Crazy Sweet (5 page)

CHAPTER

5

T
RAVIS SMOOTHED Gillian’s hair back off her face, his fingers sliding through the wet auburn strands, his palms cupping the sides of her head. Her face was tilted toward his, waiting for his kiss. Water from the shower sluiced over them.

He loved her like this—naked, and warm, and safely in his arms.

He lowered his mouth to hers and felt her tongue slip inside. God, she was always so hot, so ready. She never just kissed. She moved into him, dark and sweet, pressing against him in a way that instantly went to his groin.

It was crazy to love a woman who didn’t know her own name. He’d seen the blankness that sometimes came into her eyes, and the flash of fear that always followed. It scared her, those moments when she became unmoored, far more so than when her arm locked up. She was so tough, so deadly when she needed to be deadly, and yet she was too damn fragile for the job. He’d seen it happen only once while she was working, when she’d gotten “lost” for a brief space of time and failed to pull the trigger when she’d needed to, but once had been more than enough for him. She’d survived, but that failure should have gotten her permanently deactivated, and if she’d been a full-time member of SDF or any other government service, she’d have been out of a job a long time ago.

But she was independent, a contractor, a player who analyzed and determined her own comfort level of risk.

Hers was off the chart, and a whole boatload of otherwise tough guys wouldn’t work with her because of it. Hawkins didn’t have a problem with her. Hundreds of hours of drills and endless rounds of repetition had hardwired the girl to obey him on command. Kid had the same advantage. C. Smith worked with her, because according to him, even with her little “problems,” she was far more reliable than a whole helluva lot of DEA and FBI agents he’d been teamed with—and don’t even ask him about the CIA jerks he’d suffered through. It was no surprise to Smith that Royce had been recruited, trained, and employed by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Travis hated working with her, but he’d always rather it was him than anyone else. It didn’t matter that she had the skills to do the job. There was a part of him that never forgot she’d been Gillian Pentycote before she’d become Red Dog, and Gillian couldn’t have “smoked” a man at eight hundred meters to save her life.

Red Dog could—and did—routinely, without even having to work at it.

Hell, Gillian couldn’t have done it at ten meters—and that was the third strike against her as far as he was concerned, right after her “lost” moments, and her damn arm.

Failure of will got more people killed than equipment malfunctions. Red Dog knew the price of failure and had the single-minded will to win every single time, always acting without hesitation or mercy. But Gillian would hesitate. She would think instead of act, wondering if she was doing the right thing. In one of those unpredictable split seconds of indecision, he could lose her—and nothing in the last two years had convinced him that Gillian wasn’t still there, a sweet but deadly softness somewhere within the psyche of the hard woman called Red Dog.

Especially not the way she made love.

Her hand slid down between his legs, and she cupped his balls, playing with him as she sucked his tongue into her mouth.

Oh, yeah.
That was definitely getting him where he wanted to go, especially when she slid her hand back up and started stroking him.

The girl had good hands, and he let her set the pace and tease him, because the longer he waited, the more of her he got. At least that had been his first thought, but with each stroke, with every time she tightened her palm around him and drove him a little closer to the edge, he remembered how long it had been since he’d been with her, and his thoughts, first and otherwise, started focusing on having something sweeter and more intense on him than her hand—and lovely girl, she was thinking the same thing. It was easy to tell.

Kiss by soft, wet kiss, she worked her way down his body, until she was on her knees and had him in her mouth, her hand still stroking him, her tongue, hot and silky, snaking over the top of him. He reached behind her and turned off the water, and it was all so perfect, the heat and steam, the utter relaxation of his mind, and Gillian—going down on him.

Sometimes the girl liked to be in charge, of everything, and he didn’t mind. Oh, hell, no.

Leaning back against the shower wall, he thrust his hips forward, his hand gently cupping the back of her head. He thrust again, and she took more of him. Again, and he went even deeper.
Geezus
.

Minute after endless minute of pleasure doubled over on each other, the rhythm of her mouth, the hot, wet glides of her tongue down the length of him and back up, and the sucking—God, he loved it. She didn’t stop, just kept taking him higher, winding him up tighter with her hands and mouth, until inevitably, irresistibly, she took him to orgasm. Braced against the wall, he went rigid and just let it happen, just the way she liked it, his muscles straining, his cock so hard inside the softness of her mouth, and pure, hot pleasure pouring out of him.

She held him where he stood, until he was finished. When she released him, he bent his knees and slid down to be with her on the shower floor. Gathering her in his arms, he took her mouth in a deep kiss and slid one hand down between her legs. She was so soft to the touch, so beautiful, so wonderfully, erotically wet—and she could count on him, every time.

