Loose And Easy

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

What’s love got to do with it? That’s the question Dax had asked himself more times than he could count. What in the hell did love have to do with it?

Not much, had been the answer more times than he was willing to admit.

But this.

Standing just inside the entrance of Toussi Gallery, Dax knew this was crazy.

He tilted his head slightly to one side, looking through the crowd at the woman bent over a table writing something out on a small piece of paper.

What was that wrapped around her ass? Green shantung silk?

Yeah. That’s what it was. Dax knew shantung when he saw it-jade green shantung.

There wasn’t much of it, but he was going to go ahead and call it a skirt, for lack of a better term. And he was going to call her ass incredible, and her legs heartbreaking, and the Chinese red stilettos she was wearing-he was going to call those dangerous.

She straightened up from the table, and Dax quickly retooled the whole deadly combination in his head. The ivory satin halter top she was wearing was the danger zone. The pale ivory breasts almost spilling out of the top were the hot zone-a verifiable hot zone with a very elegant string of pearls looping across it like a police line: Do Not Cross.

Yeah. He grinned.

Dax loved a challenge, and he was thinking going up against a string of pearls was a win-win situation, especially with a woman wrapped up inside them. Women and pearls was one of his favorite combinations, like tequila and a beach, like sunrise and sex.

And yes, he was a great one for a wake-up call.

From the curvaceous mounds of her breasts it was a short trip up the satiny skin of her throat and the delicate angle of her jaw to a cherry lipsticked mouth he didn’t trust himself to stare at, and the rest-smooth, pale cheeks, an elegant nose, and thickly lashed and artfully made-up eyes, almond shaped, sultry.

She was gee-fucking-gorgeous.

He felt it in his heart.

She reached back onto the table and retrieved a small jacket, jade green shantung, and slipped it on over the halter top. The jacket fit her like a glove, and after it was on, she did one of those quintessentially female things that no guy could resist- she slid one perfectly manicured hand up around the back of her neck and with the utmost unconscious grace, lifted her hair out of the back of the jacket. The next move was also filled with so much fluid, female grace, the slight toss of her head to get her hair to settle back into a fall of silken auburn, he wondered for a second if someone was filming her. Who the hell else moved like that? Some movie star? Some model?

He didn’t look around to see if there was anyone with a camera trained on her, though. He didn’t want to miss anything, not a move.

Which proved to be his undoing.

Her next move, and so help him God, he never saw it coming, was to turn and look toward the door, and when she saw him, she smiled. It was a professional smile, not a personal smile, and yes, he knew the difference, intellectually. Emotionally, though, it was still a knockout. Then things got worse.

One long-legged, spike-heeled stride after another, she walked toward him, her smile in place, and he didn’t know if she was going to sell him real estate or proposition him.

He was ready for either, and unbelievably, he found himself steeling his heart against the sound of her voice. If her voice in any way matched the sultry welcome of her whiskey-colored eyes, he was doomed.

“Hi,” she said.

It did. He felt the slam-dunk with just one word.

“I’m Suzi Toussi.” She held out her hand, and like an idiot, he took it, shook it, and didn’t let go- so she did it for him, retrieving her hand and giving him a very small, very aware smile that said she got hit on every day of the week and twice on Sundays. “Thanks for coming to the showing. Are you familiar with Nikki’s work?”

“No.” He looked around the gallery and changed his mind. “Maybe.” Some of the stuff looked familiar. The paintings were all angels like on the postcard, but the full divine being, instead of just the partial view used on the invitation. Even a quick look around showed that the artist had a couple of models she used a lot, one guy with long blond hair, and a guy with short dark hair, and from the looks of some of the paintings, sometimes she put them through hell.

“She did the Brad Pitt cover of Esquire magazine a few years ago. You might have seen it.”

Probably not. He didn’t keep up with the Pittster.

“Suzi,” he said, bringing his attention back to her face, especially her eyes, and there was a correction on the color. Whiskey didn’t quite cover it. They were darker than Scotch, richer, with a warm undertone of amber, and like everything else about her, they had an elegance that defied comparison.

He hadn’t seen anyone like her, not anywhere, and he’d seen a lot of women. They were kind of a hobby with him, which he knew didn’t throw him in a very good light, but it did give him a certain expertise, and one thing he knew beyond doubt was that God made women like her for only one reason-to hurt men, to break their hearts and hurt them where they lived, which for Dax, currently, was just a little south of his belt buckle.

“So the gallery is yours?” Her name was on it- Toussi.

“Used to be.” The luscious Suzi Toussi smiled. “Now I’m just the hired help.”

“And what do you do when you’re not hired to help out here? Take care of Mr. Toussi?” It wasn’t fishing. He was dragging the ocean floor with a steel net.

