Crazy Kisses

by Tara Janzen

  The trip home from Panama had taken a good portion of the day, and late afternoon light was slanting in through the huge wall of windows facing out toward the city. Kid was a morning person. When he’d first started working for SDF, he’d shared J.T.’s loft for convenience’s sake. He’d kept it because of the morning light.

  On a clear day, the sun broke across the straight edge of the eastern horizon like a blade. Night was always drawn up from the ground like a veil.

  He checked his watch. She had only a couple of hours before her show opened at Toussi’s, a couple of hours before her real life started back up again—the life that up until last night had not included a guy with a half-a-million-dollar bounty on his head.

  He’d promised to run her up to Boulder, to her house, so she could get some clothes, but someone else would have to do that now.

  He let his attention fall back to the drawings, his gaze going over each one. Where necessary, he pushed a paper aside to better see the sketch beneath.

  She was so good.

  They were all variations on the same theme: Peter Chronopolous the Destroyer, and carnage, lots of motherfucking carnage.

  The ones where he’d shot Mancos the first time weren’t quite as bad as the rest. She’d left the guy’s corpse out of her point-blank view of him firing the .45, and instead given that grisly thing a few pages of its own, all of them as incredible as anything she’d drawn of Sanchez.

  Goddamn. She shouldn’t have seen the aftermath of the head shots. He’d been so careful, so fucking split-second careful with both of them.

  But somehow she’d seen it all, drawn it all, and nobody was better. Even with just a regular number two pencil, he could tell the difference between a shard of skull on the floor and a splatter of brains on the wall. He didn’t know how she’d done it, made the difference so incredibly clear, and he wished like hell that she hadn’t.

  Fuck.

  Just thinking about her seeing the killings made him feel a little faint. That he’d burned those images into her memory banks made him sick.

  Geezus. Nothing was ever easy—and nothing was going to change. He was a marked man, with his life forfeit every single day. He’d thought he could leave el asesino fantasma in South America.

  He’d been wrong. A half a million dollars changed everything.

  He heard her start the shower in the bathroom, and he knew he had to make a choice. He could go in there with her and pick up where they’d left off in his bed. She’d welcome him. He knew it. She’d slept on him all night long on the plane and kept close to him all day, her hand sometimes reaching out just to touch him, just to make sure he was still by her side.

  So yeah, he could go in there.

  Or he could grow up.

  He couldn’t change what he’d done. He wouldn’t change it. But the choices he’d made had come with a price, and there was no decision about whether or not it would be paid. The price was Nikki, and the deal had been closed. What happened next between them wasn’t about who she’d slept with, or who she hadn’t slept with. It wasn’t about sex, or even about love. More than anything else, it was about Paris. It was about her life, her whole life. His path was set. She was just starting out on hers. She was young and talented, and the world was just waiting to lay itself at her feet.

  And that’s what he wanted for her, even more than he wanted her for himself. Twelve hours ago, he would have said that was impossible. On the plane, he’d decided beyond a doubt that there was nothing he wanted more than to have her for himself.

  He’d been wrong.

  This was easy.

  Leaving everything on the table, he walked back into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

  “Skeeter,” he said, when she picked up. “Where are you?”

  “Down on the firing range, shooting with Travis. Where the hell are you?”

  Perfect. He’d known Skeeter and Nikki’s model had become good friends over the last year, and there was probably no one Nikki would be happier to see than Travis.

  Well, maybe her “no, not really” fiancé, but he didn’t think Rocky Solano was anywhere in the building—which, for as easy as this was for him to do, was a damn good thing. He was walking away from her, yes, but he had no intention of actually handing her over to some other guy. Given the “no, not really” situation, he figured Rocky was probably already hell-and-gone out of the running.

  “I just got home. I’ve got Nikki with me. We’ve had an interesting night. Left three dead guys in the house in Panama. I want you to come up here and debrief her, get the facts, let her tell you everything. Bring Travis with you. I’m sure she’ll be glad to see him.”

  “Juan Conseco’s guys?” Skeeter asked.

  “Two were Conseco’s, the third guy was one they did.” He knew she wasn’t supposed to have had access to the Top Secret file of the work he was doing for the DEA, but he also knew Skeeter.

  “Whoa, Kid. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” He was good at his job. Damn good.

  CHAPTER

  16

  NIKKI STOOD IN THE MIDDLE of the Toussi Gallery, among the hundreds of people who had come to the opening, saying hello and shaking hands with a smile plastered on her face while her insides seethed.

  Kid had run out on her.

  Again.

  Without a word.

  Less than twenty-four hours after telling her how much he loved her, how he couldn’t live without her, after making love to her all damn night long, he’d run out on her—and that was unforgivable.

  When she got her hands on him, she was going to throttle him, and by God, she was going to get her hands on him, if she had to chase him all the way back to South America. Being taller, heavier, bigger, faster, and stronger wasn’t going to save him. No way in hell. She didn’t care that he had more guns than God and years of combat experience. She was taking the boy down—hard. To the mat.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself,” Travis said by her side. “Either that or your face is going to crack in two. I mean it, Nikki. You need to breathe yourself through this, or you’re going to do some permanent damage. Let go of the anger.”

