In Rides Trouble: Black Knights Inc.

by Julie Ann Walker

  Note to self. No overly demonstrative facial expressions.

  Billy patted at his pockets. “I know I’ve got a marker around here somewhere…”

  “All right, all right,” she capitulated. “I’m going. But you’re a greasy, grimy monkey turd,” she called over her shoulder as she darted down the gangway, Angel following behind her.

  “Grow up!” her brother hollered back.

  “A greasy, grimy monkey turd with fish lips and bird legs and the brain power of an amoeba!” she yelled, joy and relief at finally, finally being back where she belonged making her voice bright.

  “Oh yeah?” Billy just couldn’t let her have the last word. It would’ve gone against twenty-six years of tradition. “Well, you look like a can of smashed buttholes, and your breath smells like you eat used kitty litter!”

  Her laughter echoed through the ship.

  Man, it’s good to be back.

  Chapter Six

  “I feel like a new woman,” Eve said as she emerged from the women’s shower room, and Bill’s laughter at his little sister’s crazy antics died like a grease fire doused in baking soda.

  Eve was dressed in a royal blue version of the cotton warm-up Becky’d worn—Angel had wheedled the clothes out of some starry-eyed female sailor—only on Eve’s 5’10” frame, the hems of the legs hit her mid-calf.

  Still, she managed to pull it off. Oh hell, who was he trying to kid? She made the damn things look like they were supposed to be those short little island pants women donned when the weather turned warm. The kind of pants she’d worn that summer they dated. The kind of pants she’d paired with a super sexy set of wedge heel thingamabobs that’d made her mile-long legs look even longer.

  Some things never changed. Just his goddamned luck.

  “You don’t look like a new woman,” he told her. “You look exactly the same way you did eleven years ago.”

  Without a week’s worth of grime and grit covering her face, she was just as drop-dead gorgeous as he remembered…unfortunately.

  “Where’s Becky?” she asked, ignoring his last statement even though a blush climbed up her throat to stain her cheeks.

  “She went to check on our boss.”

  “Good, I’ll go join her.” She nibbled on her lower lip like she always did when she was nervous. The gesture was so familiar, reminding him of everything that happened between them, and he couldn’t stop the sudden fury that raced through his veins. “I want to tell her that I…Hey! What are you doing?”

  What was he doing?

  He was frog-marching her toward the briefing room Captain Garcia had allocated for the Knights’ personal use, that’s what he was doing.

  It was amazing how the years just…fell away. Leaving room for all the old hurts to come rushing in.

  “You can go see Becky later. For now, you and I need to talk.”

  “I…I don’t know what we have to say to one another,” she stammered, her big eyes wide. “It’s been over a decade. S-surely we can just let bygones b-be bygones.”

  “If it was up to me, I’d take you up on that, sweetheart. But it’s not up to me.”

  She sucked in a stunned breath before she ripped her arm out of his grasp. “Don’t call me sweetheart, and don’t touch me! You lost that right eleven years ago!”

  “Lost the right!” he bellowed at her. It was as if he was a twenty-year-old kid again, with the same twenty-year-old temper. “You obviously have a very selective memory, sweetheart.”

  “Oh!” she stomped her foot, and there was the pampered little princess who’d broken his heart. He unceremoniously shoved her into the briefing room and kicked out a chair. Motioning for her to sit with a hard point of his finger.

  She threw her nose in the air and crossed her arms over her chest.

  Goddamnit!

  He wasn’t handling this well, but she always did that to him. Made him act out of character.

  Whenever she was around, he felt the need to beat his chest and knock heads together, and the whole thing was as disconcerting as it was ridiculous. “Eve,” he growled. “Just take a damn seat. I promise you I’m not here to rehash the past. Whether you believe it or not, there are more important things to discuss.”

  “Like what?” she asked, still refusing to sit.

  Fine. Let her stand. He, for one, was beat.

  He plopped down in a chair on the opposite side of the conference table and scrubbed a hand over his face. Sighing heavily, he said, “Like the fact that you can’t tell anyone, I mean no one, not even beloved Daddy, about me or my partners’ involvement in this little endeavor.”

  “But…why?” She obviously chose to ignore his slur against her father.

  “Because one of the things that makes us so effective is the simple fact that no one knows the true nature of our work—besides the President and his Joint Chiefs, of course.” And now the two commanding officers of this naval ship. Damn it!

  “You’re kidding me,” she shook her head, eyes darting around the room as if trying to find the hidden cameras. Only no one was going to jump out from behind the door and yell, You’ve been punk’d!

  Nope. Not this time.

  “Becky said you guys were private government defense contractors. There are tons of those, so I don’t know why—”

  “We’re more than that,” he told her. “Much more.”

  “But…but,” she shook her head again.

  Yeah, a lot of folks had trouble believing the reality of 007 when they were faced with it. Probably because the real-life version was so much less sexy. Blood and guts and days spent wallowing in your own smelly sweat certainly weren’t “martinis, shaken not stirred.”

  “But the captain and his first mate know who you really are. Becky told me so.”

  “Yeah, they do, and don’t think for one minute it didn’t burn our asses to blow our covers.” He didn’t bother to correct her terminology in reference to the commander.

