by Tara Janzen
Jane Linden was awake.
Jane.
He didn’t dare turn around, not yet. The girl tore him up like none other. He had no explanation for the way he felt about her, kind of wildly, crazily in lust. She didn’t seem to know he was on the planet. But a sweet, awful yearning had hit him hard the first time he’d seen her, the first instant, and over the last two weeks, it had only gotten worse.
“Here,” he said, extending his hand to Skeeter. “I’ll, uh, put it with the other ones.”
Four other envelopes had been delivered to the gallery tonight, all of them for someone named Robin Rulz, but nobody named Robin worked for Toussi’s. Considering the grubby little group of kids who had been delivering the envelopes, Travis didn’t think Robin Rulz actually had a thing to do with Toussi’s. The kids had just made a mistake—all five of them, one right after the other, all night long.
Right.
He looked down at the envelope, and sure enough, it had the same return address printed on it as all the others, a business logo for an Oriental rug company just off Speer Boulevard.
“I’ll take these back to the Castle Import Rug Company today or tomorrow. They’ll probably know who this Robin Rulz is.” It was the best idea he had.
“There is no Castle Import Rug Company anymore,” Skeeter said, the slight shift of her head telling him she was looking at him now, not the girl. “They were closed down a few years back. The importer, a guy named Greg Stevens, is still doing time in Canon City for felony abuse of child labor laws and trafficking in heroin. The drugs came in his shipments of rugs, and he used a bunch of homeless kids to distribute through downtown, called them the Castle Kids. Overall, he was pretty small-time. He didn’t have a lock on the trade, but because of the kids, they put him away with the maximum sentence.”
And as quickly as that, the whole mess with the envelopes got a whole lot stickier than Travis ever would have imagined possible up until Nikki’s sister, Regan, had gone and fallen in love with Quinn Younger last summer. Since then, every time he turned around, he’d found himself knee-deep in street gangs, derelicts, murder, mayhem, and guys like Quinn, Kid Chaos, and Superman, a.k.a. Christian Hawkins, who took it all in stride.
“So he’s in prison, and the kids are still running wild on the streets? Handing out envelopes?” None of this was making any sense, yet.
She shrugged. “The police caught a few of the Castle Kids and handed them over to Social Services. Most of them were never found. They just melted back into the landscape, disappeared on the streets.”
“Like the five who showed up here tonight.” That much, at least, was damned obvious.
“Yeah. I think so. Robin was one of the kids who never got caught, the oldest, the one who held them together and got them a new gig.”
“Doing what?” A new gig didn’t sound promising, not for a bunch of former drug dealers, even pint-sized ones.
Behind him, he heard Jane stir in her makeshift bed of chairs, and it took every ounce of control he had not to turn and look at her. It seemed that’s all he did these days, look at Jane and fill up with longing like some sixteen-year-old virgin. He both loved it and hated it. Loved the sheer high of wanting her. Hated to think he was never going to get her, but, man, the girl defined the words “hard to catch.”
“Petty theft, pickpockets, running a few scams. After they regrouped, they started calling themselves the Castle Rats, which sounded a lot tougher than Castle Kids.”
Maybe to a bunch of twelve-year-olds. Castle anything sounded like a video game to him. He looked at the envelope in his hand, then thought to hell with it and tore it open.
“I don’t think they’re dealing drugs anymore,” he said, pulling out a five-dollar bill. “This isn’t a night’s work of selling anything I’ve seen on the street.”
“No,” Skeeter said. “It’s not drug money. It’s tribute.”
“Tribute?” What an odd term, but she sounded damned sure of what she’d said. “For this Robin guy?”
“Robin Rulz isn’t a guy.”
Travis just stared at her, letting that bit of 411 sink in with all its implications.
“And from the looks of this”—she gestured at the money in his hand—“I’d say the Rats want her back.”
Yes. He was getting a nice clear picture now. Former Castle Rat, princess of the underground, and leader of a street gang becomes art gallery shopgirl whose mere presence was enough to turn him into a stumbling idiot. Oh, this was just great.
