Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(31)
So back the hell off, you big, dumb, blind, exasperating oaf! She couldn’t say that last part. Not if she valued her job—which she did. Unfortunately. There was something about eating three times a day that appealed to her. Then, of course, there was her lollipop habit. Not cheap.
“Didn’t you tell me just this morning that you were learning all of this in order to take on a more lucrative position within our organization? Well, stress comes with the job, Rebecca. Get used to it.”
Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. Grrreat. God, he made her want to get a name change.
And yes, she’d told him this morning after she’d confessed how she’d broken into Grigg’s personal email account that she was learning these rather, er, dubious computer skills from Ozzie in order to better serve the team. Frank’d been ape-shit pissed enough about that little revelation, she figured it was probably prudent he not know Ghost was teaching her to shoot, Billy was giving her private lessons on explosives, and Steady was schooling her on rudimentary field medicine.
Yepper. It was best to just keep all that to herself. Ease him into the idea of her joining the team, really joining the team, a little at a time.
But first, she had to handle him looming over her, casting that monster shadow with his unbelievably wide shoulders, heating her back with the insidious warmth of his hard thighs, smelling like hot leather and cold beer and…Frank—which she could totally do. Yessiree, she could handle it. No problem.
Her fingers typed in the wrong command, and she cursed.
“I’m in,” Ozzie announced, and she threw her hands in the air.
In consolation, she unwrapped a grape Dum Dum and angrily plugged it into her frowning mouth. She nearly cracked a tooth, but seconds later the explosion of sugary flavor helped her focus on the task at hand instead of Frank’s distracting nearness.
Oh, and the teensy tiny minor fact that he was a total dill-hole where she was concerned.
Exiting her machine, she rolled her chair toward Ozzie’s monitor and watched code zip across the screen. They were plugged into the City of Chicago’s surveillance system. Not a totally difficult hack job, but the resident computer virtuoso had beaten her again.
Whatever.
She’d continue to practice. At everything.
Because maybe then Frank would take her seriously, instead of viewing her as the necessary nuisance that kept all their covers intact. Maybe then he’d see her as a grown woman instead of the grease-covered, lollipop-sucking little sister of one of his men. Maybe then—
“Now we just need to upload the partial picture we got of Mystery Man from Delilah’s security camera into my program and compare it to possible matches in the city’s system. If we can get a better picture of the guy’s face, we can run it through the facial recognition software and determine just who in the world we’re dealing with,” Ozzie explained while his fingers continued to blur above the keyboard.
“Did you get a chance to see this guy?” Dan asked Ali. “Is he the one following you?”
Ali leaned in closer to the upper right hand corner of Ozzie’s monitor where the grainy photo of Mystery Man flickered rapidly as it was compared to the city’s surveillance footage.
“Looks like him,” she murmured, concentrating on the picture. “The hair’s right. The build’s right. He’s certainly not my mugger. That guy was huge. More the size of Frank, but…” she frowned at the photo, “I can’t positively tell if that’s my elusive shadow or not,” she finished with frustration.
Yes well, they were all frustrated. But the fact that the guy had simply disappeared after supposedly pointing a gun at Ali’s head wasn’t what was putting a hard kink in Becky’s mood.
Nope. Her kink had everything to do with a certain man whose nom de guerre was Boss.
Why did he have to be such a hardass? Why couldn’t he just admit—
Suddenly the flickering stopped, and two photos appeared side-by-side on Ozzie’s computer screen.
“Damn, the boy’s good,” Dan whistled when the two snapshots pulled from the city’s site revealed less than the one taken from Delilah’s. They were clearly of the same man, but in both photos the guy’s face was averted. “Seems to know just where the cameras are and is careful to avoid them.”
“Told ya,” Ghost muttered. “The guy had spook written all over ’im.”
“CIA?” Frank asked, thankfully turning away and taking his heat, smell, and omnipresence with him. She could finally draw in a full breath.
“If I had t’ hazard a guess,” Ghost replied.
She noticed how Ali’s eyes widened at that particularly disturbing news and wondered if the woman consciously realized she’d just taken a step closer to Ghost, or if Ghost realized he’d unhesitatingly placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
Those two are fighting a losing battle, she thought. They should just do it already and get it over with.
Yeah, right. Who was she trying to kid? Like she had any expertise when it came to the vagaries of romance, considering the only things keeping her warm at night were flannel sheets and Mr. Blue.
She was such a loser. Here she was, twenty-five years old, not too sore on the ol’ eyes—at least that’s what most of her friends of the male persuasion assured her—and all her action came from a seven-inch piece of sculpted bright blue rubber that required D batteries.