In Rides Trouble (9 page)

She shoved the lollipop back in her mouth and tried to breathe shallowly.

“More like I kissed him…or maybe I allowed him to kiss me when I shouldn’t have, or…hell, I don’t know.” Becky bit down on her lollipop, the crunch so loud Eve wondered if her friend had lost a tooth. Apparently not, because Becky started chewing angrily, taking out whatever frustration she was suffering on the poor piece of candy. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get home,” she promised.

Eve watched as Becky finally snatched a glance over at the big man and saw the moment their eyes met and clashed. She fancied even
she
could feel the shocking jolt of electricity in the visual exchange.

“Cheese and rice, Becky.” The tiny hairs on her arms stood up as in warning of a potential lightning strike.

“I know,” Becky moaned, jerking her gaze away. “It’s a disaster. Please talk to me about something else.”

“Okay,” she said, racking her brain for a change of topic as she shivered in response to the charged atmosphere. She grabbed at the concern foremost on her mind. “Please tell me this is the last leg of the trip. I just want to be home.”

Becky shook her head and fished around in her pocket for another sucker. “I wish I could. But you’ll be glad to learn there are only two more transfers in our future. We’re catching a military transport from here to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. From there, you and I will hop on a commercial flight back to O’Hare.”

“Just you and me? What about the others?”

“They’ll be taking another military transport from Andrews to Great Lakes Naval Base.”

“But why aren’t we all going together?”

Becky sighed and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. In response, Eve’s intestines tied themselves in big, loopy bows because that was Becky’s habitual forerunner to the words,
you’re not going to like this
.

“You’re not going to like this…”

Sometimes she hated being right.

“
What
am I not going to like?”

“The press is meeting us there.”

“Oh crap.”

She absolutely
hated
the press. They’d dogged her her entire life, reporting on every humiliation she’d ever suffered…and she’d suffered more than a few.

“Must we talk to them?” she asked.

“
Yes
,” Becky stressed, “we must. Apparently we’re one of the top stories, so we’re going to have to withstand our time in the limelight. I say we just tell our tale—pun intended—and get it the hell over with so our lives can go back to normal. The sooner the better. My guys can’t afford to have their faces splashed all over the front page. Hell, you’ve seen the lengths they’ve gone to to ensure our travel itinerary is so convoluted no one will ever be able to trace our movements. Can you imagine them cheesing it for the reporters? No way.” She shook her head. “I need you to help me do everything humanly possible to make sure this story dies a quick and painless death.”

“Fine by me. I’d just as soon it never breathed life in the first place, but…uh, your guys?” She raised a brow, wondering if Becky even realized how proprietary she sounded.

“Huh?”

“You called them
your
guys
.” She stressed the last two words.

“Yeah. That’s kinda how I think of them…as mine, you know?”

No, she didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine living day in and day out with a bunch of brutes the likes of Frank Knight and Billy Reichert.

“They’re like my brothers,” Becky added.

Uh-huh
. “And Frank, er, Boss? Is he one of your brothers?”

Becky swallowed and started studying her dirty hospital booties as if they were made from the most fascinating weave on the planet. “I feel a lot of things when it comes to Frank Knight,” she finally admitted. “
Sisterly
certainly isn’t one of them.”

Yup, just as she Eve suspected.

Glancing again at the big man, she grimaced before wrapping a comforting arm around her friend’s shoulders.

She very much feared Becky was headed for deep, deep trouble where Frank Knight was concerned.

***

Frank glanced at Angel and Bill pacing along the far end of the dock, and tried like hell to remember just exactly what’d happened down in the
Patton
’s cold, sterile sick bay.

It was all a blur.

All of it except for that kiss.

He remembered that kiss very,
very
clearly.

Even blitzed out of his ever-lovin’ mind on some heavy duty narcotics, he’d still realized the dead last thing he should do was pull her sweet lips down to his.

He knew that, but he hadn’t been able to help himself.

And then she kissed him back, and she was so much more…
mind-boggling
than he ever imagined. Her cool fingers had been on his face, her soft breasts had been on his chest, her silky, hot tongue had tangled with his, and he knew he was doing the exact thing he always swore he’d never do, but…he just hadn’t been able to help himself.

Then she’d pulled away, and the room suddenly closed in on him. The next thing he remembered was the doctor leaning over him, shaking him awake, and asking him all manner of inane questions.

After the drugs wore off, he initially thought it was all a dream, but then she was barely able to look at him as the chopper lifted them from the destroyer’s big deck and he knew it was more than just another one of his very,
very
real fantasies starring him and her and the nearest horizontal surface.

Shit.
He was such an
asshole
!

He stole another glance at her as Angel sauntered up behind him.

“She is not as tough as she would have everyone believe,” the former Mossad agent rasped quietly.

“I know.”

