Thrill Ride (19 page)

“What’s wrong with you?” Boss demanded, glowering. “Are you sick? Did you catch something in the jungle while you—”

Desperately, she shook her head, hoping he’d leave well enough alone.

Geez, Van, you’re really impressing the hell out of your boss and your coworkers today, aren’t you?

“The dam’s sprung a leak,” Steady offered, and Boss’s brows slid down his forehead, his expression all but screaming
ah, women’s theatrics; I get it
.

But he didn’t get it at all. Nobody did.

“So who tried to smoke Rock?” Ozzie asked, oblivious to the fact that she was sitting there suffocating under the guilt of knowing her actions could have very well gotten Rock
really
killed instead of only
pretend
killed.

“Dunno,” Ghost shrugged. “I heard the shot directly to my left after I’d fired off the blanks, and I tried to track him. But by the time I’d eluded those CIA boys, the sonofabitch was long gone.”

All eyes, including Vanessa’s—red-rimmed and still brimming with tears, no doubt—turned to Rock. And, oh, he was so beautifully alive. Looking much worse for wear, but alive. She couldn’t help herself, she reached over and squeezed the hand that was closest to her, needing to assure herself that he was real and warm and vital, half-expecting him to pull away because he was so rightfully
pissed
at what she’d done.

But he didn’t.

Just the opposite. He turned his palm and laced their fingers together, and her heart pounded against her ribs until she fancied everyone seated around the table could see it fluttering the fabric of her safari shirt.

“
Non
,” he shook his head. “You all stop makin’ eyes at me. I haven’t the first clue who that might’ve been. Unless Rwanda Don didn’t want me talkin’ to the CIA and decided to hire someone to take me out. Which I wouldn’t doubt, come to think of it.”

“Rwanda Don?” Boss asked as he toed out a chair and settled his bulk into it, pulling Becky down onto his lap.

Bill walked into the room right at that moment with Eve directly on his heel, and it was obvious from the man’s stony expression and Eve’s red cheeks that they’d had yet
another
disagreement about something. Vanessa wasn’t sure what the story was with those two, but it was obviously long, convoluted, and painful. And speaking of…

Rock must’ve decided the whole hand-holding/reassuring thing had gone on long enough, because he returned her hand to her lap and gave it a judicious pat before planting his tattooed forearms on the table. And so much for her momentary, desperate hope that maybe he’d forgiven her for bringing him here, for nearly getting him killed.

But how could she really expect him to do that? She couldn’t even forgive herself.

Oh, God. If she started crying or…or
eeping
again, she was sorely tempted to grab Ghost’s sniper rifle and just put herself out of her misery.

Fortunately, Rock’s next words interrupted the world-class pity party she was in the midst of throwing for herself. “Rwanda Don is a long story. You sure we have the time for it?”

Boss frowned as he glanced at his watch. “Hell no. General Fuller arranged transport for us back to the States, and the van should be here any minute.”

“Well, if we don’t have time for this Don person,” Becky piped in, “then would someone mind telling me what the heck happened out there?” She flung a hand in the general direction of the front door.

And, yep, that was just the distraction Vanessa needed, because she was way past needing an explanation herself. After all, she
had
seen Rock get shot. Four. Times.

Yet here he sat. Not a scratch…er…not a bullet hole in him.

“Steady,” Rock nodded toward the Knights’ resident medic, “you want to take this one,
mon
ami
. It
was
your idea, after all.”

The smile that lit Steady’s face was blinding, and it occurred to Vanessa why everyone—including Steady himself—had tried to pair the two of them together when she first joined the group. After all, they both had that hot Latin blood, and Steady possessed the kind of dark beauty all women found irresistible.

All women except her, obviously.

Because the moment she’d walked into BKI head-quarters, she’d only had eyes…er…
ears
for Rock. All it had taken that first day on the job for her to start salivating and imagining Cajun French–speaking babies was for Rock to open his mouth, and Carlos “Steady” Soto hadn’t stood a chance. From that very first word, she’d been toast. Complete and total toast.

