Crazy Kisses (13 page)

Finally, she let out a short breath and started in. “Remember when you asked me why I’d come to Panama?”

“Yes.” He wasn’t going to like this. He could already tell.

“Well, it wasn’t just so I could see you. I came to tell you good-bye.”

Good-bye.

The warning bell turned to a silent chill.

“I’ve been offered a position in Paris for a year, as the artist-in-residence for the Musée de l’Odéon, and I didn’t want you to come home and find out that I wasn’t there, that I’d left without a word, so I came to see you, to tell you myself. In person.”

How incredibly thoughtful. And what an incredible amount of effort she’d put into it, traveling all the way to Panama. About the same amount of effort he was going to have to put into keeping his anger where it belonged—someplace else. Anyplace else.

Fucking Paris?

“What about Rocky Solano?” Really. What about the old fiancé? What did he think about his bird flying the coop?

“Rocky has an apartment on the Left Bank. He’s in and out of Paris quite a bit, so it’s no problem for me to stay there.”

Of course not.

And it was perfect, exactly what she needed, a sophisticated, artistic, wealthy husband with an apartment on the Left Bank.

Fuck.
His apartment was on the South Platte.

Looking down at her where she was lying on his chest, he realized another reason he’d stayed in Colombia for so long: the sheer simplicity of it. There were good guys, like him and C. Smith, and there were bad guys, like Conseco. There were orders, and he followed them. There wasn’t a Nicole Alana McKinney in the whole freaking country, no one on the whole damn continent who could turn him inside out with just a glance or a couple of well-chosen words—like “good-bye” and “Paris.”

He loved her. That had never changed, not from the first moment he’d seen her, but,
geezus,
he hadn’t ever, not from the very beginning, been able to figure out what to do with her. She was amazing, and he was a grunt with a gun, and he hadn’t had her back in his keeping four hours before her life had been on the line. Solano was giving her Paris. Kid gave her nightmares.

So great. He’d finally gotten it all straight in his head. He needed to back off. Except there was one little problem with his noble, self-sacrificing plan: It fucking sucked.

Yes, he’d screwed up by not coming home sooner, and yes, in a lot of ways, she’d be better off with Solano, but neither of those things meant anything compared to the one undeniable truth in the whole mess: She was his—and he wasn’t giving her up, even if she had come to Panama to say good-bye.

And if she hadn’t fallen sound asleep, sprawled over the top of him, by God, he would have told her.

C
HAPTER

12

Denver, Colorado

T
HIS COULDN’T BE GOOD.

Travis took another step inside the old building where he’d tracked Jane and stopped—and
sonuvabitch
. Behind him, someone else did the same thing, took a step, one squeaky step, and stopped.

Shit
.

He’d followed her for almost an hour through the growing storm, freezing his ass off and ducking through alleys, and crossing deserted streets full of closed bars and darkened storefronts to reach a boarded-up theater on Denton Street. Two flights up the back stairs and through a broken door had brought him to this—a hallway with half the linoleum ripped out, a good fourth of the ceiling missing, and somebody behind him in the dark.

Another step sounded back by the stairwell door, followed by another, but with no squeaking this time, and he ratcheted his alarm down a few notches—quite a few. The steps had been light, not heavy. It was somebody little. Probably a Castle Rat, he figured, since Jane had come here in the first place to find them.

A slight scuffling noise off to his right upped the ante again, but not by much.

Two Rats.

He wasn’t worried. He was demoralized. The building was a dump, a helluva place for a bunch of kids to be living. Light from the street lamps outside barely cut through the grime-covered windows. The floorboards creaked. Plaster was crumbled everywhere, and there were wires hanging out of the walls. However much money the Castle Rats had stolen over the years, it hadn’t gone into their accommodations.

“Stop
pushing
.”

“I’m not pushing.”

Three Rats, maybe four.

“
Shhh.
”

“
Shhh,
yourself.”

Five Rats. Given the six envelopes Jane had gotten tonight, there had to be at least one more somewhere.

Six little kids—he didn’t think he was in too much danger, unless one of these wires was live, or he fell through a rotten floorboard.

He started forward again, making a personal note to himself that the next time he decided to chase after an ex-juvenile delinquent in search of her old gang, he needed to bring a flashlight.

Jane had disappeared. He’d lost sight of her when she’d gotten to the top of the stairs and shoved her way through the broken door. But this was the place. He was sure of it. He just wasn’t sure what he was doing here—besides being stalked.

His invisible posse was definitely on the move behind him, snagging themselves on the walls, pushing, despite the order not to, squabbling in whispers. Funny thing, though, it was starting to sound like there were more than five of them back there, more than six, way more.