“Come on, sweetheart,” he said, bringing her with him to her feet as he stood up. “Let’s go have some fun in bed.”

CHAPTER

6

H
ONORIA “HONEY”
YORK
had been warned about traveling to
El Salvador
.
Third World
slumming, her father had called it, something best left to others, though he hadn’t named the “others.”

He hadn’t needed to. Everyone knew the name.

Not much shopping, her mother had cautioned, and therefore not much to do with one’s time.

Her oldest brother, Thomas, had suggested his place on St. Barts, if she really felt the need to get away. Two of her other brothers had decided to take Thomas up on his offer and left a week ago with a few cases of Dom and a small posse of up-and-coming models. Her fourth brother was temporarily out of touch while on an expedition to the North Pole to draw attention to his latest political cause, global warming. It was working. He had a BBC crew with him, and an independent filmmaker who had cut a deal with the Discovery Channel for any exclusive polar bear footage that came out of the grand adventure, and a deal with
Rolling Stone
for any footage of her brother’s rock-and-roll-star girlfriend doing anything in fur and a pair of mukluks.

Grand, outrageous adventures—that’s what the York family had, what they’d been having since the first York had left the family estates in England over two hundred years ago and braved their way to the New World and a whole new level of wealth and social notoriety.

Yorks
did not have dangerous encounters in pestilent hotel rooms with ill-kempt men carrying guns. At least no
York
in good standing ever had until today, a tricky designation at best, and no one talked about the
Yorks
not in good standing. There was only one, actually, the one who had gotten Honoria into hot water up to her neck again. Then she’d gone and all by herself made it so much worse.

Oh, God
. She should have known better than to take any advice offered by Elliot “Kip” Fletcher-Wooten III. Anyone who had graduated from Harvard and taken less than ten years to wash up in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, as the manager of a beachside cabana resort with a high-season rack rate of less than two hundred dollars a night was obviously from the shallow end of the Fletcher-Wooten gene pool.

Actually, any male over the age of three who allowed himself to be called “Kip-Woo” had probably been doomed from the start. The same, she realized, might be said of any female over the age of three who allowed herself to be called “Honey,” and God knew, she was well over the age of three—and God knew, she was having a dangerous encounter in a pestilent hotel room with an ill-kempt man carrying a gun.

Two guns, actually, his and hers.

She stifled a groan. How in the world had she let that happen? And what in the world was going to happen next?

Oh, God, she didn’t want to know.

She was shaking so badly, and she could hardly catch her breath, and her heart was in her throat, which was a perfectly crappy place for it to be.

So help her God, if she got out of this alive, she was going to personally strangle Kip-Woo for hooking her up with Javier, a bellhop at the Royal Suites Hotel, who had hooked her up with Rey, a busboy at the Caribe Inn, who had hooked her up with Hector, the guy on the street who had cheated her out of two bullets. One block, that’s all she’d gone, one block into no-man’s-land, in a cab that had summarily deserted her at the first sign of trouble, to buy a gun to protect herself in a country where she had no business being in the first place.

It was all so ridiculously clear now, the same way it was so ridiculously clear that she should have strangled Kip years ago, when his neck had still been small enough for her to get her hands around, before he’d grown up and become her coconspirator, confidant, and all-around
idiot
best friend with connections to unsavory people like Hector.

The nameless one deserved house arrest, but house arrest had never worked on that one before, and she doubted if it would now.

To his credit, Kip had warned her not to travel to
El Salvador
alone, especially to San Luis. Things had been a bit unstable in San Luis of late, he’d said; some bad elements had moved in.

No kidding. She’d seen nothing but bad elements since she’d left her lovely hotel and gotten in that damn cab, which she shouldn’t have done. Hindsight was always so perfect. Any woman with an ounce of sense would have listened to Kip, or her father, or her debutante advisor from the year of her “coming out,” who had also warned her not to travel to
El Salvador
, especially alone. Her colorist had warned her. The valet at Saks had warned her. Never travel alone, they’d said, and never, ever travel alone when going abroad, which for her colorist meant any place other than
Manhattan
,
L.A.
, or
Washington
,
D.C.
, and absolutely everything below the
Mason-Dixon Line
.

El Salvador
was below the Mason-Dixon, far, far below, but technically speaking, as of one minute ago, she was no longer alone. She had a bodyguard with a gun who did not work for the State Department and whose name probably wasn’t John Roland.

No wonder it was so hard to breathe.

“If you pass out, that’s going to be a bad thing,” her “bodyguard” said without shifting his gaze from the door.

Yes, she knew that, thank you. For one thing, it meant she’d end up on a very questionable-looking floor, because he did not look like he was going to take the time to catch her if she started sliding down the wall.

