Born Wild (4 page)

She wished she could say she hopped-to without hesitation. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. For some reason she couldn’t explain, maybe it was momentary panic or a bout of fleeting hysteria or…the fact that she didn’t want to let go of Billy and the comfort his nearness provided, but she froze. For just a second. But it was long enough for Billy turn to her, his expression so soft, the light in his eyes so warm that she almost forgot how precarious her situation was and melted into a puddle of hormonal slop right there on the pavement.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” he crooned in a low voice, the endearment jolting her like a shock from an electric eel. “Go ahead and hop in.”

It took a second more for her to snap out of her trance—
I
really
am
a
sad
sack, aren’t I?—
but then she hurried to do as she was instructed. Heaving open the heavy door and jumping up into the mammoth vehicle, she quickly tossed her bags onto the back seat. The heat inside the Hummer had sweat popping out all over her skin and trickling in an itchy line between her breasts, but that was nothing compared to the fire in her heart.

Sweetheart…
Oh, how she’d loved to hear that word on his lips that summer and—

For
the
love
of
all
that’s holy, pull your head out of your butt! Someone might be waiting back there to kill you!

Okay, and that was the voice of sanity yanking her from her reverie. And, yep, perhaps she should listen to it.

Shaking her head at herself, she watched as Billy skirted the front of the vehicle before wrenching open the driver’s side door and hopping inside, bringing with him the smell of sunshine, leather, Irish Spring soap, and man.

Before she had a chance to utter one word, he leaned over, yanked her seatbelt tight across her lap and started the big engine. Throwing the monster vehicle into gear, he slowly—
slowly?
—pulled out onto Jeremy’s street as adrenaline coursed through her system, making her brain fizz. At the stop light on the corner, she swiveled in her seat and tried to peer out the heavily tinted back window to see behind them. But there was something strapped there. Narrowing her eyes against the dimness of the hot interior, she wondered if that was a….? Yep, that was most definitely a gun rack. A gun rack with two short-barreled shotguns attached to it.

Double
gulp.

Facing forward once again, she scooted down in her seat to try to use the side rearview to see—

“You’re gonna give yourself whiplash if you keep flopping around like that,” Billy commented, cool as can be over there, which only managed to redline her own anxiety.

“Is it behind us? That black Chevy? Is it following us?” she asked breathlessly. The air conditioner was blowing full blast on her heated cheeks, but it did little to mitigate the stagnant air inside the Hummer.

“Indeed it is,” Bill said like one might say
indeed
the
sun
is
shining
.

What
the
huh?
How could he remain so unruffled when there was a mysterious black SUV following them? Possibly being driven by the very person who’d been trying to eighty-six her for months?

Oh yeah, because he did this sort of thing for a living. Which was the whole reason why she’d run to him in the first place.

Okay Eve,
she coached herself, taking a deep, cleansing breath,
get
it
under
control. You’re in good hands.

And just the thought had her glancing over at the steering wheel, where Bill’s broad, tan hands handled the huge Hummer as gently and as easily as a little girl handles a puppy.

She’d always loved his hands. So big, so…capable looking. With long, knobby fingers, square nail beds, and tough calluses, his hands had always made her feel safe, secure…
protected
. Looking at them now reminded her of the first time he kissed her…

They’d just come back from a day on the water where she’d taught him how to captain the little Daysailer her father had given her for her eighteenth birthday. She’d been feeling awfully proud of herself for having instructed the big, handsome petty officer on anything. But after they’d stepped off the boat and onto the dock and he’d turned to her? You better believe she’d known by the look in his eyes that her time as teacher was over. His expression had clearly conveyed that
he
had a thing or two to show
her.

And, boy, oh boy, had he ever…

Even now she could recall the exact feel of his broad, callused palms cupping her cheeks, remember the sensation of his rough thumb hooked gently beneath her jaw, guiding her head this way and that as his tongue learned the secrets of her mouth, licked and laved and sucked until she forgot her own name and—

“Calm down, Eve,” Billy instructed, and she realized not only was she staring at his hands, she was also panting like she’d just surfaced from a skin dive. “This vehicle is armored and the glass is bulletproof. You’re safe in here.”

