“So that means my job at Black Knights Inc. is over.” And saying it out loud for the first time was like having his stomach cut open and listening to his guts spill on the floor. “I’ll never be able to go back in the field. I can’t run half a mile on the treadmill without collapsing from the pain, much less hump my ass over mountains or through jungles.”
“So?” Apparently she was doing her best impression of a scratched record. She kept skipping and repeating the same lines over and over. “You’re still an integral part of this team. What you do with these computers…” She waved at the monitors. “It’s invaluable. And your design suggestions for the last couple of custom bike jobs? Brilliant.”
“It’s not enough,” he said around the lump in his throat. “Boss brought me on to do more than computer work. But I’m no good for more than computer work, and I—” His eyes burned. He had to stop and look away so she wouldn’t see what a pussy he’d become. When he turned back, Becky whacked him on the back of the head hard enough to have him seeing stars. “Hey! I had a minor concussion not five days ago, and now you’re—”
“Shut up,” she hissed. She was holding her Dum Dum lollipop an inch from his nose. He went cross-eyed when he tried to look at it. “For a genius, you sure are an idiot.”
Ozzie frowned. “I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.”
“Probably because it’s true. Do you really believe you’re only worth something to Black Knights Inc. if you can do the job you were hired to do?”
“Well—”
“Nope.” Becky plunked her water bottle down on the table. Peanut, who had been doing figure eights around the legs of her chair, hissed at the sudden noise and scampered away. “You don’t get to talk. I’m talking.”
“But you asked a question.” He blinked at the rage brightening her cheeks.
“So?” She looked at him like his IQ might have fallen into the double digits. “That doesn’t mean I expect you to answer!”
“Of course not,” he said, completely flabbergasted.
“Do you think the only thing Frank and I have been building here, the only thing all of us have been building here, is bikes?”
He opened his mouth to tell her they’d been building some pretty hefty spec-ops résumés as well, but snapped his jaws shut when he realized this was another rhetorical question.
“We have been building a family, you big, beautiful meathead. Black Knights Inc. is more than just a business. It’s a home. It’s your home.”
Family… Home… There was a lump in his throat he was having trouble breathing around. His whole life, he had wanted family. His whole life, he had wanted to belong, wanted to be wanted.
“What we have is stronger than blood,” Becky went on, her voice growing hoarse. “We have bonds of the heart. Bonds of the soul. And all of us here at BKI would sooner chop off all our legs than let you leave because you have it in your fool frickin’ head that you’re not good enough, or that we wouldn’t want you if you couldn’t do exactly what you were originally hired to do.” If he wasn’t mistaken, her eyes were overly bright.
Oh, good. I’m not alone. Because that lump in his throat had grown to the size of Australia. “What does Boss say?” Was that his voice? It sounded like he was talking underwater. “Does he feel—”
“Frank will tell you the exact same thing I’m telling you,” she cut in. When a tear trickled down her cheek, smearing a line in a patch of grease, he thought he just might die. “We’ve talked about it a hundred times. What this place means to us. To all of us. What the people mean. It’s like being married—good or bad, sickness and health, for richer or for poorer, we are all on this wild ride together. Oh, Ozzie…” She sat forward, grabbing his face with her grubby hands. Someone had started a fire in his chest. A smaller conflagration burned behind his eyes. “How could you not know that? How could you not know how much we all love you?”
She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tight. Damn if he wasn’t on the verge of bawling his motherfucking eyes out.
* * *
“Whoa.” Christian stumbled to a stop in the doorway to Emily’s office. “What…uh…what the bloody hell has happened? Are you—”
“Shh,” she scolded him. “Come in. Sit down. I’m eavesdropping on Ozzie and Becky, and you’re blocking my view.” With her office door open, she had a straight shot at the bank of computers where Ozzie and Becky sat.
Christian glanced over his shoulder. “Eavesdropping on Ozzie and Becky made you cry?”
“Yes,” she hissed, waving for him to come in already and take one of the two chairs in front of her desk. For crying out loud! The man follows instructions for shit. “It was a poignant moment.” So poignant because talk of family, talk of BKI being a family, touched a particularly tender spot inside her. “No time to explain. Now sit down and shut up.”
He eyed her for a full three seconds. Finally, he shrugged and shuffled inside. He was wearing a purple dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar and with the sleeves rolled up. The color emphasized the bright green of his eyes, and the tailored cut made his shoulders look as wide as an Olympic-sized swimming pool. She ignored all of this—yeah, right—as he took a seat.
“…are you working on?” Becky asked, wiping the tracks of tears from her cheeks as she pointed to Ozzie’s computer screen.
Emily had been curious about that herself. For the last few days, Ozzie had been nose deep in something. And since she was the office manager, kept apprised of every mission or project, the fact that she didn’t know what was keeping Ozzie up nights meant it was something personal.
“I’m trying to track down the person hired to kill Samantha’s father all those years ago.”
Christian muttered something under his breath. Emily shushed him.
“Why?” Becky asked Ozzie.
