Crazy Hot Read Free Page A

in Washington, D.C., and we don't have an operation yet,” Quinn explained. “Skeeter's holding down the fort back at headquarters.”
    “Well, see, there you have it.” Kid kept moving toward the door, each step slower than the last, until he finally came to a complete stop under Quinn's unwavering gaze.
    Quinn knew the distance between the barn and the gas station. A hundred yards. “I can handle it.”
    Kid didn't look convinced. “Maybe she's a decoy. Roper Jones is not going to give up, Quinn. Not until you're dead or Hawkins gets him.”
    “Roper Jones is not stumbling around in Burt's Gas Emporium. A woman is, and I'm pretty damn sure we better find out why.”
    With a reluctant nod, Kid finally agreed.
    Quinn turned toward the door, slipping the Beretta under his shirt and into the waistband of his jeans. Hell. He wasn't making it easy for Kid to play bodyguard.
    Bodyguard. Christ. He'd always been his own damn bodyguard, and done a damn good job of it—up until two weeks ago in those West Side rail yards.
    The memory gave him an instant's pause.
    Okay, he admitted. The Roper Jones heist had gone down bad, real bad, and Hawkins had literally had to scrape him off that friggin' back alley, but they'd gotten what they'd been after that night and he was healed now. He was ready to get back in the game. More than ready.
    He slanted the computer screen a quick glance as he passed by. Plum lipstick. Lavender shirt. Golden ponytail.
    Hell. She didn't look like she was ready to get in the game. She didn't look like she'd ever even heard of the game. Ready or not, though, she was about to get her first taste of it.

C
HAPTER
    2

    S HE'D MADE A MISTAKE coming here, Regan decided, and she'd wasted a whole lot of time doing it. There was no sign that Wilson had ever been to Cisco. If Quinn Younger had been here, well, it looked like he was long gone now, too.
    Inside the gas station she'd found nothing but dust and spiders, greasy old oilcans, and tanker receipts.
    Dragging her hair out of her eyes, she glanced through the nearest broken window at the other buildings and sighed. She'd come this far. She was going to have to search them, too. She'd never rest easy if she didn't.
    Not that she was resting particularly easy, sifting through Burt's dust. Up until last night, when she'd found the mysterious entry on Wilson's desk calendar, she'd lived her life in a manner that had all but guaranteed she would never find herself in a situation like this—alone, in a deserted town, looking for a man she might need and didn't know. Her job in the paleontology lab at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science was everything Regan McKinney wanted. Her career was intellectually stimulating and yet fit within well-defined parameters of quietness and security. Haring around the world on wild adventures had been her parents' idea of living. It had also put them in an early grave. Regan wasn't having a thing to do with it.
    At least she wouldn't have, if Wilson hadn't disappeared—or wandered off. More than once over the last two weeks, she'd wondered if that wasn't really the case. He'd aged in the last few years, truly aged, his body taking on a fragility she wouldn't have thought possible in the robust dinosaur hunter and flashy orator who had always been her grandfather. What had once been an endearing absentmindedness was possibly becoming something more, something she didn't want to think about too much.
    She'd found the charger for his cell phone in his bedroom, which explained why she hadn't been able to reach him that way. All her calls to the places where he was supposed to have spent the night had only confirmed the worst: He was lost.
    She had to find him. He'd raised her and her little sister, Nikki, after their parents had died. The three of them were a family, and she was terrified that if she couldn't find him, nobody would.
    The sound of an approaching car brought her head around. A blue SUV passed by Burt's big front