She was
still
complete toast.

And he was never going to love her.
Never.
Capital N…And why should he? If he hadn’t had a good reason before, he certainly had one now. She’d nearly gotten him
killed
.

Another ravaging sob threatened in her chest, but this time she managed to hold it back.

“I just figured,” Steady began, tugging on his ear as he set out to explain his grand scheme, “that if we had any hope of making this thing work, of helping Rock out, we had to get the friggin’ Company off our backs. And the only way that was gonna happen was if Babineaux kicked the bucket. So we drew some blood, had Wild Bill fit him with explosives, let Ghost go out and simulate sniper shots, and voila!” he snapped his fingers, “Ding, dong, the Cajun’s dead!”

For a long moment after that rather short monologue, there was nothing but silence, each of the women staring at Steady, trying to determine if what he’d said made a lick of sense. Becky was the first to come to the conclusion that,
no
. No, it didn’t. Because she shook her head rapidly, like a cartoon character without the resulting
eye-ee-eye-ee-eye-ee
sound effect, and said, oh-so-eloquently, “
Huh?
”

“Yeah,” Vanessa nodded, a million questions spinning through her brain, but the most important one Becky seemed to have nailed. “What she said.”

Bill rolled his eyes. “I don’t know how the hell you managed a medical degree when you can’t explain yourself for shit.”

Steady’s face was wallpapered in big dollop of
what-the-hell-dude
. “I hit the high points.”

“Yeah,” Bill nodded then quickly shook his head. “Like that time you told me to take the high ground and cover you while you recon-ed that leafy foxhole in Colombia? When you just happened to leave out the part where you planned to toss a grenade in the sonofabitch, blowing it to Kingdom Come and bringing every FARC guerrilla within a quarter-mile radius down on our heads?”

“Ooh, ooh,” Ozzie raised his hand like a kid in a classroom. “I’ve got one. Like the time you told me to distract that Taliban warlord with my witty repartee so you could scout his compound for the location of his weapons stash. Only instead of marking the location of said stash, you called in an airstrike and watched it go
kaboom
while I was left to make like Usain Bolt and hightail it on outta there. That was classic.”

Steady waved an unconcerned hand. “Details are superfluous.”

“Jesus,” Bill’s expression was filled with disbelief, then he shrugged and turned back to the group at the table. “Steady drew Rock’s blood because we figured the CIA would want DNA evidence. Then I took a portion of that blood, put it into three bottle caps along with a small amount of plastic explosive, and set each with a charge before taping them to Rock’s chest. Ghost,” he pointed a chin at the man in question, “armed with blanks and the remote detonator for the charges, snuck out before The Company sent in backup. When Rock stepped out on the porch, ostensibly to give himself up, Ghost pulled the trigger on his sniper rifle and the remote detonator simultaneously, which resulted in the sound of gunshots and the high-powered bursts of blood you saw shooting out from Rock’s chest. Add a little more blood in a smear down the hall, fake a giant pool of blood with red food coloring, oil, and some thickening agent, and voila!” He snapped his fingers, grinning at Steady, who was now the one to roll his eyes. “Ding, dong, the Cajun’s dead.”

“Like I said,” Steady sighed, “superfluous details.”

“But—” Vanessa was trying to wrap her head around the complexity and brilliance of the plan. It wasn’t really working. Her head. Not the plan. Obviously, the plan had worked perfectly.

“Plus,” Ozzie added, “we figured they’d assume Rock had made enemies, being rogue and all—”

“I hate that word,” Rock grumbled, and Vanessa, even with her head spinning, once again experienced the overwhelming urge to reach over and grab his hand. But she figured she’d pressed her luck about as far as she could with that little move, so she laced her fingers together in her lap, squeezing them until the her nails bit into her knuckles.