Damn. Up until last summer, he’d led a pretty sheltered life, a good life, building his cabin up in the canyon and running his sexual imprinting business down in Boulder, sidelining as an EMT, working at a snail’s pace on his doctorate, rock climbing on his days off, and modeling naked for Nikki.
A soft sound behind him warned him Jane was rising from the chair, and he braced himself.
There had been no crime in his life, no criminals, no ex-juvenile delinquents trying to make good, though more than a few guys he’d met thought his sexual imprinting business was just a scam to get his hands on a lot of women. It wasn’t. He took his techniques very seriously, and he never hooked up with his clients.
“I’ll take the envelope, please,” Jane said, coming up behind him, proving every word Skeeter had just said, and in two seconds nearly doubling the amount of words she’d spoken to him since he’d shown up at Toussi’s two weeks ago and first seen her helping Katya unpack one of Rocky’s pieces.
Taking a steadying breath first, and feeling like a fool for needing one, he turned to face her—and damn. Even with all his preparation, all his getting ready, she still made his heart catch—wild Jane.
She wasn’t classically pretty, not by a long shot. She had a tiny scar along her cheekbone and another one across the bridge of her nose. They were nothing like Skeeter’s, just small imperfections that somehow made her more exotic than she already was—which was plenty. Her eyes were almond-shaped and the palest green he’d ever seen, her nose slightly upturned with a dusting of freckles, and her hair was so dark and silky, he’d dreamed of it sliding over his skin for nine nights running—not fantasized, but dreamed. Subconscious. Unbidden. Nine nights in a row.
It was a little crazy. He was so hyperaware of her, sometimes he swore he could feel her breathe.
“Uh . . . sure,” he said, handing her the envelope and the money.
She didn’t say thank you. She didn’t say anything, just stuffed the money in her pocket, glanced at the envelope, then looked back up at him.
That’s all it took. He got the message loud and clear: She’d like the rest of them—please. He didn’t have to go far, just a few feet over to the stairs where he’d put them on a step.
It was the strangest thing. She talked to Katya, Suzi, and the other girls who worked in the gallery, her voice soft and low, slightly husky, but she’d hardly said a word to him, getting by with a nod here, a shake of the head there, a slight shrug for his more open-ended questions. It was like she practiced being quiet and her favorite person to practice on was him. He knew she practiced being invisible. He’d watched her do it, fade into the background, make herself still. About half of the people who came into the gallery never knew she was there, even if she walked right by them. It wasn’t just that people didn’t always pay attention to their surroundings. It was the way she did it, never approaching anyone directly, always coming up on a person’s weaker side or in a blind spot. The other half of the gallery patrons barely noticed her—but not him. He’d actually hurt himself a couple of times, running into stuff because he was so busy noticing her he’d forgotten to watch where he was going.
It hadn’t been too embarrassing, though, because she didn’t notice him, ever, not even when he was falling on his face. It was the damnedest thing, having someone, especially a woman, be so unaware of him.
He handed the other envelopes over.
“So you’re Robin Rulz,” he said, thankful his voice didn’t crack.
&n
bsp; She gave him a quick glance, which very clearly said “yes,” then went back to shuffling through the envelopes, turning each one over.
Cripes, he thought, borrowing one of Skeeter’s favorite words. Maybe if he stood on his head and juggled flaming swords he could hold her attention for more than a nanosecond.
Then again, maybe not. She didn’t seem like the flaming swords type.
Hell.
He watched her flipping through the envelopes and saw that each one had a letter from the alphabet written on the back. He hadn’t noticed any letters when he’d handled them, but it looked like she’d expected to find them. She shuffled through the envelopes twice, quickly, shifting the order, her expression growing more and more grim.
When she looked up, it was to Skeeter, not him.
“This won’t be a problem. I promise. Tell Superman I’ll take care of it. Tell him I would have taken care of it when I first got here, but I thought they’d all gotten picked up when I left. I thought they’d all be in foster homes by now.”