  He’d been telling her that for the last two hours, and her answer hadn’t changed.

  “No.” On this point, she was absolutely adamant. “I’m not letting go of anything, least of all Peter goddamn Kid Chaos Chronopolous. He can’t do this to me.”

  “He already did.”

  The look she gave him would have leveled a lesser man.

  Travis didn’t flinch, not so much as a twitch.

  “Rocky’s been looking for you,” he said.

  Of course he had, and she should have been looking for him, too. Instead, she was idiotically looking for Kid, because everything inside her said he couldn’t possibly have left her, the facts be damned.

  “If the engagement is over, you need to tell the guy,” Travis said, giving her more helpful and totally unnecessary advice.

  “He knows,” she said. “He knew before I left, and after our phone call this afternoon, I don’t think he can have any doubts.”

  “So you already gave him the ring back?” he said, gesturing at her left hand.

  “No.”

  “Well, the ring has to go back, babe.”

  Of course the ring had to go back, the incredible, one-of-a-kind, Rocky Solano-designed masterpiece. She’d tried to return it before she’d left Denver to go to Panama, but Rocky had asked her to keep it until she got back, until she’d had a chance to find this Kid Chaos guy and figure out how she felt.

  Well, she’d found the Kid Chaos guy all right, and figured out exactly how she felt, in spades, and the ring was going back. She was planning on it, couldn’t wait to do it, except for one little problem.

  “I don’t have it.”

  Travis shot her a wary glance. “Don’t tell me you lost a thirty-thousand-dollar ring.”

  “I didn’t lose it, exactly. I just don’t have it.”

  “Why
not?”

  “It’s still in Panama. In my luggage.”

  “In the house with all the dead guys.” It wasn’t a question. It was a declaration of exasperation.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s a helluva place for it to be. Do you think maybe you should reconsider Rocky’s offer? I don’t think he gets many dead guys at his house.”

  She knew what he meant. He’d been tight-jawed when he’d seen the sketches she’d done on the coffee table and seen the kind of danger she’d been in. She had an awful feeling Kid might have had the same reaction to her drawings, that it had all come back at him, and that’s why he’d left.

  But all she could do was shake her head. “You know how it is between Rocky and me.”

  “I know you haven’t slept with him, if that’s what you mean.”

  “He wanted that to change.”

  “And that’s when you hightailed your butt to Panama. So what in the hell were you thinking in the first place when you said you’d marry him?”

  “That he was brilliant,” she said, not having to think for even an instant. She’d known exactly why she’d said yes to Rocky. “That he was beautiful, good, and fine, and that he cared for me. That we could build a life together.”

  “And that you were never going to see Kid again.”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “That, too.”

  “These guys Kid killed,” Travis said. “Skeeter thinks they were after him, like after him for money or revenge or something.”

  She nodded.

  “And you said there were more guys chasing you, when you and Kid ran from the house.”

  She nodded again.

  “Geezus, Nikki. Just how much trouble do you think we’re talking about here?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Did it ever occur to you to cut your losses and just—”

  Travis kept talking, but suddenly, Nikki was only half listening. Her attention had been drawn to the gallery’s front door and the man walking through it. With all the people milling about and crossing the room between them, she only caught glimpses of him, but even the merest glimpse was enough to flood her with relief.

  Kid.

  He’d come—and she knew the only loss she wasn’t willing to risk, ever, was him.

  KID stood just inside the doorway of Toussi’s, looking at all the people who had come for the show, watching the crowd, and trying not to be completely blown away by Rocky Solano’s “fiber art.”

  Geezus.

  Fiber artist his ass.

  If Rocky Solano was a “fiber artist,” Kid was a Boy Scout.

  Fiber engineer, was more like it. Or fiber architect. Or even fiber freaking magician.

  The work was incredible. Towering. Great swaths of intricately woven material hung suspended from twisted forms of iron and steel, cast bronze, and copper pipe, ten to fifteen feet high.

  When he’d left his apartment, he hadn’t planned on coming to the gallery, or at least not coming inside; at least, that was the story he was sticking with even if he was the only one buying it. Because against his better judgment, the gallery is where he’d ended up. His instincts had said “follow,” when Skeeter and Nikki had left Steele Street for Toussi’s.

  So he had.

  And of course, Skeeter had known. She’d picked up his tail about half a block from home.

  “Glad you could make it,” she said, coming to a stop next to him, grinning.

  “It’s not that I didn’t trust you to do the job.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, her gaze quartering the gallery. “There’s a helluva lot of people here tonight.”

  Over four hundred by his estimation, enough to give the fire marshal apoplexy.

  “How did the debriefing go?” he asked.

  “She pretty much filled me in, gave me as much as she had, and let me just say that you made a helluva impact with your Rambo impression.”

  He ignored that.

  “Head shots, Kid?”

  And he ignored that.

  “A little jacked up, were we?”

  “Eat worms, Baby Bang.” He wasn’t going to talk about it.

  “Well, just so you know, I don’t think the head shots upset her nearly as much as coming out of the shower and finding out that you’d handed her over to me.”