“Mr. Toussi lives in San Francisco with Mrs. Toussi, and they manage to take care of each other without too much interference from me.”

“Only child?”

“Two sisters and a brother,” she said, obviously chatting him up, still so professional. She wasn’t giving away anything… not yet.

He grinned. “I bet they were glad to get the boy.”

She arched a delicate eyebrow. “In my experience, boys are nothing but trouble, but I bet you already knew that.”

His grin broadened.

“So why did you sell out?” he asked. “This place looks like the place to be.”

“I got an offer I couldn’t refuse,” she said, so cool.

“Early retirement and all that, but keeping your hand in on the side?”

“Not quite.” The barest flicker of humor passed through her gaze, and he was all but hypnotized with curiosity. “So, Mister…?”

“Killian, Dax Killian.”

“Dax,” she repeated. “That’s an unusual name.”

“Daniel Axel,” he explained. “About seventh grade, it got slammed together and stuck.”

“I see, Dax.” Her smile returned, perfectly professional, which simply wasn’t going to do, not for him, not with her. “We have wine and escabeche and some other very nice… canapés and hors d’oeuvres for your pleasure. Feel free to look around, and if you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask me, or one of my assistants. There are two or three still running about. Oh, just a moment.” She lifted her hand and waved someone over.

Dax followed the gesture, and if his heart hadn’t already been stolen, he might have been susceptible to the young woman heading in their direction.

Sweet lovin’ Patsy. He’d never thought of a sweater dress as summerwear, but when it was cobalt blue, sleeveless, low-cut, and barely covered a very cute butt, he was going sweaters for summer. Yeah, sweaters and curves-slinky, slender curves, not like the lush, auburn-haired bombshell on his right.

“Jane,” Suzi said, when the girl reached them. “This is Mr. Killian. He’s interested in Nikki’s work. Will you show him around, please?”

“My pleasure.” Jane had silky dark hair falling straight to her shoulders, freckles and a small scar across the bridge of her nose, a wild pixie face, and the palest green eyes he’d ever seen. She also had a small scar along her left cheekbone, which in no way detracted from her beauty. If anything, it made her even more exotic-looking.

Esme was right. He needed to spend more time in Denver. He wasn’t keeping up, especially in the old neighborhood. The chop shop where he’d moonlighted as a teenager wasn’t too far north of the gallery, home of hot women and amazing angels.

“Thank you, Jane,” Suzi said, then turned to him with another blindingly gorgeous smile. “Mr. Killian, my head assistant, Jane Linden, and my pleasure.”

Given half a chance, he thought, watching her walk away.

“Mr. Killian,” Jane said at his side.

“Dax,” he offered, getting his mind back on his business, and he did have business here.

“Dax.” The younger woman smiled with all the professional courtesy of her boss and gestured toward the far corner of the room. “We can start where Nikki McKinney started, with the Ascending Angel series. She was only sixteen when she won the prestigious Cooper-Lansdowne competition, which was the beginning of her brilliant career. She’s had a meteoric rise in the art world since her first showing at Toussi when she was twenty-one, the youngest artist to ever have a solo show here, or at our sister gallery in Los Angeles.”

“I can see why.” The longer he looked at the paintings, the more intrigued he became. He pulled the invitation out of his back pocket. “I actually came here with a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” the beautiful girl said.

Dax smiled back. “Well, I have a little sister, about your age, I guess, and she’s been corresponding with this guy who asked her to meet him here tonight, for this party, this showing, and I thought-well, I thought I better meet him first. From the invitation, it seemed like the artist knows him. Nikki McKinney wrote him a note on the card.” He handed the postcard over, address side up, so Jane would see it right off.

The girl took one look and let out a laugh, her cultivated, professional smile turning into a real grin.

“Johnny,” she said, looking up and meeting his gaze, her green eyes alight. “Johnny Ramos. Come on over here, and I’ll introduce you, so to speak.”

She started weaving a path through the crowd, and Dax followed, curiosity warring with concern. Easy wasn’t here. If she’d made it this far, she would have called him. And if Easy wasn’t here, he didn’t want to be meeting John Ramos in this room. The kid had decked Kevin Harrell with a single punch back when he and Easy were in school, and Dax wanted the guy with those instincts to be with her at Nachman’s.

Dax didn’t think Isaac Nachman would or could do anything to Easy, but he’d always felt she was on safer ground with the Otto Von Lindberg part of the night’s plan. Otto had a few sexual proclivities, sure, but Easy had his number.

Nobody had Nachman’s number, nobody, and the guy was way more than half a bubble off.

“So you know this Johnny Ramos?” he asked the lovely Jane.

