Nothing ventured, nothing gained in the pickup game. One of the women in the bar had definitely noticed him, smiled even, and still he hadn’t made a move, just watched the crowd, and waited, and wondered what in the hell he was waiting for, an engraved invitation?

No, he realized now. He’d just been waiting for something more, anything more than what he’d seen and felt in the bar. So he’d left and gone out onto the street, and there on Seventeenth, with her ass peeking through torn fishnet and her hair ratted up into a blond pile on top of her head, he’d finally seen something he wanted, and he was making his move now.

Slipping his hand around the back of her neck, he opened his mouth wider over hers, pushed his tongue deeper, and let her know he wanted her, pulling her tighter and sliding his other hand up her thigh, under her skirt, but stopping short of the red lace panties. Her skin was satin smooth beneath his fingers, her half slip a silky drape across the back of his hand.

And she was trembling, ever so slightly, but he could feel it.

Good. That’s all he’d needed to know.

He slowly broke off the kiss, taking his time, breathing her in and letting his mouth rest on hers, before he finally pulled away.

“Stay put,” he said, opening the car door and swinging his feet out onto the pavement. “This will only take a minute.”

In whole, it took more like five before he was settling back in behind the steering wheel.

“ Genesee Park?” he asked.

“Yes.” She nodded. “And, well… whatever you’re thinking… well, it’s probably not…I mean I just wanted to say, uh…well…”

He turned in his seat, and with one arm draped over the steering wheel, gave her his full attention.

“Well, what I wanted… to, uh, say, I guess… was, that, I, uh…”

She was stumbling over her words and having trouble meeting his gaze, and yeah, he remembered her doing that before when he’d kissed her. It was sweet. But she needed help here.

“Yeah, me too,” he said, hoping that would clear up any confusion she might have. He’d loved it. She’d loved it. And trying to play it any other way wasn’t going to fly, not in his car.

Reaching for the ignition, he gave it half a twist, and the beast that was Solange fired up, all eight cylinders of pure Cobra Jet.

Genesee Park, a cold-cash deal in exchange for an undisclosed piece of property “recovered” off a seminude German, and Esme Alden sitting in his Cyclone, looking downright dumbstruck-the night was looking up, even if they were in a back alley in RiNo, surrounded by crazy spider boys, with a pimp trolling the streets looking for a Dixie impersonator who looked just like her, and a bookie and his goons looking for Burt Alden’s daughter and the guy in a Cyclone who’d saved her.

Was he willing to stick with her with that kind of night stretching out in front of him?

Oh, hell, yeah.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Lieutenant Loretta Bradley of the Denver Police Department surveyed the scene in room 215 of the Oxford Hotel with a jaundiced eye. Friday night was definitely getting off to a strange start.

Damned strange.

“What we’ve got here isn’t the bloodbath we expected,” Connor Ford, her newest detective, said. “It’s just a bloody mess.” She’d snagged the sandy-haired, gray-eyed youngster from the Boulder Police Department about a year ago, and he was working out pretty damn well-so far.

“Yes, I can see that,” she said, letting her gaze range across the elegant hotel room one more time before it settled on the victim and the EMT patching him up with a little first aid. “So what did he do, panic and roll around on every single surface he could find?”

“Seems like it. He’s a little upset,” the detective said.

“Oh, yes,” she agreed. The old guy, one Otto Von Lindberg from San Francisco, was definitely upset, grumbling and complaining under his breath, giving them all the evil eye, wanting everyone to leave, just leave. “And what in the hell is that?” She gestured to the symbol someone had very carefully carved into the old guy’s back. He was bleeding, but he was in no danger of bleeding out. He’d been cut deep enough to maybe leave a scar, but not deep enough to kill, not even close. The EMT was using steri-strips and butterfly bandages, not stitches, to hold the guy together.

It was all damned strange.

Especially the black leather thong the old guy was wearing. It had snaps on it, and spikes, and… oh, hell, she’d seen it all in her twenty-five years on the force, but this was one of those things that was going to stick with a person, seeing this old fart in his leather thong, sporting a dog collar around his neck. According to Connor, he’d been handcuffed with his hands behind his back, flex-cuffed around the ankles, hog-tied, leashed to the bed, and bleeding profusely when the manager had found him, after being alerted by one of the maids.

Interestingly, the maid had not seen any blood or wounds when she’d first glanced in the room. But by the time the manager had calmed her down enough to understand what she was talking about and gotten up to room 215, the guy had definitely been bloody and writhing around on the floor. The 911 call had been dramatically overstated-with three squad cars bearing down on the hotel in award-winning response time… “Blood everywhere, it’s a massacre.”

Not quite a massacre, Loretta thought, shaking her head and looking the old guy over. He did have blood running down his back into his butt crack, though, and geezus, she would have just as soon skipped that part.

Half of a leash was hanging off the guy’s dog collar and trailing down the front of his chest, with a cleanly cut end, and the other half was still tied around the bed frame. He’d been easy pickings for whoever had cut him up and then cut him loose.

Sometimes Denver was an interesting town- too interesting.

“I don’t remember Dixie ever taking a knife to anyone,” she said.

“ Dixie ’s involvement was a misunderstanding on our part,” Connor said. “The guy was pretty wound up when we arrived, jabbering away in English and German, and it took a while to figure out he wasn’t saying ‘It was Dixie.’ He was saying ‘It wasn’t Dixie.’ Kind of a miscommunication thing…maybe.”

Loretta gave her new boy a long look. “I want Dixie anyway, and I want Benny-boy Jackman, and I want them both at the precinct before I get there.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And if it wasn’t Dixie, who was it? Maybe this guy blew into town on his own and found a knife-wielding dominatrix hawking it on Colfax. Or maybe somebody helped him out. The doormen here at the Oxford usually have their little black book vetted better than this, but if someone in the hotel was involved, I want to know who.”

“The new valet,” Connor said. “He was approached a couple of days ago by a blond-haired woman who wanted him to make sure she got this trick instead of Dixie. The woman also requested that Von Lindberg be put in this room-two-fifteen. I think because of the fire escape. She paid the valet fifty bucks, and the reservation clerk fifty bucks.”

Loretta looked to the open window and the curtains blowing in the light breeze. Okay, she thought, the Boulder boy was earning his keep.

“And how was the valet supposed to steer this john to her?”

Connor flipped open his notebook and showed her the top page. “She left her phone number.”

Loretta grinned. “Find this blonde and bring her in. I can’t have hookers carving their initials into their customers.”

“It’s not her initials, Lieutenant. It’s kanji.”

“Kanji?”

“Japanese characters. At least the middle part of it looks like a distinct character. The angled lines around the outside of it might just be for decoration.”

Whatever it was, she didn’t want decorating fat old Germans with the sharp end of a knife to become a new trend in Denver.