Hell for Leather (Black Knights Inc. #6)(89)

What he needed to take care of? He needed to take care of the idiotic, ill-timed, ill-fated love he’d developed for her. That’s what he needed to take care of.

“Delilah, I—” He stopped. Unsure of how to go on. Uncertain, even, if he should. How did he tell her all the things he felt, all the things she meant to him now and couldn’t mean to him in the future? How did he tell her about—

“What is it, Mac?”

He swallowed. Damn, were those tears burning the back of his nose? “I’ll…uh…I’ll see you later, darlin’.”

And with that, he turned tail and ran like the yellow-bellied coward he was.





Chapter Twenty-three


Red Delilah’s Biker Bar

Three weeks later…

I’ll see you later, darlin’…

Whenever it was quiet and empty in the bar, like now, Mac’s last words echoed through Delilah’s head, taunting her.

For the first week, those five words had filled her with hope. Hope that he would walk through her door at any moment. Hope that he would take her in his arms and tell her he’d been crazy not to give her, give them, a chance. Hope that he would see that what they had was too precious and rare to let slip away before it was ever given an opportunity to really start.

But one week slid into two, and he’d done none of those things. Her hope had been replaced with disbelief. Disbelief and hurt. She couldn’t understand why he was avoiding her. That had never been part of their bargain. And if it had been, she wouldn’t have signed herself up for it. Because she’d never, never been prepared to give up everything. To give up his friendship. To give up the chance of seeing his dazzling smile or his adorably crooked nose. To give up ever hearing his slow, Texas drawl.

And then it’d occurred to her that perhaps he wasn’t avoiding her at all. That perhaps he was simply out on a mission somewhere, deep in a jungle or sweating in some desert. He was a super-secret spy-guy, right?

But she’d quickly been relieved of that little misconception when, one night after a handful of the Knights came in to enjoy some peanuts and brews, she’d oh-so-casually let slip a question to Ozzie about Mac’s “secret” whereabouts. Ozzie had frowned and informed her that there was nothing secretive about it. Mac was back at the shop, cleaning out the fuel lines on Siren.

Uh-huh. And there’d gone that little glimmer of optimism, crushed beneath Ozzie’s words as surely as Roscoe Porter—one of her most loyal patrons—crushed beer cans against his big, wrinkled forehead.

Which brought her to today. Three weeks into what she’d come to call The Great Disappearing Act. And even though the words I’ll see you later, darlin’ still accosted her from time to time, they no longer brought with them hope or disappointment or hurt. Nope. Now they just pissed her off.

What the hell is wrong with him? The man doesn’t even have the decency to—

“You’re going to slice off a finger the way you’re handling that knife,” her Uncle Theo observed. She was behind the bar, cutting up lemons and limes to be used in cocktails. When she glanced at him—he was sitting on a stool across from her, the Chicago Sun-Times in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other—she couldn’t stop the little sigh of relief that whispered from between her lips. He was healthy. And alive. And save for a little scar near his temple and the crutches he still had to use, no one looking at him would know what a harrowing ordeal he’d been through.

But she would never forget. Never forget the fear in his eyes. The tears streaming down his face. The blood. God, there’d been a lot of blood…

No, she’d never forget. Not if she lived to be a hundred years old. She wiped her hands on her apron and reached across the bar, squeezing his hand.

He made a clucking noise, his bushy, white mustache drooping at the corners. “How long until you stop needing to touch me every thirty seconds to assure yourself I’m really here?”

She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I don’t know. It might be a while yet.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but a sharp knock on the front door sent Fido scrambling out from under her feet and racing around the end of the bar. His doggy nails scraped against the hardwood floor, alerting her to the fact that it was probably time to take out the clippers. Dog ownership had its own learning curve, one she was enjoying immensely. And besides seeing her uncle healthy and happy—well, as happy as he could be considering he’d watched one of his oldest acquaintances die at the hands of terrorists. She knew he was still struggling with that—nothing gave her more pleasure than to know Fido had completely recovered. The dog had nothing to show for his close brush with death except for a six-inch scar furrowing through the yellow hair on his chest.

“Yorp! Yorp! Yorpyorpyorp!” he sang happily as both Delilah and her uncle yelled toward the door, “We’re closed!”

“It’s Zoelner!” came the reply from outside, and Delilah’s hand jumped to her throat when her heart tried to escape from her body via that route.

Mac…. Something had happened to Mac and—

She hopped over the bar, not bothering to use the hinged ledge at the end. Hurdling a barstool, she was across the room in two seconds, twisting the locks and throwing open the door. Zoelner stood on the threshold in jeans and a leather jacket, his expression unreadable.