  That was good to know, kind of a relief, but he wasn’t going to talk about that, either.

  “You said he was a fiber artist, Skeeter, like he wove baskets or something.” That’s what he wanted to talk about.

  She shrugged. “You’re seeing some of his best stuff. ‘Arma-X-Geddon’ over there.” She pointed to a piece on his left. “‘Slave-2-Queen’ next to it. See how they’re all about strength and subtlety, holding fast and letting go, will and acquiescence?”

  He slanted her a curious glance, then went back to the art. Yeah. He saw it all right—all the soft/hard, weak/strong, stiff/flowing stuff, and it was all nothing short of freaking amazing.

  Hell.

  Worse than hell, all of Solano’s work was somehow really sexy, sensual, like the curve of Nikki’s hip, which Kid swore he could see in the black iron and blue silk piece Skeeter had called “Slave-2-Queen,” and he couldn’t help but wonder if Nikki had posed for her fiancé naked, which just made his gut churn.

  He wasn’t fucking going to live through this. He could tell. But maybe he could live through the rest of this minute, and then he’d just hope for the best on the next.

  He’d made the right decision. He knew that—but being right was getting harder.

  His gaze lifted up the length of the giant piece in front of him. Hugely thick, knotted yarns as big as his arm and saturated with color hung between a pair of gleaming copper spikes. Other pieces were draped with the finest woven linens and silks. Some were no more than strings of fiber, all of them with an eye to weight and form, to the “hand” of the cloth and the qualities of the metal. He wasn’t an idiot. He could see what was right in front of him, and he couldn’t compete with what he was seeing, which led him to the million-dollar question: What had Nikki been thinking last night?

  “You could have told me he was a freaking genius.” Not that he would have liked hearing it.

  “He’s a freaking genius fiber artist.”

  “And a metalworker.”

  “And he’s headed this way.”

  Shit. That’s all he needed, and it was exactly why he’d planned on staying outside. He had not wanted to get within a hundred feet of the guy Nikki had thought she was going to marry, the guy whose apartment she was moving into in Paris, whether she married him or not.

  Skeeter started to move, and he grabbed on to the back of her belt so fast, she grimaced.

  “Uh . . . wedgie alert there, Kid.”

  He didn’t doubt it. She was wearing skintight leather pants.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he ground out. “So don’t even think it. You and me, we’re like Siamese twins, until he’s gone.”

  From where he’d waited outside for a few minutes, he’d seen Nikki get whisked away when she’d entered the gallery, and though he’d glimpsed her here and there, on the move, it wasn’t easy keeping her in view. The crowd wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen in Denver. It was like Friday night at Rico and Luis Sandoval’s, except on steroids, and maybe hallucinogenic mushrooms. From what he’d picked up in the few minutes he’d been there, half the people were from L.A. and half were from New York and the other half were from Denver, with about a third mixed in from Chicago.

  “Where is he?” Of the hundreds of people in the gallery, none of them seemed to be heading toward him and Skeeter. Everyone was milling.

  “He’s behind ‘Undressed Destruction’ now. He’s the one those other people are following.”

  Kid did see a group of about seven people winding their way through the crowd on a collision course with Nikki, which was leading them in the general direction of the front door, but no one in particular seemed to be doing the leading.r />
  “He’s got a white stripe in his hair,” she added helpfully.

  Of course Solano would have a stripe in his hair, Kid thought, still not seeing the guy. Didn’t everybody here have a stripe in their hair, except him?

  “The one in the white shirt and the indigo blue watered silk tie.”

  Nada. Kid couldn’t see him. Nothing—and in this crowd, someone in a shirt and tie should be easy to spot. It’s what he’d worn with his black suit, very professional, very bodyguardlike, and that was what he’d told himself his job was tonight.

  He knew what Conseco wanted, and it wasn’t girls with mock-croc pink luggage, and yet he’d felt compelled to come tonight, to watch over her. Call it seven months of justifiable paranoia, or lovesick stupidity, but he hadn’t been able to stay away. Later, he’d promised himself, he would let her go, after the party. If she left with her “no, not really” fiancé, Solano, he’d go throw himself off the nearest bridge, then crawl out of the river and go home and get mind-bendingly drunk. And if she didn’t go with Solano, he’d send her home to Boulder with Travis, back to her grandfather’s house. The writing was on the wall, right along with Sanchez and Mancos’s blood: She was better off without him, and it wasn’t something he was going to allow himself to forget, because he knew what Conseco did want: Peter Chronopolous, the gringo who’d gotten shot outside Banco Nuevo and been admitted to the Bogotá hospital, the guy he’d tracked to Panama City. Conseco wanted el asesino fantasma.

  “I still don’t see him, Skeeter.”

  “Well . . . uh. He’s—” her voice trailed off.

  Kid glanced over and caught the look she was giving him through her sunglasses, and yes, he could read her like a book, shades or no shades, and she looked guilty as hell. Skeeter Bang didn’t have any secrets from him, not even the one about her being in love with their boss, Dylan Hart, which was about as big a road to nowhere as he could imagine—and his love life was in shreds.