Crazy Love Read Online Free Page A

weekend road warriors who didn’t know their torque from their alternators. He’d done his share of street racing, and it was a freaking free-for-all. The miracle was that more people didn’t go down in flames.
    He tightened his hold on the bottle of Scotch. “She was supposed to tear that engine down last January,” he said as calmly as possible. “I gave a direct order.”
    Mercy was a monster, a 1969 Chevy Nova with a 427 and a zero to sixty of under four seconds, and that was before Skeeter and Creed had modified her. With high-octane gas and ten pounds of boost, the dynamic duo had gotten the Nova up to 700 hp, making her absofuckinglutely lethal on the streets.
    “It would take a papal bull to get Skeeter to destroy Mercy,” Hawkins said.
    “She isn’t Catholic,” he said, feeling another nerve snap and unravel and go straight down the toilet.
    “She’s not stupid, either, Dylan.” Hawkins turned back to the computer. “You need to give her a chance. You need to stop staring at her ass and take her to Washington, D.C.”
    Well, that was pretty close to the last damn thing he wanted to hear—and it was wrong, to boot. What he needed, what he really needed, was to take her to bed, but he wasn’t going to do that, either. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t going to think about it anymore. He was done, finished, moving on.
    “Call her and tell her to get her butt out of that car and back up to this office.” That’s what he needed to do—give orders. And what everybody else needed to do was obey them.
    But once again, it didn’t look like he was going to get what he needed.
    The look Hawkins gave him said he was completely deluded. “You must have her confused with the other Skeeter Jeanne, the one who does what I tell her to do, because the one out there”—he gestured toward the windows overlooking the garage—“that one pretty much does whatever the hell she wants to do, especially when she’s off the clock.”
    As if to prove his point, a pair of tires started winding up out in the garage. Within seconds a cloud of smoke rolled against the windows.
    Sonuvabitch.
    Dylan strode over and looked down at the rows of cars filling the bays. They were some of Steele Street’s finest—Trina, his AC/Cobra roadster; half a dozen of Quinn’s Camaros; a lot of classic muscle from the late sixties and early seventies, including Hawkins’s 1971 Dodge Challenger, the mighty Roxanne; and in the middle of them all, Skeeter, tempting fate, God, and the wrath of the ventilation system.
    Mercy was screaming when Skeeter finally released her brakes and tore down the garage, burning rubber all the way, heading for the freight elevator.
    Dylan’s heart lodged in his throat.
Fuck.
    The building wasn’t long enough for that freaking trick.
    Sure, he’d done it, which was why he could hardly breathe. At sixteen, he’d come within inches of dying in flight, airborne behind the wheel of a fastback Shelby Mustang.
    At the last possible second, Skeeter eased down on the brakes and downshifted, driving Mercy home. The Nova slid into the freight elevator like warm butter, no danger, no drama—except for the heart attack she’d given him.
    Okay. That was it. She was done. Finished. He was clipping her wings.
    He looked back at Hawkins, who tossed him a set of keys.
    “You’d better take Roxanne,” Hawkins said. “Where Skeeter’s going is no place for a nice girl like Trina.”
    Skeeter wasn’t going anywhere, Dylan could A-1 guarantee it, but he took the keys anyway.
    Anybody who wanted to play chicken with the seventh floor ended up in the old freight elevator, the one that looked like an upended Gothic catwalk clinging to the outside of the building, the one that took fifteen minutes to reach street level. The new elevator on the other side of the building would get him there in two.
                      
    HAWKINS felt the rattle of the door when it slammed, and he heard Dylan slip on the first