Crazy Sweet (6 page)

CHAPTER

7

G
ILLIAN STOOD NAKED in the shadows behind the open set of French doors in her loft, looking out over the garage’s second-floor garden. Lush greenery and the kaleidoscopic colors and sweet scents of hundreds of flowers in full bloom filled the rooftop.

The sun was sliding behind the mountains, the air cooling and blowing gently across her skin, the quiet before the storm. Sometimes, every now and then, when she least expected it, all the jumbled-up pieces of her past would streak like a bolt of lightning across her brain, frying synapses and circuits, and throwing her into an abyss of chaos.

Tonight that was not going to happen, because something else was. She felt it. There was blood on the wind.

She took a long, steady breath, letting it spiral into her body, lazy and gentle, and fill her lungs. Tonight there would be death. Here.

Before…before the night in the white room, she didn’t think she’d known things, not the way she knew things now. XT7, the drug she’d been given, was complicated, its effect on women untested and undocumented except on her, and it had fucked her up good. Her memories had been wiped clean. Other portions of her brain were walled off. She could feel the walls, but she couldn’t get around them.

And another part of her brain had been opened up, unblocked, let loose: prescience, a stream of it, not always good for anything, but sometimes good for what she needed. Like tonight.

She let her breath out, slow and easy, and softened her gaze. The EI Salvador mission had been flawless. She’d been like a cat in the dark, and before she’d been a cat slipping over Royce’s walls, she’d been the bad bitch Red Dog. Those poor little
mareros,
the gang-bangers, in
Mara
Plata had never imagined anyone like her. They’d never imagined the promise of their lousy lives getting even worse.

She wasn’t a social worker. She wasn’t out to save tattooed teenage boys with ink on their faces, and ink on their arms, and no prospects beyond the trinity of dots they wore like a badge on their skin: hospital, prison, and the grave. Anyone who dealt with Royce was her enemy.

Everyone who dealt with Royce was her enemy.

The Central American gangs were violent in the extreme. Those boys expected to die badly. She couldn’t scare them with death—so she’d found the one gangster at the top of the San Luis heap with the pull to make a decision, and she’d given him the name of a buyer he would want to deal with more than Royce, the buyer she’d given to everyone she’d wanted to take away from the ex-CIA agent.

Fuck
. She knew some bad people. She’d killed some, manipulated others, and did business with one: Sir Arthur Kendryk, Lord Weymouth. Kendryk ate gangs like
Mara
Plata for his
noon
luncheon. In the month he’d held her captive, she’d seen him do it, wipe a
Third World
network and power base right off the map with a sweep of his hand.

The San Luis
mara
would never know what hit them, if they screwed with Kendryk, or if they didn’t meet their quotas, or if he simply decided he no longer needed them. The Lord of Weymouth did not leave loose ends—except for her.

For her, he would take the
Mara
Plata deal, the way he’d taken the other four deals she’d ruined for Royce. In the realities of Kendryk’s world,
Mara
Plata barely registered on the scale, and then only if the whole, international scope of the gang was taken into consideration.

For her, he’d dealt with the Uzbek, Gul Rashid, and given him a premium price on a shipment of Afghan opium.

For her, he’d broken his golden rule—he’d felt pity, then suffered as pity had turned to empathy and the death stroke of love. Nothing about the fact made him happy. So he fought it with the arrogance of his wealth, with the power of his intellect, and with the icy coolness of his most disdainful regard.

And yet he was there, always…for her.

Behind her, she heard Travis rise from the bed. The angel didn’t know about Kendryk. No one did, not Skeeter, not Kid, not even Superman.

But it was the angel who would be hurt the worst.

She let her eyes drift closed and took another soft breath.

She could still feel him, still feel where Travis had been inside her, could still feel the pleasure he’d given her. No one made love like the angel boy, and certainly not the devil named Kendryk.

And yet
…
and yet
…For a moment, no longer, she halted her breath, held it inside, then released it gently back into the night.

And yet Kendryk was a part of her, too, for better or for worse, and there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that it was going to be for worse, that someday he would demand a price it would kill her to pay—and she would pay it anyway.

She took another breath and slowly opened her eyes. The shadows were deepening across the garden, melding into one darkness, the veil of night spreading out from the horizon.

Sometimes she didn’t like herself very much, and the weeks she’d been with Kendryk had been the worst of those times. She didn’t know for sure, couldn’t know for sure, but she didn’t think the woman she’d been before the XT7 would have made the choices Red Dog had made. Or maybe the will to live that beat so strongly in her heart had always been there, the bone-deep conviction that she would do anything—
anything
—to survive. Having “died” once, it was not an experience she wanted to repeat.

So she’d done what she’d had to do. She’d made her deal, sealed the pact, and reaped the unexpected rewards of having Sir Arthur Kendryk at her back.

Smoothing her hand low across her belly, she let out a sigh and waited. Travis moved quietly, but she could sense his growing nearness, sense the warmth of his desire and the warmth of his body reaching out to surround her. When she felt him come to a stop behind her, when she felt his hand slide around her waist and draw her close, another, softer sigh left her.

He was shameless, this boy who loved her. All of twenty-four years old when they’d met, he’d known more about her body than she had, known more about what she’d needed, more about what she’d wanted. To this day, he knew more about giving her pleasure than he should.

“Close your eyes,” he said quietly, his mouth brushing across the back of her neck.

