In Rides Trouble (Black Knights Inc. #2)(83)

“She told me she planned to turn off her phone. She said she needed approximately twenty hours of sleep. I doubt you’ll be able to reach her.” Angel tilted his head, his dark eyes seeing too much in Bill’s tightly controlled face. “So, Eve Edens? I can’t help but feel there’s history between the two of you.”

Bill ran a hand over his face and sighed, planting his ass on a lounge chair. “It’s a very long, very stereotypical story. You know, rich girl, poor boy, Daddy doesn’t approve.”

“Well,” Angel looked around the empty courtyard and shrugged, “it would appear we have all the time in the world.”

Before Bill even realized what he was doing, before he realized he even wanted to spill his goddamned guts, he opened his mouth, and the words just started tumbling out like road apples from the south end of one of Chicago’s northbound carriage horses.

***

“Becky, Becky,” Frank whispered over and over again between kisses as he backed her into his bedroom.

He reveled in the knowledge that there were no more barriers standing between them…well, unless you considered their clothes, but even one-handed, he was doing a pretty fair job of disposing of those.

Becky was no slouch herself. She’d already pulled off his hospital gown and was going to work on the buttons at his fly.

Love. He couldn’t believe it, but he was in love. And it was so damned good, because he’d never realized it before but love was life. He was alive! He was in love, and he was alive and if he was any more happy he’d probably burst. Kaboom! He could just see himself exploding into a colorful mist of heart-and dove-shaped confetti.

He managed to whip her shirt over her head and unhook the back clasp of her bra, and—God love the woman—she stepped out of her jeans and panties and stood in front of him and—

Sweet kee-rist, she was gorgeous.

And she was his. All his.

He couldn’t help himself; he lowered his head to press a kiss to one of those amazing nipples, smiling when it hardened against his tongue. Her fingers were in his hair, his name was on her lips, and when she pushed him back on the bed and straddled his hips, he forgot all about telling her the one thing he’d meant to tell her the minute he walked through the door.

Then, suddenly, she was gone.

***

She couldn’t do it.

She really, really wanted to. But she couldn’t. Not after meeting Michelle. Not after staring into little Franklin’s eyes.

What was this thing she was feeling?

Guilt. That’s what.

And it was so cliché it was almost laughable. Who didn’t suffer recriminations after having elicit sex with a man who happened to love another woman, another woman who happened to be the mother of his child?

For crying out loud, she was the other woman. One giant, walking stereotype. And she wanted to delay the next few moments for as long as she could, because, God, the come-to-Jesus talk she needed to have with Frank was going to be awful….

Don’t be a coward! her conscience yelled at her and, prodded by that shrill inner voice, she made herself meet his confused gaze as he sat up on the bed.

His endearingly crooked grin stopped her from saying the words on her tongue, and she couldn’t help herself, she reached forward to trace the thin white scar on the edge of his lips. “How’d you get this?” she whispered.

“I got it courtesy of my father.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story,” he leaned in for a kiss, but she backed away. “One that begins with my father’s cheating and ends with a ridiculous childhood promise I thought I made to Michelle.” He frowned at her reaction to his move.

And there it was. That woman’s name. Thrown out there so casually and carelessly.

Becky’s heart shriveled down into a hard stone and pulsed inside her chest like a bad tooth. She swallowed. So much for putting off the come-to-Jesus talk. “What are we doing here, Frank? How can you love her and make love to me?”

“I don’t see what one thing has to do with the other.”

Men. The insufferable *s!

“You can’t understand how wrong it is to be in love with Michelle while you diddle me?” She couldn’t help it, the last few words came out on shriek of outrage.

She bent to grab her jeans, stepping into them and angrily pulling them up her legs even while she searched for her bra.

Where was the stupid thing?

Oh yes, hooked over his lamp.

Another cliché.

Man, she was really racking them up today.

“First of all,” Frank said, scowling, as he watched her wrestle herself into her clothes. “You and I do not diddle. We make love. Secondly, I love Shell, but I’m not in love with her. I think there are laws against that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking there are no flowers in my family’s attic,” he said as he shoved himself back inside his jeans and fumbled one-handed with the buttons.

She raised a brow. The man had obviously lost his mind.

He rolled his eyes at her look of confusion. “Let me see if I can explain it another way. Are you in love with Bill?”

He had lost it. No question. “No, of course not. He’s my brother.”

“Well, there you go.”