Sweet.

Her hair was coming out of her Spa Monterey ball cap in kind of a tangle, but he could still see the nape of her neck-and when he did, he knew that was it. The whole caveman thing was about the nape of her neck, the sheer tenderness of that soft expanse of satiny skin, the silken strands of auburn hair curled damply across it, the delicacy of her nape, the vulnerability of it.

The way he wanted to get his mouth on it.

Yeah, that was the situation-the kiss-the-back-of-Suzi-Toussi’s-neck situation. Talk about tough.

Tough luck, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to be fulfilling that little fantasy anytime soon.

As if to prove his point, off in the distance, coming from the north, he heard the rise and fall of police sirens again.

Suzi lifted her head at the sound, her eyes meeting his across the console and the bucket seats.

“More cops?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Gang-style slaying at the Gran Chaco is going to trump a lot of street crime. It doesn’t even matter that the dead guy is Jimmy Ruiz. What matters is that he was killed in the gringa‘s room.”

Even behind her amber tinted glasses, he could see the sudden edge of panic in her gaze, and man, did he understand. In about ten minutes or less, she was going to own the top slot on the cops’ suspect list, and ending up in a Paraguayan prison was simply not on the menu-ever.

Then she went for the slam dunk. For the barest instant, as their gazes met, she did something so unexpected, so ingenuous, so purely female, that all he could think was Fuck it. She bit her lower lip, her teeth gently pressing into that plump curve of super soft, cinnamon-lipstick-slicked skin-and it was a done deal.

The whole thing was over.

Without another thought, he leaned across the Land Cruiser and took her mouth with his, his hand sliding around the back of her neck, over her soft, satiny nape, his fingers tunneling up into her hair, holding her, his tongue sliding into the warm, honeyed depths of her mouth.

And sliding again, exploring, taking her with a kiss, again and again, holding her tighter, kissing her harder, his heart starting to pound-because she let him. She more than let him. Geezus, for such a piece of work, she was so sweet, turning into him, her lips so soft, her tongue sliding over his teeth. She made a small sound deep in her throat, and he knew he was in trouble, hands down, no holds barred-and he loved it, the heated thrill of it, the chase, anticipating the hot, hot sex of discovering a woman for the first time, the excitement of taking her clothes off-the way he wanted to take Suzi’s clothes off and just get into her.

Yeah.

He slanted his mouth over hers more fully, taking more of her, taking everything he could get, all the sweet surrender and every soft sigh.

Oh, yeah.

She was so wonderfully dangerous, turning him on. Six months of nonstop fantasizing had brought him to this, their first kiss and wanting to just “do it” and keep on “doing it” in the front seat of a stolen Land Cruiser, with a dead body behind them, a dead body ahead of them, the cops getting closer, second after second, and him getting hard.

Perfect.

Oh, God, his kiss.

Suzi just gave herself up to it, to the taste and the heat of it. He was rock solid up against her, the muscles in his arms flexing around her, the gentle strength of his hand on the back of her neck, the sensual thrill of having his tongue pushing into her mouth again and again, the erotic rhythm of it melting her brain. He was insistent and tender at the same time, turning her on with every move of his lips over hers, with every thrust into her mouth, making her want to give him more.

Oh, God, she usually had more sense.

And she wasn’t fooling herself. This didn’t have anything to do with being scared half to death by Jimmy Ruiz getting massacred in her room or by the police descending on the hotel.

This was all about Killian the Konqueror, “Konk” to the guys with their boots on the ground, or sometimes K.C., to those who could spell, she guessed. Rumor had it that it was tattooed on his ass in Chinese-”Conqueror,” his nom de guerre, his war name.

God, she believed it. There was enough “boy” left in the Boy Scout to pull a stunt like that. And so help her, she wanted to find out, to get him out of his clothes and just get so damn close to him.

She slid her fingers up into his hair and kissed him like her life depended on it, slow and deep, teasing him with her tongue, breathing him in and tasting him-and it was all so impossibly good, so impossible.

“Konk”-geezus, who in the world let themselves be called Konk?

She sighed and moved against him, pressing herself against his chest. God, he was built like a slab of granite, and she loved it, and yes, she knew what kind of guy let himself be called Konk, the kind of guy who’d earned the name the hard way from the kind of guys who’d been up there on the ridge with him in Afghanistan seven years ago and innumerable times since.

She’d had to dig deep for that information, for the story of the ambush, of the overwhelming enemy forces, and of the deeds that had brought him and his guys home that long-ago night. Dax’s cousin Esmee Ramos didn’t have access to those facts, but her husband, Johnny, did, and so did the other SDF guys. They knew Dax was a legend in the wasteland, and Johnny hadn’t been shy about telling that story and all the others. Before joining SDF, Johnny had been a U.S. Army Ranger, one of the bad boys who hoped to end up with the big bad boys like Dax and the A teams.

But this kiss…this kiss was crazy and had no place to go.

No place, she told herself.

Off in the distance, but getting closer at an accelerating rate of speed, the wail of sirens cut through the air-trouble and nothing but, just like Daniel Axel Killian, and heading their way.

Somebody needed to show an ounce of sense, and considering the way his hand was sliding up her side and heading toward her breasts, she figured if there was going to be any sense in this front seat, it was going to have to come from her.

Damn.

With a monumental effort, because he tasted and felt so good, and because it had been so, so long since she’d been kissed, she broke away from him-and there they sat, still wrapped up so close, their noses touching, his breath soft on her skin, the temperature in the Land Cruiser heading for the deep freeze with the air conditioner going full blast, and her still absolutely melting inside.

“Hey,” he said, his voice rough.

Yeah, that was about all she had left, too.

“Hey.” She needed her head examined, and they were still so damn close, one of his hands still in her hair, rubbing the back of her neck, the other no more than an inch away from her breast, their foreheads still touching.

Behind them, the second flank of police cars screamed by, their sirens descending in the other direction.

“We need to…”

“Yeah.” The quicker the better, and still she didn’t move away from him.

Who the hell was he to affect her this way? Some guy who’d walked into the Toussi Gallery one night and looked too good to be true. Some guy who’d smiled at her and with one unabashed, come-on curve of his mouth had told her that he knew all about her, everything-and for a moment, she’d believed that he had.

But he didn’t. No one did, except for Buck, and probably Hawkins, maybe Dylan, her family, and the few people who had been involved. An accident, it had been termed, and rightly so, a violent accident covered up by the money and power of one of Australia’s most prominent families, the records sealed, the rumors squelched, the story barely heard. The Weymouth clan was synonymous with the Northern Territory, be it cattle stations, gold, or uranium, and by their choice, a life had been nearly wiped off the slate of the world, nearly forgotten.