Thrill Ride (Black Knights Inc. #4)(58)

And even though it took everything she had to turn away from Rock, even though her instinct was to throw her arms around his neck and tell him exactly what she was feeling, she knew he wouldn’t welcome the gesture, nor would he want to hear her words. So, with a deep, fortifying breath, she started to march out of the living room only to be stopped by a callused palm on her forearm.

For one brief moment, her heart sprouted feathers and soared. Did Rock…?

But, no. It was only Boss.

“I’ll walk with you,” he said, his expression solemn, that kernel of doubt still in his eyes.

“Yeah,” she swallowed, amazed to discover she was about to completely blow her cover as a hard-assed operator—again—and burst into tears. But she sucked it up. Literally. She made a snorting sound as she raked in another breath. “You have to know he’s not telling us everything, right?” she whispered lowly, keeping the conversation private. “He wouldn’t have played even a tiny part in killing innocent people. He…he just wouldn’t have.”

“Hell, I know that,” Boss grumbled quietly. “But as right as you are about that, he might be right in that the only way out of this thing now is to give him up.”

Oh, geez. Just the thought of what the CIA would do to him if they got their hands on him…

The walk to the front door was the longest she’d ever taken, especially since each step took her further and further away from the only man she’d ever loved. But when they finally reached their destination, Boss didn’t give her a moment to second-guess herself. He opened the door the barest inch, shouting out, “I’ve got a woman exiting! Don’t shoot!”

“Affirmative!” That loud voice echoed over the speaker and down the side of the mountain in the opposite direction, an effective death knell to the part she was going to play in the rest of this operation.

But just before she squeezed through the door, hands up, palms out, she heard Steady yell to Boss the four most fantastic words ever spoken in the history of the world…

“I’ve got a plan!”

***

Rock stood by the front door to Eve’s vacation home, listening to the eerie sound of those black Chinooks muttering overhead, aware of the fact that the original six CIA agents had now ballooned to over twenty, and trying to guess what the odds of this thing actually working might be.

Because Steady’s big plan?

His death. Pure and simple. Richard “Rock” Babineaux needed to die.

And with his head aching like a rotten tooth and the room spinning ever so slowly due to the fact that he was a pint and a half low on blood, he figured he was pretty close to accomplishing that goal.

“Two to one,” Ozzie said from beside him. Because in all the years they’d worked together, the two of them had made a game of weighing the odds.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t a game.

And he was starting to get that feeling…

The one that told him things could go really wrong, really quickly. And he absolutely hated that feeling. Especially since he’d left Vanessa with the impression that this was going to be all her fault.

He hadn’t wanted to be so hard on her, but he’d needed her out of the house. Safe. And the quickest way he’d known to accomplish that feat was to blame her for their current predicament and guilt her into leaving.

Of course if this thing went sideways, those were going to be the last words she ever heard out of him and…

Sweet Lord almighty!

When she saw him go down, she was going to flat-out lose her shit—all the women were—and he hated that. He hated knowing she was going to think, just for a little while, that his death was on her. Because, yes, she’d betrayed him, and by God he may feel like holding her down so he could wring her neck, but he in no way wanted her to suffer under the impression that—

“Naw,” Steady scoffed, interrupting his thoughts. “It’s way better than that. I’d say it’s closer to fifty-fifty.”

Way better?

Steady considered it way better that he only gave this thing—his plan—a fifty-fifty shot of working?

Rock closed his eyes and girded his loins to do…well…what he was about to do. Because the truth of the matter was, they’d run out of options. So when Steady had piped up with, “You need to die, Rock,” before laying out a plan to make that happen, on their terms, they’d decided to give it a go.

But now that he was here, about twenty seconds away from opening that door and stepping into the abyss, he was beginning to regret his decision to go along with this harebrained scheme. Of course, that probably had a lot to do with the fact that, besides there being twenty-plus agents stationed outside with direct orders to shoot him dead if he put up any kind of resistance, he had three small capfuls of plastic explosives taped to his chest.

That’s right.

Plastic explosives. Taped. To. His. Chest.

Mon dieu, he could only pray Wild Bill was on top of his game with those charges—way the hell at the very pinnacle of his game, in fact. Because when dealing with explosives of any kind, especially C4, you didn’t just check your work once—you checked it three times. And, by God, you better never let your attention wander while handling them or you might wind up missing a few digits at best, a few lifetimes at worst. And if Bill hadn’t calculated those percentages just right…