“Apparently not,” Skeeter said, crossing her arms over her chest and tilting her head to one side, her feet slightly apart.
It was a very considering stance, and Travis couldn’t help but wonder what in the world she was considering. If it was kicking ass, it wasn’t going to be much of a contest. Skeeter was all long legs, sleek muscles, and mad skills—and Jane wasn’t.
Jane was curves.
Soft lips.
Silky.
“You guys never got caught,” Skeeter went on. “Ever, none of you, not once, not by anyone. That’s what the legend was all about. You pulled more wallets in LoDo in two years than the rest of the city combined, and no one ever laid a hand on you. So why would they all suddenly get picked up?”
Jane just looked at her, her expression unreadable, except for the tension Travis felt coming off her in waves—unreadable to him anyway, but Skeeter seemed to figure it out.
“You called the cops on them yourself.”
“Kondo was only ten when I left,” Jane said. “And he wasn’t the youngest. How old was your crew when you got hurt that night up on Wazee?”
Skeeter stiffened ever so slightly, and Travis went all ears. He’d been trying to get Skeeter’s story out of her since the night they’d met, but the girl did not talk about what had happened to her face. It had been violent, that was obvious from the scar, and bloody. He knew from his EMT work that head wounds bled like hell. Jane, however, knew the facts, or at least the rumors.
God, he had led a sheltered life.
“Older than yours,” Skeeter said after a long moment. “Old enough to take care of themselves.” She turned her attention to him. “The triptych was the last piece, right?”
“Right.”
“Then you owe me four hours, and I’ll see you tonight at the show.”
She was leaving? Just like that?
“But—” he started to say, then stopped. But what? Don’t leave me alone with Jane? Hell, all he’d wanted for two weeks was to be left alone with Jane. He’d made more excuses to hang around Toussi’s than made sense with his schedule, practically delivering Nikki’s pieces for the show one at a time. He’d even started hand-delivering Rocky’s work, which had caused the artist to immediately ask “Who’s the girl?”
Not much got by Rocky—except Nikki. She’d sure gotten by the guy, or the other way around. Travis didn’t know what was going on for sure, and Nikki wasn’t talking, no matter how many questions he asked. But she’d stopped crying, and that was a helluva improvement over the last year.
Skeeter had already moved to the alley door and was slipping on her jacket, the fur-lined leather one she’d gotten for Christmas and didn’t go anywhere without. He would have offered to walk her to her car, but she would have laughed him off the planet. All Skeeter Bang ever expected out of a guy was for him to watch her back when the bad boys threw down and the shit hit the fan, and she could damn well be depended on to return the favor.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Tonight.”
“You’re done here, too, right?” she asked, but somehow, the way she said it sounded more like an order than a question.
“Finished.” He nodded, intrigued. Skeeter had never given him so much as a suggestion about what to do, let alone an order.
“Headed home?”
“Yep,” he said, and found himself having to fight a grin at the relieved expression on her face. If it had been anyone other than Skeeter, he would have thought she was showing a little territoriality over him. But this was the infamous Ms. Bang, the same Ms. Bang who had put herself between him and a street gang last summer, and this had all the earmarks of a repeat performance, pure Skeeter as protector. Protecting him from Jane, he supposed, the notorious Robin Rulz, pickpocket extraordinaire and leader of the Lilliputians, all one hundred and ten pounds of her—if that, soaking wet.
Sure the girl undid him, but he wasn’t a complete idiot. He could handle himself. He certainly didn’t need protection from Jane Linden.
CHAPTER
9
OKAY, NIKKI HAD GOTTEN exactly what she’d wanted so desperately back at the Parrot Bar, Kid going home with her, and she still wasn’t happy, far from it. Sitting in an examining room at the clinic, watching a doctor try to put him back together, was tearing her apart.
How could he have let so many bad things happen to him? He was a mess, and from the look on his face, and the tone of the conversation he was having with the doctor—in Spanish, damn him—he didn’t have a clue.