“—so it’d be easy for them to jump to the conclusion there was an assassin out there looking to put an end to his life, which,” Ozzie frowned, “come to find out, is probably true. Dude,” he turned to Rock, eyes wide, “you’re unbelievably lucky you were already flopping around from those explosives, making yourself a moving target, or you’d probably be sporting a new hole in your head.”

“Don’t remind me,” Rock grunted, drawing a design on the tabletop with one long finger, frowning concernedly.

“And since we’re talking about that flopping around…” Ozzie continued, grinning like the cat who’d swallowed the canary. All he was missing was a feather sticking out of his mouth. “You could use some serious acting lessons. Daniel Day-Lewis you are not, my friend.”

Rock opened his mouth, probably to refute Ozzie’s aspersions upon his acting ability—after all, he
had
managed to fool the CIA and all the women present; Vanessa would
not
think about that—just as Boss’s phone began blasting the opening bars to “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

“Our ride is two minutes out,” the big guy announced after glancing at his iPhone’s screen. “Ghost, grab the body bag.”

“Body bag?” Eve interjected for the first time since they’d all gathered around the table, a definite hint of horror in her tone. “Why do we need a…a…
body
bag
?”

“Because Rock’s dead,” Boss shook his head, frowning at the poor, obviously overwhelmed woman like maybe she’d been absent the day they handed out extra IQ points. “We can’t very well let him walk out of here. No one but the people in this room, not even General Fuller or the other Knights, know what we’ve pulled off. And they won’t. Not until we get home. And Fuller won’t know until after we clear Rock’s name. Which begs the question, Ghost. You gonna be all right not telling Ali what’s going on?”

“She’s at her parents for the next two weeks, and she knows I’m on a mission. She doesn’t expect t’hear from me for days,” Ghost said, bending to pull a thick, black body bag from a duffel bag, laying it out on the floor and unzipping it.

Eve’s gulp was audible. And seeing that monstrosity there, watching Rock push up from the table, Vanessa felt herself on the precipice of bursting into tears yet again.

So close. She’d been so close to really losing him. Had that bullet that’d taken a bite out of his ear been two inches to the right…

This time, it was
her
gulp that was audible.

“
Chere
,” Rock leaned down to whisper in her hear, his hot breath tickling her lobe. “You didn’t do anything wrong today. You gotta stop beatin’ yourself up, okay?”

No, she couldn’t stop beating herself up for almost getting him killed. No way. No how.

Then he grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. “I’d have done the same thing if I were in your shoes,” he insisted, and Ozzie piped in with, “He’s right. We all would’ve done the same thing.”

“But how c-can you forgive me after I almost got you—”

“Vanessa,” he held her gaze until she could see the truth of his words in his eyes. It warmed her heart like nothing else ever could. “I don’t hold anything against you. You did what you thought was right. That’s all any of us can ever do.”

And a little bit of the weight that’d been pressing on her shoulders lifted away. Because if Rock could forgive her for what she’d done, then maybe she could begin working toward forgiving herself. Sucking in a shaky breath, she nodded. And Rock must’ve been satisfied with what he saw in her face, because he winked and then strolled over to lay down inside the body bag.

And, okay, seeing him there like that, inside that retched thing, had tears threatening again. But she figured she used up her allotment of everyone’s patience when it came to hysterics, so she held them back.

“You…you c-carry body bags around with you?” Eve asked, watching with wide, terrified eyes as Ghost zipped Rock into the thing.

“Of course,” Boss said, bending to grab four duffels, shouldering two on each arm. “This isn’t a game of Risk we’re playing here. Men die in this business. But one thing’s for certain: if they do, we never leave ’em behind.”

“Hoo-ah!” Ghost, Bill, Steady, and Ozzie all answered in unison. And hearing that call to arms, that battle cry to duty and brotherhood, sent a shiver streaking down Vanessa’s spine.

Black
Knights
Inc. Headquarters

21 hours later…

“
Why
can’t I go home now?” Eve asked.

