The Nauti Boys Collection

by Lora Leigh

  “I still need a job.” Her chin lifted defiantly.

  “I can put you to work at the lumber store.” He shrugged. “I hear you’re pretty slick in the office.”

  Crista’s eyes narrowed. “I applied there months ago. There were no openings.”

  “I’m the boss; I’ll make an opening,” he gritted out.

  “And you couldn’t make one before I had to take that job at the diner?”

  He grinned, devilry glittering in his gaze then. “I didn’t have enough incentive then. Maybe I do now.”

  If she had something to throw at him, she would have given a pitch worthy of a baseball player at that moment, just to wipe the smirk off his face.

  “You’re a real ass, Dawg,” she sneered instead.

  “So I keep hearing, fancy-face. So I keep hearing.”

  NINE

  Aaron Grael was dead, and no one else was talking. As far as the thieves and the buyers were concerned, there was no one missing from either little group. And that was bullshit. They already knew that, a million of the two million dollar price tag on the missiles had been paid to a middleman, or woman as the case may be. And Dawg knew Grael had been convinced Crista was that woman two seconds before Dawg killed him.

  Dawg’s report was turned in. He had seen Grael firing at the team; he had wounded several of them. Dawg had made the shot and taken him out. It wasn’t exactly a lie, of course, but it wasn’t the truth, either.

  Now they had to figure out where the missing middle person was, where the money was, and how it affected the case.

  The four experimental, newly designed Sidewinders could be launched from greater distances and carried an explosive weight nearly double their predecessors. And they could be nuclear-armed.

  They were built with detonation chips, a safeguard that disabled the missiles entirely and effectively halted any chance of detonation or guidance of the weapon without them. They were to have been transported to Fort Knox without those chips before heading to another base. But, somehow, the Army fucked up. The missiles were shipped with their safety chips, and the shipment was hijacked.

  Fortunately for the task force, it seemed the hijacking was done by a group with little or no experience in the stealing and selling of the Sidewinder missiles.

  A Swedish mercenary had negotiated the buy for a Middle Eastern terrorist with fingers in damned near every conflict in the world. The Swede, alias Akron Svengaurrd, had contacted Aaron Grael for the exchange of half the money down and two of the safety and guidance chips. The rest of the money would come once the chips were authenticated—and the Army had made certain they were authenticated—and the missiles were in place for the Swede’s team to pick up.

  The operation the combined ATF and Homeland Security task force were working netted not just the thieves but the Swede as well. And it was the Swede they had wanted most. Him and the missiles.

  The thieves might not have had much experience in the stealing and selling of weapons, but they were damned smart. And they had the contacts imperative in such a sell. It had also made them harder to catch. They were paranoid, and they were damned careful. And the only man they had a chance of getting any information out of was dead.

  Because Dawg had a hard-on for Crista.

  “The woman was there.” Timothy Cranston wiped his hand over his balding crown in a sign of disgust as he handed out the reports to be passed around. “No one identified her; no one saw where she went.”

  “Do you think she killed Grael?” Greta Dane, a grimly determined agent at Dawg’s right spoke up.

  “Why would she kill him?” Natches snorted. “That’s her money man. She would want him alive.”

  “He could identify her,” Greta pointed out with a snide look in Natches’s direction. “And he would have known there would be plenty of his guys left alive when the smoke cleared. Someone could have talked.”

  “She didn’t kill our man,” Timothy assured them all, glancing at Dawg. “Shot came from the back of the head and from Dawg’s weapon. Autopsy confirmed it this morning. The camera’s put our lady in front of him. After she disappeared behind those crates closest to the wall, she disappeared from sight completely. All we have on the outside cameras is some erratic shadowing too large to be a woman.”

  Dawg sat back in his chair and kept his mouth carefully shut. He didn’t give a damn that Grael was dead, but he knew Cranston was pissed. Ultimately, it would work for them rather than against them. The Swede was a major player in several conflicts; just catching him had been an incredible coup.

