In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(49)

Becky had taken to eating Dum Dums years ago as a way to help herself quit smoking. She liked all the flavors except root beer, which she’d pitched in the trash until the day she found out root beer was Frank’s favorite. Then she started stashing the little treats in places he was sure to discover them. His desk drawer, his coffee mug, his shirt pockets.

He’d professed irritation at the time—because he was unable to resist the sugary treats, and it severely pissed him off anytime his willpower failed him. But right now, he’d give anything to once more be on the receiving end of one of those sweet suckers.

Instead it was Angel, that prick…

Bill turned toward the railing, resting his elbows on the top rung. “I don’t know how to feel about that.” He motioned with a jerk of his chin toward the pair laughing and carrying on below.

“Neither do I,” Frank admitted.

Bill shot him a sharp glance. “I always kind of figured it’d be you.”

“It’d be me what?”

“You know,” Bill shrugged. “I figured it’d be you who ended up with Becky.”

“And why would you think that?”

“Because of the way you two constantly dance around each other like boxers, taking strips out of each other’s hide.”

Frank made a face clearly stating his belief that Bill must be suffering from some sort of insanity.

Bill rolled his eyes. “Goddamn, Boss. Are you gonna make me say it?”

“I guess so, since I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“The way you guys continually snipe at each other…it always sort of feels like…I don’t know…foreplay.”

“Goddamnit, Bill!”

“What? You made me say it. And just because she’s my sister, I’m not supposed to notice these things?”

“You’re damned right!” Frank barked, embarrassed, incensed, more than a little bit chagrined because, in truth, it always sort of felt like foreplay.

“Oh, come on. I’d have to be a blind man.”

“Yeah well, I’d never do anything about it.” At least not when I’m stone-cold sober. Give me a few narcotics, and then I can’t keep my flippin’ hands to myself.

“I know.” Bill nodded, still watching him with too much intensity. “You’d never breach the sanctity of the employee/employer relationship which, God knows, I respect you for. But I just figured someday…” He let the sentence dangle.

Someday. If the guy only knew what’d happened down in the Patton’s sick bay…

“She’s too young for me,” he spoke aloud the mantra that’d circled around in his head for over three years.

“Maybe,” Bill agreed, and a new world record for pounds-per-square-inch of pressure was set by Frank’s jaw. “But what’s a few years when we’re talking about amour?”

Aw, goddamnit. He needed to nip this thing in the bud right here and now. Turning to Bill, he managed to unclamp his teeth and let the man see the raw, profligate heat in his eyes. “Who’s talking love, Bill?”

See? See what I feel for your sister? It’s straight-up, one-hundred-percent, f*ck-all-night lust.

But instead of getting pissed like he should have, like Frank wanted him to, Bill simply tilted his head and narrowed his eyes in speculation.

“Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine. Or leave a kiss but in the cup, and I’ll not look for wine…”

“What the hell? You’re quoting poetry now? Jesus H. Christ!” Someone please shoot me!

“My point is, Boss,” Bill stressed, “that what I’ve seen in your eyes when you look at my sister isn’t always what you’re showing me right now.”

Frank growled and once more faced the railing, silently cursing Bill for seeing too far, too much. After a long moment, he swallowed down his hostility and ventured, “And you’d have been okay with that? With me and Becky?”

“If you loved her?”

He groaned like he was being tortured—which he was. “Yeah, if I loved her.”

“Yeah, Boss. I’d be okay with that, but I don’t think you would.”

“You’re damned right! It makes me a filthy lecher!”

It was sudden understanding he saw flicker through Bill’s dark gaze, a sort of ah-ha moment. Though, if Bill was just now light-bulbing the fact that he was too old for Becky, then the guy was a lot slower than Frank ever guessed, and that didn’t make a damn bit of sense given Bill was usually nose-deep in a novel the size of a small coffee table.

“I don’t think the age gap is problem, Boss,” Bill replied. “One, because what’s a decade and some change when you come right down to it? And two, because I know you. This has nothing to do with Becky’s age or your age and everything to do with that woman up in Lincoln Park.”

Don’t punch him. Don’t punch him. Don’t…

“Shit!” he growled as he stomped away from the railing, slamming the door to his office behind him and throwing himself down in his desk chair until the metal springs wailed for sweet mercy.

Instead of punching Bill for his unwelcome insight, he satisfied himself by slamming his palm down on the scarred surface of his wooden desk. He regretted the move when it caused a stack of papers, precariously perched close to the edge, to slip over. The stack fluttered to the floor in a giant, disorganized mess.