The Spanish was deliberate. She knew it. Just like it had been a deliberate choice between him and his friend, C. Smith Rydell, back at the Parrot. But she could have told him that a person didn’t always need to know a language to know what in the hell was being said—and back at the Parrot, Kid had been trying to dump her on Smith.
Damn him. He’d never seen “meltdown” the way he would have seen “meltdown” if he actually had been able to talk Smith into taking her back to Denver—and Smith had known it. She’d seen the wary glances the other man had thrown her way. Rightly so, but Smith wasn’t her concern. Kid was, and looking at him, she knew she had plenty of reason to worry.
How could he possibly think that running out on her all the time was going to solve anything?
And God, he was running. He looked run into the ground, like he’d been running since he’d left last September. It wasn’t just the bandages and the blood. It was his body. He’d actually put on weight since she’d seen him last, all of it in muscle, but instead of filling him out, it only made him look harder, less likely to yield—to anything, ever. He’d become the ultimate warrior, frightfully self-sufficient, not needing anyone or anything. He looked like Christian Hawkins, and she wouldn’t have thought there was another man on earth cut like Superman.
Between the two of them and another SDF operative she’d met, Creed Rivera, they were all perfect savages—absolutely perfect.
It was a new dimension for her, something she had never encountered until she’d photographed Creed. But it was the sheer, uncompromising brutality of tonight’s violence that had sent those truths home in a way she was going to be struggling with for a long time.
She’d thought she knew men, inside out, upside down, every which way.
She’d been wrong.
In all her work, she’d missed something vital in the male psyche, something she needed to understand, something she especially needed to understand in Kid.
From where he sat on the examining table, he swore, and the doctor, a man named Varria, apologized profusely. Then Varria gave him another shot with the needle.
She needed to understand it, or she was going to lose him to the wild life—and this time, she feared it would be forever. That she would never get him back.
WELL, this was the last goddamn thing Kid had wanted, to be practically buck-ass naked in front of Nikki, while the clinic doctor poked and prodded and stuck him with needles.
“Does t
hat hurt?” Dr. Varria asked, poking him again with a syringe full of anesthetic.
“No.” Kid ground the word out from between his teeth. It stung like hell, and the place where Varria was sticking him looked more like hamburger than a part of his body, but no, it didn’t hurt.
Looking at Nikki hurt—so he didn’t.
Savage. How could she think such a thing about him?
Then again, how could she not?
“I’ve never seen stitches get pulled out of the skin like this,” Dr. Varria said, peering closely at the wound in his side.
Kid wasn’t surprised. Considering that Dr. Varria looked about twenty-two and the diploma on the wall said he’d gone to medical school on an island known for its beaches and piña coladas, he couldn’t have seen much.
“Can you sew me back together?”
“Sí, sí, I’m going to put in a few more sutures than you had, but they’re not going to do any good, if you keep getting into fights and getting shot at.”
“What?” Nikki asked from behind him, where she was sitting on a chair in the small examining room. “What did he say?” She had refused to stay in the outer office with the two DEA guys escorting them to the airport.
“Bala, bullet.” Dr. Varria switched to English and pointed out two of Kid’s wounds. “Here and here. The injury on your husband’s arm has all the characteristics of a stab wound with a dull knife.”
Piece of board, Kid could have told him, and he wasn’t her husband—not even close.
“But the two major injuries are definitely bullet wounds.”
Great, Kid thought. That was just what she needed to know.
He heard her get out of her chair, and his muscles tensed. He’d bet his favorite Porsche that the freaking fiber artist had never been shot, and he most certainly did not want her coming over and staring at his bullet holes—not when she still had blood on her dress.
And not when her suitcases had been packed and stacked in his courtyard, ready to go.
She’d pulled herself together after he’d told her he’d be the one taking her back to Denver, and she seemed to be holding up pretty good, but he didn’t like taking chances in that department. As for him, with his butt hanging out, he was already tipping the vulnerability scales.