Hell on Wheels (Black Knights Inc. #1)(53)

Of course, before he’d run off to do whatever it was he’d just done, he’d had the audacity to do an about-face and kiss the daylights out of her.

So what the h-e-double-hockey-sticks?

Either he wanted her or he didn’t want her. The back and forth was making her insane.

She glanced up to find him watching her, his expression growing alarmed.

Uh, what was the question again?

Oh, yeah, what was she thinking about?

So much had happened in such a short period of time with so little sleep in between that her usually quick brain was reduced to a slow-moving, doughy mush—about the consistency of pancake batter. Pancake batter to go along with syrup.

How appropriate.

“Pancakes,” she finally told him, figuring that was as close to the truth as anything else.

His face relaxed as he lifted one dark brow. “Hungry?”

“No. Not really. Although, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m starting to get a craving. Weird, huh?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Grigg always said you made the best pancakes.”

A hard knot instantly formed in her stomach, nauseating her.

That’d been her special treat for Grigg whenever he’d come home on leave or during the few visits he’d made back to North Carolina after joining the Knights. Usually that special treat was also shared with whichever girl Grigg’d managed to bring home with him the night before.

That had been his M.O. Hook up with some woman he met in a bar and cart her back to Ali’s spare bedroom for a night of headboard-pounding debauchery—because, of course, he couldn’t take his newest conquest to their parent’s house. He had some discretion, after all.

Come on Ali, he’d once said when she accused him of being a total hound dog, a guy like me works hard and plays hard. If you’d move that damned bed away from the wall, you wouldn’t even know I was there.

Um, yeah right. ’Cause it was so easy to ignore Oh, Grigg, yes! Oh, Grigg. Oh, Grigg. Yes, yes, yes!

She smiled sadly, missing her big, stupid, lusty brother like crazy. What she wouldn’t give to wake up tomorrow morning to make pancakes for him and whatever barfly he’d managed to lure home with his masculine wiles.

“Yeah,” she told Nate now, “I do make good pancakes. At least, his lady friends always seemed to like them.”

He cocked his head.

“You know Grigg. He was always with someone. Plus…” she frowned and glanced down at the menacing looking gun in her hand. She knew how to handle the weapon—Grigg had made sure of that—but the thing still looked foreign with her pink-tipped fingers curled around the handle. Whose life was she living? Certainly not hers. She was a kindergarten teacher, for Pete’s sake.

“Plus,” she shook her head and set the gun on the paint bucket beside her, wiping her sweaty palm on the fine leather of Becky’s borrowed chaps. “After their…uh, excursions, they were always hungry. And I figured it was a better send-off than Grigg would give them. He usually just kissed them at the door and made some asinine noises about calling them when he was next in-country.” She rolled her eyes. “For some reason, it made them feel better to hear it and Grigg knew that, so he said it. I gave him hell about it, the lying, but he said it wasn’t a lie so much as an altruistic misrepresentation of the truth. Which, if you ask me, is just a bunch of hooey. Still, those women never complained, so I always figured they were as much to blame as my brother who seemed to have a perpetual pilot light going behind his zipper. Not that he was so different from other handsome, single men of his age, but a baby sister always expects more from her big brother. I’ll be the first to admit I suffered a little hero worship where Grigg was concerned and I—”

“Ali,” Nate interrupted softly, “it’s gonna be all right.”

Crapola.

She beat back the burn of tears.

There went her mouth again. Put her in a stressful situation, add a nice dollop of rejection and humiliation along with a big ol’ spoonful of Nate Weller—stir until frothy—and she suddenly couldn’t stop yammering.

It was a problem, but for the life of her, short of biting her tongue in half, she didn’t know how to solve it.

Swallowing, she released her pent-up breath and met his steady gaze.

“How do you know it’ll be all right?” she asked him, not even caring about the pleading edge to her voice.

“’Cause I won’t let it turn out any other way.”

God help her when he said things like that.





Chapter Twelve


“ETA on Christian, Mac, and Jamin is forty-eight hours,” Becky reported as she stood leaning a slim shoulder against the metal doorjamb to Frank’s office.

The sight of her there, so negligent and unknowingly sexy and so, so…young made Frank grit his teeth as he reached for the one thing that would keep him from jumping down her perfectly lovely throat just for being her. For being the one thing on the face of the planet he craved more than those damned root beer Dum Dums, or that new shipment of thermal imagery optics they’d all been waiting on for the last two weeks, or…or his next stinking breath, come to think of it.

“Jamin?”

“Yeah,” she crossed one bare foot over the other. Her little toenails were painted a bright, do-me-big-boy red.