Crazy Kisses (10 page)

“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.

C
HAPTER

9

O
KAY, 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 that 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.

“A man with such a beautiful wife should take better care of his health, no?” Dr. Varria smiled, all toothy and idiotic, and yeah, Kid knew why. Nikki had that effect on men. She’d slam-dunked Smith, and C. Smith Rydell was a rock when it came to women. He loved them; he was just never in love with any particular one.

Which was just one more reason why Smith should be the guy taking her home.

Goddamn.
He sucked in his breath, when Dr. Varria stabbed him again with the needle.

“Absolutely,” Nikki said, coming to a stop next to where he was sitting on the edge of the examining table with nothing but a good-size paper towel over his lap. His pants were hanging around his ankles, so the doctor could rebandage his leg. “A man with a wife should take better care of his health. So what happened here?” She lightly touched his right shoulder.

“Another bullet wound,” Dr. Varria announced with authority. “Obviously healed.”

“And here?” She touched his jaw, and Dr. Varria lifted his head and looked closely at the stitches.

“There’s some cauterization, so whatever cut him was very hot.” The doc flashed her another toothy smile. “Your husband lives a dangerous life.”

“Yes, he does,” Nikki said, not sounding any too happy about it, and Kid wondered what she thought she was doing, besides confusing him. “What about these?”

Her fingers landed on the scars marking his upper left arm, and it took everything Kid had not to grab her hand. She wouldn’t understand about the scars, but the doctor did. His question proved it, and the fact that he switched back to Spanish to ask it.

“¿Fueron a propósito?”
Were these on purpose?

The look Kid gave him said it was none of his business and to back off—now.

Varria got the point.

“Knife wound,” the doctor said abruptly, turning aside and busying himself with the suturing tray, obviously not wanting any more to do with the dangerous life Kid led.

Perfect, Kid thought. That was just what he needed, a nervous doctor sewing him up. But Varria was right. The scars had been deliberate, and they’d been made with a knife: three horizontal lines incised into his skin in remembrance of a brother who’d borne the same marks.

“You didn’t have these last September,” Nikki said, tracing the scars—and Kid did grab her hand.

“Don’t,” he said.

“I’ve seen these exact markings before, on someone else, and he wouldn’t tell me what they meant either.”

That got Kid’s attention. Only one other person alive had the same scars. They’d been cut into Creed Rivera by the NRF bastards who had butchered J.T.—Creed, who had cut them into Kid’s arm over a smoky fire on the side of a mountain in Peru, a legacy of blood and brotherhood.

She was right. He was a savage.

So was Creed, and Nikki had obviously seen the jungle boy without his shirt, maybe without anything, considering that it was Nikki McKinney.

“Don’t tell me you painted Creed.” Or he was going to go ballistic. First she slept with Rocky Solano, then she stripped the jungle boy down to his skin?

Kid couldn’t take it.

“As much of him as I could,” she said, doing the exact opposite of what he’d just asked. “Skeeter set up the shoot for me, but Creed wouldn’t take his pants off. He just flat-out absolutely refused.”

Kid felt a wave of relief wash through him. He should have known he could count on Creed. He’d counted on Creed for everything during those last weeks of their search-and-destroy mission in South America.

“Hawkins did, though,” Nikki added. “Everything.”

Kid felt Dr. Varria putting in his stitches, the prick and pull of the needle and suture going through his skin. He heard the doctor muttering about the mess he’d made of himself, but he didn’t take his eyes off Nikki.

Of course, Christian Hawkins would have taken his clothes off for her. Superman was fearless.

Still . . . still, this was Nikki, and Kid was . . . was—

“He’s exquisite, more muscle definition than ten other guys, and the tattoo, my God, have you seen it?”

Of course, he’d seen Superman’s tattoo. But didn’t she know they had real problems here, and dragging more naked men into the picture wasn’t helping?

“He
is
the angel, Kid, the very first.”

“Hawkins, an angel,” he said bluntly, not buying it for a second. Christian Hawkins had the kind of reputation that would give an angel a heart attack, and he had that reputation in places no angel would ever go, the real hellholes of the world.

“He saved my life, when I was about six, at Rabbit Valley. Snatched me from the jaws of death.”

“The jaws of death?” That sounded a bit much, even for Superman.

“A rattlesnake. I didn’t realize I’d wandered so close to one, but there it was, tail rattling, and then there was this guy, scooping me up into his arms, and there were feathers all over him, all over his back, down his arms, inked into his skin, but to me they looked real, and the whole moment just flashed onto my brain, being saved by a dark angel.”

Honestly, nothing about that bit of information surprised him. He knew all about the bust that had landed Denver’s finest crew of car thieves on Doc McKinney’s dinosaur digging team in Rabbit Valley, Colorado, and he’d known Nikki had been there that summer with her grandfather. J.T. had been one of the chop-shop boys. As for Hawkins, hell, he’d never mentioned saving a little girl from a rattlesnake, but he wouldn’t. Saving people’s lives was business as usual for Superman, especially women’s lives, and no woman who had ever met Christian Hawkins ever seemed to forget him, apparently even if she was only six years old, but—

“I think that’s the dichotomy I’m always working with, Kid, being saved by the dark angel, the darkest angel.”

Okay, dichotomy—they’d had this conversation before about the dichotomies in her work, but Kid was stuck in another place right now, and—

“I think that’s why I never know if Travis is ascending to heaven or descending to hell.”

And now Travis? The glowing wonder-stud, who Kid would have put his money on as the guy Nikki would run off with, not some “civilized” fiber artist, but now that he thought about it, maybe there was a little bit of savage in Travis, too, and—

“So I paint him both ways, but the truth, I believe now, is a lot more complicated.”

For all his poking around, Dr. Varria, Kid suddenly realized, had not gotten enough anesthetic into his wound.
Dammit
. And yes, the whole goddamn thing was complicated, a little too complicated for a guy who was getting stabbed with a needle, over and over again, and yet he did have this one point he needed to make.

“
Naked,
Nikki? You photographed Hawkins
naked
?” His head was swimming.

“I do all my models naked, Kid. You knew that from the beginning.”

Right. Right, he’d known that, but that wasn’t helping matters now, especially with—
shit!

“You need to numb that up a bit more, Doc,” he said between his teeth.

Varria blanched and reached for the syringe.

“My work couldn’t possibly be why you never came home,” she said, sounding surprised, then unsure. “Or could it?”

“I . . . I need to lie down.” His head really was swimming. There was even a moment when he sort of went blank for a second, and then he was on his back, with Nikki and Dr. Varria hovering over him.

Nikki had ahold of his hand.

He liked that. He liked it a lot, even if he was still so goddamn mad and still feeling as guilty as hell. And yes, he was incredibly grateful she was thinking about something other than what he’d done at the house,
anything
other than what he’d done—but he was still angry about the whole damn situation.

“Kid?” she said, leaning over him, her expression overly worried. “Kid, are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He was fine. Too much sex and not enough food, he decided. Too much fighting, too many stitches, and not enough taking it easy like the doctors in Bogotá had told him to do. “Yeah,” he said again. “I’m fine.”