  Which was pretty much Cranston’s opinion. But it also left the team with a contact they had been lusting after, a potential double agent.

  And that was too bad. That contact was a dead end, and Dawg’s lust had come first. He had dibs on it.

  “I want to know who that woman was,” Timothy barked in irritation. “Come on, boys and girls. All we have is brown hair, brown eyes, slender, and pretty. That’s a third of the fucking women in this state or any other. If we get her, we get the money and hopefully break the silence among the thieves. This is the weak link, or they wouldn’t be so nervous they’re pacing their cells. She’s our weak link. I can feel it.”

  Dawg almost grinned. Timothy’s fat little hands were rubbing together in glee.

  He was the most unlikely looking OHS agent that Dawg had ever seen. Portly, grandfatherly, the crown of his head shining, and the short gray hair around it standing out in spikes, he looked more like an accountant or overworked executive than one of the sharpest minds in Homeland Security.

  “Dawg, have you or Natches heard anything new?” Timothy barked then.

  The lumberyard and Natches’s garage were two of the gossip points in the county. Information on the theft had come to Dawg’s lumberyard before news of it had made the agency channels. Considering the fact that so far, news of it hadn’t hit the television or radio stations, they were fairly certain it had to have leaked from the thieves themselves.

  “Johnny’s come up clear on involvement.” Dawg grimaced at the thought of his estranged cousin, who raked on his nerves worse than nails over a chalkboard. The news of the hijacking had first come from Johnny when he stopped by the lumber store to buy shelving materials for the bakery goods store he owned outside of town. “We can’t place him anywhere with our buyers or sellers, and according to the agent that questioned him, he overheard it at the store. But he gets a lot of customers, especially out-of-towners and soldiers from Fort Knox, so that makes sense. He could have just heard about the hijacking. And he likes to gossip about everything he hears.”

  Asking Johnny where he heard it hadn’t worked out, and Dawg and Natches both knew better than to push it. The snaky little bastard would immediately see a weakness and strike.

  “Would you know it if you even heard anything?” Greta suggested snidely, her honey-colored eyes gleaming with bitterness in her pale, freckled face.

  It was rumored that she had lost family to a terrorist attack, and Dawg had always tried to temper his sarcasm toward her, for that fact alone, but her own bitterness was beginning to create a sense of tension in the team whenever she was around.

  “Meaning?” He arched his brows mockingly.

  “Meaning these are your people.” She waved her hand to the files and reports. “Whoever stole the missiles knows this area like a native. Which means the woman is probably a native. You wouldn’t suspect a friend or an ex-lover.”

  He heard Natches snort mockingly at that statement.

  “Sweetheart, I live for paranoia. I suspect everyone but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” He gave her a toothy grin and watched as irritation thickened in her expression. “Are you in that group?”

  “Dawg.” Timothy’s voice was a warning little snarl. He was always snarling when he wasn’t rubbing his hands in glee.

  Dawg turned back to him, his brow lifting in question as Natches smirked behind him.

  “Don’t you two get on my nerves.”
He pointed his finger back at them demandingly. “I won’t be nice.”

  Bald and portly he might be, but he could put a hurtin’ on the ego if a man wasn’t careful.

  “Go over that information, and we’ll meet back here tomorrow afternoon,” Timothy finally ordered with an edge of frustration. “Keep your eyes and ears open and hope we get something before the week is out, or my boss is going to rip all our asses. Boys, we don’t want that.”

  Dawg flipped open the file, his gaze running over the pages in a slow scan. He was more concerned about finding any incriminating evidence that could have come up against Crista than he was information he had already read. If she was guilty, now was the best time to know. If she wasn’t, then she would gain the benefit of the doubt until he saw otherwise. But not a lack of suspicion.

  They were lucky. Crista had been in the shadows the entire time she had been there when the agents moving into the warehouse had assumed she was with the buyers. They had swarmed the back end of the cavernous building and worked their way forward.