“You are not the right man for her.”

He swung around to glare at the Israeli’s calm, inscrutable face. Had he been that obvious? “What would you know about it?”

“I know the look of a man in lust, and I know the object of a man’s lust very rarely meets a…shall we say,
happy
end.”

“Fuck you, Angel,” he growled, unaccountably mad.

Of course, he had to admit, despite appearances, his anger wasn’t aimed at Angel. Nope. That would’ve been too easy, and he was
not
an easy man. What he
was
was truthful. And the truth of the matter was he was pissed as hell at himself, because every word out of Angel’s mouth was spot-on.

“Just mind your own damn business,” he finished with a weary sigh.

“Do you deny it?”

“Deny
what?
” He really considered picking the guy up and chucking him over the docks and into the ocean.

“That you’re not the right man for her.”

“No, goddamnit! I know I’m not!” And that’s what made the thing that happened between them in sick bay so fantastically terrible. Then a horrible thought occurred to him. “Do you think
you’re
the right man for her?”

Angel lifted that annoying brow of his, and Frank barely resisted the urge to rip the sucker clean off. “I might be.”

Like
hell…

He opened his mouth to tell Angel exactly what he’d do to him if he so much as
looked
at Becky sideways, then snapped his jaws closed with an audible
clack
.

Maybe Angel was right. Maybe he
was
the right man for Becky. Lord knew he had to better for her than Frank. At least Angel was born in the same decade as Becky, which was more than he could claim.

Shit.

He lifted his good hand to rub at the sudden pain shooting through his chest and marched toward the transport vehicle that pulled up to the end of the dock.

Never in his entire life had he wanted to be home as badly as he did at this very moment. And that was saying a lot since he’d spent endless amounts of time in quite a few less-than-hospitable environments.

He just wanted to get back to Chicago, back to the compound, back to normal.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t help but wonder if things would ever be normal again, because right at that moment he caught Becky watching him, and the look in her eyes was one he easily recognized. He easily recognized it because it was the same look reflected in his own.

Abject longing.

That about summed it up.

And how was he ever going to resist her now that he knew she wanted him as much as he wanted her? How was he ever going to resist her now that he knew the sensation of her in his arms? The taste of her on his lips?

Sweet
Christ, help me.

Northern Indian Ocean
Six hours later…

“Sonofabitch!” Sharif howled in frustrated impotence as the catamaran’s last working outboard motor sputtered to a hiccupping halt.

Ominous silence settled over the little sailboat.

He was out of petrol, minus a satellite phone, running low on food and fresh water, and without a breath of wind to fill the sails…

He had not signed on for this…for
any
of this. He was supposed to answer the bloody phones, not find himself wounded and afloat out in the middle of the goddamned Indian Ocean. And it was all the fault of that little blond American
bitch
!

He threw his head back and shrieked his rage over and over into the endless expanse of the cloudless sky, then fell to his knees and convulsed in a long series of bone-cracking shudders that made his back teeth ache.

“I’m dead,” he whispered into the lonely silence, lifting eyes that were as red and swollen from his vitriolic outburst as they were from the fever that wracked him.

I’m dead.

Strangely, the thought didn’t frighten him. Not in the usual sense, in the
fear
of
the
unknown
sense. In truth, he didn’t much care what happened. He’d never been particularly religious, had always considered himself of a scientific mind, so he figured chances were pretty good that nothing happened. One second you’re here, having thoughts, making plans, eating, working, fucking. The next second you’re gone. End of story.

So no, the thought of death held no fear. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t royally miffed by the idea. Because he was going to die, and Rebecca Reichert—that bitch—was going to go right on living her entitled little American life and that was just so incredibly unfair he could barely stand it.

He glanced around, looking for something, anything, on which to take out his frustrations. But there was nothing. Just him and kilometer after kilometer of placid, turquoise water.

For the first time in his life, he lamented the fact that he wasn’t surrounded by the dirty, seething mass of humanity. With his hand swollen to the size of a cricket glove, and the infection ravaging his system, what he wouldn’t give to see the face of one skinny, ignorant pirate or one snide British football fan—or
soccer
as the Americans liked to call it. Leave it to them to filch the name of a four-hundred-year-old sport and apply it to a totally new endeavor, then condescend to call the original sport something entirely new.

He hated American audacity. Scratch that. He just hated Americans. One small, blond American in particular…

Listlessly, he let his gaze roam around the sailboat, cataloging what would soon become his floating coffin.

Something sparkled over by the aft railing.

Struggling to his feet, he shuffled over to investigate.

What he found was a long, thin fillet knife, its tip wedged under the metal lip that secured the railing to the deck. Bending, ignoring the thick blood that pounded through his head and hand at the maneuver, he picked up the blade and studied it with a sort of abstract fascination.

Ah, yes. And so the solution presents itself.