More like a pack of them, scurrying, coming up on three sides, funneling him closer to the set of double doors halfway down the hall. He was headed in that direction anyway, but he’d rather get there without the help.

Coming to a sudden stop, he whipped around and heard them damn near pile up on each other in the dark, trying to stop themselves from getting too close to him, from getting close enough for him to see.

Where in the hell had they all come from so quickly? From out of the woodwork?

Now he knew why they were called Rats.

“Who’s the youngest?” he asked, making sure his voice was strong and clear and absolutely ringing with authority.

“Me,” a little voice said, and was immediately hushed.

Contact, he thought.

“I’m looking for Robin,” he said, his gaze scanning the darkness, picking up bits and pieces of movement all down the hall and in the gutted rooms off to the left.

There were dozens of children. Dozens. Surrounding him, cutting him off from the stairwell and the windows, cutting him off in every direction, except toward the double doors, which was suddenly the last place he wanted to go.

He needed his freaking head examined. He’d walked into this situation completely unprepared. He didn’t need a flashlight. He needed riot gear.

“Ro-bin, Ro-bin,” a voice said from inside one of the rooms.

The other kids quickly picked up the chant.

“Ro-bin, Ro-bin, Ro-bin.”

Oh, Christ.
This couldn’t be good.

“Ro-bin, Ro-bin.”

Too late, he heard the sound of footsteps above him. He glanced up just as someone dropped on him through the broken ceiling and knocked him to the floor.

Then the rest of them swarmed.

SO
. . . help . . . me . . . God
—Jane froze on the stage at the front of the Empire Theater, her gaze glued to the unbelievable sight of Travis James being pushed and shoved down the center aisle. The Rats had him tied from top to bottom, like a mummy, his hands bound behind his back, his ankles shackled.

Shackled. The famous Travis James. The sheer horror of it made her feel faint.

He must have followed her, for God only knew what insane reason, and the little buggers had caught him and tied him up with everything they could find, rope, tape, electrical cords, old clothing.

“
Tri-bute. Tri-bute,
” they chanted, marching him along, gagged and blindfolded like some prisoner of war. And it was him, unmistakably. Travis James was the only six-foot, blond-haired, pictures-of-me-sell-for-thousands-of-dollars angel she knew—and he’d been captured by the Castle Rats.

It was enough to give her an instant ulcer. She could actually see her life flashing before her eyes—her new life, the one she’d fought for, the one suddenly in danger of disappearing faster than snowballs in hell.

She was a college girl, for crying out loud, a freshman at Metro State with a GED high school diploma already under her belt. She had a downtown apartment and a downtown job—and a past that simply wouldn’t leave her alone.

If anything happened to Nikki McKinney’s model, she would never forgive herself, and neither would Katya Hawkins—and something definitely could happen to him. The Rats were children, technically, but they weren’t sweet, and they weren’t nice, and they had a lot more in common with a pack of hyenas than she was comfortable admitting. She’d made damn sure of it when she’d been Robin Rulz, and she couldn’t imagine that things had changed.

“Hey, now, what’s this?” the tall boy standing next to her asked, gesturing up the aisle. “Have you gone and gotten yourself a boyfriend, Robin?”

All of seventeen years old and more dangerous than he looked with his shock of dark hair, slender build, and soft brown eyes, Fast Jack Spencer was the one who’d sent the Rats to Toussi’s with the envelopes spelling out E-M-P-I-R. She’d gotten the message even without the last E. He hadn’t said why he’d set the night in motion yet, but it couldn’t possibly be any good for her. No way in hell. Nothing about being back in the Empire was good for her.

But Travis James—
good God,
that disaster was flat on her plate. How could she have been so careless as to let him follow her?

“Boyfriend?” she repeated, at a complete loss. There was no explanation for Nikki McKinney’s drop-dead-gorgeous model being in a ratty old theater light-years from the hip bars and studio galleries of lower downtown, absolutely none. It boggled the mind.

The Rats were marching him up the stairs on the far end of the stage, and she instinctively started toward him, trying to think fast. She told herself not to panic, but she knew the situation, which had been sketchy at best, had just taken a real bad turn for the worse.

“Or is he a cop?” Fast Jack asked, following her across the stage.

Well, hell. Between cop and boyfriend, there was no contest. She’d take both.

Undercover vice, she decided, but before she could get the words out, one of the Rats tossed Travis’s wallet across the stage to Fast Jack.

“He’s no cop, Jack,” the boy said.