  Dawg had gone after Grael when the other man had sprinted for the shadowed, crated area in the front of the warehouse. Grael had gone after the woman he believed had betrayed him. If Dawg had been a second later, Crista would have died.

  No one could possibly know Dawg was involved in this investigation. Other than the task force members, no one else could have known. And they were die-hard agents. It would shock him to his back teeth to find out one of them was a traitor.

  But hell, he had been wrong before. And as he said, trust wasn’t one of his virtues. If he even had a virtue. He was a vices type of guy, virtues weren’t his strong point.

  The file was empty of any incriminating evidence against Crista, which meant he didn’t have to tell Cranston she was involved. At least, not just yet.

  Slapping the file closed on the desk, Dawg rose to his feet and glanced at Natches. His cousin was rising from his own chair and snagged the dark glasses he had left lying on the table.

  “Ready to roll?” Natches smirked, his dark, forest green eyes gleaming with amusement.

  He knew Crista was waiting for them at the lumber store, safely ensconced in Dawg’s office and going over his paperwork. Her eyes had gleamed in joy the minute she saw the mess his personal office had become over the past year. A man would think she was staring at diamonds rather than the paperwork from hell.

  And Natches, being Natches, had found no end of amusement in the sight of Crista’s curvy little ass plopping in Dawg’s oversized chair as she told him, none too politely, to just get the hell out of her way while she organized his mess.

  “Do you think I have an office to return to?” Dawg sighed the question in resignation.

  “Think smelly candles and vases of flowers.” Natches lifted his head, his nostrils flaring as though testing the air for a sweet scent. “I’m betting vanilla and roses,” he said then, looking back at Dawg.

  Hell, if all it took was the scent of vanilla and roses to keep her tight ass out of trouble, then he was all for it. He was to the point that he was ready to pull his hair out. He hadn’t had her in his life forty-eight hours yet, and she already had him on such a tight edge that explosion was imminent.

  Explosion of the sexual sort. He was so damned hard he was about to rupture his jeans with his erection. Or choke said erection with the confinement.

  He hadn’t had enough of her that morning. Hell, he had a feeling he could take her for hours and still not have enough of her.

  As they left the small downstairs office Cranston had taken in the London, Kentucky, courthouse, Dawg stayed carefully on guard for watching eyes. Exiting the lower level, they were able to stay out of the main portion of the courthouse. The other agents used other exits, other hallways.

  Paranoia. It had been bred into him by his coldly suspicious parents long before he ever joined the Marines and then the ATF. Even as a kid, too damned young to know what the word meant, he had begun to develop a suspicious nature.

  Of course, with two cold, selfish egomaniacs as parents, how could he help it? His mother saw shadows in shadows, and everyone was out to get her. Emotions were her worst enemy, and she had fought against them tirelessly. And his father. Hell, his father had been as much a bastard as Natches’s father was. Sometimes Dawg wondered how Rowdy had hit it so lucky. His father, Ray, had been tough but caring. And Rowdy had never suffered a beating in his life.

  Until Dawg was old enough and big enough to fight back, his father had taken great delight in making his son cower.

  Dawg hadn’t inherited his father’s habit of striking first, but his mother’s insidious paranoia was a part of him.

  So much so that he couldn’t get out of his head the look in Crista’s eyes when he asked her about a pregnancy. For a second, pain and fear and sorrow had flashed in the chocolate orbs. It had been so quick he couldn’t even be certain it had been there. Paranoia or fact?

  He shook his head as he and Natches moved toward their Harleys. Dawg pulled his dark glasses from his shirt pocket and placed them on his nose as he stared around the sunlit courthouse parking lot.

  “Stop worrying so much,” Natches murmured as they straddled the bikes. “We have any number of reasons for being here.”

  Dawg glanced over at him before turning the key and starting the cycle. The rough, dangerous rumble of the motor ignited beneath him. The relaxing sense of freedom it normally gave him was absent now.

  He had found a new freedom. A new peace. That of being buried so deep inside Crista that he could feel her heartbeat.

