Read Crazy Sweet for Free Online Page B

his, waiting for his kiss. Water from the shower sluiced over them.
    He loved her like this—naked, and warm, and safely in his arms.
    He lowered his mouth to hers and felt her tongue slip inside. God, she was always so hot, so ready. She never just kissed. She moved into him, dark and sweet, pressing against him in a way that instantly went to his groin.
    It was crazy to love a woman who didn’t know her own name. He’d seen the blankness that sometimes came into her eyes, and the flash of fear that always followed. It scared her, those moments when she became unmoored, far more so than when her arm locked up. She was so tough, so deadly when she needed to be deadly, and yet she was too damn fragile for the job. He’d seen it happen only once while she was working, when she’d gotten “lost” for a brief space of time and failed to pull the trigger when she’d needed to, but once had been more than enough for him. She’d survived, but that failure should have gotten her permanently deactivated, and if she’d been a full-time member of SDF or any other government service, she’d have been out of a job a long time ago.
    But she was independent, a contractor, a player who analyzed and determined her own comfort level of risk.
    Hers was off the chart, and a whole boatload of otherwise tough guys wouldn’t work with her because of it. Hawkins didn’t have a problem with her. Hundreds of hours of drills and endless rounds of repetition had hardwired the girl to obey him on command. Kid had the same advantage. C. Smith worked with her, because according to him, even with her little “problems,” she was far more reliable than a whole helluva lot of DEA and FBI agents he’d been teamed with—and don’t even ask him about the CIA jerks he’d suffered through. It was no surprise to Smith that Royce had been recruited, trained, and employed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
    Travis hated working with her, but he’d always rather it was him than anyone else. It didn’t matter that she had the skills to do the job. There was a part of him that never forgot she’d been Gillian Pentycote before she’d become Red Dog, and Gillian couldn’t have “smoked” a man at eight hundred meters to save her life.
    Red Dog could—and did—routinely, without even having to work at it.
    Hell, Gillian couldn’t have done it at ten meters—and that was the third strike against her as far as he was concerned, right after her “lost” moments, and her damn arm.
    Failure of will got more people killed than equipment malfunctions. Red Dog knew the price of failure and had the single-minded will to win every single time, always acting without hesitation or mercy. But Gillian would hesitate. She would think instead of act, wondering if she was doing the right thing. In one of those unpredictable split seconds of indecision, he could lose her—and nothing in the last two years had convinced him that Gillian wasn’t still there, a sweet but deadly softness somewhere within the psyche of the hard woman called Red Dog.
    Especially not the way she made love.
    Her hand slid down between his legs, and she cupped his balls, playing with him as she sucked his tongue into her mouth.
    Oh, yeah. That was definitely getting him where he wanted to go, especially when she slid her hand back up and started stroking him.
    The girl had good hands, and he let her set the pace and tease him, because the longer he waited, the more of her he got. At least that had been his first thought, but with each stroke, with every time she tightened her palm around him and drove him a little closer to the edge, he remembered how long it had been since he’d been with her, and his thoughts, first and otherwise, started focusing on having something sweeter and more intense on him than her hand—and lovely girl, she was thinking the same thing. It was easy to tell.
    Kiss by soft, wet kiss, she worked her way down his body, until she was on her knees and had him