Crazy Hot by Tara Janzen Read Free Book Online Page A

BRA.
    Quinn kept his eyes on the road, mostly, but he couldn't help but glance over to the passenger seat every now and then.
    She was wearing a lace bra beneath her wet shirt. The delicate tracery outlined against the lavender silk was unmistakable.
    Lace.
    God, it had been a long time since he'd kissed a woman. Since he'd undressed a woman.
    He hadn't thought about it much lately, which probably said something about him he didn't want to know. He sure as hell hadn't thought about it since the rail yard rumble. At first, he'd been too busted up. Then Dylan had shipped him to Cisco and buried him in the desert to keep him out of the way. He knew Roper Jones wanted him dead. News of the hit had traveled fast, fifty thousand dollars fast, but, hell, it wasn't the first time Quinn had been on somebody's hit list.
    It was just the first time Dylan had thought he might actually get hit.
    Quinn didn't blame him. The disaster in the BN&SF rail yards had been the first time he'd needed somebody to scrape him off the street. Bullets had been flying; he'd been beaten and bleeding like a stuck pig from a head wound and an ugly gunshot that had torn open his shoulder. His knee had been wrenched damn near backward, and Hawkins had come out of nowhere, straight through the middle of the fucking melee, and gotten him out alive, if half dead counted as alive. Quinn hadn't been too sure at the time. Neither had Hawkins—but he hadn't admitted it until a few days later, when he'd dropped by the hospital.
    “‘Keep breathing, you son of a bitch'?” Quinn had asked, repeating Hawkins's words to him in that frickin' alley. “Is that the new SDF triage directive?”
    Hawkins had just grinned. “I didn't haul my ass back down there and put it on the line to drag out a corpse.” Tall and dark-haired, dressed in suede pants and a chocolate brown silk shirt, Hawkins—“Superman”—had draped himself with typical long-limbed elegance into one of the hospital's utilitarian armchairs. For being such a badass knuckle-dragger, he had a disconcerting habit of occasionally showing up looking like a
GQ
poster boy.
    Quinn had tried to grin back, and failed. He'd hurt everywhere. His leg was in a brace, his face tight with the stitches below his eye, and his shoulder even tighter.
    God, what a way to make a living.
    Wait for the drop, and when it comes, steal Roper blind. That had been the Defense Department's directive to SDF. No rules, take everything you can get, any way you can get it. Quinn and Hawkins had been working together for four months, working as far inside Roper's criminal empire and as far outside the law as their pasts could take them—and Hawkins's past was good for five to ten on any given day of the week. Superman was so connected with Denver's underworld, the government guys they worked with sometimes wondered what side he was really on.
    Christian Hawkins had made his reputation years ago with the high-profile murder of a senator's son in lower downtown. Hawkins hadn't offed the kid, but he'd gone to prison for it. That gave him more chops than most on the street and made him invaluable as an undercover asset for SDF when they were on home turf. When it came to Christian Hawkins, only a few very select friends knew he wasn't bad.
    “How's your cover?” Quinn had asked, biting back a grimace of pain when he tried to turn his head. That had been his biggest concern after the rail yard fiasco, that Hawkins had finally blown his cover by coming to his rescue.
    “It'll hold. It always holds.” Hawkins had shrugged.
No problem
.
    Quinn hoped to hell it wasn't a problem. Roper Jones was the scum of the earth, but up until last year, he'd been strictly Chicago scum. Now he was moving out of drugs, bookies, extortion, and prostitution into international arms deals—or so government intelligence had reported.
    General Grant, SDF's commanding officer at the Department of Defense, wanted to nail Jones's ass, preferably before the CIA