by Paige Tyler
He tensed beside her, then shook his head. “I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”
She took a breath and nodded, glad he couldn’t see her face. “It’s okay. No big deal.”
Holden shifted her on his chest, turning her a little so he could see her face. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what?” Kendall asked.
She knew what he was talking about. She simply wasn’t interested in admitting how much all of this was affecting her.
Holden lifted a brow, clearly not believing her. “You don’t have to act like none of this bothers you. You wouldn’t be the first woman who thought it would be fun to get involved with a SEAL only to change her mind when reality intruded.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said something like that,” she said. “Did that happen to you before? Were you with someone who thought they wanted to be with you, then changed their mind?”
He didn’t say anything for a long time, but when he finally nodded, she was shocked how sad it made her feel to think about someone walking away from Holden because they didn’t like his job. It wasn’t surprising. A good portion of her coworkers in the Bureau were either divorced or permanently single because of their job. Being a SEAL had to be worse.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said firmly. “You haven’t known me long enough to realize this yet, but soon enough you’ll figure out that once I make up my mind about something, I don’t ever look back.”
Holden regarded her quietly for a long time, then flicked off the bedside lamp before pulling her back down to his chest. She snuggled in close, already thinking about what they could do with the two days he had off.
Then it hit her. She’d been making plans like Holden was really her boyfriend. Yeah, she’d slept with him and it had been incredible, but none of this was real, no matter how much she might want it to be. What the hell was she thinking? A few days from now, he’d be in jail and she’d be working the next case.
She blinked back tears. What the hell was she going to do?
CHAPTER TWELVE
YOU KNOW, SOME people have been known to actually park cars in their garage,” Kendall said, her lips curving. “Even if it does only rain forty days out of the year here.”
Holden chuckled. Each apartment in his building came with a storage space big enough to hold a car, but his was filled with stacks of boxes and motorcycle parts. “I suppose I could park my Jeep in here, but then I’d have to keep all this stuff in my apartment and that might get a little messy.”
Kendall wandered into the middle of the garage, carefully stepped around the pieces of metal that covered nearly every square inch of the floor. She glanced at the other parts arranged meticulously on the two work benches, then eyed the ones hanging from the ceiling, masked off with craft paper in preparation for painting before leaning over a little to look in the box near her feet, showing off that amazing ass of hers. The sigh of her sexy curves filling out her jeans made him go hard again.
He said “again” because he’d already gotten a boner this morning as she’d sauntered into the bathroom to take a shower, her hips swaying in the most hypnotic way he could ever imagine. Of course, he’d also gotten a hard-on when she’d come out wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around her. Watching her dry her hair had been the most arousing thing he’d ever seen. It had taken every bit of control he had to keep from yanking that damn towel off.
Kendall knew exactly what she’d been doing to him. The little smile that had crept across her face as she watched him out of the corner of her eye told him that. She’d been teasing him.
It had taken one hell of a cold shower to get his erection to go down. He would have said the hell with it and spent the morning in bed with Kendall making love, but he wanted to take her out. Especially since she’d probably been cooped up enough yesterday waiting for him to come home.
“I’m generally clueless about this kind of stuff, but even I recognize that thing over there is a motorcycle gas tank,” she said, gesturing at piece of metal hanging from the ceiling near her head. “And those are motorcycle tires obviously,” she continued, motioning to the far side of the garage. “So. I’m guessing you’re building your own bike? But does it really take this many parts? Unless you’re trying to build more than one?”
He laughed. “The plan is to build one, but finding parts for a Harley Davidson WLA is kind of a crapshoot. Most of what you see here I purchased from collectors in Eastern Europe and Russia based on little more than blurry pictures and some general descriptions. I ended up with more than I wanted in an effort to make sure I find the exact parts I need.
Kendall glanced at him like she thought he was crazy. “I’ve heard of a Harley, of course, but what’s a WLA?”
He moved over to stand beside her. “WLA is the model designation Harley used in the 1940’s for the bikes they made for the Army to use in WWII. It had a 45-cubic-inch, high-compression flathead engine. Or what passed as high-compression for the time. In reality, the compression ratio was pretty low, but that turned out to be a good thing, since the engine still ran well on the low-octane gas available then.”
Her eyes glazed over a bit at all that info. “Okay, I don’t understand anything you just said. I thought Harley was like the all-American company? Why did you have to search all over the world to find parts?”
“The US sent a lot of bikes to Europe as part of military support packages in the early years of the war. They didn’t have the same motorcycle culture we had in the States, so most of them sat in storage instead of being ridden until they fell apart like here in the States. Russia and the other former Warsaw Pact countries are about the only places you can still get the parts now, especially if you’re looking for ones that are in practically mint condition.”
He spent a while showing her the various parts, explaining what they did and how they fit together. He also told her about the few pieces he was missing. He hadn’t intended to go into detail because he didn’t want to bore her, but she asked a lot of questions, so he kept answering.