He almost smiled.

He’d just end it. Right here. Right now. On his own terms. Put a period on his life that had been tragically condensed to this lonely little world of infinite glassy seas and relentless agony.

He’d heard there wasn’t much pain in slitting one’s wrists. And bleeding to death promised to be much quicker and so much less horrific than dying from dehydration coupled with starvation and infection.

He tested the blade with his thumb.

Sharp.

Sharp enough to do the job with very little effort.

That was good. He was never very brave when it came to facing pain.

Gripping the handle with his uninjured hand, he laid the thin edge of the knife against his swollen left wrist. Holding his breath, girding himself against the sharp bite of agony to follow, he smiled when a warm gust of wind cooled the sweat on his fevered brow.

Mmm, it felt wonderful. Like a sweet benediction at the end.

He’d just begun to press the blade into his skin, watching with a sort of detached delirium as a tiny drop of blood welled at the tip, when another breath of wind whipped by him, chilling him, causing gooseflesh to rise over his skin.

He dropped the blade. The loud
thunk
it made when it hit the deck echoed like a cannon explosion in his pounding head, but he ignored it as he eagerly glanced out at the softly rolling seas. The deck beneath him bucked gently, a physical lullaby, but the very last thing he was going to do was sleep.

I’m saved!

With a cry of triumph, he stumbled to the main mast and began the arduous task of unfurling the sails.

He was a two-day sail from the Somali coast, and with the infection multiplying in his body every minute, the odds were stacked against him. But he’d been bucking odds his entire life.

“Here I come, Becky!” he yelled, laughing hysterically as the sails caught the wind and snapped tight. “Here I come!”

***

Outside the gates of Black Knights Inc.
Goose Island, Chicago, Illinois

“We’re here.” Patrick Edens’s cultured voice roused Becky from what she realized must have been a dead sleep. There was a giant smear left by her cheek on the limousine’s rear driver’s side window, and was that…?

Yepper, she’d been drooling. A big slobbery glob slowly cut a path down the tinted glass.

Perfect. Just perfect.

Of course, when she looked over and found Eve on the opposite side of the swank leather seat as dead to the world as she’d been, she didn’t feel quite so bad. Although at least Eve had had the decorum to simply tilt her head into the corner with her mouth closed and her hands tucked daintily between her knees.

Go figure.

Eve did everything with grace and panache, and Becky loved the woman to distraction, but sometimes she felt like a complete clod by comparison.

Wiping the wetness from her chin, she glanced out the window toward the high, wrought-iron gate that was the only public entrance into the compound and gazed lovingly at the warm, brick buildings beyond. It was quite a sight, especially when compared to where she’d started in that little pre-fab building. The main structure on the compound, the old factory they’d turned into lofts, office space, and her chopper shop, glowed dark red in the late afternoon sun. Yellow light glinted off the leaded glass windows on the upper floors. It was beautiful. It was her pride and glory…it was
home
.

And she couldn’t wait to get inside.

“Thanks for the ride, Mr. Edens,” she whispered quietly so as not to wake Eve. “Tell Eve I’ll call her tomorrow.”

Patrick nodded regally, and she took that as her cue to depart.

Fine by her. Eve’s father had a way of sneering at her down the length of his patrician nose that tended to make her fingers itch to close themselves in a fist and plant one right in his puss.

Eve always claimed she was imagining things, but Becky knew the score. Patrick Edens didn’t think she was good enough to lick the bottom of his daughter’s couture pumps, much less be her best friend.

Asshole.

But right now even the slightly condescending tilt to his chin couldn’t bank her enthusiasm. Because she was home.

Finally.

Hastily, she pushed open the limousine door before the driver had a chance to do it for her. Stepping onto the curb, she watched the long, black car pull onto Cherry Street and disappear around the corner.

She took a deep breath, dragging in the damp, fishy odor of the Chicago River mingled with the sweet smell of cocoa drifting on the wind from Blommer Chocolate Company. The tension inside her ebbed like the retreating tide.

She knew exactly how Dorothy felt, because no truer words had ever been spoken than “there’s no place like home.”

Grinning, she turned toward the gatehouse and the big, red-headed beast of a man working inside.

“Hey there, Rebel!” he called, hauling himself out of his chair and ducking under the door frame as he exited the little building. He’d been seriously wounded in the same incident that resulted in Patti’s death, but, by the looks of him, he was making a full recovery.

The sight did her heart good.

“Manus!” she squealed, running and stopping herself from jumping into his burly arms at the last second. Gingerly, she wrapped her arms as far around his barrel chest as they would stretch and hugged him softly.

“Well now, that’s no kind of hello.” He pulled back, his round, freckled face wreathed in smiles below his shock of unruly Irish hair. “Since when do you handle me like a piece of Venetian glass?”