  “But Dad is going to wonder what happened to me. He’s going to ask…” She started chewing on her lower lip again.

  “So tell him the truth. A group of spec-ops guys rescued you and then disappeared. End of story.”

  “But that’s not the end of the story, and I’ve never lied to him.”

  “It’s not a lie, Eve,” he grumbled, frustrated. “It’s an omission.”

  “Lie, omission, they’re the same thing, and I don’t understand why I’d need to compromise my relationship with my father just so—”

  He growled, slamming a palm on the table and causing her to flinch.

  Good. Great. She needed to be scared. She had no idea the power of the powder keg of information parked beneath her oh-so-fine ass.

  “Let me rephrase,” he enunciated slowly, “you will keep this to yourself.”

  She searched his face for a brief second, her rapid breath causing her chest to heave, before she cautiously lowered herself into the seat he’d kicked out.

  Finally.

  He was getting a damn crick in his neck looking up at her.

  “The things we do, the things we’re tasked to do, don’t necessarily fall under the guidelines of international law. This mission included. And given that, there are quite a few really, really bad guys out there who’d love to know our true identities.”

  “But I don’t know any bad guys,” she murmured.

  “Maybe not. But you of all people know how quickly rumors fly.” Being the daughter of one of the richest men in America, she’d graced the cover of more than one tabloid.

  “So you’re telling me…What are you telling me? That our government sanctions illegal activity? That you guys are the ones they call to conduct it?”

  “Which is harder to believe? The fact that our government skirts the boundaries of globa
l bureaucracy or the fact that they trust me, a gearhead from the projects, to do the honors?”

  She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes filling with tears that she tried to blink away. His damn ulcer lifted its head at the sight and started gnawing away at his stomach again.

  Good going, Bill. Way to put the “ass” in class.

  “I never cared where you were from, Billy,” she whispered. “You were the one who had a problem with it.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” He shook his head, feeling like someone should probably kick his ass for the way he was treating her, but he just couldn’t help it. “My point is every major power on the planet does the exact same thing as our government. Only the really good ones, the really smart ones—which I like to believe Uncle Sam falls into both categories—do so without any real evidence of direct meddling left behind. In order to do that, there have to be men like me, men like the Black Knights, who can be trusted to work autonomously, completely off-the-grid. Men who can be depended on to go in, get it done, and get the hell out of Dodge. Men who can be counted on to take the terrible secrets they carry in their heads all the way to the grave. So you see, it’s really very simple.” He raked in a calming breath. “If you tell anyone who I really am, what I really do, it could get me and the men I work with killed.”

  Her narrow throat worked as her eyes widened to the size of saucers. “Holy moley, Billy,” she said.

  “Yeah.” One corner of his mouth twitched at the familiar G-rated profanity. “You said it.”

  ***

  “You look very pretty in red,” Angel said in that deep, husky voice of his after they’d gone some distance down the gangway from the women’s shower room.

  “Whatever,” Becky rolled her eyes. “With this cheek, I look like I should be staring in a Lifetime movie.”

  “If I say you are beautiful, then you are. I don’t make a habit of lying to my friends.”

  She angled her head over her shoulder, eyeing the mysterious ex-Mossad agent’s dazzlingly beautiful face. “Are we friends, Angel?”

  “I think you are my only friend, Becky.”

  She shook her head as she descended a set of stairs. Angel’s big boots echoed hollowly on the metal risers behind her, drowning out the quiet shushing of her hospital slippers and reminding her that every step she took was bringing her closer to Frank. She denied the urge to take off running because, geez, she couldn’t be that obvious.

  “That’s not true,” she reassured Angel. “You have all the other Knights. They’re your friends now.”

  “Nonsense,” he snorted before instructing her to hang a right. “They tolerate me. That is not the same thing as actually liking me.” They both turned sideways and nodded at the Patton crewman who passed them on the narrow walkway.

  “They’ll come around,” she assured him. “Just give them time.”

  “You did not need any time. You accepted me right away.”

  Yepper, she sure had. But only because she’d felt so darned sorry for him.

  He’d been forced from his country, his culture, his family, his job. He’d been made to undergo extensive surgery in order to completely change his appearance.

  Man, she still had trouble imagining what it must be like for him to wake up every morning and stare at a reflection that wasn’t his own…

  Disorienting at best, she figured. Downright spooky at worst.

  And having always had a soft spot for the underdog—which he definitely was, coming into the tight-knit group of the Black Knights the way he had—she’d immediately decided to take him under her wing.

  “I was just trying to make the transition easier on you,” she admitted. “I know what it’s like to be the outsider.” After all, since Patti’s death—Patti had been the Knights’ secretary extraordinaire and Dan “The Man’s” wife—Becky was the only one in the Knights’ employ who wasn’t actually part of the team. She was just the face of the “public” operation. The wunderkind motorcycle designer who made sure all their covers as simple mechanics remained in place. But when it came to their missions, to the actual work they all did? She was kept smack-double-dab in the D-A-R-K, which, yep, pissed her off…big time. And was just one more reason why’d she’d started studying to be an operator.

