In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(81)

Maybe it was because her hair was still a little wet from the extra scrubbing she’d given it in the shower. The shower where all she’d been able to think, over and over again, was I killed a man.

“You did good, sis,” Billy told her, chafing her arm as he sat on her left.

Yeah, he could probably tell by her chattering teeth, she was having trouble getting warm. She was beginning to wonder if she’d ever get warm again. Perhaps killing someone chilled a person down to the very depths of their soul.

“I did what Ghost taught me,” she mumbled, watching a mini marshmallow slowly melt into her hot cocoa. “Slow, smooth, straight, steady, squeeze.” They were the five S’s of marksmanship. She’d obviously learned them well considering she’d hit the bull’s eye, or the fatal t-zone as Ghost called it.

“We’re gonna make an operator of you yet,” Ozzie said from across the way, stoking the fire until it rumbled and snapped and the fragrant pine logs glowed bright orange.

She gulped, looking around the courtyard at the supportive expressions on all the Knights faces and wondered why the concept of becoming an operator didn’t sound nearly as appealing as it had just that morning.

She’d done the right thing. Sharif would’ve killed her if she hadn’t killed him first. It was self-defense. Self-preservation. But she just couldn’t get that image out of her head. That horrific slideshow of bullet leaving barrel, head shattering, fluid and flesh spraying, body crumpling, leg twitching…

Sweet Mother of Mercy. No matter how many reports she’d read on the Knights’ missions, nothing had prepared her for the actual carnage of a .45 bullet impacting a human skull.

She shivered, and Billy chafed harder. She’d be lucky to have any skin left on that arm after he finished…

“What happened to Eve?” she asked, suddenly remembering the poor woman she’d been made to abandon at Red Delilah’s.

“When Bill called and said he was bringing you home, I went and fetched her from the bar. I took her back to her apartment,” Angel, who was sitting in the lounge chair beside hers, explained.

“Was she okay?”

“She was shaken and still very drunk. But once I explained that you were fine, once she realized Sharif had not managed to harm you, she seemed okay. The last I saw of her, she was curled on her sofa with an afghan, a bottle of water, and two aspirin.”

“Thank you so much.” She reached over to squeeze his hand.

“Anytime.”

She smiled sadly, took another sip of cocoa and thought, Let’s hope there’s not a next time.

Why couldn’t she get warm?

“Becky?” Angel murmured softly, and she glanced up into his beautiful face. “I once heard it said that one man can change the world with a bullet in the right place. The same applies to one woman.”

She shuddered at the thought of her bullet in the right place.

“You saved lives today by taking his. Next time you are doubting yourself, doubting the rightness of what you did, you remember that.”

Hot tears stung the back of her throat and filled her eyes. She reached for his hand again, holding it tightly.

Rock’s phone jingled to life, and all heads turned in his direction, giving her the opportunity to casually wipe away the wetness threatening to spill down her cheeks.

“Are you pullin’ my leg, Manus? He…he said his name is Snake?” Rock sputtered into his phone. “Yeah. Hell, yeah. Send him on in.”

“Who’s Snake?” Becky asked, but Rock just waved her off as the back gate opened and a tall, movie-star handsome man with shaggy, golden hair and a really bad Hawaiian shirt strode into the courtyard.

“Mon Dieu,” Rock said, grinning as he stood to take the mystery man’s hand. “It’s good to see your face again, mon ami.”

“I’m here for Shell,” the man said, a muscle twitching in his jaw.

Huh? Who was this guy Rock allowed to stroll so casually into their compound? And who the heck was Shell?

Then she forgot all about ascertaining the answers to those questions, because the mumble of male voices sounded from around the corner and she closed her eyes. She’d managed to push the thought of what was about to happen to the back of her mind, but now there was no more avoiding it.

The shit, as they say, was about to hit the fan.

Because she’d gone and done it again. Despite trying her level best to avoid it, trouble had found her. And that trouble once more threatened to shine a spotlight on the Knights—a group of men whose very lives depended on anonymity.

And for the past hour, instead of lying in a hospital bed being fed a nice little cocktail of intravenous painkillers, Frank had been out cleaning up her mess, insuring the Knights and their covers remained intact.

So add all that up with the fact that she’d seduced him on the one night when he was at his most vulnerable because he thought he was going to die, pretty much insured that, yepper, he’d had it right all along. Rebecca Reichert was the bane of Frank Knight’s existence.

Apologize.

First and foremost, that’s what needed to come out of her mouth. An apology. Not explanations, not words of defense, just a straight-up, no-holds-barred, “I’m sorry.”

Frank, I’m sorry. Frank, I’m sorry. Frank, I’m sorry.

She practiced it over and over as she set her coffee mug on the little wrought-iron table beside her chair and stood, slowly making her way toward the gate so she could address Frank face-to-face as he deserved. She wasn’t going to cower behind Billy or Angel or any of the others.