Crazy Hot (20 page)

“Uh, no, thanks,” she said after a slight cough, or maybe a choking sound, and a moment's hesitation. “I don't, uh, think I could eat right now.”

And she didn't sound like she could. Maybe it was the fast-food idea that turned her off.

“If you want an organic soybean-curd fajita or something, I'm sure I can find one.” Actually, he wasn't at all sure he could, not off the turnpike, but if it would help her relax a little, he'd whip one up himself at Steele Street.

“No, that's . . . uh . . . fine. I don't really like soybean curd.”

Go figure,
Kid thought, an artsy Boulder chick who didn't like soybean curd.

He downshifted on the off-ramp, exiting the highway for the shopping malls, gas stations, and fast-food joints of the north Denver suburbs. If the choice was going to be his, it was gonna be cheeseburgers all the way, and if he was lucky, maybe he could get a few french fries or some milkshake down her. Anything, he was sure, could only help.

F
ROM
her side of the car, Nikki looked at him, aghast.

Eat? Was he crazy? The only way she could keep breathing was to keep talking, and he wanted to eat? She might never eat again in commemoration of the most freaking awful experience of her whole entire life.

If she hadn't gone to the bathroom before they'd left the house, she would have peed her pants. Under normal circumstances the very thought would have been mortifying—but not now. Oh, no. She was way beyond being embarrassed by a small physical dysfunction.

And hadn't he been sitting right here in the very same car with her? The one with the side mirror that had been shot off in a wave of bullets?

Bullets!

Just before it had actually been scraped clean off the car by a gigantic Winnebago going full speed, head-on, up the canyon? Hadn't he been sitting right next to her as he'd taken them to certain death in a game of chicken so close she still didn't believe they hadn't gone up in a ball of twisted metal and flame?

Oh, yes, she'd peeked over the dashboard and looked death in the face, and wasn't that all just seconds before they'd almost gone straight off the cliff, just before he'd flipped that awful red switch, the one she still couldn't bear to look at, and turned his already dangerously powerful Porsche into an Atlas rocket with a built-in fear factor that made the Dreaded Drop of Doom at Six Flags look like a baby buggy ride?

And he wanted to
eat
?

God, the very thought made her feel faint.

And feeling faint made her hyperventilate, and hyperventilating made it hard to breathe, and having difficulty breathing made her want to talk and talk and talk, until she had distracted herself enough to keep from fainting.

It was a vicious circle, and it was wearing her out at an alarming rate, and once she got worn out, she was going to cry, and she did not want to start crying just because she was so scared, not in front of him, not when she was so aware of him. And that was something she'd been avoiding thinking about at all costs. He was so . . . so everything.

No. It was better to talk, which would be a helluva lot easier if he would just talk back a little. Damn it, it was like pulling teeth to get him to say anything.

Like right now. He'd gone completely silent on her again, leaving the ball in her court, where the ball had been for the last half an hour, ever since they'd done that unbelievable Dukes of Hazzard thing up in the canyon. Couldn't he help her out a little?

Oh, God, she was going to cry, and for the first time since she'd been sixteen, she wasn't going to be able to save herself. What in the hell had Wilson done? And was he okay? Was Regan? Or were they getting shot at, too?

Oh, please.
She couldn't bear the thought.

“I never had a pony when I was a kid,” she blurted out, feeling a sob welling up in her throat. “I wanted one. I begged for one, but Regan and Grandpa wouldn't let me have one. They knew I wanted it to take to South America, to Peru. That's where my parents died, in Peru, in an earthquake, and I always thought if I could just get there with my pony, I could ride up into the mountains and find them, and the pony and I could dig them out, and bring them home, and then everything would be okay. It never occurred to me that they would still be dead. I was so sure that if I could just get them out from under the rubble, they would be fine. Funny, isn't it, the way kids think?”

After a moment, when he didn't say anything, she bit back her irritation and the sob stuck right in the middle of her throat, choking her, and she looked over at him.

He was watching her, his face very still, betraying nothing, and she realized he'd stopped the car. She didn't know when he'd done it, but they were stopped in a shadowed area of a shopping mall parking lot.