“When will the bike be ready to ride?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It doesn’t matter, though. When the thing you want is important to you, it doesn’t matter how long it takes to get it.”
“How long have you been collecting the parts?”
The question brought back a lot of memories, all of them good. “I got my first box of Harley parts when I was sixteen. I’ve been collecting ever since.”
She regarded him thoughtfully. “Were you still in a gang then?”
He shook his head. “It was after I got out. McKinney—the guy I worked for—liked restoring antique cars. His garage was bigger that most people’s homes. It easily held a dozen cars, not counting all the extra space for the work benches and every kind of tool you could imagine. Most of the time he’d take me out to pick up the next old beater he’d found to fix up. One time, we came back with a 58 Edsel that had an old cardboard box in the trunk filled with Harley parts. I always wanted a motorcycle, so he gave them to me and taught me how to put them together. I’ve been hooked ever since.”
“He sounds like he was more of a father than your own dad,” she remarked.
Holden took her hand and led her outside, pressing the button on the garage opener attached to his key chain. It quietly slid closed as he opened the passenger side door of his Jeep. They’d been heading to a diner for a late breakfast when he’d decided to show Kendall his garage full of Harley parts, and he was still hungry as hell.
“I suppose he was,” he told her as he got behind the wheel and started the engine. “He not only brought me into his organization, but his home as well. It’s kind of crazy actually.”
“Maybe not,” Kendall said. “He knew your real father wasn’t around, so he stepped in and filled the void. It also sounds like he did a good job, too.”
Holden slanted her a look. “You got the part where I said McKinney taught me how to steal stuff, right?”
/> “Yeah. I mean, he was a criminal, but he was still there for you.” She shrugged. “And while you might have been one yourself, you’re not now. All I’m saying is that you didn’t get from where you were then to where you are now without someone pointing you in the right direction. McKinney obviously had something to do with that.”
Introspection wasn’t something Holden normally bothered with. Seriously, until a few minutes ago, he hadn’t given a lot of thought to the role Aaron McKinney had played in his life, beyond getting him out of the gang, teaching him to be a thief, and yeah, how to rebuild a motorcycle engine. But Kendall was right. The man probably deserved more credit than that.
“How’d you get so smart?” Holden teased, pulling out of the parking lot. “You never even met McKinney, and you seem to know him better than I do.”
She let out a laugh he was coming to love. “All that college education finally paying off, I guess. But there is one thing that confuses me.”
“What’s that?”
“If you’re as close to this guy as it seems, why do you always refer to him by his last name? You haven’t used his first name even once.”
Holden chuckled. “You ever hear anyone in Star Wars referring to Darth Vader by his first name? I don’t think so. There are some people you don’t get informal with. McKinney is one of those people.”
“Okay,” she murmured, fighting to keep a straight face. “Darth McKinney. Got it.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BRUNCH AT THE diner was awesome. Eggs and bacon were timeless. Then there was the coffee, not to mention bacon and toast with butter and grape jelly. She absolutely loved grape jelly. It was her jam. Was it possible for a jelly to be a jam?
Regardless, Kendall loved being able to have breakfast for lunch.
“You sure I’m not keeping you from class?” Holden asked as the waitress brought them two big glasses of orange juice and a fresh bottle of ketchup.
“What class?” Kendall asked as she buttered her toast. Nothing bothered her more than unevenly buttered toast.
“You know…college class. Expensive textbooks, boring professors, lectures, homework, huge student loans? Any of that ringing a bell?”
Dammit. She’d completely forgotten about her cover. For a moment, she was simply a woman having a late breakfast with her incredible boyfriend after a night of earth-shaking sex. She did her best to cover her reaction by reaching for her juice and taking a quick sip. Anything to give her a chance to get her crap together.
“I just meant that I don’t have classes on Tuesday and Thursday,” she explained. “And I’m blowing my homework off until the last possible second. I work better under tight deadlines.”
Holden nodded, apparently buying her lame excuse and cutting into his eggs and bacon. She immediately joined him, shoving food in her face so she wouldn’t be tempted to say anything stupid.
They ate in comfortable silence for a while, during which Kendall was able to calm down and trust she hadn’t slipped up and completely blown her cover. But it had been damn close. And it was all because of last night.
Sex with Holden had been out-of-this-world ah-mazing. Actually, that description wasn’t strong enough for last night. Being with Holden was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. And she wasn’t just talking about the physical act of making love. She couldn’t put a name to it yet—she wasn’t sure if she even wanted to—but she and Holden had clicked together like two pieces of a puzzle right down to their very souls.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Holden was still a thief and she was still an FBI agent. No matter how much it twisted her into knots to think about it, in a couple days, she’d be forced to arrest him and put him in prison. The reminder made it suddenly hard to breathe. How could she have let things go this far?
“You don’t like the eggs?” Holden asked, jerking her out of her dismal thoughts. When she looked up at him in confusion, he gestured at her plate. “Do you want to order something else?”