“Since you had a bullet cut out of your chest a couple of months ago.”

“Bah,” he waved a baseball-glove-sized hand through the air. “I’m fit as a fiddle.” To prove it, he tilted his head back, beat his heavy chest, and did a pretty terrible Tarzan impression.

She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not sure, but I think you just insulted every self-respecting ape on the planet.”

He chuckled and caught her up in a bear hug that lifted her completely off the sidewalk and had her ribs protesting.

She didn’t care. She hugged him back with equal fervor.

“I’m sure glad you’re back in one piece,” he told her gruffly. “You had us all scared half to death.”

“I’m glad to be back,” she managed to wheeze.

“Yo, Tarzan,” Rock’s cheerful drawl sounded behind her. “Let go of Jane before you squeeze the life outta her.”

“Rock!” she whooped and ran through the gates once Manus set her back on her feet. This time she didn’t refrain from jumping into the set of strong arms stretched toward her.

“Oomph,” Rock staggered exaggeratedly, the heels of his alligator cowboy boots clacking against the sidewalk. “What did those pirates feedya? Cheeseburgers and apple pie?”

“Can it, you big Cajun,” she growled even as she planted a smacking kiss on his ear.

“You know,
ma
petite
, I’m used to comin’ home to find you’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest, but this last episode beats all. Pirates? Really, Becky?”

“It’s not like I do it on purpose. Trouble just seems to find me.”

“Hmm,” he murmured noncommittally, turning his sweat-stained John Deere baseball cap around backward so he could get a good look at her. A frown had the corners of his dark goatee drooping.

“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there,
chère
.” He softly touched her injured cheek. “I couldn’t get back in time to make the transport outta here.”

“Don’t sweat it. Frank, Billy, and Angel pulled off the rescue without a hitch.” She took his arm and started pulling him toward the shop. She just wanted to get inside.

Funny, when she left to go on vacation almost a month before, after Patti’s death and Frank’s promise to do everything in his power to impede her becoming an operator, she thought she couldn’t escape this place fast enough.

Now? Well, now all she wanted to do was lock herself inside the old factory’s thick, warm walls until the memory of Sharif’s brutal pistol carving a place into her temple and her flying over the
Patton
’s railing didn’t leave her weak and shaky.

“So I heard and saw,” Rock said. “Ya looked very brave,
très
vaillant
, givin’ your story to the reporters.” He used his key to unlock the shop’s big double doors. They popped open with a muted hiss as the airlock released. He gestured for her to precede him, and she gratefully stepped over the threshold and into her safe, welcoming, ofttimes chaotic world. “Very tragic and heroic at the same time what with your cheek and tremblin’ lips. The newspapers and networks are eatin’ it up.”

Ugh
. She hadn’t realized her lips trembled. Her knees? Yepper, they’d been knocking together like wind chimes in a hurricane, but she thought she’d managed to keep her lips under control.

Apparently not.

Great. Just…frickin’ great.

She and Eve had arrived at O’Hare International Airport only to be hustled by airport staff into a tight, windowless room packed to the brim with reporters shoving microphones in their faces. The flash of camera bulbs had been blinding and disorienting but, together with Eve, she’d recounted the tale of their capture, captivity, and eventual liberation by a heroic and mysterious team of men.

They’d stuck to the script and Becky, with her knocking knees and dripping palms, envied Eve’s ability to remain cool and unruffled—of course, she comforted herself with the thought that Eve had had a lot more practice dealing with the press.

And she especially wished she’d had just an ounce of Eve’s unflappable poise when Samantha Tate, one of the
Chicago
Tribune
’s newest and most ambitious young investigative reporters, called out, “Miss Reichert, do you think your life is jinxed given that this most recent incident is coming so soon on the heels of the supposedly gang-related shooting outside the front gates of your business, which resulted in the brutal death of one of your employees?”

There were so many offensive things in the question, that she’d opened her mouth only to have nothing come out but an insulted sputter.

First of all, her life wasn’t jinxed. It was just that trouble tended to run hand-in-hand with danger, and she happened to pal around with a very dangerous crowd. Second, Miss Tate’s emphasis on the word supposedly in reference to the drive-by shooting slipped under her skin until the image of wrapping her hands around the woman’s thin white neck burned very bright in her mind’s eye. They’d all worked incredibly hard to make sure that story was fed to the press, and General Fuller had had to pull—er,
yank
—a lot of strings to ensure the truth of that incident stayed buried in the bottom of some file in some safe room in some forgotten, bombproof basement at the Pentagon.

Not to be all Jack Nicholson-y, but the world couldn’t handle the truth of what’d really happened that day. The truth that one of their own senators had hired a group of thugs out of Las Vegas to end the lives of a sanctioned government operator and the woman with him who happened to be holding the evidence that proved the senator’s culpability in treason.