  Agonizing arousal clenched his cock and balls at the thought of taking her. The shock and surprise that had at first filled her eyes had been followed closely by desperation, desire, and emotions he didn’t want to even think about. But she had burned him alive.

  There had been more pleasure in her arms than he’d had in a lifetime of sexual acts, and that was damned scary.

  Because he wasn’t a fool. He knew what they were facing. One little slipup, one agent remembering the wrong thing, and he would be revealed; Crista would be betrayed. And, hell, that would suck. Because there wasn’t a chance he was going to let Homeland Security get their hands on her.

  If he was paranoid, then Homeland Security was over the limit. Even Cranston, as much as Dawg liked the special agent in charge of the investigation, was more paranoid than anyone Dawg had known before or since. He would jerk Crista out of Somerset and send her straight to a detention center out of the country. And once there, she would be buried in so much fucking red tape and shadows that he would never find her again.

  Once they were far enough from London to find a relatively secure spot to pull into, Dawg and Natches turned their Harleys onto a secluded lane and pulled into the small, deserted clearing hidden from the road.

  Cutting the motor, Dawg bit off a curse and stared around the clearing before turning his gaze to Natches.

  “What did you find out?”

  Natches had talked to the agents last night, subtly questioning them and covering Crista’s ass.

  “No one saw anything but me,” he drawled. “I reported that you came in before me, and I borrowed your girlfriend’s car to drive in. I was point, remember? No one can question me, because no one else knows any different.”

  Natches had indeed had point outside the front of the warehouse, communicating with the rest of the team that had been in place as the interested parties drove in. He’d announced the arrival of the woman, and in his voice Dawg had heard something the others hadn’t. A warning.

  “Watch the front, Dawg,” Natches had drawled. Not because Dawg had been closest, as Cranston had reminded him sharply.

  “My mistake,” Natches had murmured into the communications link.

  Dawg had known then. Natches didn’t make mistakes, not like that. Whoever the woman was, something was wrong, and Dawg had moved to intercept her.

  The agents assigned to this case were wild-eyed and bitter, paranoid
and determined. And it didn’t help one damned bit that Crista so closely resembled the superficial description they had of the woman acting as a contact point between the buyers and sellers.

  “If someone set her up, then we need to know why.” If someone set her up. Son of a bitch, he was aching so bad to fuck her that he was trying to find excuses where he knew he should be finding handcuffs instead.

  “Someone’s setting you up,” Natches grunted as he stared at Dawg over the rim of his glasses. “And that’s not a good thing. Who could know you’re on the team?”

  Dawg shook his head. “Better yet, who would know to use Crista if they did?”

  Natches gave him a long, mocking look then. “Dawg, Cuz, who doesn’t know that Crista Jansen is your weakness? You’ve been dogging her ass like a stray mutt for months now.” Natches smirked at his own puns.

  “Ha-ha,” Dawg sneered.

  Then he rubbed the back of his neck. Hell, had he been that transparent?

  “Even Johnny noticed.” Natches was gleefully snickering now. “And he just can’t understand the attraction, doncha know?”

  Dawg grimaced. Johnny Grace. He was a lousy damned excuse for a cousin. When Dawg’s parents had been killed in an auto accident, Johnny’s mother, Dawg’s aunt, had decided to attempt to claim part of the estate Dawg’s parents had left him. Dawg had spent a year protecting the inheritance that amounted to the only damned thing his parents had ever willingly given him.

  And there had been Johnny, standing in a court of law, reciting his father’s complaints against Dawg and swearing that his parents had meant to leave the better portion of their estate to his mother.

  And through it all, Johnny had sneered and snidely reminded Dawg over and again that his relationship with Dawg’s father had been much deeper than that of his son’s.

  Because Johnny was an ass-kissing little bastard that played up to Dawg’s father’s opinion of himself.

  “Old man Thompson was by the garage this morning,” Natches said then. “He was bitching about the lights moving back along the mountain last night behind his house. We could check it out again.”