In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(34)
“Since you had a bullet cut out of your chest a couple of months ago.”
“Bah,” he waved a baseball-glove-sized hand through the air. “I’m fit as a fiddle.” To prove it, he tilted his head back, beat his heavy chest, and did a pretty terrible Tarzan impression.
She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not sure, but I think you just insulted every self-respecting ape on the planet.”
He chuckled and caught her up in a bear hug that lifted her completely off the sidewalk and had her ribs protesting.
She didn’t care. She hugged him back with equal fervor.
“I’m sure glad you’re back in one piece,” he told her gruffly. “You had us all scared half to death.”
“I’m glad to be back,” she managed to wheeze.
“Yo, Tarzan,” Rock’s cheerful drawl sounded behind her. “Let go of Jane before you squeeze the life outta her.”
“Rock!” she whooped and ran through the gates once Manus set her back on her feet. This time she didn’t refrain from jumping into the set of strong arms stretched toward her.
“Oomph,” Rock staggered exaggeratedly, the heels of his alligator cowboy boots clacking against the sidewalk. “What did those pirates feedya? Cheeseburgers and apple pie?”
“Can it, you big Cajun,” she growled even as she planted a smacking kiss on his ear.
“You know, ma petite, I’m used to comin’ home to find you’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest, but this last episode beats all. Pirates? Really, Becky?”
“It’s not like I do it on purpose. Trouble just seems to find me.”
“Hmm,” he murmured noncommittally, turning his sweat-stained John Deere baseball cap around backward so he could get a good look at her. A frown had the corners of his dark goatee drooping.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t be there, chère.” He softly touched her injured cheek. “I couldn’t get back in time to make the transport outta here.”
“Don’t sweat it. Frank, Billy, and Angel pulled off the rescue without a hitch.” She took his arm and started pulling him toward the shop. She just wanted to get inside.
Funny, when she left to go on vacation almost a month before, after Patti’s death and Frank’s promise to do everything in his power to impede her becoming an operator, she thought she couldn’t escape this place fast enough.
Now? Well, now all she wanted to do was lock herself inside the old factory’s thick, warm walls until the memory of Sharif’s brutal pistol carving a place into her temple and her flying over the Patton’s railing didn’t leave her weak and shaky.
“So I heard and saw,” Rock said. “Ya looked very brave, très vaillant, givin’ your story to the reporters.” He used his key to unlock the shop’s big double doors. They popped open with a muted hiss as the airlock released. He gestured for her to precede him, and she gratefully stepped over the threshold and into her safe, welcoming, ofttimes chaotic world. “Very tragic and heroic at the same time what with your cheek and tremblin’ lips. The newspapers and networks are eatin’ it up.”
Ugh. She hadn’t realized her lips trembled. Her knees? Yepper, they’d been knocking together like wind chimes in a hurricane, but she thought she’d managed to keep her lips under control.
Apparently not.
Great. Just…frickin’ great.
She and Eve had arrived at O’Hare International Airport only to be hustled by airport staff into a tight, windowless room packed to the brim with reporters shoving microphones in their faces. The flash of camera bulbs had been blinding and disorienting but, together with Eve, she’d recounted the tale of their capture, captivity, and eventual liberation by a heroic and mysterious team of men.
They’d stuck to the script and Becky, with her knocking knees and dripping palms, envied Eve’s ability to remain cool and unruffled—of course, she comforted herself with the thought that Eve had had a lot more practice dealing with the press.
And she especially wished she’d had just an ounce of Eve’s unflappable poise when Samantha Tate, one of the Chicago Tribune’s newest and most ambitious young investigative reporters, called out, “Miss Reichert, do you think your life is jinxed given that this most recent incident is coming so soon on the heels of the supposedly gang-related shooting outside the front gates of your business, which resulted in the brutal death of one of your employees?”
There were so many offensive things in the question, that she’d opened her mouth only to have nothing come out but an insulted sputter.
First of all, her life wasn’t jinxed. It was just that trouble tended to run hand-in-hand with danger, and she happened to pal around with a very dangerous crowd. Second, Miss Tate’s emphasis on the word supposedly in reference to the drive-by shooting slipped under her skin until the image of wrapping her hands around the woman’s thin white neck burned very bright in her mind’s eye. They’d all worked incredibly hard to make sure that story was fed to the press, and General Fuller had had to pull—er, yank—a lot of strings to ensure the truth of that incident stayed buried in the bottom of some file in some safe room in some forgotten, bombproof basement at the Pentagon.
Not to be all Jack Nicholson-y, but the world couldn’t handle the truth of what’d really happened that day. The truth that one of their own senators had hired a group of thugs out of Las Vegas to end the lives of a sanctioned government operator and the woman with him who happened to be holding the evidence that proved the senator’s culpability in treason.