In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(54)
“I’m sorry, okay!” she yelled, sudden tears pricking behind her eyes, which only pissed her off further. If she stared bawling right there in the middle of her favorite bar, she swore she’d never forgive him.
“You’re…you’re sorry?” he sputtered. Yep, she’d never before willingly offered up an apology, so she could understand his incredulity now. “For what?” he demanded, still looming over her until she felt the need to shrink down into herself. She had to make a conscious effort to keep her spine straight when her shoulders wanted ever so much to slink up around her ears.
“For the time we…for w-what happened on the Patton,” she muttered as she darted a glance around the room to make sure no one else had heard that juicy little nugget. “I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you like that, and I’m…I just wanted to say I’m sorry, okay? I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I want things to be all right between us.”
“Sonofabitch.” He briefly covered his eyes with his big hand. Then he dragged his palm down over his face and the raspy stubble on his jaw. Taking a deep breath, looking like he’d just aged ten years, he hooked a toe in the rungs of a barstool, yanked it out, and plopped onto the seat with a groan of weariness, or embarrassment, or some other emotion she couldn’t name.
Ugh, this was turning out way worse than she ever imagined. Maybe she should’ve listened to Angel.
Except…hold the phone, Frank’s eyes were strangely soft when he finally turned toward her. “It wasn’t your fault, honey.”
Honey. Honey?
If there’d been a record playing, the needle would’ve scratched across the vinyl surface. Scccrrriiitch. Because Frank Knight was not one for endearments. Hell, before the deal they made on the Patton, he’d refused to call her anything more informal than Rebecca, much less something as personal as honey.
She sat there for a second. Completely pole-axed. All she could think was honey, honey…honey?
Finally, shaking her head like a dog shakes off water, she managed, “Of course it’s my fault. You were out of your frickin’ mind.”
“Mmm,” he agreed, nodding his head. “Just enough out of my mind to do something I’ve always wanted to do.”
Her heart stopped beating. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Becky.” He sighed, grabbing her pint of Guinness and taking a big slug. She couldn’t help but check the glowing neon Budweiser clock above the bar to make sure he wasn’t violating his food and drink cut-off time. He still had fifteen minutes. “Don’t pick this moment to turn dense.”
So Angel was right. He had wanted to kiss her.
“But if you’ve always wanted to kiss me, then why, for Pete’s sake, haven’t you?” She thought of all the time they’d wasted. Time they could’ve been loving, living their lives together instead of continually, carefully keeping each other at arm’s length.
“Because I’m your boss, and I’m too old for you,” he replied, his eyes bleak as they stared straight ahead to the shelves of liquor glinting on the mirrored wall behind the bar.
She couldn’t help noticing he made no mention of the woman up in Lincoln Park. So, had she been right about it not being serious? About the woman just being a friend with benefits? Her heart not only began beating, it leapt with hope.
“First of all, you’re not technically my boss. My paycheck comes directly from the sale of the choppers, not the U.S. government. Second, thirteen years isn’t exactly a spring/fall relationship, Frank. It’s more like a spring/summer relationship, if you want to categorize it. Or,” she went on, getting more upset by the minute because things could’ve been so different if only he’d let them—the big, stupid dill-hole, “maybe you could take the enlightened approach and admit that when it comes to relationships, age doesn’t matter.”
He turned to her then, his expression strangely pained. “But it does, Becky.” When she opened her mouth to argue with him, he pushed ahead. “Besides, that’s not an issue now.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Simply that.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what we could or couldn’t have had now that you have Angel.”
Her mind blanked. Simply…blanked. She understood the words that’d come out of his mouth—they were English, after all—but they didn’t make a bit of sense.
“What are you talking about?” she cried, then nervously glanced around the bar.
Thankfully, everyone except Angel appeared determined to give them their privacy. Angel, for his part, simply perched at the end of the bar, nursing his beer, not trying to hide the fact that he was narrowly watching their exchange.
Now she really, really wished she could read the mysterious Israeli, because somehow he was involved in all this…this…whatever the hell this was.
“I’m talking about the fact that you’re in love with the pretty-boy ex-Mossad agent.”
It was like he was spewing advanced Calculus formulas. His words were English, but they might as well have been Mandarin Chinese. “I am?”
“Aren’t you?”
“No!”
He blinked at her, the scar slicing up from the corner of his mouth going stark white, the big one slashing through his eyebrow puckering and turning vivid pink when he frowned fiercely. The man’s face was a brutal, beautiful mess. It was like a roughly detailed map of the harsh life he’d chosen, and she figured she could look at it for the next hundred years and always find something new to admire.