“So where are you going to lay low?” Dax asked.

“Where are we going?” she asked Johnny.

“My place,” he said.

“No good,” Dax said, before she could relay the information. “Somebody at the Oxford gave them Ramos’s description, and they’ve got his name.”

Oh, hell. “Your place is no good,” she said to Johnny. “The cops are onto you at the Oxford.”

He didn’t say much to that, just one word under his breath, and it rhymed with luck.

She didn’t blame him.

“Tell Dax I’ve got a safe house in my neighborhood,” he said after a moment. “If he shows up at the corner of Vine and Hoover in Commerce City, I’ll come down and bring him in. Ask him what time he thinks he’ll get there.”

“An hour, maybe two,” Dax said, obviously able to hear everything in the car. “I’ve picked up a tail. When I shake it, I’ll show.”

“I still haven’t heard from my dad, about the name,” she said.

“Don’t worry. I got the name. Thomas called back and left it on the machine.”

“So we’re good to go?” she asked.

“You’ve got the money, and I’ve got the name,” Dax said. “We’re good to go. Just stay out of trouble until five o’clock. We’ll sort out this mess with the Denver cops once we’re back in Seattle. I’ll send them the file on Shoko. If they ask around, somebody at the Oxford will undoubtedly remember seeing the dragon lady tonight. Case solved. Everybody happy.”

“We’re going to run?”

“Like hell, bad girl.” He ended the call, leaving Esme to stare at her phone and wonder how in the hell she was supposed to stay out of trouble trapped in some safe house alone with Johnny Ramos for two hours.

Two hours was a long time.

Damn long.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“Ouch.”

“Baby.”

“You’re being too rough.”

She let out a little snort and kept dabbing away at his cheek. She’d taken her shoulder holster off and left it in the bedroom, where she was planning on taking a nap before they went to Bleak’s.

Johnny understood the concept. Rangers slept when they could. It was just good standard operating procedure, but he was pretty damn sure he wouldn’t be napping.

“You should probably have a stitch put in this, maybe two,” she said.

He’d been cut on his face, fairly deep, where Mitch Hardon had hit him. The guy must have been wearing a ring.

“If you want to do it, get a suture kit out of the pack.”

She leaned back and gave him a look. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.” Johnny wasn’t kidding, he was dying. Esme was standing in front of him at the kitchen table in the safe house, doing her Florence Nightingale impersonation, and all he could think about was her cleavage, the soft shadow between her breasts, the soft curves at the V of her jacket.

He wanted to touch her so badly, he hardly dared move.

It had been quiet on the corner of Vine and Hoover since they’d arrived. The blue neon sign for the Commerce City Garage was lit up across the street, and that’s where his apartment was, on the ground floor. One of the other SDF operators had the second-floor apartment, Red Dog, Gillian Pentycote.

The building he and Esme were in had started out thirty years ago as a restaurant with a few office suites on its upper floors. Since SDF had bought the place last year, the restaurant had been gutted and converted into a garage for storing cars, and the two upper floors had been redesigned into working and living space. Steele Street Annex, it was called, with some talk going on about building another team. General Grant wanted it. The world situation needed it, and Johnny wanted more than anything to be part of it.

Except for right now. For right now, there wasn’t anything he wanted more than Easy Alex.

He’d pulled Solange into one of the bays on the ground floor, and the whole place was locked up tighter than a drum with all the building’s security systems up and running.

Esme was safe from everything in Denver except him, and he was safe from everything except the tightness in his chest that got worse every time she bent over and dabbed at his cheek with an antiseptic-saturated cotton ball. It stung like hell, and he didn’t feel a thing. He was completely removed from the minor pain of having his face cut open in a fight, and completely, totally fascinated with the cut of her jacket-low.

He knew what was underneath it, the red lace bra, the one that matched her panties, which was all that was under her skirt, except for her black satin slip.

There had to be a way to get her out of all that stuff, but he’d been enduring her tender care for half an hour and was down to four and a half hours before they left, and he hadn’t gotten anywhere.

Four hours, if he included drive time over to Bleak’s warehouse-much less than that, if this Dax guy shook his tail and showed up.

Great. He had two hours he could count on, max, and he was sucking air.

Dax. The name had thrown him for a second there. He’d only ever heard of one guy named Dax-Dax Killian, the Gunfighter. But where he’d heard about him was over in the Sandbox, never anyplace in the States.

Esme leaned over him again, this time with a small gauze bandage and a couple of pieces of first-aid tape, and he had to remind himself to breathe.

His heart was pounding deep in his chest, and he knew if she’d had any idea how much he wanted her, she’d be running in the other direction.

And he didn’t want that, so he kept himself still. If all he got was her company until five o’clock, he’d take it and be glad. Nothing in Afghanistan smelled like her. Nothing in Afghanistan looked like her. She was soft curves and golden hair, strands of it slipping loose and curling along her cheek. She was high heels and a tight skirt, and everything about her got him hot.

She laid the gauze on his cheek and oh, so carefully smoothed the tape down with the tips of her fingers.

It was crazy, and he wondered why it always had to be like this, with a woman so cool and calm and going about her business, and a guy driving himself nuts thinking about that hot, sweet place between her legs and how much he wanted to touch her there with his tongue, and his fingers, and be with her there, so deep inside her.

Geezus. The way she smelled made his head swim. It made it hard to think, made him hard… harder than Chinese arithmetic.

The sound of a car door being slammed shut on the street below had him reaching for her. He closed his hand around her wrist, stopping her from finishing with the bandage. Another door slammed shut, and he quickly rose to his feet and headed toward the bedroom that looked out onto the Commerce City Garage.

Okay, maybe he did have a brain left in his head. That was very reassuring.

And he had an erection.

And maybe that was reassuring, too, though to date, that hadn’t been a problem for him. His problem was the exact opposite.

Standing at the window in the darkened room, he watched two men approach the garage where he normally would have been for the night, if he could have stood the place on his own.

“Dovey,” she said, stopping beside him, her gaze angled toward the street.

“And the other guy, the one from O’Shaunessy’s, do you know him?”

She shook her head.

Below them, Dovey Smollett and the guy in the Chicago Bears jacket walked back and forth in front of the garage, trying the doors, and looking in the windows. Dovey stepped back and looked up at the second floor, but like the first floor, all was dark, quiet, empty. With Solange parked inside this building, there was nothing there to make anyone think he and Esme had run for home.

Dovey pulled out a phone and made a call, and after a few more minutes of wandering around, both he and the Chicago guy got back in the Buick LeSabre and hunkered in-stakeout.