“Very well,” she said. “But I didn’t know he had a girl he was seeing.”

“The relationship is in its infancy. I think that’s what tonight is all about, the first face-to-face meeting.”

“Lucky girl,” Jane said, her smile warming. “Come on.”

She led him up a staircase to a catwalk that ran across the width of the gallery. At the top, she stopped and leaned against the rail, pointing at a twelve-foot-high piece of stretched canvas that dominated the western half of the gallery.

Geezus.

“That’s him? John Ramos?” He didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding.

“That’s him, the Ironheart Angel.”

Ironheart.

The guy had a tattoo. Actually, he had a few tattoos, but the heart-shaped one was prominent on the upper left side of his chest, a heart with wings, angel wings, like those sweeping in large graceful arcs from the guy’s shoulder blades, but the wings on the tattoo were perfect, every feather in place, and the wings meant to keep him airborne were not-feathers were broken, some of them singed, some of them smoking, some of them on fire.

He was flaming out.

Burning in.

The angel’s head was tilted back, exposing his throat, an incredibly vulnerable position that the painting made clear was nothing less than the beginning of the final end. Strength ebbing, his will proving not to be enough, not against the battle wounds marking his body, a long slice from beneath his right breast down the length of his thigh, the edges ragged, blood streaming, and the lesser wounds, numerous smaller cuts, all deep, the scrapes, and contusions, and burns.

The angel’s left knee was bent, raised higher than the other, as if by some miracle of God, he would rally one more time and find the strength to push off and ascend. But Dax wasn’t putting his money on it. This angel, Ironheart, had seen his last for this go-around. Simple fact.

Standing there, looking at the painting, Dax saw the violence of the attack that had destroyed him, and after another moment, he saw the whole attack, strike by parry, strike by failure to parry. It was there in the wounds. Ironheart was left-handed, a wicked-looking, modified drop-point blade with a skeletonized handle still in his grip, and he’d been taken down by a left-handed knife fighter.

John Ramos was left-handed.

He was also born and bred to the Locos and was safe with God-C/S, con safos. The gang tattoo ran down the inside of his right arm. Obviously, Nikki McKinney thought her street-fighting warrior angels actually came straight off the street, this one from Twenty-second, XX22ST. He was buck-ass naked in the painting, totally ripped, and the reason for that was made more than clear by the leading edge of another tattoo Dax could see gracing his left shoulder-the numbers and letters “75 RAN” on a scroll.

Suddenly, the whole night made more sense. There was a good reason John Ramos had been so effective at protecting Easy. He was a U.S. Army Ranger, 75th Ranger Regiment, and the iron in his iron heart? The letters “Fe,” the chemical symbol for iron, were richly inscribed inside the winged-heart tattoo.

Ironheart-a good name for anybody from the 75th, though he couldn’t say he’d ever met an angelic Ranger. Dax grinned. Hoo-yah.

He’d also never seen a knife-fighting angel. He looked around the gallery at the other paintings. They seemed to come in two basic flavors, dark angels and light angels, or as Jane had said, “Ascending Angels,” and, he surmised, “Descending Angels.”

Ironheart was definitely on the descent in the supersize painting, and of them all, John Ramos was the only one carrying a knife, using a knife. The drop-point blade in his hand was bloody.

“He’s a Ranger,” he said, and Jane nodded.

“Just back from Afghanistan, two weeks ago, his third combat tour,” she said. “We were really hoping to see him tonight. Our guests really love meeting Nikki’s models, especially the women.”

Her smile said it all, not that Dax had needed the extra info. He was looking right at the guy.

A combat-hardened Ranger up against a seventynine-year-old nutcase was no contest. Dovey Smollett wasn’t going to give this guy a run for his money either. Neither would Bleak.

Easy would, though. She would be running him hard for his money, and Dax figured the guy was loving it. Any Ranger who’d only been back for two weeks would still have women at the top of his… wait a minute.

His gaze shot back to the Ironheart Angel painting. Sure, the guy was like “enlarged.” The painting was twelve feet high, but still… yeah, but still.

He shifted his attention back to Jane.

“This Ramos guy, how well do you know him exactly?” He wasn’t a jerk about the question. He was just curious, and possibly a little concerned. Easy wasn’t his sister, but he felt that way about her. He’d known her since she’d been in diapers. Hell, he remembered the day Aunt Beth had brought the little pink bundle home from the hospital, and he cared. A lot.

“We go to each other’s birthday parties,” she said, and Dax figured that was pretty well, and a pretty good way of putting it.

“And he’s a-”

“Great guy,” she filled in his blank. “You don’t need to worry about your sister. I guarantee it. She couldn’t be in safer hands.”

Dax hoped the hell so.