Hell on Wheels (17 page)

Then she’d bestowed on him her bright smile and laughed her sunny laugh, and he’d fallen in…
lust
. He didn’t believe in love at first sight, but something had certainly happened right then and there.

Grigg had instantly recognized the hot hunger gleaming in his eyes and had leaned in to whisper a phrase he’d repeated too many times to count over the long years to follow.
Lay
a
finger
on
my
baby
sister
and
die, asshole.

And that was just the bucket of ice water Nate needed…memories of Grigg.

Shit! What am I doing?

“This can’t happen again,” he told her as he unwrapped her legs and set her feet on the floor before pulling away. Was that his voice sounding like gravel rolling around in a dump truck?

“What? Why?” She blinked up at him.

He had to turn away. He couldn’t look at her kiss-swollen lips or the color riding high in her cheeks and know he was responsible for both. “It just can’t.”

“That’s not an answer!”

“There are things you don’t know about me, Ali.” Things she’d hopefully never know…

“Okay,” she walked to the leather La-Z-Boy he kept in the corner and plopped down. Good Lord, they were baby blue. Baby blue panties. He got just a glimpse before she closed the edges of her robe and crossed her legs. “So, are you gay?”

He coughed. “Uh, what d’you think?”

She eyed the bulge behind his zipper and shook her head.

Yeah, that’s a big negative, little lady.

“Do you have some incurable STD?” she asked, head canted just so, like she was a loan officer interviewing a potential borrower.

This was getting out of hand. “
No.
Ali I—”

“Do you have a girlfriend or wife I’m unaware of?”

“Course not. If you’ll just—”

“Then there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t continue doing exactly what we were just doing.” She stood up to make good on her word, and he nearly stumbled backward when his heel caught on the rug.

He held up a hand to ward her off like she was some hungry jungle cat instead of one small woman.

One small,
determined
woman. Oh, yes, he recognized
that
look, as well.

He was losing the battle here. Time to quit jacking off and lay it all on the line. “I’ve done horrible things, Ali. Unforgivable things. You don’t want anything to do with me.”

“No,” she shook her head, her face softening. Christ, he was going to bust out crying if she continued to look at him with those softly sincere eyes. “I don’t know exactly what you’ve done, and I probably never will. But one thing I do know is there’s no shame in answering the call of duty and doing what must be done to protect the freedom and the way of life of all the people you love. You’ll never convince me otherwise. I’ll never see you as anything other than what you are, Nate, a hero.”

And that did it. Because,
Jesus
, she had no idea. Not one friggin’ clue.

Just how heroic would she think him if she knew he’d been the one to end Grigg’s life?

Chapter Nine

The first, soft pink rays of dawn spilled between the wooden slats of the blinds, and Frank tossed aside the covers. It was barely past oh-five-hundred, but it was beyond obvious he’d get no more sleep.

Too much to worry about. Starting with the fact that one of his men had involved them all in a situation absolutely reeking of foul play, and ending with the fact that Becky was under the hugely mistaken impression he’d let her join the team if she could prove herself Ozzie’s equal.

To put it mildly, no fucking way. Over his dead body.

He rotated his trick shoulder and grimaced when it clicked into place and set up a steady throb like a bad toothache.

Getting old not only sucked, it suckety-suck-suck-sucked. Grabbing the bottle of ibuprofen from the nightstand, he threw two tablets to the back of his throat and swallowed.

Come
on, you little chemical wonders, work your magic.

Twenty minutes later he was showered, shaved, and down in his office with a glazed donut in one hand, his telephone in the other.

Nearly oh-six-thirty DC time, which meant General Fuller was due for a little wake-up call. One the ol’ hard-ass would probably rather not take, but life’s a bitch and then you die.

Interrupting the General’s beauty sleep rated real low on Frank’s list of things not to do today, way under
don’t kiss Becky
and
don’t start a war with the FBI or the CIA
. And getting General Fuller up and cranking away on his end of this rank-ass deal would go a long way to allowing Frank to put big red checkmarks next to some items on his list of things to do today. Hopefully, right beside
find
out
just
what
the
hell
Agent
Delaney
was
investigating
and
find
out
why
the
hell
there’s a spook on Grigg’s little sister’s tail.

“Frank?”

He ended his call before it got a chance to go through and glanced at his open office door.

He wasn’t the only one who’d gone without sleep last night. Alisa Morgan had dark bruises under her eyes. It also—
kee-rist
—looked like she’d been crying.

From fear? Because of her brother? Man, either reason made him want to wrap her in cotton and keep her safe on a shelf. Women, those adorably soft creatures, should never wear that particular expression. He felt partly responsible, because he should’ve known one of his men had gone off reservation. Should’ve sensed something in Grigg to warn him.

He hadn’t, and now Alisa Morgan was paying the price.

She held Peanut in her arms, her pert nose sunk deep into the cat’s patchy fur, looking like a little girl seeking comfort.

“Come on in, Ali,” he said and then realized she might not hear him over the loud purring of Sir Eats-a-Lot. He motioned to the set of chairs in front of his desk.

She hurriedly took a seat and arranged a contented Peanut on her lap. “I thought of something. I don’t know if it’s anything, but it might be…”

He motioned for her to continue.

“The memory box.”

Was that a new band? Man, he really
must
be getting old. “Pardon me?”