That only left boyfriend, and while she tried to wrap her mind around those impossible odds, Fast Jack flipped the wallet open.

“He’s got forty-seven dollars in here.”

“And he’s walking out with forty-seven,” she said, her jaw setting in a hard line. Bad enough they’d tied him up. She’d be damned if she let them steal from him, too.

“A pair of concert ticket stubs.” Jack fanned them out and held them up in the light. “So, did you have a good time at the Violins for Nonviolence in the Home gig?”

“It was off the hook.” She started walking a little faster. Travis was struggling, and it was giving her a heart attack.

“Violins for Nonviolence.” Jack laughed. “
Jesus,
Robin. Where did you find this guy?”

Under four layers of paint in a photograph hanging on Toussi’s west wall, she could have told him. Except at first she hadn’t known it was a photograph printed on the canvas. She’d thought the whole piece was a painting, pure Nikki McKinney imagination. She hadn’t known the angel was real—until he’d walked into the gallery. By then, idiot that she was, she’d been half in love with him.

Keeping pace with her, Jack quickly went through the rest of the wallet. Behind him,
Fantasia
flickered on the screen, splashing color over the whole bizarre scene. Every night was
Fantasia
night at the Empire. It was the only film they had.

The Rats had taken over the abandoned theater when the rug shop had been shut down, and they’d held on to it despite the odds, fending off four potential gang takeovers and absorbing two rent hikes during Jane’s first reign as Robin Rulz. She hadn’t planned on a second reign—ever.

But here she was again, and there they all were, the Rats, over a hundred of them, more than ever before, spreading out across the theater, hunkering down in the seats, watching, waiting.

And there
he
was, bound and blindfolded on the stage, the last man on earth she would have ever wanted to see her like this, as a punk pickpocket who’d once been in charge of the scruffiest crew of miniature miscreants to ever hit the streets of Denver.

“Four library cards, all for Travis James,” Jack said. “What the fuck does anybody do with four library cards?”

“Goes to the library,” she said, reaching over and taking the cards out of his hand. “A lot.”

“Hey, he’s got an American Express, a plati—”

“Stop it, Jack.” She snatched the credit card away before he could get too excited. “You had it right the first time. We’re together. I told him to wait outside, but he must have gotten curious, or worried. He worries about me a lot.”

It all came rolling out of her mouth like the God’s truth, easy as pie, and if Fast Jack believed for one minute that a guy like Travis James would go out with a street rat, she was going to sell him land in Florida.

But he did believe it.

“You sure as hell could do better than that, Robin, lots better,” he said in disgust, tossing her the wallet. She’d claimed him. They weren’t going to rob him blind. “Look at him. A bunch of little kids took him down. The guy’s no Sandman, that’s for damn sure. He’s just a lame-ass loser.”

She caught the wallet and shoved all Travis’s cards back inside. Fast Jack was right, of course. Four library cards. Hell, she could have taken the guy down, but that was the point. He was
not
Sandman,
not
a street fighter. He didn’t spend his nights protecting some lousy piece of turf with bravado and a knife, or a gun and his life. His life was worth more than a street corner, or a vacant lot, or a stretch of prime downtown territory.

And she was trying, so help her God, to make her life worth more, too.

“I saw a condom in his wallet,” Jack said, grinning.

She did
not
need to know that.

“I saw two.”

“Hey!” she shouted, breaking into a slow jog when one of the bigger kids shoved him into a chair. Someone else pulled out another length of electrical cord to tie him to it. “Back off. The guy’s my friend.”

“Her
boyfriend,
” Fast Jack added.

Oh, great,
Jane thought. That’s all the Rats needed to know.

“
Kiss, kiss, kiss,
” the chant changed, with a few more graphic catcalls thrown in by the older kids.

“I said back off,” she repeated, striding through the small crowd hanging around him. Unless it was Nikki McKinney doing the tying, she doubted if Travis had ever been tied to anything, let alone anything as shabby as one of the Empire’s old chairs.

She stepped up close and slipped the blindfold off his face so he could see her. He needed to know he wasn’t alone in this awful situation.

Or maybe not.

The bluest eyes in the world barely glanced at her before focusing over her shoulder and flashing bloody murder at everyone else within bloody murder range.

Yikes
. She instinctively stepped back, or at least tried to, but even with his hands tied behind his back and with hardly a second to do it in, he’d managed to reach over and take hold of her coat, and he was keeping her close with a fierce grip.

It was possible, she conceded with a little frisson of alarm, that she’d underestimated his street-fighting inclinations. Looks like he was giving were more than an invitation for trouble. They were a guarantee, and the last thing they needed right now was more trouble.