And
curses!
There she’d gone again. Completely forgetting the critical nature of her situation because she was overcome by a combination of painfully hot memories and Billy’s nearness.

Sheesh
. Too much more of that, and she should seriously consider getting her head examined. Maybe that launch into the air back at the marina and the resultant splashdown in Lake Michigan had flash-frozen her gray matter.

“That’s not—” She abruptly stopped herself and shook her head. “I’m fine. I just don’t understand why you’re not trying to lose them?” They were creeping along at a snail’s pace, like they were out taking a flippin’ Sunday drive as opposed to trying to shake the person tailing them. “Do you need me to drive?”

She wasn’t good a lot of things. She couldn’t draw or sing or hold her liquor. She sucked at baking cakes—they never seemed to rise—and public speaking scared the ever-lovin’ crap out of her. But when her father signed her up for defensive driving lessons with an ex-Hollywood stuntman after she’d started having issues with Dale the Stalker? Well, not to toot her own horn or anything—
toot, toot—
but she’d taken to the endeavor like she’d been born an Andretti.

However, the look Billy sent her questioned the validity of her most recent IQ test.

Indignation burned. “Didn’t Becky tell you how good I was down in Costa Rica?” she demanded. And, yes, a little more than six months ago she’d helped Billy and the rest of the Black Knights clear the name of one of their own by leading the CIA on a wild car chase. Which, let’s face it, still felt more like a dream set in Bizarro Land than an actual series of events…

But it
had
happened and she
had
done her part—
huzzah!
—and it was beyond irritating that even after all of that, Billy still didn’t give her the credit she so richly deserved. And when he refused to wipe that disbelieving smirk from his face, she slapped a palm against the hot dashboard. “Stop looking at me like that! I’m an excellent driver!”

He rolled in his lips as he casually—oh-so-flippin’
casually
—stopped at a red light. “I know you are, Rain Man,” he said, and it only irked her more when she
didn’t
get that particular reference. “But I don’t
want
to lose them. I want them to stick with us until your cousin calls to let us know who they are.
Then
we can decide how to handle the situation.”

Oh…well. That made sense. Sort of…

As if on cue, her cell phone jangled out the opening bars of Styx’s “Come Sail Away,” and she unbuckled her seatbelt in order to swivel around and grab her purse.

“Jeremy?” she answered after frantically scrounging around in her oversized handbag. Her phone had the annoying habit of making its way to the very bottom of the thing. “Who is it? Who’s following us?”

Her blood sizzled through her veins like she’d ascended too quickly from a deep dive because this could be it. Right here, right now, she might hear the name of whomever was trying to kill her.

“It’s Samantha Tate,” Jeremy informed her, his irritation evident.

Her heart sank along with all her momentary hopes, because Samantha Tate was the
Chicago
Tribune
’s most persistent, most
annoying
investigative reporter. “Thanks, Jeremy,” she muttered. “I’ll let you know how things shake out.”

“Take care, Cuz,” he said before cutting the connection.

“So?” Billy asked, turning to her briefly, a question in his lovely brown eyes.

“Samantha Tate,” she supplied. “She’s a—”

“I know exactly who she is,” he cut in, frowning. “And
what
she is.”

“You mean besides a serious pain the ass?” Eve submitted and felt a warm rush of pleasure flood her chest when his crack of surprised laughter echoed against the roof of the Hummer.

“That too,” he said, lips twitching. “And since she already knows who
we
both are, I see no reason to try to lose her. We’ll just let her follow us out to Goose Island.”

“She’s been leaving messages for me for two days,” Eve groused, glancing into the side view mirror and discovering that, sure enough, inside that black Chevy Tahoe was the vague outline of a woman with puffy hair. “I haven’t called her back because…well, for one thing I hate talking to the press. And for another thing, I’m sure she wants to sensationalize everything that’s been happening to me so she can snag herself another front-page byline. I’m sorry she’s sticking her big nose in the middle of this. I know how much you super-secret spy guys despise journalists.”

“We don’t despise journalists,” Billy clarified with a half shrug. “It’s just that
their
job is usually directly opposed to
our
job. But don’t worry. You won’t have to talk to her. She’ll never get past BKI’s front gates.”