Yes
…she let her lashes fall and inhaled the scent of a thousand flowers.

“Bow your head.” His voice was so sure, so gentle, and yet so undeniably male.

She obeyed.

“Submission,” he whispered with a soft laugh, and she felt his teeth graze her skin, so lightly at first, then harder, never enough to mark her, but enough to let her know he was there, in control, and that if he so chose, she would be
helpless
…
helpless
.

Poor little Gillian Pentycote, so helpless, bound and gagged. So frightened. So terrified.

The angel slipped a loop of soft rope around her wrist and drew it tight. Then he wrapped the rope around one of the brackets he’d set into the wall above the French doors and pulled, surely, steadily, until she was stretched taut with only her toes touching the floor, her arm raised above her head.

“I’m not…I’m not sure I want—”

“Yes, you do,” he said, his voice so calm.

And he was right.

The blindfold came next, tight enough for her to feel, tight enough for her to know it wasn’t going to accidentally fall off.

There were no accidents in this game. Never.

The cloth was soft. She felt the edges of it across the bridge of her nose and across her eyebrows, creating darkness, the place of fear.

The loss of sight was complete.

Her breath started to come short, running along the edge of panic, and his mouth came down on hers in a drugging kiss. Wet, serious, taking and wanting, his tongue pushing deep, again and again, consuming her mouth, demanding more, and she gave him everything she had. It was the only way. She slid her free hand up into his hair, tangling her fingers through the long strands, holding him close and moving her mouth with his, pressing herself against him, curves molding to angles, the firm softness of her body coming up against the rock hardness of his. The taste of him filled her, the gentleness of his breath against her skin, the strength of his arms around her.

Then he was gone, and she felt a strip of soft cloth going around and around the bottom half of her face, covering her mouth, fitting snugly against her jaw, wrapping around the back of her head and coming up the other side, binding her, stealing her voice, enough cloth to keep her from being able to scream.

Her heart started to beat faster, to race, and his hand was there, sliding up her torso and cupping her left breast, his palm warm, his fingers callused but gentle.

Her panic eased, but an edge of fear remained and grew sharper when his hand left her and she felt him at her feet, tying her ankles together with the other end of the rope. It took some time, the intricacy of the knots and stringing the rope through the ring in the floor, to keep her from being able to move, at all, in any direction.

When he was finished at her feet, he brought the same rope up and tied it around her waist. The tug of each successive knot tightened the one before, one after the other. She knew what came after her waist, and she started to fight, but he caught her to him hard, his hand capturing her free arm and holding it behind her back.

He tied it there, tied her wrist to the rope at her back, and she was in bondage, in the limbo of the unknown. Fear and anticipation rolled through her, holding her in place more surely than the ropes, bringing her to a perfect standstill, balanced on her toes, her raised hand gripping the rope leading from her wrist to the bracket on the wall—and being careful to breathe, she waited.

TRAVIS took a step away from her and dragged his hand back through his hair.

Geezus
. What a piece of work. Just looking at her was enough to make him hard again. The arch of her feet, the length of her legs, the incredible curve of her ass, her whole body licked with a sliver of light. She damn near shimmered, her skin was so pale. Full, lush breasts, wild hair, and two bands of black across her face—it was always like this between them, dark and sweet, so hot he ached even when he was inside her, and just a little twisted.

Yeah, he needed a shrink, to love this the way he did, to love her the way he did.

Yeah, Doc, I’ve got this girlfriend, you see, older woman, complicated, amnesiac, and so fucking beautiful—especially when I tie her up naked in the moonlight.

Yeah, Doc, you heard it right.

And he meant tied. She wasn’t going anywhere until he released her. That was the point. No half measures would do for Red Dog. The girl worked without a net—all the time, every time.

And every time, she pushed him straight to the edge. The gag and the blindfold kept him right there, balanced on the edge between his commitment and his conscience. It was a damned uncomfortable place to be—and yet it turned him on. Someday, he was going to look into that, kind of check himself out, see what the fuck was up with him; until then, he just went with it—to a point. He’d spent days designing the rigging, testing the knots, practicing tying them. Timing was everything with this gig, and when it was time to let her go, it was time to let her go. The knots needed to fall apart, and they did, every time.

But until then, she was bound.

Until then, she was his to do with as he wanted, and what he wanted was to start at the base of her throat and work his way down, all the way down, and halfway back up. That’s where she wanted him, and that’s where he wanted to be, at the soft, hot center of her with his tongue. She was so sleek, her body sculpted by lengths of hard muscle and the strength of the heart that kept her alive time and time again, and he loved her.

He loved her with every breath he took, and a lot of what he loved was the mystery of her. Thirty-three years of secrets had been lost the night Souk had hit her up, but Travis didn’t think thirty-three years of Gillian Pentycote’s secrets came anywhere close to two years of Red Dog’s.

He’d lost her once, for a month, and it had damn near driven him 0y, absofuckinglutely insane the way nothing ever had before or since. Those feelings weren’t ones he was ever going to forget. Thirty days without a word, coming off the tail end of a European job that had gone bad. The kill had been made, the mission accomplished, but it had been a mess—an incapacitating but nonlethal shot, where the guy had hung on for two days in an
Amsterdam
hospital before dying. And there had been collateral damage, of all the damn things, a bonus in General Grant’s book, one more terrorist asshole he didn’t have to worry about, but the general and the rest of SDF had wondered what in the hell had happened.