No, she’d never forget. Not if she lived to be a hundred years old. She wiped her hands on her apron and reached across the bar, squeezing his hand.

He made a clucking noise, his bushy, white mustache drooping at the corners. “How long until you stop needing to touch me every thirty seconds to assure yourself I’m really here?”

She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I don’t know. It might be a while yet.”

He opened his mouth to respond, but a sharp knock on the front door sent Fido scrambling out from under her feet and racing around the end of the bar. His doggy nails scraped against the hardwood floor, alerting her to the fact that it was probably time to take out the clippers. Dog ownership had its own learning curve, one she was enjoying immensely. And besides seeing her uncle healthy and happy—well, as happy as he could be considering he’d watched one of his oldest acquaintances die at the hands of terrorists. She knew he was still struggling with that—nothing gave her more pleasure than to know Fido had completely recovered. The dog had nothing to show for his close brush with death except for a six-inch scar furrowing through the yellow hair on his chest.

“Yorp! Yorp! Yorpyorpyorp!” he sang happily as both Delilah and her uncle yelled toward the door, “We’re closed!”

“It’s Zoelner!” came the reply from outside, and Delilah’s hand jumped to her throat when her heart tried to escape from her body via that route.

Mac…. Something had happened to Mac and—

She hopped over the bar, not bothering to use the hinged ledge at the end. Hurdling a barstool, she was across the room in two seconds, twisting the locks and throwing open the door. Zoelner stood on the threshold in jeans and a leather jacket, his expression unreadable.

“Mac,” she said, or at least tried to say. Her throat was so restricted by the presence of her heart that it came out sounding more like a wheezing Mahhh. She swallowed and tried again. “Is he okay? Is he hurt? Do you—”

“Relax,” Zoelner said, grabbing her elbow and steering her back into the bar. “Mac’s fine.” A whooshing sigh of relief gushed from her, and it was then she realized her knees were shaking like the overhead fixtures tended to do on Wednesday nights when a troop of local line-dancers took over the place. When Zoelner spotted her uncle sitting at the bar, he dipped his chin. “Theo. You’re looking well. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see that.”

“Thanks to you and the boys of BKI,” her uncle said.

Zoelner waved off his comment. “No need for thanks. Just doing our jobs.”

And Delilah still couldn’t quite believe how blasé her uncle had been when she explained to him in the hospital—after getting the go-ahead from Frank “Boss” Knight, of course—what exactly the Black Knights were and why exactly they’d been there assisting in his rescue.

Yeah, that makes sense, was all he’d said in answer to her revelation. Then he’d gone back to eating pudding while watching the Cardinals trounce the Cubs on the television hanging from the hospital ceiling.

Makes sense? Makes sense? she’d thought at the time. In what world? But then she figured it made sense in the covert government mission world her uncle had been a part of back in the day. And, go figure, they’d not mentioned a word of it since.

Men, she thought with an eye roll. Then she decided to narrow that down to super-secret former and/or current government men… They were seriously exasperating.

“When does the cast come off?” Zoelner asked her uncle, bending to scratch Fido behind the ears. The dog was sitting in front of him, holding a paw up for a shake.

“Next week, thank goodness,” her uncle said. “I’ve had an itch I haven’t been able to get to for six days now.”

“Sounds awful.” Zoelner grinned, rubbing Fido’s belly when it was presented to him. The big goofy canine was on his back, thick tail swooshing across the floorboards, head thrown back so his upper jowls sagged and made him look like he was smiling maniacally. Delilah could only shake her head and grin, wondering how she’d ever lived without the dog’s daily antics to make her laugh. Then Zoelner glanced up at her. “You got a couple of minutes? There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Sure,” she said, brow puckering. “You want some coffee?” She glanced at her watch. It was only ten o’clock in the morning, but the look on Zoelner’s face told her he could maybe use something a little stronger. “Or a beer, perhaps?”

“Coffee’s fine,” Zoelner said, standing and walking with her over to the bar. He grabbed a stool while she skirted the long mahogany length. This time she took the time to lift the hinged section at the end before slipping in behind.

While she poured him a cup of joe, her uncle folded his newspaper, grabbed his crutches, and said, “I’m gonna head outside to smoke a cigar.” He shot her a meaningful look. “And I don’t want to hear a word about it.”

“The doctors say you should stop smoking those things.” She placed her hands on her hips, completely ignoring his second sentence.

He rolled his eyes. “The doctors also say I’ve got the cholesterol levels of a twenty-year-old.” He began hobbling toward the door at the back of the bar, the one leading to the alley. “So I figure I’m ahead of the curve. Besides, a man my age has to enjoy what pleasures he can.”

“And speaking of pleasures,” she called to him, “stop sharing your stogies with the agents in the surveillance cars. You’re a bad influence!”

He simply lifted a hand to wave her off.

“He’s a tough old coot,” Zoelner observed.

“And stubborn,” she agreed, smiling after her uncle. “He insists there’s no reason for the CIA to keep an eye on him even though the head honchos in that al-Qaeda group know he’s now the only living person with the exact coordinates of five missing nuclear warheads.”

“Three,” Zoelner said.

“Huh?”

“It’s only three now,” he told her. “Given this most recent development, the DOD decided it behooved them to allocate a portion of their healthy budget to the retrieval of the nukes. Two have already been raised from the sea floor. The salvage of the remaining three is underway.”

