Crazy Love by Tara Janzen Read Free Book Online Page A

chest. She was otherworldly beautiful, sitting in the black beast, her skin porcelain in the glare of a hundred headlights, her expression calm, her focus unerring. The ball cap and her sunglasses had been jettisoned in the pre-race preparations, allowing him a rare and wondrous glimpse of what she really looked like—and she looked like an angel, her face framed by platinum blond bangs chopped into half a dozen different lengths, the rest of her hair bluntly cut in longer and longer layers until it all went up into the ponytail that hung over her shoulder. But it was her face that did him in, every time. He lusted after her body, but he was a fool for that face, the innocence and the violence of it never failing to turn him inside out.
    And she was ready to rumble, one hand on the wheel, the other on Mercy’s shifter.
    Trust, he thought, taking another swallow of Scotch.
    Trust her not to annihilate herself.
    The flag dropped. His heart stopped. Time slowed.
    He felt the roll of the throttle in his pulse, felt the power surge of 427 cubic inches of displacement let loose. The ’Cuda’s tires spun for the barest fraction of a second, and the race was lost. Skeeter’s launch was solid, pure. She hit sixty miles per hour in under four seconds, over a hundred miles per hour well before the finish line, fast enough to give the spectators whiplash. She held to her lane like an arrow, so straight, so clean, so motherfreaking quick, like a cat off the line, the Hemi ’Cuda on her ass the whole way.
    There was no luck involved.
    It was all engineering, mechanics, skill, and nerve, the last of which he seemed to have in damn short supply when it came to watching her race.
Jesus.
The hand he had around the bottle was shaking. He’d rather endure the elevator trick five times a day than see her go up against some unknown street delinquent again, ever.
    He needed to find her another hobby—like covert ops.
    Okay. That was good. That plan was already in place. Taking her to Washington and parking her in a senator’s driveway was probably as close as he was going to get to keeping her out of trouble.
    Great.
    He took the last swallow of Scotch and headed back to Roxanne. For once, it seemed he’d made the right decision when it came to little Miss Hell-on-Wheels.

CHAPTER
    5
    O R NOT, Dylan thought for the hundredth time in the last ten hours—including all the wee hours of the night during which he’d gotten damn little sleep and a little too much of his second bottle of Scotch.
    He was sitting perfectly still at the conference table in SDF’s main office, waiting for the briefing to begin, his sunglasses firmly in place, trying to keep his head from going off like a Titan missile, and trying to keep from staring at Skeeter as she downed her third doughnut.
    He was failing on all counts, and the whole doughnut thing was making him queasy, not to mention the fact that she hadn’t gotten home until four o’clock in the morning.
    Four o’clock A . M .—
ante meridiem.
    He’d left her at the Doubles about ten o’clock. So what in the hell had she been doing between ten and four? And how in the hell did she look so fresh and rested—and did he really want to know the answer to either one of those questions?
    No, he decided, because she obviously hadn’t been up all night drinking Scotch and worrying about somebody. That’s what he’d done, and he looked like hell.
    Christ.
He’d been insane to give in to all that juvenile angst at the track last night. He had no business taking her anywhere.
    And now she had sugar on her nose, and on her lips. It was enough to fry a couple more dozen of his brain cells—and his brain cells were in damn short supply this morning. Great. Running out of brain cells, running out of nerve, he should never have come home.
    “Goddammit, Dylan,” Hawkins said from across the room. “Goddammit.”
    Well, that didn’t sound very auspicious.
    With effort, he slanted his gaze toward the fax