Julie Walker - Hell for Leather

He shook his head and blinked away the disturbing vision in time to see Zoelner raise a hand and call out to the bald, goateed man behind the bar. “Hey, Brendan! Where’s the lovely lady of the house this evening? Not that my rather large, rather slow-talking friend here,” Zoelner hooked a thumb in Mac’s direction, “is wearing the sulky look of a eunuch in a whorehouse because he’s missing her gorgeous face or anything. Because she’s absolutely not his type.”

Right then, Mac made the supremely wise and incredibly mature decision to kick the former CIA agent’s booted ankle. Zoelner turned to lift a dubious brow before he hauled off and kicked Mac right back. Which, of course, left Mac with no recourse but to respond with an even harder kick and soon they were scuffling like a couple of rowdy college frat boys instead of two highly trained operators. Then again, they were highly tipsy as well. So maybe that explained it.

“Delilah’s down south,” Brendan said, coming to stand in front of them while continuing to wipe wet pint glasses with a dish towel. Short and squatty, Brendan had the physique of a wrestler and the face of a boxer—the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones looked like they’d been flattened more than a time or two by heavy fists. What he lacked in height, he obviously made up for in sheer scrappiness.

“Where?” Zoelner asked, adjusting his leather jacket and shooting Mac a narrowed-eyed glare before turning his attention back to Brendan.

“Southern Illinois,” the bartender said, and Mac thought, Southern Illinois? What the hell is she doin’ down there?

“What the hell is she doing down there?”

He blinked, startled. Had he asked the question aloud? Just how much scotch had he had?

But no. It was Zoelner Brendan turned to to answer. Of course, Mac was forced to wonder again just how much scotch he’d had when, before any words had a chance to form on Brendan’s tongue, the thought don’t let her be down there visiting a lover whispered through the back of his brain.

Whoa. What? Where the hell had that come from? He didn’t give two shits what or…or…who she was doing down in southern Illinois.

Did he?

He couldn’t help but notice his question was answered with resounding, cricket-chirping silence.

Well, hell. That’s just the booze talkin’. Because anything else was too disconcerting to contemplate.

“Between you and me,” Brendan said, leaning in conspiratorially, “I think she’s trying to avoid the bar.”

What? Why?

“What? Why?” Zoelner asked.

Mac glared at the mind-reading man. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Carnac the Magnificent or somethin’?”

“Huh?” Zoelner frowned at him in narrow-eyed affront. “Why are you scowling at me like that? Stop it, or that brown-haired Betty over there is going to think you just broke up with me.”

As a group, Mac, Zoelner, and Brendan all turned to smile at the woman in question. Zoelner raised his glass and wiggled his eyebrows, which elicited a seductive lowering of the Betty’s lashes and a subtle quirk of one corner of her lacquered lips.

“So why is Delilah avoiding the bar?” he asked, finding his way back on track more quickly than Mac. Of course, the instant That Woman’s name was mentioned, every single thought in Mac’s head focused on her like a blue-tick healer pointing out a covey of quail.

Shit, shit, shit.

“After Buzzard’s murder,” Brendan began, and oh, great. Just what Mac didn’t need to be reminded of right now—the all-out gun battle Delilah had found herself involved in a few months ago, the one where her most loyal patron died. Because that had been the night he almost threw caution to the wind and went against all his better judgment to take her up on one of her offers. She’d been so vulnerable and sad. And he’d wanted to comfort her so badly. “She’s been jumping at every chance she gets to hightail it out of here. I think this place holds too many bad memories now.”

The three of them fell quiet for one moment. Then two.

“But anyway.” Brendan brushed a hand through the air, as if he could wave off the cloud of discomfort hanging over them. “She’s on a road trip with her uncle. Something about a visit to an old friend of his, and—”

“Oh, I figured she was down there working her woo-woo magic on the budget of some two-bit municipality,” Zoelner said.

Her woo-woo magic…

Zoelner wasn’t talking about Delilah’s ability to hypnotize a man with her cat-eyed stare or the bewitching way her hips swayed when she walked across the room. He wasn’t referring to her talent for whipping up an alcoholic concoction that could taste sweet as candy one minute and knock a man flat on his ass the next or how she could cast a spell over the entire bar simply by tossing her head back and letting loose with that low, throaty laugh of hers. Huh-uh. The guy wasn’t talking about any of that, though it could all certainly count as woo-woo magic, witchcraft, or, in Mac’s not-so-humble opinion, straight-up voodoo sorceress shit. What Zoelner was referring to was the fact that Delilah Fairchild, the sex-pot owner of a down-and-dirty biker bar, happened to spend her free time working as a…wait for it…freakin’ forensic accountant.

Sweet Lord almighty, sometimes Mac still had trouble believing it.

Though, truth be told, he had no trouble whatsoever imagining it. He’d spent more than an hour or two daydreaming about her sitting at a desk somewhere, hair twisted up in a bun, reading glasses perched on the tip of her prim nose. In fact, for the last six months—ever since he’d learned what her second gig was—it’d been his favorite go-to fantasy. Something like the tried-and-true naughty librarian dream set on overdrive, because, you know, that whole one-part-proper-lady-and-two-parts-sex-goddess shtick had been a male spanktrovision standard since the beginning of time and—

The front door burst open, slamming against the inside wall. Mac turned to see who was in such an all-fire hurry to get inside the bar. One look had his lungs playing the part of Michael Jordan. They attempted to leap right out of his throat.