He was too damn busy watching the door and waiting, focused, and looking damned deadly with the way he was holding his gun, which oddly enough almost made her feel safe.

It shouldn’t. She’d been insane to let him drag her into his room. She wasn’t sure how she could have stopped him. He’d moved so fast, almost as fast as when he’d taken her gun, which still made her head spin.

She’d thought she’d had a good plan, that she’d gotten her ducks in a row by arranging to buy some protection, but oh, hell, no. Her ducks were running around in circles, in a dead panic, breathless and terrified—exactly like her, except she was glued to the wall. He’d said not to move a muscle, and she hadn’t, not one since she’d plastered herself into the corner.

“Don’t worry,” he said, slanting her a quick glance. “If those men come through the door, you’re going to get your money’s worth.”

Somehow, that was not a very comforting thought, that he could deliver five hundred dollars’ worth of violence in five minutes or less, especially when the message was delivered in such a stone-cold tone of voice.

“D-do you know them?”

“Only by reputation.”

And that didn’t sound good. Oh, no, not at all.

“Wh-what kind of reputation?”

His gaze slid to her again, his face grim, and suddenly—oh, quite suddenly—all she wanted to do was run.

“Don’t,” he said, which disconcerted the hell out of her.

“Y-you can’t possibly be reading my mind.”

“I don’t have to. Every thought you have is written on your face.” He turned back to the door, and she heard him mutter something about “must be a goddamn awful way to live.”

It was. She let out a shaky sigh, trying to buck up, think clearly, and trying very hard not to cry.

“Do
not
cry,” he said very succinctly, shooting her another quick glance, his voice taking on a very cold edge.

Damn him.

“That’ll bring them right down on top of us,” he warned.

And oh, God, she didn’t want to do that. She was so out of her element. So far out.

And she wanted back in—back into Saks and valet parking, back into cosmopolitans, one of which she could use right now, and most immediately back into the safety of her suite at the Royal.

Relative safety, she reminded herself between short, shallow breaths she was doing her damnedest to slow down and deepen. The explosion last night had been less than two blocks from her hotel. The burned-out hulks of the two cars that had been set aflame two nights ago were still smoldering in the San Luis Yacht Club’s parking lot.

“Wh-what is your name? Your real name?” She really should know, just in case she survived.

He shook his head once and turned his attention back to the door, and she decided he probably could read her mind, because she’d sure as hell just read his. His name wasn’t any of her business, not for love or money. Five minutes, five hundred dollars, and then she was on her own.

In
El Salvador
—oh, God, what was going on out there? Where were those men? The ones with the really big guns? She’d heard them come into the hotel behind her, talking, one guy shouting orders and scaring the holy crap out of her. She’d all but flown up the stairs, and practically fallen right on top of—
him
.

Her gaze dropped down the length of her “bodyguard,” from top to bottom, then went back up: camouflage boots, baggy cargo pants, and the rest of him, all wrapped in a faded and worn gray T-shirt and a once-upon-a-time-blue parrot shirt—shoulders, chest, arms.

Especially shoulders.

And chest.

And arms.

He worked out.

A lot.

Messy haircut, scruffy stubble along his jaw, short nose, small mouth, high cheekbones, dark eyebrows, and Ray-Bans, aviator style. Slouched in his chair in front of the cantina, a beer bottle dangling from his fingers, he’d looked like a thousand other slackers she’d seen in dozens of other tropical beach towns all over the world.

But standing in a grade D hotel room with no air-conditioning, with his gun drawn, he looked like the Great Wall of China, like it would take more than a horde of Huns to get through him, and with that realization came another: He really was a bodyguard.

For real.

Kip-Woo had a gun. He’d even taken her shooting and shown her how to use it before she’d left
Puerto Vallarta
to come to San Luis. But even with a gun in his hand, and even at six feet two, Honey doubted if it would take much more than a disgruntled guest or a drunken bar patron to get through Kip.

Mr. You Don’t Need to Know My Name wasn’t six feet of anything, but he was built like the Rock of Gibraltar, steady and solid from the inside out, and suddenly, for no other reason than that, she knew she was going to get through the next five minutes, no matter what those minutes brought.

After that, she’d be on her own again, but as long as he was standing there, willing and able—obviously
very
able—and ready to put his life on the line for five hundred dollars, she was safer than she’d been since she’d left the family mansion in Washington, D.C., with a quarter of a million in cold cash hidden in the lining of her Louis Vuitton luggage.

Kip knew what she’d brought with her. He was the only one who knew, and to his credit, he’d done more than warn her off
El Salvador
. He’d
begged
her not to go, especially smuggling contraband, and she wouldn’t have, not in a quarter of a million years, except for Julia Ann-Marie York, the black sheep of the
York
family and the only sister she had.