it was going to itch.”

  Which was interesting as hell, and information she was glad to have, but there was still that five million dollars out there somewhere.

  “So how did you get the money, and what happened to it?”

  “Well, getting it was…uh…easy,” he said, his voice trailing off a bit, his gaze shifting down their bodies and following the movement of her fingers over his lower abdomen. “Are you going to be doing much more of that?”

  “Probably.”

  “Could you do it a little lower?”

  “Probably.”

  When she didn’t, he looked back up at her, an unspoken question on his face.

  “The story,” she reminded him. “Magnuson International. The five million.”

  “Right.” He started in again, grinning. “My father gave it to me. I don’t know if he had a premonition or what, but the day he died, we were in Geneva, and he transferred five million dollars of his personal Magnuson International account into a private account with my name on it. I sat on the money for weeks after I buried him, waiting for my mother to come—but she never did. She was too busy getting remarried to Magnuson International’s vice president in charge of operations. So I took the money, invested it in Russian oil and gas futures, and then I disappeared.”

  And that was it, the last mystery of Dylan Hart. She was blown away.

  “I knew your father had a heart attack in Geneva, but nothing in the papers mentioned his son being there. No wonder you’re—”

  “Such a coldhearted bastard?” he filled in for her. Then he touched his fingers to her lips, silencing her, before she could say anything. “No. We’re not getting sidetracked with the psychoanalysis of Dylan Hart. I love you, Skeeter, and there’s no way I can lie here next to you and pour out my poor little brokenhearted-boy story. I walked away from my dad with five million dollars and an incredible education. You walked away from yours missing a pint of blood and needing twenty stitches, and if we have to talk about all of this now, not to mention our maternal abandonment issues, I’m going to be too angry to make love to you again.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Oh,” he confirmed.

  “Can I ask one more question?”

  He narrowed his gaze. “Only if it’s about what position we should try next.”

  “Why Denver?” she asked. “You could have gone anywhere.”

  A broad smile curved his mouth. “From all the places I’d been, Denver, Colorado, looked like the absolute middle of nowhere, the ends of the earth, but still with phone service and running water. I figured no one would ever find me here. And no one ever did. From L.A. to Chicago, the Steele Street boys pushed more stolen cars through the pipeline than any other chop shop in the western United States, and no one knew I existed, until we got busted, and that is the whole story.” He leaned down and gave her a soft kiss. “The whole story, busy girl.”

  She grinned at him and let her hand slide lower and wrap around him. His eyes drifted closed on a groan. Then he kissed her again and moved his hips forward, thrusting into her hand.

  God, he was beautiful—and he was hers.

  “You know, honey,” he murmured between kisses on her mouth, and her cheek, and her ear, and that very sensitive spot on the side of her neck, “I think we could get into Guinness.”

  “You do?” She was melting under all those kisses and the very gentle exploration he was making with his fingers between her legs.

  “Um-hmmm. I think if we can do this two more times without having to get up for food, we can set a record.”

  “You want to get into Guinness?”

  “No,” he admitted, lifting up enough to smile down at her. “I just want to do it two more times.”

  Then he kissed her, starting at her shoulder and the top of her lightning-bolt tattoo. Kiss by kiss, he worked his way down the length of her back, over the curve of her hip, and down her thigh, to the one place where the lightning bolt was broken.

  He stopped and kissed her twice on the spot.

  “I should kick Superman’s ass for taking you into a war zone.” He laid another kiss a little bit lower.

  “I’d like to see you try.” She rolled from her side onto her back and grinned up at him.

  “You don’t think I can kick Superman’s ass?”

  She shook her head, still grinning.

  “I kick Superman’s ass all the time,” he assured her, then went back to kissing her leg, following her tattoo. By the time he got to her ankle and started licking his way back up the inside of her leg, she was in meltdo
wn mode.

  “You’re getting me all hot and bothered,” she said, trembling just a little as he licked the inside of her thigh. Then he licked inside her—for a long, long time, running his tongue over her, all over her, until she came. Again.

  Oh, God. She was limp, her body on an overload of little soft explosions.

  “So you’re hot and bothered,” he said, resuming his leisurely path up her body, working his way all the way up, until he was kissing her throat, and her cheek, and her eyebrows. “What do you want to do about it?”

  He lifted his head to meet her gaze, and she knew he knew. She could feel it in the hot and welcome pressure of his body seeking entrance into hers. She could see it in the darkening of his eyes and in the not-so-innocent curve of his smile.

  “Screw you,” she said.

  His grin turned absolutely wicked, and he leaned down to whisper in her ear, “Make me.”

  CRAZY sweet

  ON SALE FALL 2006

  Red Dog was here—back from cheating death one more time. The roar and rumble of the pipes on the car pulling up outside Beck’s Back Alley Bar were unmistakable, headers and the dual exhaust of the bad girl’s ride, tuned to perfection and guaranteed to shake glass in four directions.

  Travis James let out a heavy breath and knocked back a shot of tequila before he turned to face the front door. He hated to miss her entrance. Watching Red Dog walk into a room was the best floorshow in town—in any town.

  “Geezus,” the guy sitting at the table behind him said when the door opened.

  Oh, yeah. She had that effect on him, too—all the time, every time.

  He chased the tequila with a swallow of beer and let his gaze drop down the length of her body. She was so bad, she was good. Good like seven-dollar-a-shot-mescal, and exquisitely, classy bad.

  Dangerous.

  A sheer red silk muscle shirt didn’t leave anything to the imagination, especially not the size, the shape, or the delicacy of the black lace bra she was wearing underneath it.

  He bought her a lot of black lace.

  Her worn denim jeans had silver studs running down the right leg and were so tight, they should have come with a warning label. A small chamois fanny pack was slung around her waist. Pale ostrich-leather cowboy boots covered her feet. Stacked heels, pointed toes, and worn vamps, they’d seen a lot of long days in a dozen Third World hellholes over the last two years—the two years since Red Dog had created herself from a blank slate and a heart hungry for revenge. She was five feet five inches of pure, unadulterated, ass-kicking girl, and every day she pushed him. She pushed him hard.