Julie Walker - Born Wild

“He’s certainly…uh…” Mac cocked his head, “persistent.”

“That’s one word for it,” she said, snorting and rubbing a thumb against her pounding temple.

Ace hooked an arm around her shoulders, giving her a quick squeeze. “You look completely beat, love,” he murmured in her ear. “How about you head upstairs and snuggle into bed. I’ll bring you a nice hot chocolate, we can gossip about boys, and you can forget about this whole mess for a while. How does that sound?”

How did it sound? “Like heaven,” she sighed, glancing up into his angelic face and kind eyes. Ace was going to make some man very happy one day.

“Good.” He planted a kiss on her cheek. From the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Billy clench his hands into fists. “It’s all settled then.” Ace stood and pulled her up by her elbows. “You go get into your PJs and I’ll be right up.” For good measure, after she’d turned toward the stairs leading to the loft-style bedrooms on the third floor, he gave her ass a resounding smack.

She squealed, swinging around to glare at him, but a slow smile ruined the expression.

“That’s more like it,” Ace grinned. “You’ve got a beautiful smile, love. And it breaks my heart when you don’t use it. Now, up you go,” he said, shooing her toward the stairs. She turned to do as instructed, but when her foot landed on the first tread, any momentary lightheartedness she felt disappeared like a catamaran in the Bermuda Triangle. It just…vanished. Because, oh, the look in Billy’s eyes out in that Hummer. The memory flashed through her mind, ripped at her heart.

It’s over, Eve. You ruined it.

And great. Now, not only was she exhausted, but she was on the verge of a crying jag guaranteed to last half the night. Without a backward glance, she sprinted up the stairs, wrenched open the door to the guest room, and threw herself down on the bed face-first, burying her head in the pillows lest the men downstairs hear the uncontrollable sobbing that shook her from head to toe.

* * *

“What is that look for?” Bill growled at Ace after Eve disappeared upstairs. BKI’s flyboy was standing there, arms crossed, head cocked, a narrowed-eyed glare plastering his face.

“Remember what I told you I’d do to you if you weren’t nice to Eve?” Ace smiled, all teeth and no emotion, though he did bat his girlishly long lashes.

“What the hell?” Bill threw his hands in the air, feeling his frustration mount to precarious levels. If he didn’t simmer down soon, his ulcer would wake up and go in for a second…third?…helping. “I have been nice to her. I friggin’ went and interrogated her stalker. I made sure he leaves her the hell alone from now on. I kept those damned meddling reporters from getting to her. And I—”

“And you were a big, snide, ass-clown with that little speech about her saving herself for the one.” Ace uncrossed his arms so he could sarcastically make the quote marks with his fingers.

Bill winced. Yeah, okay, so that hadn’t exactly been one of his bright, shining moments, but…

Still, after everything, he thought he’d done a pretty bang-up job of keeping his more cynical feelings to himself. So he’d appreciate it if his fellow Knights, specifically Ace, would cut him a little goddamned slack. He told the guy as much.

“Slack?” Ace asked, his expression telegraphing his annoyance louder than a WWII sticky bomb taking out a German Panzer. “You don’t need any slack. What you need is an old-fashioned ass-whooping.” Okay, and now Bill was good and pissed. He pushed up from the table, but Ace ignored the killing gleam in his eye and just kept on. “Because your ticket on the Poor-Me-I-Got-Dumped train has long expired. You need to hop off at the next stop, my friend. It’s at the intersection of Suck-It-Up and Get-The-Hell-Over-It.”

Whoa. Bill felt like he’d just been kicked in the sprouts, and red edged into his vision for about the zillionth time that night.

“What. The. Fuck. Would you know about it?” he hissed, skirting the table.

Mac’s, “Come on now, guys, let’s just take a T.O. here before things get out of hand,” went ignored.

“I know that you dated for three months back when you were both too young and too dumb to know your assess from holes in the ground. I know you went off to big, bad BUD/S training, leaving your eighteen-year-old girlfriend at college with all the accompanying temptations inherent therein. I know you went weeks, sometimes months, without calling her because of your training. I know she did what many young girls her age do and allowed her head to be turned by a good-looking, fancy-talking rich boy. I know—”

“How do you know all this?” Bill demanded, feeling the vein next to his temple pulse in warning as his ulcer sat up to lick its chops. He didn’t want to sock Ace in the kisser. Well…he kind of did. He’d been wanting to hit someone or something all evening.

“Becky told me,” Ace said, re-crossing his arms and jutting out his chin. Bill had never hated a perfectly groomed five-o’clock shadow so much in his life. “And before you go thinking your kid sister is telling tales out of school, I want you to know that I asked her what the deal was between you and Eve. I mean, come on, the wall of tension between you two is so high and tight you could bounce a grenade off it.”

“You gossip like a girl, Ace-hole,” he grumbled, staring down at his worn black combat boots. Any time he wore them, he was reminded of Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the garbage bags that’d passed as roadside trash but were, in fact, IEDs gnarly enough to take out entire sections of military convoys.

He’d spent years combing those desert roads, safely exploding this device and not-so-safely disarming that one. And all that time, even through all the danger, through all the sweat and tears, he’d never stopped thinking of Eve, never stopped wondering and agonizing over why she’d done what she’d done. Never stopped despising and blaming her for how she’d done it.

