In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(50)
“Shit, shit, shit!” He yelled and then glared at the lone sheet remaining from the stack. It sat there, partially hanging over the side of his desk, taunting him with its tenacious presence. He imagined that sheet of paper was his ridiculous infatuation with Becky Reichert, hanging on despite the odds and the overwhelming current of events surrounding it.
With a vicious swipe of his hand, he sent it flying down to join its wildly strewn compatriots.
He should’ve felt better afterward…
He didn’t. Especially when he heard Ozzie’s voice drift through the closed door, “What the hell did you do to Boss?”
“Hit him with a violent torpedo of truth, I think,” Bill replied.
Ozzie barked out a laugh. “Good ol’ Charlie Sheen.”
Frank had no idea what that meant. Probably something to do with pop culture—of which Ozzie was a master. Still, regardless of the meaning behind the phrase, the truth of Bill’s words had hit him like a violent torpedo of truth.
Because Bill was absolutely right. If things were different, if Shell hadn’t been part of the equation, he’d have given into his base desires months ago. Hell, probably years ago. And that made him no better than the man who’d sired him, the man he swore he’d never become.
The rotten apple sure doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it? Gee thanks, Dad.
Chapter Twelve
“It’s unseasonably nice outside,” Becky announced around a Dum Dum as she popped her head into Frank’s office, interrupting the situation report Ozzie was giving to all the Knights. Everyone—excluding Ghost, who was staying with his fiancée, Ali, on the East Coast until she finished teaching the semester’s classes—had finally returned from whatever conference, assignment, or mission they’d been tasked with, and the small office was full to bursting with hardened operators.
But there was someone glaringly absent from the group. Who could that be? Oh, right. Her.
It irked her to no end that she wasn’t allowed in on such meetings. She worked with these guys, and gal—let’s not forget Vanessa Cordero, the new hotshot communications specialist—every day. She cleaned their wounds and their underwear. They were her frickin’ family, for Pete’s sake, but when it came to their missions, she was treated like a nosy civilian, and that just really, really, really pissed her off.
Not that she didn’t know what was going on with her guys out in the field…
She used the hacking skills Ozzie taught her to break into their computer system and make herself privy to all of the Knights’ confidential files. Anytime there was an update on one of the guys out on a mission, she got an email notifying her of their new status, so yeah, Frank might try his best to keep her out of the loop, but she was definitely smack-dab in the loop and, just to irritate him, she’d made it her life’s mission to impinge whenever possible, whenever she knew the information being discussed wasn’t critical—like now.
“How nice is it?” Ozzie asked, his blue eyes lighting up like a kid being offered a shiny new bike.
Good ol’ Ozzie.
She could always depend on him to have her back, especially when it meant they’d likely get to go do something fun. And a warm day in Chicago in October absolutely demanded that they go do something fun.
She popped the grape-flavored lollipop out of her mouth so she could blow him a raspberry, then grinned and wiggled her eyebrows, surveying the rest of the group. “It’s sixty degrees outside, likely the last day it’ll be nice enough to take the bikes out. What do you say we all mount up, ride over to Delilah’s, and have ourselves some dogs? Frank?” Last night, when she freaked out, he’d held her safe and warm in his arms. But today? Today he was back to treating her like a plague-carrier which was just… perfect. Not. “How long before you can’t eat or drink?”
“I’m supposed to begin fasting at eighteen-hundred,” he grumbled, obviously biting his tongue on the harsh scolding he usually had ready for whenever she interrupted one of their “confidential” gatherings.
Billy was leaning against the wall beside the door. She grabbed his wrist to glance down at his waterproof diver’s watch. They had two hours. “So we’ll have the blue-hair special. Fine by me. What do you all say? Winter’s almost here. This may be our last chance…”
Again, she wiggled her eyebrows enticingly. All the Knights suffered from a form of seasonal affective disorder when winter rolled around. Oh, not because the endless cold, cloudy Windy City days caused them to slip into depression, but because the endless cold, cloudy Windy City days kept them from their favorite pastime…namely mounting a couple of tons of hand-rolled steel and rumbling toward the freedom of the open road.
“But the newbies don’t have bikes yet,” Ozzie shook his head despairingly, referring to the three newest members of Black Knights Inc. “And Boss can’t ride Boss Hog with only one arm. The stretch is way too far.”
True. Frank’s chopper—the pearl-colored beauty/beast appropriately named Boss Hog—was impossible to operate one-handed. In fact, all their choppers were impossible to operate one-handed. Trying to do so was sure to result in a terminal case of road rash.
“Boss can ride with me, and the rest of you can take one of the production bikes,” she declared, anxious to get out of the shop and away from the charged atmosphere Frank had created since their return. Or perhaps it’d be more accurate to say the atmosphere had become supercharged. It’d always hummed with electricity anytime the two of them were in the same room together, but now? Man, now the small hairs on her neck were perpetually twanged upright in warning.