daughter of an East Coast heiress and Midwestern real estate mogul. Big buckets of money brought their own fame…of a sort.
“I guess you’ve been keeping up with the news,” she muttered, shaking her head, the skin on her scalp prickling with embarrassment at the thought of Billy reading those articles. Because, talk about catching a girl not at her best.
Like the picture that’d run in the Tribune this morning? The one captured as a still from the video someone had shot with their smart phone? Well, it’d shown her and her Vespa flying over Lake Michigan, which was…so very flattering…Not! Of course, the snapshot wasn’t nearly as mortifying as the full-length video clip that some fine, upstanding citizen had been kind enough to upload to YouTube—along with the Wizard of Oz, Mrs.-Gulch-on-her-Bicycle music playing in the background. So far, the video had fifty thousand hits. And that was…pretty perfect. Par for the course, really, considering how her life had been going since she was about, oh, say eighteen or so.
But even as humiliating as the YouTube video was, the fact remained that it wasn’t nearly as awful as the picture that’d run in the paper last month after she barely managed to escape the fire that engulfed her apartment. In that particular shot, she’d sported a crazy, wide-eyed look, made even more delightful by the smudge of soot under her nose in the exact shape of Hitler’s mustache. The caption had read: Heil Heiress and Her Amazing Death Defying Fire Act!
Geez Louise. Maybe whoever was out to do her in wasn’t actually trying to kill her with bullets, fire, or cut brake lines but was, in fact, attempting to embarrass her to death.
“You want to explain to us exactly what’s been going on?” Mac pressed, and she looked up to find his expression gently encouraging. But when she glanced over at Billy?
Nada. No encouragement there. Just a squint-eyed look of contemplation and was that…? Yep. That looked infuriatingly close to disbelief.
Oh, no he di-int! She did a mental headshake, frowning fiercely as she vehemently declared, “I’m not making any of this up, Billy.”
One of his dark brows quirked, and it was like a lit match touching the fuel of her temper. She was instantly on the defensive—which really wasn’t anything new. He tended to have that effect on her most days because he blamed her for…well, everything. But that didn’t change the fact that she’d been nervous enough about coming here without having to deal with his enmity and snarky, high-handed attitude. “I’m not, dangit!” She slammed a palm down on the table, fighting not to wince at the resounding crack that echoed around the large space. “Where’s Becky? She’ll believe me!”
Or at least Eve thought Becky would believe her. Because, truth be told, there was a teensy, tiny, ever-so-miniscule seed of doubt planted back in the far reaches of her brain. The explanations the police gave seemed logical…
But, no. No. She wasn’t crazy, and she wasn’t paranoid. Someone wanted her dead. Period. End of story. Alert the gosh-darned presses!
“You haven’t said anything for me to believe or not believe, Eve,” Billy explained evenly, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. His biceps bulged, stretching the thin fabric of his gray T-shirt with its Black Knights Inc. Custom Motorcycles logo, emphasizing the hard planes of his pectoral muscles.
“Oh.” She shook her head, quickly looking away from the masculine temptation that was Billy Reichert lest her cheeks turn the color of vintage Cabernet. “Yep. I guess that’s true, huh?”
Curses. Billy had always managed to muddle her thinking. And it’d only gotten worse since they’d been reunited fourteen months ago after more than a decade apart. He’d blasted back into her life when he’d, you know, done her the itsy-bitsy favor of saving her from a band of bloodthirsty Somali pirates. She’d been doing research for her doctoral thesis out on the Indian Ocean when she and Becky found themselves the captives of a band of gun-toting, sea-faring desperados. It was then she’d been allowed in on the little secret of Black Knights Inc. Then when she’d been made to understand that Billy, and all the men who worked with him, were a whole heck of a lot more than simple motorcycle mechanics.
And since that day, she and Billy had done their best to avoid each other.
Ha! Understatement of the century! Because people avoided dog poop on the sidewalk. They avoided standing under a tree during a thunderstorm. They avoided mayonnaise-based salads that’d been left sitting out in the sun for more than an hour. What she and Billy had been doing? Well, that fell more into the turn-tail-and-run-for-your-life category.
Unfortunately, her current predicament precluded that particular status quo, so it was time to wrangle her wayward thoughts and lay it all on the line. Then again, this would all be so much easier with Becky in her corner.
Where is the woman, anyway?
She voiced the question again, and added, “And where is everyone else? This place is like a tomb.” Usually, Black Knights Inc. was filled with the sounds of blaring music, whining tools, a gurgling coffee pot, and heavy boots clomping up and down metal stairs—not to mention, Becky’s husband, Frank “Boss” Knight, could generally be relied upon to be bellowing at someone to pull their head out of their ass.
“Becky and Boss are taking a long weekend,” Bill informed her abruptly, clearly ready to get back to the question of why she thought someone would want to hurt her. And, yes, now that he mentioned it, she did remember receiving a text from Becky saying that very thing.
Shoot. If she’d recalled that this morning after the police report came in, she might’ve thought twice about making this trek out to Goose Island. Then again…there was nowhere else for her to turn. The Black Knights…er, Billy and Mac it seemed, were her last hope.
“Everyone else is out on a mission or dealing with personal business,” Billy continued when he mistook her distracted silence as her waiting for him to answer the rest of her question. “Except for Ace, who’ll be here soon. So now that we’ve covered the niceties, you want to tell us just what the hell has been going on with you? Why you’ve suddenly been thrown into the role of Violet Jessop?”
“Who?” she asked, her nose wrinkling, her brain reeling with too many thoughts to catch.
“You know,” he made a face, “the unluckiest woman in the history of the world? The one who was onboard the Olympic, Titanic, and Brittanic during all three disastrous voyages?”
She glanced over at Mac, distracted yet again by the turn of the conversation. And okay, maybe she was allowing it to happen on purpose. Because even though she knew she needed to answer Billy’s question, the fact remained that she was scared to death he wasn’t going to believe her when she did. Come on, he didn’t think too highly of her to begin with—second understatement of the century—so why would he give her paranoid ramblings credence when the Chicago police hadn’t? “Have you ever heard of this woman?” she asked Mac.
“Nope,” the big Texan shrugged. “But I don’t question this guy on much,” he hooked a thumb at Billy, “considering he usually has his nose buried in a book.”
She swung her gaze back across the conference table, reading the calm certainty in Billy’s eyes.
“Wow,” she shook her head. “And here I thought I had it bad. Sounds like this poor Violet Whats-Her-Name was the reason Murphy wrote his law. Somehow that makes me feel marginally better about everything I’ve been going through.” Then Mac’s words sunk in and, in the spirit of continuing to avoid having to discuss her suspicions and fears—her personal defense instructor, who’d been telling her for months she needed to “grow a set of balls and stop avoiding tense situations,” would’ve been so disappointed—she cocked her head and said, “I don’t remember you reading a lot before. In fact, you used to tease me incessantly about having my nose pressed into a book all the time, and—”
She stumbled to a stop because Billy’s eyes sharpened, like those of a hawk spotting its prey. She swallowed, her level of discomfort—because, hey, after their sordid history and Billy’s obvious disdain for her, there wasn’t a moment she wasn’t uncomfortable when he was in the room—shot through the three-story roof. And when he opened his mouth? Boy, oh boy, you better believe she had every right to feel that way. Because his words were saber strikes, slicing into her already sadly lacking confidence, and making her regret not only her cowardice at not addressing the main issue head-on, but also in coming out to BKI at all. “And I don’t remember you being a scooter-riding divorcee with a taste for skimpy dresses, fancy parties, and rich men,” he snarled. “I guess things change, huh?”