And, just like that, Eve was reminded she’d be spending an indeterminate amount of time under one roof with Billy “Wild Bill” Reichert and all his brooding looks, sharp words, and menacing, smoldering sex appeal…

Triple
gulp.

Black Knights Inc. Headquarters, Front Gate

7:15 p.m.

“I demand to see my daughter! I know she’s here!”

Mac glared at the salt-and-pepper-haired man raving on the other side of BKI’s tall, wrought-iron gate and wondered if he’d ever despised anyone on first sight as much as he despised Eve’s father.

Patrick Edens was wearing a cream-colored linen suit like he was freakin’ Colonel Sanders or something. Though Mac would lay two-to-one odds that Edens had never set foot inside a Kentucky Fried Chicken in his entire pampered life. A long black limousine was parked at the curb, and a gold Rolex glinted on Edens’s wrist when he lifted a hand to point a manicured finger at Mac. “You filthy, lecherous bikers can’t hold her prisoner here! I’ll—”

“Sir,” Mac cut in, and it was only his gentlemanly Southern upbringing that allowed him to address the raving ass-hat in such a polite fashion, “I can assure you we’re not holdin’ your daughter prisoner here. She—”

“Dad?”

Mac lifted his eyes toward the sunset sky with its streaks of pink and orange and sent up a small prayer of gratitude. Too much more of that and he’d be tempted to shove a fist straight into Edens’s mouth, ruining the man’s expensively capped teeth. And since Edens had the look of a guy who wouldn’t take a punch—a punch he damn well deserved because, seriously? Filthy, lecherous bikers?—without raising a big ol’ stink and getting a bunch of stuffy lawyers involved, that would be very,
very
bad.

Lord
knows
a
lawsuit
is
the
dead
last
thing
any
of
us
need
right
now…

“What are you doing here?” Eve asked, still towel-drying her hair.

She’d been in the shower when Toran buzzed from the front gate to say her father had arrived on the scene. And Bill and Ace had been in the middle of coordinating an emergency exfiltration for Ozzie and Steady who, like always, had managed to make trouble for themselves in some bug-infested South American hellhole. Which meant—
oh, goody, goody gumdrops
—he’d been the only one left to run interference on their unwelcome guest.

“I should ask
you
the same!” the elder Edens thundered. “What are
you
doing here? It’s like you enjoy getting yourself into situations that titillate the press!”

Mac turned to see Eve’s face fall, and he wondered if, perhaps, he’d still be forced to plant one in Edens’s kisser after all.

“Dad—” she tried, but her father just cut her off.

“I was contacted by Samantha Tate. And imagine my surprise when she asked me why my daughter had decided to shack up with a bunch of greasy motorcycle mechanics.”

“I’m not shacking—”

“Get your stuff. You’re coming home with me.” Edens threw his nose in the air, adjusting his baby blue silk tie. “And that’s final.”

Mac lifted a brow, sliding a surreptitious glance toward Eve. The poor woman’s face was so red it was almost purple, and she was chewing on her bottom lip so hard he was surprised she didn’t just gnaw the sucker right off. It was obvious that, even as a grown woman, she was used to doing as her father instructed. So it surprised him when she lifted her chin against the warm evening breeze and said, “No, Dad. I’m staying here.”

Well, look at you, honey. Way to go…

“Wh-what?” Edens sputtered, his face taking on a similar hue to his daughter’s. Only his wasn’t fueled by timidity or humiliation; it was fueled by fury. Patrick Edens obviously wasn’t a man used to hearing the word “no.”

“I’m staying here,” Eve repeated. “It’s safe here. Now, I know you don’t believe I’m in trouble, but—”

“You’re
not
in any trouble!” Edens spat. “Why do you keep insisting that you are when the police have assured you time and time again that it’s nothing more than a string of bad luck?” Edens pursed his lips, narrowing his eyes. “It’s because of Jeremy, isn’t it? I knew it was a mistake for you to move in with him instead of coming home to me. Well, we can remedy that tonight and—”

“No.” This time when Eve said the word there was some power behind it. Mac crossed his arms over his chest, content to let her handle the situation because she appeared to have it well under control.

Edens on the other hand? The man looked like he was about to blow a gasket. And sure enough, his face contorted into an ugly snarl, and he hissed, “Don’t you do this again!” His upper lip curled. “Haven’t you had enough of the press? Haven’t your recent mishaps and your new personal endeavors brought enough disgrace to our family?”