“You're crying,” he said.

“Oh, damn.” She checked her face and discovered he was right. Her cheeks were wet. Tears were running into the corners of her mouth. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, wondering what in the world had compelled her to tell him about the pony. She'd never told anyone but Regan and Wilson about the pony, and the whole idea had done nothing but freak the two of them out, especially Regan, who'd been afraid she actually would run off to Peru, whether she had a pony to take with her or not.

“How old were you when your parents died?” His voice was very calm, his question very straightforward, as if she hadn't just told him something really pitiful about herself.

God, the pony story. What had she been thinking?

“Three.” She inhaled a breath, deeply, and hoped it would somehow get past the knot in her chest. “I, uh, don't remember them, my parents, not personally, I mean, because they were gone a lot that last year, and it wasn't until I was around ten or so that I realized
my
parents were dead. I'd always known Regan's parents were dead, and that was always so awful, the burden we all bore, the great family tragedy. It was what made us different from everybody else in the neighborhood. She cried a lot for them, but for me they were just people I couldn't remember—up until I was ten and it hit me that they'd been my parents, too.”

“That must have been hard,” he said, still so calm, his voice a little sad, surprisingly empathetic. “Hard to realize your parents were gone, and then realize you were really late in figuring it out.”

She slanted him a quick glance, startled by his insight. She'd never told anyone that particular twist on her grief. She'd felt so stupid, and foolish, and alone. Not only had she missed her parents' lives, she'd missed their deaths, which had made her even more of a weirdo than she already was, which according to every housekeeper they'd ever hired was pretty damn weird—a situation that had not improved with the live-models-in-the-garden-shed incidents. Her first piece with Travis had garnered her national recognition in the Cooper-Lansdowne competition, but she'd never had to talk so fast in her life as she'd had to talk to keep Regan from sending her to a psychiatrist for professional help. She hadn't slept with Travis. Regan had made her swear it on their parents' unmarked graves—and to this day, she'd never slept with any of her models.

In fact, she'd never slept with anybody, not the full-contact, welcome-into-my-body type of sleeping with somebody, and seeing as how she'd just turned twenty-one last week, that was probably the weirdest thing about her of all. It was certainly the least known. Everyone thought she was such a wild thing.

“Were your parents' bodies ever recovered?”

“No.” She shook her head and gave him another careful, slightly amazed look from across the Porsche. No one in her whole life had ever had the guts to ask her that.

“You might feel better about it if they were.”

She didn't doubt that she would, had never doubted it, not since she'd first come up with the stupid pony plan. A part of her was utterly compelled to go to Peru, but she hadn't done it, and she wasn't sure exactly what kind of fear it was that kept her from going, whether it was the fear she wouldn't find them—or the fear that she would.

They'd be nothing but bones now. She wasn't sure she could bear that, to see their bones. She'd spent her whole life around bones. Wilson and Regan dragged them home by the truckload. It was the reason she worked with live models, living, warm-blooded, muscular, fleshed-out men who breathed and sweated. And when she painted them, they breathed and sweated on the canvas as well. Life pulsed from them. They were angels and demons and powerful creatures of psychic mythology—and they lived. In her work, she put the flesh on the bones. She didn't scrape the dust away and leave them all bare.

She hated bones.

“Wilson went to look for them once,” she said. “But he couldn't find them, couldn't locate the bodies. Everyone he talked to had a different story about the
norteamericanos
and where they'd been when the quake had hit. He came home feeling worse than when he'd left, and I guess I always figured if he couldn't find them, I wouldn't have a chance.” She gave a small shrug and rearranged a couple of the eye shadow containers in her silver box. “I wouldn't even know where to begin.” It was an excuse, but an excuse she'd clung to for years.

“I would.”

Dumbstruck, she lifted her head and stared at him. Had he just said what she thought he'd said? And who was he, she wondered, to even offer such a thing?

“If you ever decide you want to try, call me,” he continued. “I'll see what I can do. Steele Street has a lot of connections in South America. I'm down there all the time. Quinn and I just got back from Colombia a few weeks ago, and my brother is still there.”

