“Beg all you want, Chels,” he pointed a finger at her adorable button nose, “but the fact remains when it comes to you CIA types, it’s better to find out what the strings are before they’re even attached. So, spill. Why are you really here?”

“Are you deaf?” she huffed. “I’ve been appointed the CIA’s liaison to Black Knights Incorporated. And my supervisor sent me here on a goodwill mission in an effort to assist you in your exemplary work for the president—”

“The president and his Joint Chiefs, yada, yada, yada,” Dagan finished the sentence for her. “Yeah. You already played me that tune over the phone. Which is another thing. Where exactly were you when you made that call?”

“Huh?” Her smooth black brows crinkled. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, were you in Chicago, New York, DC?”

“I…I was in my apartment in Georgetown,” she said, thrusting out her stubborn little chin. The woman could do mulish like nobody’s business. Most days, he admired that aspect of her character. Right now, it made him want to put his fist through a wall. Because there was something she wasn’t telling him. And—yes, goddamnit—it hurt that she didn’t trust him enough to give him the truth.

Will I never get out from under that catastrofuck in Afghanistan? His guilt, usually relegated to the recycle bin of his subconscious—except for on the anniversary of that disastrous date—suddenly popped back up to be reused. Oh, great. As if my day wasn’t already circling the drain. But he’d be damned if he’d stand there playing the poor-me card when he could do something more productive. Like, say, raking the ever-exasperating Agent Duvall over the coals.

“And your supervisor flew you here in the middle of the night—a CIA agent who has no jurisdiction on U.S. soil—just to find one missing old man?”

“Two missing old men,” Chelsea corrected. “Because unless I’m mistaken and you’ve got him tied up down in the basement, Charles Sander is also persona in absentia.”

“Oooh.” Ozzie placed his hand over his heart, stumbling back like he’d just been hit by one of Cupid’s arrows. “A woman who speaks Latin. Marry me, Agent Duvall. Marry me right this minute.”

“Shut up, Ozzie,” Dagan thundered when Chelsea turned to gift Ozzie with another beatific smile. “And before you go getting too flattered, Chels, you should know that he asks everything with breasts and ovaries to marry him.”

“Can I butt in here?” Delilah asked, and Zoelner blinked, having momentarily forgotten about the other people standing in the dingy little living room. “Why doesn’t the CIA have jurisdiction on U.S. soil?”

Dagan opened his mouth to answer, but Mac beat him to the punch. “The Central Intelligence Agency is chartered to work internationally.” The former Fed’s slow Texas drawl made that last word sound about a hundred miles long. “The FBI is the federal agency that deals with domestic issues.”

“Oh.” Delilah frowned. “So, then why is she here?”

“Exactly!” Dagan threw his hands in the air.

“Look, people,” Steady cut in. “I hate to be the one to mention it, but does it really matter why she’s here?”

“Considering the CIA just loves to stovepipe the rest of us?” Dagan replied. “Yeah, I’d say it matters.”

“I’m not stovepiping,” Chelsea insisted.

“Zoelner’s right. It matters if she’s stovepiping,” Ozzie said in an aside to Steady.

“Even if she is stovepiping, her arrival here might be—” Steady began, only to be interrupted by Chelsea yelling, “I’m not stovepiping!”

“What the heck is stovepiping?” Delilah asked, and all heads turned toward her. The room was so filled with tension at that point that Dagan felt like he was defusing a bomb. Defusing a bomb while being chased by a psycho killer and running through a minefield filled with hungry lions…

Yeah, that about covered it.

Mac, still managing composure despite the volatile atmosphere, supplied helpfully, “It’s when one agency doesn’t help the other because they’re stingy when it comes to their Intel.”

“I’m not stovepiping,” Chelsea repeated sullenly.

“I don’t believe you.” Dagan scowled down at her, narrowing his eyes when the slightest wash of pink tinged her cheeks. “Aha!” He pointed at her, but before he could say anything more, Steady stepped in again.

“Whether you believe her or not is inconsequential, hermano, because, the fact remains we were going to call for her help anyway, so—”

“You were?” Chelsea grinned at Dagan, one victorious brow raised.

“Just for access to the infrared on Eyes in the Sky,” he admitted irritably.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” She slung the black carryall around in front of her to dig out an iPad. Punching the button on the Bluetooth device hooked around her ear, she simultaneously sat on the arm of the couch and started issuing commands to whomever was on the other end of the line. “So, what do you need?” she asked as she powered up the iPad.

“We need heat scans of the entire town,” Ozzie told her. “We’re hoping to go door-to-door to ask if anyone has seen Charles or Theo, and that exercise would go much more quickly if we actually knew which houses were occupied.”

Had everyone lost their friggin’ minds? They were just going to ignore the ten-ton elephant—aptly named Chelsea’s Bizarre Appearance—that was tap dancing over there in the corner? Because why in the world would—

“Dagan?” When she used his given name, he realized two things. First, it made his skin prickle. And next, it was the second time she’d tried to get his attention.

“What?” he demanded, feeling as if his head should be spinning around atop his shoulders à la Linda Blair in The Exorcist. See…Ozzie wasn’t the only one quick with the horror movie references…

“I asked if there was a specific grid you’d like me to start with,” she said, frowning up at him. “My technician,” she pointed to her earpiece, “is telling me it’ll take about two minutes to reroute the satellite and begin uploading the scans.”

