Crazy Wild Read Online Free Page B

buddy,” he said as Bruno pushed by them, heading toward the main doors where Reinhard was waiting, his face a mask of cold anger.
    “Geez.” The surfer guy turned back to her, meeting her gaze. Then he smiled, a blindingly white grin that flashed across his face and lit up the whole atrium. “Where've you been, huh? I've been looking all over for you,” he said, guiding her away from the escalator, his body loose and angled between her and Reinhard, every move he made as smooth as silk, so natural that for a micro-instant even she believed she knew him. “Come on. I just need one more book, and then we can get out of here.”
    Damn, damn, damn. Her mind was spinning. Who was this guy? No one from Eastern Europe. She wouldn't have forgotten him. She wouldn't have forgotten anyone who looked like him. He sounded American. He looked American, pure California beach boy, and when she'd seen him in the reading room she hadn't for a moment considered him a player. He'd been too noticeable with his sun-streaked hair falling to his shoulders, his face pretty enough for magazine fashion ads, and wearing clothes that looked like they came straight out of those ads: casual but very expensive cargo pants and hiking boots, and a fisherman's sweater, all in black. He'd been impossible to miss, and because of it, she'd dismissed him completely, and now he'd caught her—whoever the hell he was.
    Cursing herself as a fool, she fell in beside him, because with Bruno the Bull and Reinhard Klein not twenty feet away, there wasn't a damned thing else she could do, not for the next few seconds. Her only consolation was that out of all the men, the California surf angel had to be the least dangerous of the three.
    She knew what Bruno and Reinhard were capable of doing. She knew how coldly brutal they could be.
    Oh, yeah. The pretty slacker dude saggin' in the designer clothes was easily the least dangerous of the three.
    Easily.

C
HAPTER
    3

    W ELL, THIS WAS GOING pretty good, Creed thought, walking Cordelia Kaplan right past Reinhard Klein and into the fiction stacks. She was stiff as a board beside him, her face perfectly sullen, which he supposed wasn't such a bad thing for the teenaged boy she was pretending to be. Up close, though, the disguise was ridiculous, and he was disappointed in himself for buying it even for a second. True, she'd been sitting cross-legged on the floor at the older woman's feet up in nonfiction, which hadn't given him a very good look at her. He'd seen the dark hair falling over her face, cut short in back like a boy's, and a wrinkled plaid shirt she must have had on under the sweater, and in his eyes he'd seen a boy with his grandmother instead of a female tango—terrorist—dealing in deadly contraband.
    But up close, she was no more a boy than he was the King of Siam. Delicate, that's what she was. He could feel it in the shoulder beneath his hand despite the bulky sweater and old coat. Without the big glasses overwhelming her face, what had looked like a small, unremarkable nose was actually a delicate curve, a very refined curve, and her cheekbones went way beyond classic into exotic. She was Dominika Starkova, all right, and her eyes weren't brown. Up close, they were a dark mossy green.
    His gaze dropped down the length of her body, remembering the picture Dylan had sent, but there wasn't a curve in sight, not a one that he could see with her bundled up in her homeless-boy gear. Given time, she probably could have perfected her transition, looking as much a boy as she'd looked a mousy librarian, but she'd had no more than seconds.
    Damn, she'd moved fast.
    And if he wasn't mistaken, she was getting ready to move fast again. Another level of tension had stiffened her up even more, the old fight-or-flight reaction.
    “Don't,” he said, losing the friendly tone and tightening his hold on her a fraction of a degree. They had just passed out of Reinhard's line of sight. There was a service entrance on the