Too Hard to Handle (Black Knights Inc. #8)(2)

Ozzie turned to grin at Rock. And even though he was in profile, Penni noticed the expression looked a little…different from the one she’d seen on his face three months ago. It was duller. Sadder. Harder somehow.

Her mind returned to the hotel bombings in Kuala Lumpur—the ones that had left her colleagues, her friends, dead—and started picking at the memory like a scab. What lay beneath burned and ached, but she’d learned a thing or two over the past few months. One of which was how to take a deep breath and push aside the ugly thoughts so they didn’t rise up and overwhelm her in grief. She wasn’t entirely sure time healed all wounds as much as it simply taught a person ways to stanch the chronic bleeding.

Geralt, heretofore known in her mind as the Carrot-Topped Colossus, must have sensed a lull in the men’s debate. He cleared his throat and said, “Speaking of skirts”—his accent was one hundred percent Windy City, his words running together like cars colliding on the Eisenhower Expressway—“we got one here who says she’s looking for Dan Man.”

Penni was trying to decide whether or not she should take offense at being labeled “a skirt” when Scarface and Rock jumped from their seats. Ozzie craned his head around the side of the Adirondack chair. And suddenly she was…

Not scared, exactly. In her thirty-three years she’d faced down a lot worse than three flag-waving, gun-toting, pretend motorcycle mechanics. But now that she was here at Black Knights Inc., on the brink of telling Dan that she hadn’t been able to get him out of her head since The Assignment, and that she—

“Agent DePaul!” Ozzie crowed, pushing up from the chair and grabbing the crutches leaning against it. He hobbled over and threw an arm around her shoulders, squeezing her tight. The move was made awkward by the crutch shoved in his armpit. “Forget about my fantasy shag-o-rama with ace reporter Samantha Tate,” he told Rock and Scarface. Shag-o-rama? Christ almighty. “Because my future wife has just arrived!”

Uh-huh. Sure. Because while they’d worked together in Kuala Lumpur, Ozzie had gaily—and quite insincerely—asked her to marry him at least a half-dozen times.

She turned to grin at him now, grateful for his exuberant welcome and the balm it was to her frayed nerves. But her smile faltered when she saw his eyes.

He was different.

Gone was the spark, the bright golden glow that seemed to shine from within him. Now there were shadows lurking behind his sapphire irises. Deep shadows. Dark shadows. Shadows that told her all his good-natured joking was a studied act, a slick veneer to cover up what was hurting and broken inside him.

She wasn’t sure if it made her feel better or worse, knowing she wasn’t the only one irrevocably changed by The Assignment. On second thought, she was sure. Worse. It definitely made her feel worse.

But what are you going to do?

Keep on keeping on, that’s what. A phrase her father had taught her to live by.

“Your future wife, huh?” she asked Ozzie, determined to play along. If he insisted on wearing a false happy face, far be it from her to pull off his mask. “What makes you think I’ll take you up on your offer of marriage this time when I’ve turned you down every time before?”

“Well, why else would you be here?” He wiggled his blond eyebrows. “I mean, it’s obvious you’ve come to your senses and decided to make me the happiest man on the pl—”

“Dim your love-lights, you oversexed jackass,” Scarface said, crossing his arms over his chest when he came to a stop in front of them. He was a mountain of a man. Close to six-and-a-half feet of bulging, flexing muscles. “I’m blinded by the bullshit shining in them.”

“Oversexed? Me?” Ozzie’s tone and expression epitomized incredulity. “You’re one to talk. I’m surprised every morning that Becky can walk out of your bedr—”

“Not in front of our guest,” Scarface growled, leveling Ozzie with a look Penni was surprised didn’t curdle the latter’s balls. “Especially not before the introductions have been made.”

“Typical.” Ozzie shook his head. “You can dish it, but you can’t take it.”

When a vein the size of a garden hose appeared in the center of Scarface’s forehead, Ozzie quickly relented and officially introduced Penni to Richard “Rock” Babineaux and Frank “Boss” Knight, a.k.a. Scarface. After shaking the men’s hands, Penni turned to extend the gesture to Geralt and thank him for the escort.

The giant redhead ran a hand over his bristly crew cut and said with a dramatic leer, “Believe me, the pleasure was all mine. And if you decide not to take Ozzie up on his offer of ball-and-chaindom, how about you and me grab a cup of joe before you leave, yeah? Ya see”—he had the audacity to slow wink at her before turning a smug smile toward Ozzie—“I’ve always had a thing for NYC accents, especially when that accent comes with a broad whose legs go all the way up.”

From “skirt” to “broad.” She wasn’t sure it was an improvement. And didn’t everyone’s legs go all the way up to…well…wherever all legs went? Hips, usually?

“Back off, you big ginger!” Ozzie bellowed, pushing Geralt’s shoulder but failing to budge the Carrot-Topped Colossus an inch. “I saw her first!”

“Oh, sure.” Geralt made a face. “‘I saw her first.’ The go-to gambit of small-minded men with even smaller d—”