Bill watched as she glanced warily around at the hard faces of the Knights. Everyone who’d been down in Costa Rica was now gathered around the conference table on the second floor of the shop, anxiously waiting to hear the sit-rep—situation report—from Rock. Everyone except for Ozzie, that is. He was over at his bank of computers monitoring all CIA activity to make sure no one was second-guessing the show they’d seen down in Central America.

Of course, after the eighteen-hour, two-plane-ride journey north to Chicago, and the three-hour power nap each of them had taken upon arriving home—they’d all been fall-on-their-faces tired—it was a pretty sure bet if they hadn’t heard anything from The Company by now, they were in the clear in that respect.

Still…the Knights never took chances. Case in point, the next words out of Boss’s mouth. “You can’t go home because you know too much.” The big guy’s jaw looked hard as a rock, his gray eyes flinty.

A hand jumped to Eve’s throat as she swallowed…loudly.

Becky punched Boss on the shoulder, glaring at him. And when Eve turned to Bill beseechingly, he had to fight hard to keep from reaching across the table to grab her hand. Consoling her, protecting her, reassuring her had been his job…once.

But not anymore.

“What the hell?” Boss demanded, glowering at his wife, rubbing his shoulder as if her puny swipe actually hurt him.

“The way you said that,
because
you
know
too
much
,” Becky lowered her voice, frowning lopsidedly, and it was actually a pretty good impersonation of Boss at his most badass, “made it sound like there was an unspoken
and
now
we
have
to
kill
you
tacked on to the end.”

“It did?” Boss turned to Eve, his scarred brow arched in a ragged line.

“M-maybe,” Eve admitted. “Sort of…”

Boss glanced around the table, his expression asking the rest of the Knights for verification of the ladies’ assessment. He frowned fiercely when he was met with various winces, shrugs, and nods.

“
See
,” Becky stressed, never one to pass up an I-told-you-so. “You could use a little work on your delivery.”

“That’s not what you said last night when I—”

“Jesus, God, please spare me,” Bill held up a hand.
Erp.
The thought of Becky and Boss getting in on made him throw up a little in his mouth. One thing a big brother never wanted to picture was his little sister doing the nasty.

“You need to stay here because the CIA might try to make a grab for you as soon as you leave,” Ozzie added, swiveling away from his computers in order to face the group, for once not being his usual irreverent and obnoxious self.

“What?” Eve glanced at him in alarm. “Why? I thought you said they bought the ruse, so—”

“Just because they bought it doesn’t mean they won’t think to double-check. And you’re an easy target, Eve.” Ozzie’s serious expression—yes, the kid could pull one out on occasion—softened. Although, Bill had to admit, the fact that the guy was wearing T-shirt with a picture of Spock that read
Trek
yourself
before
you
wreck
yourself
sort of ruined the whole hardened-operator persona he’d suddenly donned. “All it’d take is ten minutes with them poking and prodding at you before you’d fold like a cheap lawn chair.”

“Well I—” Eve began, but Bill decided it was time to interject. They didn’t have time to sit around pacifying Eve’s fears, and they really needed to get moving on, what he suspected was going to be, the monumental task of figuring out how to clear Rock’s name.

“Ozzie’s right,” he declared, making sure his harsh tone brooked no argument. When Eve turned to blink at him rapidly, raking in a shaky breath, he figured he’d nailed it. “You’ve still got a week left on the vacation time you took, so it’s best if you spend it here with us.” God help him. “Hopefully, by the end of that week, we’ll have either cleared up this misunderstanding with Rock or we’ll at least be well on our way to doing so. Then you’ll be free to leave.”

And, yes, that sounded a bit autocratic, even to his own ears. He figured it sounded autocratic to hers as well when her eyes narrowed to slits and her lips tightened.

“You can’t hold me here against my will.” She pinned him with a determined stare, one she wouldn’t have been able to pull off a decade ago.

“No, we can’t,” he assured her, allowing his face to soften. “But we’re asking. Nicely. Pretty please with a cherry on top?”