Speak of the devil…

Even if he hadn’t recognized the long auburn hair cascading from beneath a motorcycle helmet and tumbling around a set of leather-clad shoulders, the shouts of gleeful greeting and the lifted mugs of beer would’ve told him the woman of the hour had made her way home.

See… Beautiful and vivacious and able to command the attention of every man in the room…

He swiveled back toward the bar, but the hairs on the back of his neck almost instantly alerted him to the fact that That Woman had marched up behind him.

Slowly, with what he hoped wasn’t a patently false look of unconcern, he turned around. But before he could open his mouth, she whipped off her helmet and shook out her hair. He was accosted by the spicy-sweet scent of her perfume and the earthier aroma of the open road. Inexplicably, and to his utter horror, Little Mac, the idiot in his pants, defied all convention—not to mention the amount of liquor he’d imbibed—and lifted to half-mast.

Well, for God’s sake, he thought with disgust, mentally calling himself and Little Mac ten kinds of fool just as Delilah blurted, “Thank goodness you’re here.”

“Huh?” Okay, and even in his scotch-muddled state, he recognized his response for the gleaming bit of witticism it was not.

Delilah frowned. “Are you drunk?” She placed her hands on her hips. Her round, curvy, delicious hips. Her lovely hips that just begged for a man’s hands and—

Ah, hell…

“Maybe,” he told her, holding his forefinger and thumb an inch apart. “Just a little.”

“Goddamnit!” she growled, then immediately yelled for Brendan to bring over two cups of coffee.

“Hey, now. Don’t do that,” Zoelner objected. “I’ve been working all evening on this buzz and I—”

“Can it,” Delilah cut him off. Mac lifted his eyebrows in surprise. Not that Delilah wasn’t a speak-her-mind, in-your-face kind of broad, because she was. But this was something different. The tone she’d taken with Zoelner bordered on rude.

“I need you.” She pointed a red-tipped finger at Zoelner’s nose, causing the man to go cross-eyed when he attempted to focus on it. Whoa. What? She needed…Zoelner? Then she turned to include him in that stomach-churning statement. “I need both of you.”

Zoelner’s face pulled down in a considering frown. “Just to be clear, I’m not usually the kind of man who likes to share his pleasures.” Okay, and just the thought had a lurid emotion—not jealousy, definitely not jealousy—buzzing at the back of Mac’s head like a swarm of angry Texas yellow jackets. “But if you’ve a mind to—”

“Not like that,” Delilah hissed, color climbing in her already flushed cheeks.

All right. Something…Mac tilted his head, blinking…isn’t right here. Unfortunately, the discombobulating combination of scotch and Delilah’s nearness ensured he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Then she saved him the trouble of trying to figure it out when she blurted, “My uncle is missing. And I need you guys to help me find him.”

Well…hello, sobriety.

Outside Theo Fairchild’s Brownstone

Thirty minutes later…

Don’t panic…

Delilah Fairchild had been repeating those two words to herself for hours. She said them when her uncle wasn’t back at the motel when he said he’d be. She breathed them the first—and the thirtieth—time she called his cell phone only to be transferred straight to voice mail. She muttered them after a half-dozen inquiries to the area’s hospitals turned up exactly nada. She combined them with a rather poetic curse when the local police told her she had to wait twenty-four hours before the missing person’s report she filed would get any real attention—her uncle being an adult and all, and possibly just holed-up in a hotel somewhere getting his knob polished. For the record, the policeman hadn’t actually said that, but his intent had been clear. And she echoed them over and over inside her motorcycle helmet the entire four-and-a-half-hour, hell-bent-for-leather ride back to Chicago.

But the truth was…she was starting to panic.

Big time.

Of course, it didn’t help matters that two of the guys she’d been depending on to assist her in finding her uncle happened to be drunk as the proverbial skunks. When she stormed into her bar, intent on running upstairs to the apartment she lived in above the place in order to grab the spare keys to her uncle’s new townhouse, she’d been beyond relieved to see two of the Black Knights occupying center barstools.

That relief had lasted all of about ten seconds.

Because the only thing more exasperating than dealing with drunks was dealing with drunks when you desperately needed them to be sober.

And speaking of drunks…

A yellow taxi pulled up behind her motorcycle, its headlights bathing her in sharp white light. She raised a hand and squinted against it as she toed out her kickstand and hooked her helmet over the chrome handlebars of her Harley chopper. Bryan “Mac” McMillan and Dagan Zoelner, each wearing faded jeans, summer-weight leather jackets, and T-shirts advertising the custom motorcycles of Black Knights Inc., climbed out of the vehicle. Silhouetted against the light, they both looked big and mean—Mac much more so, with hulking muscles and a perpetual scowl—and, wouldn’t you know? They were just what she needed right now.

If only they were sober…

Of course, as her Uncle Theo liked to say, she could wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one filled up faster. Which in this case meant drunk or sober, she was taking Mac and Zoelner any way she could get them.

“So, what are we looking for here?” Zoelner asked, coming to stand beside her. The guy stumbled slightly when he tipped his head back to take a sip of the coffee she’d made Brendan pour into Styrofoam cups. He swayed again when he glanced up at the three-story brownstone her uncle was in the middle of restoring to its former glory. The dimly glowing streetlamps cast the building’s warm rock facade in sharp planes and dark shadows. And for some reason, perhaps it was nerves or maybe it was the adrenaline that had been flooding her system all day, but it struck her as slightly…foreboding. Perhaps even…malevolent?