  Angel stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. She turned, glancing curiously into his dark eyes. They were the only part of him that hadn’t changed from the man he’d been before. Oh, the plastic surgeon had no doubt altered the shape, but the eyes themselves were likely the same. And if the eyes were the windows to a man’s soul, then Angel’s soul was lost…lost and hurting…

  “I never really thanked you for your hospitality that first night,” he said, squeezing her shoulder. “For making me feel welcome by cooking that, um…meal.”

  She swallowed down the deep sorrow that stuck in her throat like a load of peanut butter every time she really allowed herself to stare into Angel’s sad eyes and forced a playful snort. “That’s because you were too busy trying not to throw up.”

  “The matzo ball soup was not so bad,” he assured her.

  “It was barely palatable, and you know it.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, but the kugel—”

  “Was downright inedible,” she finished for him.

  “I thought the rugelachs were very tasty.”

  “Uh-huh, once you got past the fact that chewing them was tantamount to chewing rocks.”

  “Becky,” he grabbed her other shoulder so she was forced to continue facing him. His eyes were bright with sincerity. Too bright. Her cheeks heated. She’d never been very good at accepting gratitude. Even the head-knuckling “thanks” she usually got from the guys after doing them some favor usually made heat wash like water from the top of her head down over her shoulders. “It was wonderful of you to go to such trouble. I want you to know how much it meant to me.”

  “Stop,” she waved her hands in front of her eyes, trying to divert the conversation away from the uncomfortable road it was heading down, “you’re making me all faklempt.”

  He shook his head, his lips twisting. “You know the real pronunciation is verklempt.”

  “Well, that’s what I get from learning all my Yiddish from Saturday Night Live, isn’t it?” She made a face and he laughed.

  Thank God. Joking, palling around, now this was footing she was comfortable with.

  “Now,” she said, once more turning to head toward sick bay, “give me the scoop on the story everyone’s being told about the Hamilton’s liberation.”

  “They are saying the pirates surrendered without a fight once a specialized group of spec-ops guys boarded the ship.”

  “And these spec-ops guys? Where’d they supposedly disappear to?”

  “It is a mystery.” She could hear the smile in his voice. “You know how those spec-ops guys are.”

  “Do I ever…”

  They stopped and nodded to another crewman who squeezed by them. Angel waited until the man was out of earshot, before continuing, “They’re telling everyone there was another ship, a NATO vessel—whose identity will remain secret—from which the group of men operated. Of course, that vessel has since quit the area.”

  Of course.

  “And the media?” she asked.

  “Will be fed the same story.”

  Sleight of hand built upon lies layered on top of deceit. Welcome to the Wonderful World of Clandestine Missions.

  Rounding a final turn, they finally came to sick bay. Anxiously stepping inside, she quickly took in the half dozen crisp, white hospital beds spaced three feet apart and lining opposite walls until her hungry gaze lighted on Frank at the far end of the long room. Every bed had its own blue-and-white striped curtain attached to an overhead, semi-circular bar. Its purpose was to give the patients a modicum of privacy. Lucky for Fr
ank, since he was currently the only resident of sick bay, privacy was not much of an issue.

  The size of the hospital bed, however? Now that was an issue.

  She could see his big, bare feet dangling off the end of the mattress.

  He didn’t seem to mind, however, considering he was fast asleep, his heavy chest rising rhythmically in time to the gently fluctuating hum of the Patton’s big engines.

  She took a hasty step forward before Angel wrapped a restraining hand around her elbow, giving her a nearly negligible shake of his head before smiling winningly as the ship’s surgeon strolled toward them.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Angel rasped as the doctor shoved thick, black-rimmed glasses up a rather short nose while tucking a clipboard under his uniformed arm. “But Miss Reichert wanted to personally thank the man who spearheaded the negotiations for her ransom, even if all our work on her behalf turned out to be unneeded,” he added quickly. “Is now a bad time?”

  Geez, Becky. Use your head.

  Frank was supposed to be a perfect stranger, so she couldn’t very well run to his bedside and start crooning over him. But that’s exactly what she’d have done had Angel not held her back.

  And you think you’re ready to be an operator? Pfft.

  The doctor ran a critical eye over both of them before glancing at his watch. “No. It’s time for me to wake Mr. Smith anyway,” he used Frank’s alias, “and test his cognitive abilities. Come with me.”

  “And how is the patient?” Angel asked as they followed the doctor toward the back of the room.

  “He has three problems,” the ship’s surgeon said, referring to his clipboard. “The first is the laceration near his scalp. I stitched that up and, as long as he keeps it dry and clean, it should heal rather nicely with barely a scar.”

  Not that another scar would make that much difference, she thought lovingly, her eyes glued to Frank’s battle-ravaged face as they approached his hospital bed.

  “His second problem is that he’s concussed. His CT scan shows some bruising but no bleeding, so as long as he takes it easy, he should be back to form in a couple of days. His third problem, however, isn’t such an easy fix.” The doctor stopped, and Becky wanted to howl No, damnit! Keep walking! But she was forced to peel her eyes away from Frank to fix her attention on the doctor. “You said he came by this injury after falling from the second story railing outside the mess hall?”