Born Wild

the familiar scents of motor oil, fresh paint, and strong coffee. The smells grounded him enough to manage, “Is she o-okay?”

Bryan “Mac” McMillan, lounging on the leather sofa they’d dragged into the shop and pushed against the side of the staircase that led to the loft space on the second floor, folded one corner of the Chicago Tribune back. He lifted a brow at what Bill assumed was his bloodless face. Because despite the fact that the ol’ ticker wasn’t simply ticking but hammering like crazy, he didn’t think any of the red stuff was actually making it to his brain. He felt faint.

“Now don’t go off with your pistol half-cocked,” Mac replied in his slow, Texas drawl. “She’s fine.” The relief that poured through Bill was so overwhelming he had to lean back against Phoenix’s hand-tooled leather seat or risk taking a header straight onto the shop floor. “Says here,” Mac continued, “she plowed her motor scooter off the marina wall somewhere between Museum Campus and Buckingham Fountain on Thursday evening. She nearly drowned because she was weighed down by her backpack.” The thought had the hairs on Bill’s arms and neck standing on end. “Had to be scary as hell.”

A million half-formed questions buzzed haphazardly through his under-oxygenated cerebral cortex. He grasped the first one to take any sort of solid shape. “What the fuck was she doing riding a scooter? Those things are dangerous, especially in traffic and—” He slammed to a stop when Mac once again glanced at him over the top of the paper with that annoying eyebrow raised. “What?” he demanded.

“Those things are dangerous?” Mac snorted. “Says the man who rides a quarter ton of hand-rolled steel.”

Bill made a face, briefly glancing down at Phoenix’s large gas tank with its intricate, almost whimsical paint job: a mythical firebird rising from the flames. “Okay,” he admitted grudgingly. “Point taken. But the difference between me and her is that I can handle my bike where she, obviously, can’t. What happened anyway? How did she manage to ditch the thing in the lake? Let me guess, she was texting.”

Bill could totally see it. The woman had a social life that, more often than not, made the society pages. One of the main reasons he avoided perusing the local news…

I mean, come on, it was bad enough he had to occasionally stomach her company because she happened to be his kid sister’s best friend. But to read about some ooh-la-la party she’d attended on the arm of whichever rich-as-Croesus ass-hat happened to be Chicago’s newest and brightest? Yeah, no thanks. He’d rather stand in the middle of a daisy-chained set of IEDs with the timer on the whole mess ticking down to Boomsville.

“Accordin’ to this,” Mac lowered the paper to his lap, flicking a finger at it, “after the police fished her scooter from the lake, they discovered one of the couplings on her brake lines had rusted and come loose. Apparently, Eve didn’t realize she was in trouble until she was almost at top speed. Then, with traffic stalled in front of her, she had to shoot for the lake or risk killin’ herself or someone else.”

Shit. Bill swallowed uncomfortably, the scene playing out very vividly before his eyes.

Too vividly…

And here he’d accused her of negligence when, in fact, she’d made the smartest decision possible given her pathetically few options at the time.

Well, smarts had never been something Eve Edens lacked. Loyalty? Sincerity? Fidelity? Now those were entirely different matters.

“The police are sayin’ it was an accident,” Mac continued, frowning.

Uh-oh. Bill knew that look. He cocked his head, eyes narrowed. “But your Spidey sense is telling you something different?”

Mac was a former all-star FBI agent, and if the man said something smelled fishy, you could bet your left nut there was a goddamned blue whale in the room. And, yeah, so Bill realized that wasn’t technically a fish, but the point was still valid.

“Just seems awfully coincidental, that’s all. Nobody’s that unlucky, are they?”

He frowned, considering Mac’s words and remembering all the drama Eve seemed to trail behind her like a not-so-invisible tail. But before he could voice his opinion one way or the other, his cell phone sprang to life in his hip pocket. Pulling it out, the number for BKI’s guardhouse lit the screen.

“What’s up, Toran?” he asked after thumbing on the phone.

“A taxi just pulled up out front. Eve Edens is here,” replied the guard. Well, speak of the devil. Bill’s heart, which had just returned to its normal rate, kicked itself into overdrive again.

* * *

Holy moly. Eve felt the need to whistle and shake her head as she glanced around the second-story loft with its multiple office doors and bank of state-of-the-art computers. She’d never get used to the fact that Billy and her best friend Becky operated a covert government defense firm—that’s right; a real life James Bond-type enterprise—under the guise of a custom motorcycle shop. But that probably had a lot to do with the fact that she’d known them back in the day. Back when Becky was little more than a sullen teenager with a chip the size of Texas on her shoulder, and Billy was just a fresh-faced petty officer with pie-in-the-sky dreams of becoming a spec-ops warrior.

Although, as it turned out, those dreams hadn’t been pie-in-the-sky at all. Because he had become a spec-ops warrior. He’d become one of the big, bad Navy SEALs who were so popular in the media nowadays. And as she let her gaze travel across the conference table to his face, she tried to see the young man who’d stolen her heart so long ago.

Um, yes, and that’d be what the Black Knights referred to as a no-go. Because his ready smile and easy laugh were gone. Gone like the woolly mammoths. Gone like the homing pigeons. Long, long gone. Now his brutally handsome face was unyielding, fixed in grim lines of determination and impatience. His jaw was wider than she remembered, looking like it’d been shaped by a hatchet strike. His lips were harder and his tan skin was tougher. The corners of his dark chocolate- colored eyes were creased from spending years out in the elements, squinting against some far-away desert sun. And yes. It was official. There was nothing even remotely youthful about him now, save for the lush fan of his thick lashes and the plump curve of his lower lip.

This Billy Reichert—this hard, world-weary soldier—no longer resembled the young man who’d patiently and gently guided her toward the discovery of passion. No longer resembled the young man who’d teased her, laughed with her, loved her, and made her feel like she was…the only girl in the world.

Okay, and great, she was channeling Rihanna. Which meant she’d mentally stalled as long as she could.

“I think I’m in trouble,” she blurted, and the words reverberated around the cavernous space of the chopper shop/super-secret-spy shop like foghorns echoing across open water. It was then she realized the place was unusually quiet. “Where is everybody? Where’s Becky?”

“What kind of trouble?” Billy ignored her questions as his eyes narrowed dangerously.

There was a time she’d have laughed in the face of anyone who described Billy Reichert as menacing. But she wasn’t laughing now. Because his expression was that of an executioner. Cold. Hard. Unyielding. Talk about brrrr. She tried to disguise her shiver as a half-shrug.

“Um,” she bit her lip and let her gaze swing over to Mac, seated at the head of the conference table. That’s better. At least he doesn’t look like he ate babies for breakfast. “I…I think someone might be trying to hurt me.”

Hurt? Yeah, right. More like annihilate. But she was taking this one step at a time…

“Unless you’re the kind who’s so clumsy you’d trip over a cordless phone, you do seem to have run into a whole lotta bad luck recently,” Mac drawled, his dark hair falling across his wide forehead, accentuating the deep, friendly blue of his eyes. And even though his expression was kind and his words sympathetic, Eve felt her cheeks heat.

Stupid fair complexion. And stupid nosy reporters!

Her entire life she’d been plagued by journalists who thought to capture for posterity—on film and in print —every folly, mishap, and humiliation she suffered. But she supposed that’s what she got for being born the