Crazy Love by Tara Janzen Read Free Book Online

Skeeter would show him a driver. She’d take Mercy and drive Rob North’s ’Cuda straight into the ground.
    He wanted her to sit and wait outside Whitfield’s while he did the mission alone? Well, hell, nobody did sit and wait better than she did. She’d been sitting and waiting for seven months for a chance like he’d just given her.
    And she wasn’t going to blow it. Hell, no. But neither was she going to roll over and play dead. He was going to have to get another girl for that gig—like one of his MBA, Ph.D., fashion model look-alike girlfriends. He had a million of them, without a street rat in the bunch. There were no bad girls in his lineup, only the cream of the American social strata. And that was the reality check she needed. Dylan Hart was never going to be hers.
    Never.
    But from the first moment she’d seen him, when she’d still looked like something out of a freak show, with the stitches running across her forehead, her one eye blackened, and her lip swollen, and him looking like a poster boy for a polo club, she’d been in love—stupid, calf-eyed, unrequited love.
    He was the most physically arresting man she’d ever seen, his face the stone-cold definition of hard-edged elegance, his dark hair silky and always perfectly cut, the broadness of his shoulders accentuated by the lean musculature of his body. He was the brains behind SDF, the boy who’d started the chop shop on Steele Street with a crew of teenage car thieves. He was the boss, and he was a mystery, his past nonexistent. There was no Dylan Hart, no birth certificate, no medical records, no Social Security number, no anything anywhere before he’d been sixteen and gotten arrested for grand theft auto—nothing except a faint trail she’d followed to a name, five million dollars, and a seventeen-year-old scandal.
    The name was Liam Dylan Magnuson, the money had never been found, and the date coincided with when Dylan had shown up in Denver, but she had not been able to make a positive connection between Liam Dylan Magnuson and her Dylan Hart, nothing she could take to the bank, or to Superman for confirmation.
    Her
Dylan Hart—she let out a small snort. He wasn’t ever going to be hers. Not in this life, and probably not in the next.
    Cripes.
Just what she needed, more bad news.
    She dropped her cigarette on the asphalt and ground it out with the toe of her boot. He’d made it clear what he thought of her—incompetent.
Geez.
Sit and wait in the car while he stole the Godwin file.
    He either hadn’t been listening back at the office, or he didn’t want to believe she’d comported herself with commendable professionalism her first two times out with Superman. He saw her as a child, but if he stuck around, that was going to change.
    No child could have built Mercy. No child could take Rob North in the quarter mile. It took more than guts and speed to get the Nova to the finish line in one piece and ahead of the competition. It took skill and the lightning-quick reflexes she’d honed against Superman. It took some brains.
    She checked the ice pack Johnny had put on the intake, then knelt next to him at Mercy’s left rear wheel to help with the lug nuts. After they’d switched out the tires, she started her final check of the car.
    THE half inch of Scotch in the bottom of Dylan’s bottle wasn’t nearly enough to get him drunk, which was fine. No matter what happened in the next twelve seconds, he still had to drive home.
    Twelve fucking seconds—or less. He knew what Mercy could do.
    The Nova and the ’Cuda were on the line, clouds of smoke lingering over the tires the drivers had heated up during their burnouts, the engines rumbling, chassis shaking with barely suppressed energy. There were no lights at the Doubles. Cars staged on a white stripe painted across the asphalt. They launched at the drop of a flag.
    His gaze went from the muscled skinhead piloting the ’Cuda to Skeeter in Mercy, and something tightened in his