He was serious. It was hard to believe, but he was actually serious.

“What's Steele Street?” she asked, swiping the back of her hand across her face, then lifting the hem of her T-shirt to do a better job. “The place where you work?” She kept her gaze on him.

“Uh, yes,” he said, after clearing his throat. His gaze had dropped quickly to her bare midriff, before flicking back up to hold hers, and if she wasn't mistaken, a little color had washed into his cheeks.

That was interesting, she thought. Very interesting. It was the most emotional thing she'd seen him do all night. He hadn't so much as flinched during their ordeal in the canyon. Nor had he hesitated, not once. He'd been in complete control of their imminent destruction, right down to his lightning-quick reaction in drawing that wicked-looking shotgun in the middle of it all.

Hell, he'd even aimed. And now he was affected by her midriff? Was it possible he was feeling a little of what she was feeling? And wouldn't it be great if she could figure out exactly what that was?

“We do a lot of, uh, international business as well as domestic.”

She read men for a living, and Mr. Thank You, Ma'am, but I'm in Charge was just a little bit flustered by her flash of skin. It was subtle, amazing, and definitely there. And in the odd way of things, it made her realize she wasn't having any more trouble breathing, and that she'd stopped crying, and that he truly had a remarkably soothing voice and incredibly beautiful eyes—which was about the millionth time she'd noticed that particular fact. They were thick lashed and deep set, with the most wonderfully stark, hawklike eyebrows.

She needed to paint him. Not on canvas, but put the paint right on him, her fingers on his face, sliding color across his skin—and if that flustered him a little more, all the better. She kind of liked him flustered.

“What kind of business?” she asked, and gave the edge of her shirt a quick glance. Dark streaks of mascara dirtied the white cloth, giving her a pretty good clue as to what she must look like: a mess. The smudge of blue swirled next to the mascara didn't look promising, either. As usual, she must have had paint on her face the whole night, and as usual, no one had bothered to tell her.

Dang it.

“Cars, mostly. Specialized cars and security.”

“You mean cars like this one, with armor?” And there they were, having a little old regular conversation, without her talking her head off. What a relief, even if the conversation was about armored cars.

But what in the world, she wondered, had Wilson been doing with those dinosaur bones to get them all in so much trouble?

“Yes.”

“And is that where you learned how to drive like you were doing up in the canyon?” Which had been utterly insane, but she wasn't going to put it in those words. He'd probably saved her life driving like a madman.

“Actually, we go out to California, to a tactical driving school, every few months and burn up a few sets of tires.”

Ex-sniper, ex-Marine, tactical driving, private company, bought his car complete with armor from a man who'd lived in Panama—finally, it was all starting to make sense. “So you're a bodyguard?”

“Sometimes. Yes, ma'am.”

Ma'am.
The man had offered to help her find her parents' remains, been blatantly sidetracked by her midriff, and he was still calling her ma'am? God, who would ever have believed that a sniper could be so sweet? Sweetly fierce like he'd been in her studio, sweetly sincere in the offer he'd made, and so sweetly beautiful, it hurt.

Yeah, she liked him flustered all right. She liked him flustered, because he flustered the hell out of her. His hair, short as it was, was standing on end. A trace of beard stubble darkened his jaw and upper lip. His clothes were rumpled and damp from the ungodly heat, and he was still beautiful, with cheekbones she wanted to slide her fingers over and a mouth she wanted to kiss—thoughts even more disconcerting now than they'd been an hour ago, when she'd been safely behind her camera.

“Have you been to Peru?”

He shook his head. “Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and all over Central America, but not down into Peru.”

But he would go there? For her? To find her parents?

“I just about drove Grandpa crazy asking questions about Peru,” she told him. “Where he'd gone. Who he'd talked with. I took notes in a special notebook. I wanted to know everything for the trip. I had maps and snacks, and a backpack full of winter clothes. Regan was terrified I was going to run away, and then one day, I just quit talking about going, quit planning the whole, big, awful adventure. I wasn't curious anymore. I was just angry, and I pretty much stayed angry.”