And, yes, he’d pulled out the big guns. Because that little phrase was one they’d used between the two of them that summer when they’d been young and dumb, when they’d mistakenly confused their mutual lust for something more. And maybe he was an asshole for whipping it out now, but he knew it would work like a charm. Because it always had…

“O-oh…” She looked flustered, just as he’d hoped. “Okay, but I—”

“Good,” he cut her off. He couldn’t stand it when she looked at him like that, so trustingly, so…innocently. She
wasn’t
innocent. Sheltered, yes. But not innocent.

Although she had been.

Once.

And he’d been such a goddamned idiot to try to protect that innocence and—

“All right,” Boss interrupted his thoughts, which was just as well. He needed to get his mind off the woman who’d—
spurned
, he guessed was the word—him, and get the sucker back in the game. “And since we’re talking logistics here, Ozzie, how goes the plans for Rock’s funeral?”

Okay, and how bizarre was that? To be talking about a guy’s funeral when he was sitting catty-corner from you?

“It’s good,” Ozzie nodded. “The Connelly brothers have a guy who works in the city morgue. He’s tagged a John Doe with Rock’s name and entered it into the system.” The Connelly brothers were a quartet of burly Chicago boys who manned the guardhouse by the main gate at BKI headquarters. And the crazy, Irish bastards had enough connections around the city—both legitimate and illegitimate—to make Bill’s head spin. “We’ve got a casket on order from Lakeview Funeral Home, and we’re negotiating a plot in Lincoln Cemetery. All BKI personnel are putting the finishing touches on their various missions, or abandoning them completely, and should be trickling home in the next seventy-two hours, give or take.”

And wasn’t that going to be fun? When the Knights walked in expecting to attend a funeral, only to realize Rock wasn’t really dead? If the Connelly brothers’ reactions to the news were anything to go by, Rock was going to be sporting some cracked ribs. Which was another thing Bill was still trying to get his head around, the fact that the Geralt, Manus, Toran, and Rafer Connelly could manage to simultaneously wrap a guy in a bear hug. Talk about one hell of a weird sight to behold. It’d looked like a human boulder pile, all huge and lumpy.

“If anyone is watching,” Ozzie continued, “it’ll look like we’re doing what we should be doing. Making all the arrangements to bury one of our own.”

And
bam!
As always, the I’s had been dotted and the T’s had been crossed. There were days when Bill still felt the need to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t simply dreaming up the well-oiled machine that was Black Knights Inc.

“Fantastic,” Boss declared. “So now it’s time to get down to brass tacks.” He turned to Rock, and Bill watched the ragin’ Cajun blow out a deep breath. The man still looked dead-dog tired, but there was no mistaking the determination in his eyes or the hard set of his jaw. Rock was finally ready to explain just what the
hell
was going on. “You wanna tell us why the fuck our government is saying you killed ten hardworking Americans?”

***

And there it was.

The question Rock knew the Black Knights had been dying to ask from the first second they had him back in the fold.

He glanced across the table at Vanessa. And even after everything, after all the terrible things he’d said to her, after the way he’d pulled her close with one hand while simultaneously pushing her away with the other, she still looked at him with such trust in her beautiful, dark eyes, such…
conviction.
Like no matter what he had to say, she’d never stop caring for him, never stop believing in him.

Dieu
, she was some kind of woman.

The
best
kind of woman. The kind that deserved a loyal, honorable, trustworthy man who’d worship the ground she walked on and love her with all of his heart. Too bad Rock could give her everything on that list except for that last thing.

The most important thing…

“First of all,” he began, slowly, then found himself stopping almost immediately in order to wrangle his erratic thoughts into some kind of order. This explanation was going to be long and laborious and, truth be told, he was probably going to step all over his dick trying to lay out the intricacies of the whole sordid tale. Not to mention the fact that he was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs over how the Knights were going to take it. He wasn’t sure whether they’d see what he’d chosen to do as something worth glorifying or reviling. Since, honestly, he reckoned it fell somewhere in the middle of the two.

