Thrill Ride (Black Knights Inc. #4)(68)
“M-maybe,” Eve admitted. “Sort of…”
Boss glanced around the table, his expression asking the rest of the Knights for verification of the ladies’ assessment. He frowned fiercely when he was met with various winces, shrugs, and nods.
“See,” Becky stressed, never one to pass up an I-told-you-so. “You could use a little work on your delivery.”
“That’s not what you said last night when I—”
“Jesus, God, please spare me,” Bill held up a hand. Erp. The thought of Becky and Boss getting in on made him throw up a little in his mouth. One thing a big brother never wanted to picture was his little sister doing the nasty.
“You need to stay here because the CIA might try to make a grab for you as soon as you leave,” Ozzie added, swiveling away from his computers in order to face the group, for once not being his usual irreverent and obnoxious self.
“What?” Eve glanced at him in alarm. “Why? I thought you said they bought the ruse, so—”
“Just because they bought it doesn’t mean they won’t think to double-check. And you’re an easy target, Eve.” Ozzie’s serious expression—yes, the kid could pull one out on occasion—softened. Although, Bill had to admit, the fact that the guy was wearing T-shirt with a picture of Spock that read Trek yourself before you wreck yourself sort of ruined the whole hardened-operator persona he’d suddenly donned. “All it’d take is ten minutes with them poking and prodding at you before you’d fold like a cheap lawn chair.”
“Well I—” Eve began, but Bill decided it was time to interject. They didn’t have time to sit around pacifying Eve’s fears, and they really needed to get moving on, what he suspected was going to be, the monumental task of figuring out how to clear Rock’s name.
“Ozzie’s right,” he declared, making sure his harsh tone brooked no argument. When Eve turned to blink at him rapidly, raking in a shaky breath, he figured he’d nailed it. “You’ve still got a week left on the vacation time you took, so it’s best if you spend it here with us.” God help him. “Hopefully, by the end of that week, we’ll have either cleared up this misunderstanding with Rock or we’ll at least be well on our way to doing so. Then you’ll be free to leave.”
And, yes, that sounded a bit autocratic, even to his own ears. He figured it sounded autocratic to hers as well when her eyes narrowed to slits and her lips tightened.
“You can’t hold me here against my will.” She pinned him with a determined stare, one she wouldn’t have been able to pull off a decade ago.
“No, we can’t,” he assured her, allowing his face to soften. “But we’re asking. Nicely. Pretty please with a cherry on top?”
And, yes, he’d pulled out the big guns. Because that little phrase was one they’d used between the two of them that summer when they’d been young and dumb, when they’d mistakenly confused their mutual lust for something more. And maybe he was an * for whipping it out now, but he knew it would work like a charm. Because it always had…
“O-oh…” She looked flustered, just as he’d hoped. “Okay, but I—”
“Good,” he cut her off. He couldn’t stand it when she looked at him like that, so trustingly, so…innocently. She wasn’t innocent. Sheltered, yes. But not innocent.
Although she had been.
Once.
And he’d been such a goddamned idiot to try to protect that innocence and—
“All right,” Boss interrupted his thoughts, which was just as well. He needed to get his mind off the woman who’d—spurned, he guessed was the word—him, and get the sucker back in the game. “And since we’re talking logistics here, Ozzie, how goes the plans for Rock’s funeral?”
Okay, and how bizarre was that? To be talking about a guy’s funeral when he was sitting catty-corner from you?
“It’s good,” Ozzie nodded. “The Connelly brothers have a guy who works in the city morgue. He’s tagged a John Doe with Rock’s name and entered it into the system.” The Connelly brothers were a quartet of burly Chicago boys who manned the guardhouse by the main gate at BKI headquarters. And the crazy, Irish bastards had enough connections around the city—both legitimate and illegitimate—to make Bill’s head spin. “We’ve got a casket on order from Lakeview Funeral Home, and we’re negotiating a plot in Lincoln Cemetery. All BKI personnel are putting the finishing touches on their various missions, or abandoning them completely, and should be trickling home in the next seventy-two hours, give or take.”
And wasn’t that going to be fun? When the Knights walked in expecting to attend a funeral, only to realize Rock wasn’t really dead? If the Connelly brothers’ reactions to the news were anything to go by, Rock was going to be sporting some cracked ribs. Which was another thing Bill was still trying to get his head around, the fact that the Geralt, Manus, Toran, and Rafer Connelly could manage to simultaneously wrap a guy in a bear hug. Talk about one hell of a weird sight to behold. It’d looked like a human boulder pile, all huge and lumpy.
“If anyone is watching,” Ozzie continued, “it’ll look like we’re doing what we should be doing. Making all the arrangements to bury one of our own.”