“Tell him to start with downtown and make his way back toward our current location,” he said, irked that she’d somehow managed to take over the situation without first coming clean about her mysterious arrival. Diversion and avoidance. Yeah, he’d learned that pretty little trick in spy school, too.

Chelsea relayed the information, simultaneously tapping on her iPad. Then she grinned up at him. “Has anyone ever told you when you get pissed, your voice gets all raspy? I can’t imagine how you handled that out in the field. It’s a tell that—”

“And has anyone ever told you that your observations are about as welcome as an itchy asshole,” he cut her off.

“Yeesh.” She suppressed a grin. “You’d be the first.”

“And don’t think just because I’m agreeing to your help right now that it means I’m swallowing that load of hogwash you’re dishing.”

“First it was horse crap and now it’s hogwash?” She wrinkled her nose. He did not make note of how cute it was. “None of that is very appetizing, is it?”

“I mean it. The minute we find Delilah’s uncle,” he pointed a finger at her, “I’m going to be all over your ass like a bad rash until you come clean with whatever it is you’re hiding from me.”

“A bad rash, huh? I’ve heard calamine lotion works wonders for that.”

“I’m dead serious,” he warned.

“Ooh.” She shivered dramatically. “I love it when you bring out the sound and fury.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Spoken like a true scholar.”

He scowled down at her. She grinned up at him. And the Black Knights appeared to have been stunned into silence. The air around them vibrated like a yawning black hole of complete conversational failure. Then Chelsea’s iPad dinged and a set of real-time infrared scans appeared on her screen.

The Knights gathered around her as the first image took shape and Mac leaned in close, whispering, “Well, I tell you one thing, she’s got some snap in her garters.”

Yeah, Dagan thought uncharitably, that’s one way of putting it. Another way of putting it would be to say she was a serious pain in the ass.

* * *

The Knights were eyeing the CIA agent with differing levels of curiosity and suspicion, and Delilah had to admit that Chelsea Duvall was not what she imagined in a government spook. Short, slightly plump, and adorably cute with her mixed heritage and smattering of freckles, Chelsea looked more like she should be teaching kindergarteners their ABCs and 123s and less like she should be chasing bad guys around the globe.

Then again, perhaps that was the whole point. A spy wasn’t supposed to look like a spy, right?

Mac’s knuckles brushed the back of her hand when he stepped up to get a closer look at the screen on Chelsea’s iPad, and Delilah would swear she felt the touch somewhere much more intimate. A slight shiver convulsed her muscles, and she just barely held back a gasp as she glanced into his big, square, unfairly attractive face.

Oh, goody-goody-gumdrops. So the Mask of Inscrutability has returned!

And how he could manage to look completely unfazed when mere minutes ago he’d been sucking her nipple and grinding the hard, hot length of his erection against her she’d never know. For her part, she couldn’t seem to come down from the high. Her body was still piano-wire tight, the blood rushing through her veins as sharp and warm as the hot toddies she liked to serve when a nor’easter blew through Chicago.

She now knew what it meant when those historical romance novels she liked to read claimed the heroes “ravaged” the heroines. Because, really, considering the way Mac had held her, stroked her, kissed her, tongued her, there was no other way to describe it. And if she was going to call it a ravaging, then she also had to call Mac completely, deliciously beastly. He’d been growling and groaning and—for the love of tequila—to say it’d been hot would be like calling lukewarm bathwater hot. Because enigmatic, self-disciplined, Bryan “Mac” McMillan losing control of those reins he usually kept such a tight hold on had been way beyond hot. It’d been volcano-hot, surface-of-Mercury-hot, exploding-star-hot. So hot she was still feeling singed, and he was…

Well, he was ignoring her and watching the CIA agent’s screen with concerted interest.

Ugh. She didn’t know if she should be depressed or impressed.

“Yorp!” Fido sang from his position by the back door, wagging his tail enthusiastically. Obviously, he had no interest in what Agent Duvall was showing them, and Delilah sort of envied the big yellow dog. How nice would it be to have no worries except for when your next meal or game of fetch would be?

Then again, that wasn’t necessarily true. Because poor, sweet Fido had lost his master as surely as she’d lost her uncle. And, okay, so that was one way to take the edge off the lust still zinging through her system. Thoughts of Uncle Theo…

“Check that out,” Ozzie said, pointing a finger at the screen. “Why are there four people in that building downtown?”

Delilah couldn’t help herself, she moved in closer so she, too, could see what Ozzie was motioning toward. To her utter consternation, she couldn’t understand the information on the agent’s iPad. It just looked like vague gray outlines in a series of geometric shapes with four green dots moving around inside one of them.

“Squatters?” Mac supplied. “Or kids in there havin’ a toke?” When her arm brushed against his, he took a small step back. She glanced up at his face and was rewarded for her effort with an expression that was no longer the Mask of Inscrutability. That was the good news. The bad news? Well, now he’d reverted back to his second most favorite look. Disapproval.

Oh, you’ve got be kidding me! Her feelings must’ve been evident on her face because disapproval quickly morphed into dismissal.

Wahoo! We’re three for three, folks! And, oooh, where was a rock when she needed one? Something small and hard that she could zing toward his stubborn head? Just whack! Knock some sense into him with one blow. She was stopped from glancing around the room in search of a serviceable item when Ozzie replied, “Mmm. Yeah, you’re probably right. Ask for the next scan, Agent Duvall.”