Eve’s Wedding Knight

else ahead of that priority.”

Jake waved that angrily away, like taking a swipe at a fly. “Yeah, well this is the first time I’ve been responsible for sending a civilian into harm’s way, too.”

Birdie, who could be every bit as annoying as a fly when he wanted to be, just smiled. “Jake…Jake. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you’d send your own mother undercover if you thought it would get you Cisneros’s head on a pike, but I imagine just about anybody else would be fair game. No, son…no. That’s not what’s going on here. Hot damn-” he rubbed his hands together briskly, then helped himself to a slice of tepid pizza “-I do believe it’s finally happened. Wait’ll I tell Margie.” He bit into the pizza while offering the box to Jake. “Not bad. Care for some?”

Jake shook his head; for some reason he’d lost his appetite. He was staring at the microphone, transfixed by a new voice, an unexpectedly full and throaty voice-not Bessie’s-which was at that moment crooning a familiar blues standard. He thought, She can sing. I’ll be damned.

“Kidding aside…” Birdie’s voice came to him softly, and with a steely edge of warning. “My friend, happy as I am that this has happened to you, your timing’s way off. This is bound to affect your judgment. Already has. If you can’t see that…”

Jake rubbed at his burning eyes and nodded. He could see that. He could see a lot of things. That was the problem. He could see Eve with Sonny Cisneros’s hands all over her…caressing that creamy skin as he fastened a pearl choker around her slender throat. And he could see those same hands on that same throat, choking the life out of it. Not that it would happen that way. Cisneros wouldn’t soil his own hands with murder. He’d have his men do it. And maybe, since he supposedly cared about this woman, this one time he’d tell them to do it quick.

“I need to talk to her,” he growled. “Tell her she’s got to quit fooling around, quit trying to keep Sonny away from her sister. I want this over. Capish?”

“Yeah,” said his partner gently, “I believe I do.”

Eve’s first appointment with her “physical therapist” had been set for Friday. As the day approached, she felt like a six-year-old counting the days until her birthday party. Who would be there? Her hair was a mess. What should she wear? She had Sergei drive her to town so she could buy workout clothes.

“Whadaya need those for? It’s not like you’re gonna be doing anything physical,” Sonny pointed out. He’d been noticeably cranky since the Jacuzzi episode.

“I want to fit in,” Eve calmly explained. “Plus, I like them. I think they look sexy.”

“Yeah, they do,” Sonny grumbled, “for all the good that does anybody.”

While she was at it, she went to a salon and had her hair trimmed. She got hair clippings all down inside the collar, which itched like fire until she was able to get home and take it off. Then she had them in her bed instead.

“What’re you so excited about this physical therapy stuff for?” Sonny wanted to know.

“One step closer to getting my life back,” Eve answered fervently, and watched with satisfaction as the lines of suspicidn in Sonny’s face softened into sympathy.

The key to undercover work, she’d discovered, was to tell the truth whenever possible.

Even so-and whether out of suspicion or genuine interest she couldn’t be certain-Sonny insisted on accompanying her to her first therapy session. At least, thanks to the bugs, she knew Sonny’s presence wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

She did her best to throttle back her anticipation. After all, she told herself, Jake might not even be there. To avert suspicion, the therapy sessions were scheduled for three times a week, because that was what would be expected for her type of “injury,” not because there was any real need for her to check in that often. Would Jake come himself unless there was something he needed to talk to her about? And it had only been a few days since she’d seen him. She told herself he wouldn’t be there. Of course he wouldn’t. She’d gotten all worked up-not to mention prettied up-for nothing.

So it came as something of a shock to her when she walked into the Body Shop and there was Jake in sweatpants and tank top, pounding the daylights out of a punching bag.

Not like it was anything that obvious. She was checking in at the lobby desk, which was situated behind a curving counter in front of a wall of glass overlooking the main workout room, the purpose of which, she assumed, was to give visitors a view of the club’s sumptuous facilities so that they’d be enticed to join. While the beefy young man on duty at the desk was on the phone, Eve watched an interesting assortment of sweaty people of varying ages, genders and degrees of fitness pumping away on stationary bicycles, stairchmbers, rowing machines and Nautilus equipment.

The area in the back of the room was devoted to free weights. These were serious bodybuilders, she assumed from the look of them-brawny guys with bulging biceps, massive deltoids and necks with a greater circumference than their heads. Most of them wore headbands to keep the sweat out of their eyes, and some wore hand protectors and heavy support belts. All of them wore looks of grim concentration, if not intense pain.

“Serious stuff,” Eve said to Sonny, nodding toward the weight lifters. Sonny, who had declined the attendant’s invitation to pay the fee and join the fun, merely grunted and resumed his pacing. Not that Sonny was in terrible shape, but as far as he was concerned, that physical stuff was for the Rickys and Sergeis of this world. He preferred more subtle methods of power and control.

So, since the attendant was still occupied, Eve went back to watching the club’s patrons. Through large glass windows on one side of the main exercise room, she could see aerobics classes in progress. In one, a dozen or so senior citizens in sweats gamely flapped and stretched and marched and swiveled at the exhortations of a fiftyish woman wearing a fuchsia leotard and purple tights. In the room next door, a younger group wriggled and pounded energetically on and off stairsteps to the beat of a dance tune only they could hear. And farther back along that same wall, partially obscured by the huffing puffing weight lifters, a tall, lean man in gray sweats and a white tank- style undershirt was attacking a massive punching bag with the single-minded fury of an enraged bull.

“My goodness,” Eve murmured under her breath. She wasn’t even into boxing; she hated violence-she’d seen too much of its end product. But for some reason she couldn’t take her eyes off the man at the bag, and watching him, unaccountably felt her heartbeat quicken and her breath grow thick in her chest. This was violence, yes, but it seemed more like an imperative of nature than a product of mankind’s folly-like a grizzly bear pummeling a tree trunk, or a bull elk’s charge; primitive and exciting; a bit frightening, but in a way, soul stirring, too.

The man paused, steadying the bag with a glove while he wiped sweat with a forearm. Then he lifted his head and looked straight at her; even from that distance she could see his eyes glowing black as coals beneath the furrowed brow. Her breath gushed from her as if one of those gloved hands had just made contact with her solar plexus. She thought, My God-it’s Jake.

“Miss? Uh, ma’am?” The attendant was talking to her. “Okay, if you want to go on back, your therapist is gonna meet you. Go through there-that’s the ladies’ locker room, you can change in there-then go on through. You’ll go past the pool and you’ll see the doors marked Steam Room, Whirlpool, and so on. She says she’ll meet you there-at the whirlpool.”

Eve nodded. She was still trying to recover her breath. She started for the door the attendant had indicated, to the right of a large arrow and the sign Ladies.

“Wait,” Sonny blustered. “I wanna meet this therapist.”

The attendant said, “Sir, if you’d care to wait till she’s done, if you could just have a seat… Or else you can come back for her-whichever you prefer. Should be ‘bout half an hour.”

“How about if I bring-?” She looked at the attendant.

“Name’s Marcie,” he supplied.

“Okay, I’ll have her come out afterward so you can meet her. Is that all right?”

“Just want to make sure she knows what she’s doing,” Sonny said gruffly. “Don’t want some quack messing around with my girl.” He stroked her arm, then leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Go on-get it over with. I’ll be waiting.”

Eve whispered, “Okay,” breathless as a child. She picked up her bag and walked through the swinging door, and instantly was slapped in the face by the humidity and swamped by the unmistakable smells of the gym-sweat and steam and disinfectant and oil of wintergreen. Her knees felt weak, as though she’d just had a bad fright, or narrowly avoided an accident.