Read Crazy Hot for Free Online

lifting his hand and sliding a silken strand of hair behind her ear. “You were perfect.”
    “Oh.”
    Oh
was right, as in
oh, shit.
He had to move away from her before he did something he was guaranteed to regret—like kiss her. He'd gone to see Professor McKinney four years after that summer, after he'd started college and joined ROTC, after he'd set his life on a path that wasn't going to include lockdown in the state penitentiary. The old man had been pleased to see him, more than pleased, and eager to hear his plans, and a little less eager to explain why the house was in such a state. Quinn remembered there had been dresses tossed all over the dining room in the big old house up on the Hill in Boulder, fancy dresses. His granddaughter was getting married, Wilson had said, not the baby, not Nikki, but Regan, his oldest. Too young at nineteen, the old man had complained, but there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it.
    Quinn hadn't seen the professor since, and he'd refused to admit, even to himself, that he'd gone to Boulder that day hoping to talk with the girl he'd seen practically naked all those summers ago.
    His gaze drifted over the woman looking up at him from the contoured depths of the Camaro's bucket seat. That girl had grown into a beautiful woman.
Beautiful married woman,
he reminded himself.
    Her nose was too broad across the bridge for her to be conventionally pretty, her eyebrows too dark of a contrast with all that blond hair and her light gray eyes, but Quinn was no less intrigued than he'd been when he'd first seen her as a teenager. The lavender shirt that had looked so soft and fresh when she'd first stepped into Burt's had long since wilted in the heat. Dampened by her sweat, it clung to her body in a thousand fascinating ways.
    In his tried-and-true fantasies, that night in the tent had continued with her dropping her shirt. An event as unlikely to occur now as it had been back then.
    Right.
    Taking a breath, he broke eye contact with her and tore open the top of the bag of ice.
    “Here,” he said, slipping a small cube between her lips. “Suck on this, and when you're done, I'll give you some Gatorade to get your electrolytes back up to speed.”
    “This . . . this was a bad idea, my coming here,” she said around the ice, reaching for the seat belt clip. “And I . . . I think it's time I left.”
    “No.” He shook his head, and she paused for a second. Then she rushed ahead, her fingers scrambling for the clip.
    “I'll . . . uh, just take my own car, thank you.”
    He put his hand over hers, stilling her frantic movements, and her gaze slammed back into his.
    “You don't have a car anymore,” he told her, lying just enough to get his way—because he was going to get his way.
    Thinking faster than he'd expected, she immediately swung her gaze around to the Porsche.
    He did grin at that. “Nope. That's Kid's car, and I don't think he trusts you. He thinks you're with the bad guys.”
    “The bad guys?”
    “Vince—”
    “Branson and his friend,” she filled in, surprising him again. “Are those the men you stole from?”
    That little deduction startled a laugh out of him. Even only halfway with the program, she was quick, damn quick.
    “Maybe,” he admitted. Branson worked for Roper Jones, and SDF had definitely lifted merchandise from Roper Jones, the unusual shipment of crates Quinn had nearly gotten himself killed intercepting in the Burlington Northern's Denver rail yards.
    Crates full of plaster casts, the old dinosaur doc missing, and Regan McKinney in Cisco
—the connection had been forming in his mind since the moment he'd recognized her. He wasn't the only car thief and lower-downtown hustler who'd been handed over by the courts to Wilson McKinney that summer. Dylan Hart, Christian Hawkins a.k.a. Superman, J. T. Chronopolous, Zachary Prade, and Creed Rivera had sweated out three months in the professor's dinosaur bone beds with him, too.
    Something was telling him