Eve stumbled back as if Edens’s words had gut-punched her, and Mac was just about to step in when she rallied, dragging in a deep breath and squaring her shoulders. “None of that was my fault, and you know it. Now go home, Dad.” Before Edens could answer, she spun on her heel and started marching back toward the warehouse.

“Eve!” Edens shouted at her back, but she ignored him, her chin held high.

Mac turned a considering eye on Edens, sucking in a breath through his nose. The air smelled like warm pavement, blooming flowers, and Edens’s top-shelf cologne. “Well,” he said, “I think that about does it.” Eve’s father opened his mouth to object, but Mac yelled to Toran who was watching all the commotion through the open window of the gatehouse. “Escort Mr. Edens here off our private property.” Edens sputtered like a kinked garden hose. “And if he puts up a fight, call the police.”

Then, he turned to follow Eve into the shop. And as he watched her long, determined strides, he couldn’t help but wonder if Wild Bill had misjudged the woman.

***

Black Knights Inc. Headquarters, 2nd Floor

8:20 p.m.

No, no, no. Something isn’t right. How the hell did the arson investigator miss this?

“You gonna invite us?” Mac asked, dragging Bill’s attention away from the high-resolution photos Jeremy Buchanan had provided. They showed Eve’s blackened, gutted condo, and if Bill was being honest, Buchanan had really come through for them in a couple of ways. First, he’d held his own as they escorted Eve to the Hummer—Bill had recognized that kill-or-be-killed look in the man’s eye, the look that said Buchanan had been willing to do whatever needed to be done in order to keep his cousin safe. And second, these files were straight-up cherry. Comprehensive and detailed.

He wondered if maybe, just maybe, he’d jumped to the wrong conclusion about the guy. Not that Buchanan wasn’t still an asshole. He was. No question. But there were quite a few people who thought
Bill
was an asshole, so that particular moniker didn’t hold a hell of a lot of water. Plus, the dude worked vice. He was a multimillionaire, trust-fund baby who preferred to get his hands dirty in the trenches to make the world a better place rather than sitting in some high rise celebrating the high life. So, yeah, maybe Buchanan wasn’t as ginormous a tool as Bill’d initially thought.

“Hey. I said, you want to invite us?” Mac repeated.

“Huh?” he frowned, his eyes darting back to the photo in his hand, his thoughts racing along with his heart. Most of the guys he worked with had metronome-steady pulse rates, but not him. Nope. He’d never perfected that little trick. Then again, unlike other operators, the adrenaline didn’t make him weaker or less logical. Hell, no. It did just the opposite, focusing him, sharpening his world and everything in it to a fine point. Except, for the life of him, he couldn’t guess what in the world Mac was talking about. “Invite you to what?”

“That party you got going on in your head,” Mac drawled. “You’ve been sitting over there making noises for the last five minutes.”

He had?

Bill glanced at the other two people seated around the conference table. Eve was gnawing her thumb down to what had to be a bloody stump, and Ace, holding the report on the condition of Eve’s Vespa, was frowning at him over the top of it.

Okay, so obviously he had. But that’s because he was onto something big,
huge
. And the only thing that tempered his excitement at having made this particular discovery was the knowledge that Eve had been right all along…

Someone
was
trying to kill her.
Sonofabitch.

“The fire department used the old method of locating the fire’s point of origin by relying on lowest burn and deepest char pattern,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. That method had been proven faulty more than five years ago. “Which points to the drapes on Eve’s living room window. But what they didn’t take into account was that the fire burned for over six minutes after the initial flashover and before the CFD put it out. And
that
means it had time to change from a fuel-controlled fire to a ventilation-controlled fire.”

He glanced around at the faces looking back at him, expecting something more than a series of wide-eyed blinks. Then he reminded himself not everyone—very few people, in fact—understood the mechanisms by which explosions, and the resulting flames, operated, and he tried to put it in layman’s terms.