“First of all,” he tried again, and this time he was able to finish his thought, “I want everyone to know, I didn’t kill those men. In fact, some of those deaths I wouldn’t have the first clue how to manage. I mean, how
do
you give a guy a heart attack?”

The question was meant to be rhetorical, but Ozzie interjected with, “Atropine.”

“What’s that?” Vanessa asked, her dark brows pulled down in a sharp V. While her attention was diverted, Rock found his gaze drifting over her pretty profile. And lower…to her breasts. Those beautiful breasts he’d kissed and caressed, those perfect nipples he’d licked and sucked and watched furl into little brown nubs. They were covered now by a lipstick red T-shirt that worked to emphasize the beauty of her black hair and olive skin, but he could remember them perfectly and—

Merde.
Now his dick was hard.

Way
to
go, dipshit
, he chastised himself even as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Dropping a hand, he tried to inconspicuously adjust himself into a more comfortable position, but when he glanced up, he found Ghost watching him with one black brow quirked in question.

He rolled his eyes and jerked his chin in Vanessa’s direction—better to admit the truth than have Ghost thinking he was some sicko perv who got wood from discussing all the esoteric ways to kill a man. Realization dawned in Ghost’s eyes, and he nodded once, sliding Vanessa a surreptitious glance before turning his attention to Ozzie.

And,
oui
, maybe Rock should take a page from Ghost’s book and pay attention, too. After all, it was his job, his
life
, they were in the middle of discussing.

“…derived from the nightshade plant,” Ozzie was saying. “It’s incredibly dangerous. Just a minute amount sprayed on the skin—”

“Great. Good,” Boss cut him off, coming as close to rolling his eyes as Boss ever came. “You’re a genius. We get it.” The big guy turned back to Rock. “Continue, will you?”

“
Oui.
” Rock didn’t relish the thought of laying everything out on the table. But as his dear ol’ daddy used to say,
It’s time to shit or get off the pot.
He’d been keeping secrets from the Knights for long enough, and it was time they knew the truth. “So, while I didn’t do the actual killin’, I
did
interrogate them. I was the one to extract confessions from them.” And, oh, the horror of digging around inside those men’s heads. Of discovering what made them tick, what made them happy or sad or horny or scared…

If it was possible to catch sociopathy from the scum of the Earth, then Rock was doomed. Because he’d gotten closer to rolling around in the psychological muck with those men than anyone ever should.

“That’s why your vanishing acts meshed with their kidnapping reports,” Ozzie said. “You were interrogating them.”

“
Oui.
”

“But interrogating them for what? Get them to confess to what?” Steady asked, leaning forward on the conference table, lacing his fingers together. Everyone liked to give Steady shit for being flaky, but the truth of the matter was, the man had a mind like a steel trap. He was the only Knight in residence who had a chance of giving Ozzie a run for the money in the IQ department, which was probably why the two of them got on so well. A case of über brain meeting über brain…

“The better question would be, what
didn’t
they confess to,” he said, trying to push away the memories of some of those confessions, of hearing the filth that spewed from the men’s mouths, of seeing their utterly inhuman lack of remorse for what they’d done.

Until they’d been caught, of course.

They’d always been sorry as hell to have been caught.

“Drug traffickin’, weapons deals, slave trade, child prostitution, murder, rape, extortion, money launderin’, the selling of military secrets.” The list went on and on. “You name it; these men did it. But in order to get a visit from me, they had to have knowingly participated in, or ordered the murder of, an innocent. That was a rule.”

Boss turned a page in the dossier in front of him. The one that listed all ten of the men Rock was accused of killing. And, oh yeah, there was the added benefit of having the guys’ pictures printed there as well.

Like Rock really needed any reminders…

The name, date of birth, face, and list of crimes of each of those men had been etched on the back of his brain with a dull knife.

“Nothing in the files suggests these men were involved in anything illegal,” Boss muttered, slowly flipping pages.