“About damn time, if you ask me,” she said, wondering, not for the first time, at the idiocy of a government that would not put the recovery of nuclear weapons at the very top of its to-do list.

Zoelner shrugged, and there was that look again. The one that made her wonder if she should renew her offer of a beer. She tilted her head. “You’re not here at the bequest of Agent Duvall, are you? Was I wrong? Did the Intel I gave them on the ghost accounts Winterfield set up in Argentina not pan out? Does she want me to—”

“I don’t want to talk about Chelsea Duvall,” Dagan spat the name like one usually spits out rancid meat. “She was a pain in the ass while I worked for The Company, and now, thanks to her spiffy new title, she’s a pain in my ass again.”

Uh-huh. Pain in the ass. Did Zoelner realize when he said that, it sounded like a euphemism for my wildest fantasy come true? Usually she would have called him on his bullshit, but there was that look again. It was really beginning to trouble her. “So, then, um…what did you want to talk about?”

“Do you love Mac?”

“Say what?” She must have misheard him.

“Do you love Mac?” he repeated, and yeah, okay, so she hadn’t misheard him. He’d asked it. That question. The question. Her scalp began to tingle.

“I don’t know how that’s any of your—”

“Because he loves you.”

Thunk. The sentence landed with the weight of a tractor trailer. Was the room spinning, or was that just her head? Then, reality—and the words I’ll see you later, darlin’—slammed into her. She shook herself.

“Yeah, right!” she scoffed, grabbing the coffee pot to top off his nearly full cup. She needed something to distract herself, to keep him from seeing just how much his words affected her. “The man has been avoiding me like I’m a plague carrier. If that’s how he treats someone he loves, I’d hate to see how he treats someone he hates.”

Zoelner reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a photo, slapping it down on the bar. She leaned forward, examining the picture. A woman. Black hair. Blue eyes. Nice face. Curvaceous figure.

“She’s pretty,” she said, trying to stymie the wild race of her heart. Because he loves you. Zoelner couldn’t know just how much she wished that were true. “Who is she?”

“She’s the reason Mac refuses to take a chance with you,” Zoelner said. Delilah picked up the photo, examining it closer. This was the woman who’d ruined Mac? The woman he said reminded him of her? She was pretty. And there was something—

“She’s his mother,” Zoelner said, and Delilah felt her jaw fall open. It was a wonder the thing didn’t land at her feet.

“H-his mother?”

“Yep. And I want to tell you a story. But before I do that, I have to know if you love him.”

His mother was the mystery woman? Delilah stared at the photograph. She could see it. Mac had those same eyes. That same smile… His mother? But why did he—

“Hey.” Zoelner snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Earth to Delilah. Come in, Delilah.”

“Sorry,” she said, blinking, her brain spinning in circles the way Fido did when he got bored and caught sight of his tail.

“I have to know,” he repeated. “Do. You. Love him?”

She swallowed, a little afraid to admit it aloud for the first time. But then she took her own advice and toughened up, buttercup. Harley-riding, beer-slinging, yada, yada, yada, right? Dragging in a deep breath, she looked Zoelner square in the eye. “Yes. I love him.” God, it feels good to say it.

“Good.” He nodded. “Because, like I said, he loves you, too. And the fact that he does scares him to death.”

Could it be true? Did she dare hope? “Scares him? But why?”

“Because of Jolene.” He tapped his finger on the photo. Jolene? Mac’s mother’s name was Jolene? “Because she was a faithless cow who ran out on Mac and his father when Mac was only twelve, leaving behind nothing but a selfish, insipid farewell note that didn’t contain a single regret or apology.”

She winced. Twelve? Such an impressionable age. An age when a boy needed his mother for guidance on how to start behaving like a man. “That’s awful.” She frowned her confusion. “It really is. But I don’t understand what the hell it has to do with me.”

“Hang on a second,” Zoelner said exasperatedly. “I’m getting there.”

She made a face. “Then, by all means,” rolling her hand, “carry on.”

Zoelner lifted his mug of coffee, taking a hasty sip. “Apparently Mac’s father was devastated by Jolene’s desertion. See, the man was deeply, tragically, and, if you ask me, a little madly in love with her. Like, seriously, I think Mac’s father went a little coo-coo.” Zoelner whirled his finger in a circle next to his temple. “He spent the next seven years of his life and his very last dime—money that should have gone to running the ranch that’d been in Mac’s family for generations—trying to locate her. No luck. And, according to Mac, even on his deathbed, having finally succumbed to a broken heart and pancreatic cancer, his father was still obsessed, crying out her name.”

“Jesus,” Delilah breathed, shaking her head, chills rippling up her arms.

“Yeah.” Zoelner nodded. “But it gets worse. See, Mac adored and idolized his father. And after the banks foreclosed on the ranch, he busted his ass to get into the FBI Academy so he could finish what his father started, using every resource The Bureau afforded him in order to continue the search for Jolene.”

She lifted a hand to her throat, her thumb resting atop her thundering pulse point. “Did he…” She had to lick her suddenly dry lips. “Did he ever find her?”

“It took a couple of years, but he finally located her out in California. She was happy as a pig in slop to be living all the glitz and glamour and excitement of the LA scene. And when Mac confronted her about abandoning him, it was only to discover she was completely unrepentant. She even had the gall to tell him it was for the best. Because she’d been so unhappy living on the ranch.”

Delilah shook her head, her eyes wide. It was like something off daytime television. All the treachery and drama but with none of the happy endings.