Giving herself a mental shake, Kendall picked up her knife and fork and cut up her two eggs over easy with guacamole on the side. “Of course, I like eggs. Is there anyone who doesn’t? They’re a quintessential basic. Like bread, cheese, pizza, and chocolate. Everyone likes eggs.”
Holden snorted. “I hate to mess with your quintessential logic, but my mom didn’t think much of eggs at all. Now, that was probably because she was so horrible at cooking them. But if you made a list of the anti-egg crowd, she’d be at the top.”
He bit into his toast and chewed slowly, staring down at his plate. She could tell he was a million miles away. Kind of like she was.
“Tell me about her,” Kendall said. Not because she was an FBI agent trying to get information out of him, but because she wanted to know everything there was to know about Holden the man, not Holden the thief.
“Not much to tell, really.” A small smile tugged at his lips. It was a fragile thing that slipped away long before it ever touched his eyes. “Mom died when I was nineteen.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, truly meaning it.
He shook his head. “It’s okay. I’ve made my peace with it after all these years. But back then it was rough. You’d think since she didn’t play a big part in my life that her death wouldn’t be a big deal, but it hit me harder than I would have ever thought possible, especially considering the fact that I saw it coming.”
She wanted to ask more, but wasn’t sure if she should. Finally, she went with her instincts. “Was it drugs?”
He nodded, wiping the remains of his egg yolks up off the plate with a piece of toast. “She’d used drugs as long as I could remember, but it got worse as I got older. That’s why I started working for McKinney. In return, he got her into rehab. There was no way I could have afforded something like that without him.”
“It didn’t help?”
“It did for a while,” he said. “But in the end her addiction to drugs was stronger than her desire to stay with the people who cared about her.”
Kendall reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. “I’m sure that’s not how it was. She loved you enough to try, but addiction is addiction. It’s a lifelong battle and unfortunately, she lost. That doesn’t mean she didn’t care about you.”
She expected Holden to point out she really didn’t have enough knowledge of the situation to make statements like that, but instead, he nodded again.
“I know that now,” he said. “Hell, I probably knew it then, but I was too young and stupid to process it. Which was why I walked away from the whole mess and found myself in a Navy recruiting office. Two weeks later, they had my name on the dotted line and I left for basic training. So, in that regard, I give my mom credit for me going in the Navy. I ran away from the life I wanted to leave behind.”
Kendall smiled. “Good thing you ran into a Navy recruiting office. Imagine how different your life would be if you’d ended up in the circus?”
He laughed. “I don’t know. I think I’d look good in those tights the acrobats in Circus Du Soleil wear.”
She considered that. “I guess, but if it’s all the same, I think I’d rather have you naked.”
He lifted a brow. “I’m not sure the world is ready for naked acrobats.”
She shrugged. “I think it could be the next big thing. I know I’d pay to see it.”
Holden snorted but didn’t say anything as a waitress came by to refill their coffee. They fell into that comfortable silence again as they finished eating. After they were done, they sat there sipping coffee and gazing at all the people passing by on the busy sidewalk outside. It was close to mid-day, so the tourists were already out in force, giving them lots to look at.
Regardless of how interesting the tourists might be, Kendall couldn’t help thinking about the stuff Holden had said about his mother. Especially the part about him taking the job with McKinney just so he could get his mom into rehab. It seemed the more she learned about Holden, the ha
rder it was to judge him as a criminal. He’d done what he had to do to survive and take care of his mother. It was difficult to condemn him for that.
It was tough to think poorly of McKinney, too. He’d helped a street kid get his mother into rehab, for heaven’s sake. How could she hate on the man for that? Even if he’d done it to get his hands on a skilled thief like Holden.
It made her wonder how McKinney had been willing to let Holden walk away and join the Navy.
“So,” she said, not sure how to phrase the question in a way that didn’t sound like she was snooping. “McKinney didn’t have a problem with you joining the Navy?”
When Holden didn’t answer right away, she thought she’d finally asked him for more than he was willing to reveal. But finally, he looked at her.
“He didn’t like it, but he understood why I had to do it. And in the end, we made a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” she asked hesitantly, not sure if she really wanted to know.
“Nothing big,” he said, his voice casual even if the expression in his eyes said it was anything but. “He agreed to let me walk away, and in return, I agreed not to use the skills he’d taught me.”
Kendall knew it was stupid, but for some reason she started to breathe easier. He’d walked away from that life to become a SEAL and never looked back. Holden couldn’t be the one who’d stolen the Key.
But the evidence the FBI had said otherwise.
“Of course, there was the additional proviso that if I ever did that kind of work again, it would only be for him.”
Kendall swallowed hard. “And did you ever do that kind of work again?”
She held her breath as she waited for him to answer, even though she didn’t want to know. But before he could say anything, the waitress appeared with their bill, telling them to have a nice day as she placed the bill on the table. Holden took out his wallet and tossed some money on the table, then slid out of the booth and offered Kendall his hand.
