Free Crazy Wild by Tara Janzen Page B

trying to hold her anxiety at bay.
    “What have you got on Reinhard?” he asked point-blank.
    “He's bad. Really bad. Trust me.” Okay, that wasn't exactly cutting-edge news, but she had to be careful. “He's into . . . well, you obviously know the kind of deals he's into, but there was this
incident,
you see . . . about a month ago in, uh, Karlovy Vary, and there are a few things your government would like to know about it, some very specific things. All I want is a guarantee of safe passage and enough money to make my life a little easier than it's been lately. That's all. I swear it.”
     
    INCIDENT
in Karlovy Vary?
Well, that was a damned interesting turn, Creed thought, looking down at her, listening to her talk and spin and try to hook him without actually giving herself away. She was still shivering, but the color was coming back into her face, washing her cheeks in soft pink, and her gaze was focused again, all green and aquamarine with streaks of brown and gray.
    Geezus,
she was pretty.
    “There might even be a reward in this for you,” she continued, looking so incredibly sincere, he couldn't find it in himself to believe her for a second. She was lying through her teeth about not knowing the location of the bomb. She knew. If she wasn't so damn frozen, she'd be sweating with knowing it. “And you can have it all. I swear. I don't need any reward, just enough money to get around. That's all. And the information is good, probably worth a promotion or something. You can count on it. Names, dates, places—the works.”
    He wasn't going to tell her, poor thing, but she'd already given him a name, a date, and a place. An incident in Karlovy Vary a month ago could only mean Keith O'Connell, December 7, in a warehouse on the outskirts of town—that's where the CIA had found the body. If she was telling him that she could positively hang O'Connell's death on Reinhard Klein, she indeed had something to sell besides a nuclear bomb. Daniel Alden, the director of the CIA, and every agent in Eastern Europe had laid O'Connell's death at the feet of Sergei Patrushev and the Russian Mafia. If Reinhard had also been involved, then his ties to the Mafia and Patrushev were closer than anyone realized—which wasn't good news.
    “Okay,” he agreed, lying at least as much as she was. “We'll talk and see what you come up with. Maybe you do have something I want.” His gaze dropped to her mouth, just a slight shift in his attention that lasted no more than a second, but it was enough to unnerve her. He saw it in her sudden stillness and silently swore at himself for giving so much away.
    It had been crazy to kiss her up on the roof—and it would be even crazier to kiss her again, but he was thinking about it.
    He must be out of his mind. None of the shrinks had come right out and said it, not yet anyway, but they had to be thinking it. Skeeter was definitely thinking it. He could tell by the way she watched him—like a buzzard on roadkill, every move he made.
    He needed to call her. Skeeter worried the way other people breathed, and she'd probably tried to call him a couple of times since he'd left. He needed to tell her—again—that he could take care of himself. It was the people who counted on him that got screwed. No matter how much shit hit the fan, he kept coming out in one piece.
    Slipping his phone out of his pocket, he flipped it on and checked the screen. Fifteen missed calls. He ran through the first few numbers, got the general idea, and turned off the phone.
    Hell.
Fifteen calls from Skeeter were about twelve more than he could handle.
    “Are you hungry?” he asked the woman he'd all but kidnapped. When Dylan told him to keep somebody in one piece, he meant with a sustainable body temperature, not one frozen piece, and Cody Stark was still shivering uncontrollably. He needed to do something about that before he took her back outside to get to his car, or she wasn't going to make it.
    She shook her head,