But maybe Ace was right. Maybe it was time to let it go. Just…let it all go. She’d been so young…so young and so very naïve…

“I gossip like a girl?” Ace queried, dragging Bill from his ruminations. A shit-eating grin was spread across the man’s pretty-boy face. “Why thank you, Bill. I take that as a compliment.”

“Yeah, well, the next time you think of opening your mouth to discuss my private life,” he grunted, and it occurred to him then that he was emotionally exhausted, bone-tired of holding on to scorn and hostility that was more than a decade old. It was time to move on, “why don’t you try counting your teeth instead, huh?”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Ace winked, but Bill knew they were only words. Ace would continue to butt into everybody’s business with impunity. Just like he always had. “And now,” Ace continued, reading the surrender on Bill’s face, “why don’t you go up and talk to Eve. If I’m right, and I always am, she could use a little comforting right now.”

Now that made Bill’s chin jerk back on his neck like he’d been the recipient of a five-finger sandwich. “I thought that’s what you were going to do.”

Ace rolled his eyes, heaving a long-suffering, overly dramatic sigh. “She’d much rather that comfort come from you, you nitwit.”

No, she wouldn’t. No way. No how. “She would?”

“Without a doubt,” Ace stated with conviction. “So get to it.”

“But…” He glanced back at Mac who was still seated at the conference table.

All right, it was confession time. Because in all honesty, the thought of going upstairs to comfort Eve scared the living shit out of him. He may never be able to forget what had happened, he may never be able to trust her again, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still want her more than he wanted his next sunrise. If he lived to be a hundred years old, he figured he’d never stop wanting Eve. And that meant, in order to save himself more grief and misery, he had to stay away from her whenever he possibly could.

Now being the perfect example.

“Don’t we still have things to discuss?” he asked Mac, and it was only partly a stalling tactic. Because Bill hadn’t missed the flicker in Mac’s eyes when Eve asked if he really thought whoever was doing this was someone she knew. Mac smelled a rat. Bill was certain of it. “Like, who you suspect is really behind these attempts on her life?”

“I don’t know who’s behind them,” Mac said, his expression contemplative.

“There,” Bill pointed a finger at the guy’s face. “That look right there tells me you know more than you’re saying.”

Mac shrugged. “Here’s what I know. There are usually two reasons people commit premeditated murder.”

“And those are?”

“Love and money.”

“Jesus,” Bill swiped a hand over the back of his neck where a patch of goose bumps had suddenly erupted. Love and money, huh? Well, shit. That could mean only one thing. “So you suspect it’s someone very close to her,” he murmured, unconsciously shooting a worried glance toward the stairs leading to the third floor.

“Let’s rule out everything else first,” Mac stated. Then he added, “But let’s do it in the morning. Because right now, I’m tired as a cactus.”

Ace snorted. “You’ve been hanging around with the ragin’ Cajun too long, Mac my man.”

“Hey,” Mac frowned, “I’m from Texas. We have our own expressions and—”

Bill stopped listening, instead turning his full attention toward the staircase.

Did he dare?

“Go,” Ace came up beside him, giving him a little shove even as Mac continued to rant about the superiority of Texans when it came to the inventiveness of Southern colloquialisms. “But I warn you, you better just talk to her, just comfort her. I don’t want to hear you up there smudging her cookies.”

“Smudging her what?” Bill asked, only half listening since all his attention was focused on those stairs. Was it a stairway to heaven or hell?

“You know what I’m talking about,” Ace insisted. “Eating her cake, flicking her bean, smudging her cookies. None of that.”

And, shit, had his thoughts been plastered all over his face?

He turned to lift a brow at Ace who flattened his mouth and narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, I can see the gerbils spinning the wheels in your head. But I trust you to keep them, and yourself, in check. Can you do that for me?”

“Of course I can,” Bill said, but he wondered who he was trying to convince more, Ace or himself. Then he decided there was no use standing there pondering imponderable thoughts, so he pulled his determination around himself like a steely mantle and stomped across the room to the metal steps.

Somewhere on Lake Shore Drive

11:02 p.m.

She needed to die. It was the only way…

And it broke his heart that’s how it had to be. But there was a law in the jungle: Eat or be eaten. And, as sad as it might sound, it didn’t matter what the relationship was. The female praying mantis ate her lover. The chimpanzee was known to eat his enemy. Even polar bear fathers had been filmed killing and eating their young.

He didn’t make the rules, by God. But he’d certainly learned to live by them. And the only way he could see to get free of his current predicament was for Eve to meet her maker.

Unfortunately, she was proving far more difficult to kill than he ever imagined…

Tough. That’s what she was. Tough and smart and beautiful. And there was a part of him that was so damned proud of her and how far she’d come from that young woman who’d suffered nearly paralyzing shyness and self-doubt. A part of him that adored her and scorned himself and the decisions he’d made that necessitated her death.

No. He shook his head, gazing out of his living room window at the cars zooming past on Lake Shore Drive, and beyond, to the calming blue of the lake itself. You’ve made your decision.

As always, the inner pep talk steadied him. And he could admit that he no longer had the time to stage her death, to orchestrate another accident. The clock was ticking down to the final hour, and he had to act fast. It needed to be quick. It needed to be dirty. And it needed to be soon.

Which meant it was time to call in the cavalry, otherwise known as the lowlife Chicago thugs who were threatening to break his knees before breaking his neck…

Picking up a cheap, plastic pre-paid phone, he dialed a number he knew by heart. One quick string of words later, and it was done. Eve’s life—or the end of her life—was no longer in his hands.