“Growing up, our parents were always so wrapped up in—” she shook her head. “Forget it. None of that matters. Crap. My brain feels all spongy…full of holes, you know?”

“I’d offer you a cup of coffee…” She made the facial equivalent of
I’d rather be tarred and feathered.
“Yeah,” he chuckled, “I didn’t think so.”

“That stuff is motor oil,” she declared, her tone full of disgust.

“Mmm hmm, but it works wonders for mental acuity.” And for helping a guy resist the lollipops some tiny temptress insisted on shoving into his shirt pockets. It was hard to enjoy the taste of root beer when your tongue was wearing a caffeine sweater.

“I’ll pass,” Ali replied dryly. “I value my stomach lining too much to—Ouch!”

She gingerly pulled Peanut’s kneading nails from the denim of her jeans. “They say love hurts. I never knew they meant it literally until I met Peanut.”

Funny. The woman was funny. Add that up with cute as a button, smart as a tack, and surprisingly tough underneath that cupcake exterior, and Frank understood why Ghost went all Cro-Magnon around her.

“Anyway, back to the memory box,” she said, scratching Peanut under his scarred chin until his yellow eyes rolled back in abject feline ecstasy. “It’s something Grigg and I started when we were kids. Putting little keepsakes inside. You know the kind of stuff I mean, his little league baseball glove, my first Barbie, our good report cards, things like that.”

Yes, Frank had a memory box himself. Filled with childhood memorabilia and stored in his sister’s attic. But what did that have to do with Grigg’s work for the FBI or the fact that Ali herself was now being ghosted by some man oozing CIA training in every calculated move like a snail oozes a slime trail?

“As we got older,” she continued and once more grimaced as she gently withdrew Peanut’s painfully loving claws, “we started keeping copies of more important documents in there. Wills, employment contracts, that kind of thing.”

Now
they were getting somewhere. Frank sat forward.

“About once a year, Grigg would send me a zip drive filled with all the pictures he wanted to keep copies of, and I’d add it to the memory box,” she explained. “Usually, they were photos of him and Nate. Sometimes there were shots of the rest of you guys and the bikes you were working on.”

A little niggle of excitement stirred in the bottom of his stomach.

“So,” she made a motion with her hand and Peanut meowed his displeasure at the interrupted chin scratching. Ali dutifully resumed her task. “I guess it was about a week before we found out about Grigg, I received a zip drive from him in the mail. I opened it up, found a set of pictures just like always, so I put it in the memory box and forgot about it. When you asked if I’d received anything from Grigg that was out of the ordinary, I didn’t even think twice about the zip drive. Especially since I’d opened it and glanced through the pictures. But there was something else on the drive besides the pictures: a file I couldn’t access. It was secured with a password. Knowing Grigg, I figured it might be racy photos of him and some woman, or women,” she rolled her eyes. “But maybe it was secret files or something?”

Or something…hot damn! This could be the break they were all waiting for.

“It might be nothing, but the timing is awfully coincidental, don’t you think?” she asked hopefully.

He certainly
did
think. “Yes. Have you told Gho—ah, Nate about this?”

Her face fell, and she grabbed up Peanut to once more burry her nose in the cat’s patchy fur. In response, the stupid feline ratcheted his motor into overdrive.

Hello
.

So something had obviously happened between Ali and Ghost last night. Something to make her eyes all wounded and wary.

Frank never thought he’d say it, but Nathan Weller was a goddamned moron. Couldn’t the man see this woman adored him? Didn’t he notice the catch in her breath every time he entered the room, the way she instinctively gravitated toward his side even though he was about as welcoming as a prickly pear cactus?

Probably. Ghost was nothing if not observant. So, yeah, he no doubt saw all of it. Which was probably exactly why the guy was always careful to keep her at arm’s length.

Ghost had some serious issues. No doubt starting and ending with Grigg and what happened in that filthy, stinking hut in Syria. It didn’t take a genius of Ozzie’s caliber to figure out Ghost’s feelings for his dead friend’s kid sister must fall directly into a category appropriately titled It’s Complicated.

“No,” she shook her head. “I didn’t tell Nate. I wanted to run it by you first. I didn’t want to look like a fool if you thought it was nothing.”

Ah yes, not wanting to look like a fool in front of the one person you wanted more than you wanted your next breath? Frank could relate.

And speaking of fools…Dan poked his head into the office followed by his much prettier, much better half.

“Whadup, kiddies?” he asked as Patti pushed by him to glare at the donut in Frank’s hand.

Busted.

“I thought you said you were gonna start cutting sugar from your diet,” she harrumphed, hands on hips.

Ho-kay, he’d made that grandiose statement in front of the Knights in the hopes Becky would leave off stuffing those ridiculous suckers in his pockets.

The ruse hadn’t worked. Either Becky was determined to undermine his alleged new diet, or she simply reveled in the fact that he was a total wuss when it came to resisting root beer-flavored suckers.

If he had to lay down money, he’d bet on the latter.

Now, looking at Patti’s perturbed face, he figured maybe it was better to actually
go
on the sugar-free diet.

But, shit, he really loved his morning donuts.

Sometimes the best defense, especially in the face of an agitated woman, was evasion and diversion. “Ali just remembered something that might help us figure out just what in the world is going on here,” he replied, neatly sidestepping Patti’s looming lecture.