“It means the fire didn’t originate from the curtains lit by the candle. It means the fire originated by the front door and spread toward the air coming in
through
the open window. See,” he slapped the photo he’d been examining down on the conference table and turned it around so the others could see, tapping the image with his finger. “Whoever started this did so with a quick-burning and, my guess would be, brutally hot accelerant that was poured under the door and lit. It turned the place into a tinderbox in minutes. But it burned the longest and hottest by the open window where the air could fuel it, which is why the arson investigator mistook that for the point of origin.”

“So I was right,” Eve whispered, her eyes as round as hand grenades. “Someone wants me dead.”

“Jesus, Eve.” Ace scooted his chair closer to hers and threw a muscled arm around her shoulders. Bill tried very hard to ignore it this time, but when Eve reached over and clutched Ace’s hand, he recognized the green-eyed monster sitting on his shoulder for what it was.

For
Christ’s sake, man! Cut that shit out!

Although, honestly, he wasn’t sure if he was mentally yelling at himself or Ace. And for a brief moment he was thrown back to earlier that afternoon, when Eve’d curled her delicate fingers into his waistband and the simple feel of her knuckles brushing his back had damn near lit him on fire. That small touch had been more erotic than some of his more memorable full-on make-out sessions, which just proved how far he
hadn’t
come in his long, oh-so-long,
too-
damn-long journey to forgetting about one Miss Evelyn Edens.

Well, shit on a stick…

“How in the world did you manage to get out of there alive?” Ace asked gently, giving Eve a squeeze and jerking Bill from his unwelcome thoughts.

“One of the fire escapes is beneath my bedroom window,” she said, her voice hoarse, which was just what Bill needed to crank down the heat on his ill-timed burst of libido. Well, that and the pictures that flashed through his head of how she’d been forced to make her escape. He grabbed the travel-sized bottle of Pepto-Bismol he’d shoved in his pocket and sucked back a healthy chug.

Come
on, you sweet, pink elixir. Work your wonders…

“When the fire alarm woke me up, flames were already licking under my bedroom door.” She shook her head, her inky black hair swishing across her shoulders and Ace’s arm. Bill remembered how soft it had once felt swishing against
his
arm. And
goddamnit!
He gulped another chug of Pepto. “So I threw open my window, and…and climbed out,” she swallowed, her dry throat making a sticky sound in the relative silence of the big room.

Yeah, climbed out onto a rickety iron fire escape from the friggin’ eighteenth floor.
Jesus.

“It was smart,” he admitted, wiping a drop of the pink medicine from his lips.

“What was?” Mac asked, brow furrowed.

“The way the fire was set. It’s almost like whoever did it knew the CFD was still employing the old investigative techniques. Or they just got lucky.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the Internet lists all sorts of ways to get past arson investigators,” he explained, moving to point a finger at the photo again, but Becky’s unbelievably ugly and unconscionably fat tomcat had hopped up on the conference table at some point and was now lying on the pile of photos, reclined back like a raja on a bed of pillows.

“Damnit, Peanut,” he groused, regretting the fact that he’d told Becky he would feed the bastard, not to mention consenting to scooping giant turds out of the litter box. Talk about a job no self-respecting man should ever agree to. Shoving an impatient hand under Peanut’s big fuzzy butt, he retrieved the photo. The tomcat’s crooked tail flicked once, but other than that, he didn’t move a muscle.

Damn scurvy feline. Walks around like he owns the place…

“As I was saying,” he flicked a couple of gray cat hairs off the photo, “the Internet lists ways to get past arson investigators, but most of those rely on the old point-of-origin dog-and-pony show. Could be whoever did this didn’t know there are more precise investigative methods out there today and—”

He stopped because Eve’s face, naturally pale, had turned as white as the potassium perchlorate he used when making explosive primers.

“What?” he asked. “What is it?”

“D-Dale,” she said, her pulse hammering at the base of her throat. Seeing it caused every cell in Bill’s body to go on high alert. Somewhere inside him a red light was flashing and an alarm was blaring.

“What about the bastard?” he demanded, sitting up straighter, barely recognizing his own voice.

“He’s a…” She licked her lips. “He’s a volunteer firefighter. And he…he does a lot of training with the CFD.”

And just like that, rage exploded inside Bill with the force of a bunker buster. Because even though he and Eve weren’t exactly simpatico, the fact remained that nobody, and he meant
nobody,
got away with attempting to turn her into a crispy critter.