In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(31)

“I know,” Becky moaned, jerking her gaze away. “It’s a disaster. Please talk to me about something else.”

“Okay,” she said, racking her brain for a change of topic as she shivered in response to the charged atmosphere. She grabbed at the concern foremost on her mind. “Please tell me this is the last leg of the trip. I just want to be home.”

Becky shook her head and fished around in her pocket for another sucker. “I wish I could. But you’ll be glad to learn there are only two more transfers in our future. We’re catching a military transport from here to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. From there, you and I will hop on a commercial flight back to O’Hare.”

“Just you and me? What about the others?”

“They’ll be taking another military transport from Andrews to Great Lakes Naval Base.”

“But why aren’t we all going together?”

Becky sighed and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. In response, Eve’s intestines tied themselves in big, loopy bows because that was Becky’s habitual forerunner to the words, you’re not going to like this.

“You’re not going to like this…”

Sometimes she hated being right.

“What am I not going to like?”

“The press is meeting us there.”

“Oh crap.”

She absolutely hated the press. They’d dogged her her entire life, reporting on every humiliation she’d ever suffered…and she’d suffered more than a few.

“Must we talk to them?” she asked.

“Yes,” Becky stressed, “we must. Apparently we’re one of the top stories, so we’re going to have to withstand our time in the limelight. I say we just tell our tale—pun intended—and get it the hell over with so our lives can go back to normal. The sooner the better. My guys can’t afford to have their faces splashed all over the front page. Hell, you’ve seen the lengths they’ve gone to to ensure our travel itinerary is so convoluted no one will ever be able to trace our movements. Can you imagine them cheesing it for the reporters? No way.” She shook her head. “I need you to help me do everything humanly possible to make sure this story dies a quick and painless death.”

“Fine by me. I’d just as soon it never breathed life in the first place, but…uh, your guys?” She raised a brow, wondering if Becky even realized how proprietary she sounded.

“Huh?”

“You called them your guys.” She stressed the last two words.

“Yeah. That’s kinda how I think of them…as mine, you know?”

No, she didn’t know. She couldn’t imagine living day in and day out with a bunch of brutes the likes of Frank Knight and Billy Reichert.

“They’re like my brothers,” Becky added.

Uh-huh. “And Frank, er, Boss? Is he one of your brothers?”

Becky swallowed and started studying her dirty hospital booties as if they were made from the most fascinating weave on the planet. “I feel a lot of things when it comes to Frank Knight,” she finally admitted. “Sisterly certainly isn’t one of them.”

Yup, just as she Eve suspected.

Glancing again at the big man, she grimaced before wrapping a comforting arm around her friend’s shoulders.

She very much feared Becky was headed for deep, deep trouble where Frank Knight was concerned.

***

Frank glanced at Angel and Bill pacing along the far end of the dock, and tried like hell to remember just exactly what’d happened down in the Patton’s cold, sterile sick bay.

It was all a blur.

All of it except for that kiss.

He remembered that kiss very, very clearly.

Even blitzed out of his ever-lovin’ mind on some heavy duty narcotics, he’d still realized the dead last thing he should do was pull her sweet lips down to his.

He knew that, but he hadn’t been able to help himself.

And then she kissed him back, and she was so much more…mind-boggling than he ever imagined. Her cool fingers had been on his face, her soft breasts had been on his chest, her silky, hot tongue had tangled with his, and he knew he was doing the exact thing he always swore he’d never do, but…he just hadn’t been able to help himself.

Then she’d pulled away, and the room suddenly closed in on him. The next thing he remembered was the doctor leaning over him, shaking him awake, and asking him all manner of inane questions.

After the drugs wore off, he initially thought it was all a dream, but then she was barely able to look at him as the chopper lifted them from the destroyer’s big deck and he knew it was more than just another one of his very, very real fantasies starring him and her and the nearest horizontal surface.

Shit. He was such an *!

He stole another glance at her as Angel sauntered up behind him.

“She is not as tough as she would have everyone believe,” the former Mossad agent rasped quietly.

“I know.”

“You are not the right man for her.”

He swung around to glare at the Israeli’s calm, inscrutable face. Had he been that obvious? “What would you know about it?”

“I know the look of a man in lust, and I know the object of a man’s lust very rarely meets a…shall we say, happy end.”