“Thank you,” she whispered, the moonlight shining on her blond hair, making it glow. “And not just for the jacket. Thank you for…” She swallowed and shook her head. “For saving my butt today.”
“It was my pleasure. That thing is world class, you know?”
She blushed. “Is the incomparable Prince of Shadows actually flirting with me?” She placed a hand over her chest. “Be still my heart.”
When he winked and smiled, she scowled and pointed at his face. “Give that thing a rest, will ya? I can only bear it for a few seconds at time before my…” Something flickered behind her eyes.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I just remembered… Were you about to tell me something before Grafton’s men starting shooting at us again?”
His heart hopped into his throat. Now that they’d made it out alive, giving her the truth no longer seemed prudent. “It was nothing important.”
She narrowed her eyes, her skepticism clear. Then Boss called out to them from the end of the parking lot. “For fuck’s sake! Hurry up! We got a plane to catch!”
The man’s timing was impeccable. Angel wasn’t saved by the bell in this instance; he was saved by the boss.
“I think he wants us to run,” Rock said with a sardonic twist of his lips as he glanced at Ghost.
“After all these years,” Ghost told him, “you don’t gotta teach me how to speak Boss. I’m fluent.”
The two of them broke into a trot, Sierra still slung over Ghost’s shoulder as if it were an extra appendage. Angel glanced down at Sonya’s bare feet. Those hot-pink toenails winked at him from beneath the hem of her black slacks, and he chastised himself for not kissing and sucking each of them earlier. “I could carry you,” he suggested.
She made a rude noise, grabbed his hand, and broke into a jog.
She truly is tough as nails, he thought, pride swelling his chest. And she’s going to be mine. I’m going to make her fall in love with me now just like I made her fall in love with me back then.
He might have let his imagination run wild with plans for the future—a house, two little girls who would inherit their mother’s bright, firefly laugh—if he wasn’t suddenly face-to-face with the man of the hour.
Standing beside Boss, the infamous Spider didn’t look very scary. His hands were bound behind his back with a bright orange zip tie and his mouth was covered with a length of gray duct tape. Blood dripped from his shoulder, and Angel caught the matching smear of crimson on Boss’s jeans, testament to Boss having wiped off his Ka-Bar knife there before re-sheathing the blade in the holder clipped to his belt.
As good as Ghost was with a sniper rifle? That’s how good Frank “Boss” Knight was with a blade.
“Lord Grafton,” Angel said lazily, “may I say how splendid you look in handcuffs?”
Hatred—and he was happy to say more than a little fear—blazed from Grafton’s black eyes when he snarled something that sounded like fuck you from behind the duct tape.
“I’m Frank Knight,” Boss reached for Sonya’s hand, ignoring Angel’s exchange with Grafton. “If you want to call me Boss, that’s fine. Everyone else does.”
“Pleased to meet you.” Sonya pumped Boss’s big paw. “I’m Sonya. Plain old Sonya.”
A crooked smile tugged at Boss’s lips before he turned to Angel, his expression turning serious. “We won’t fit in one vehicle.” He frowned toward the tree line where Angel assumed they’d left their car. “You and Sonya are gonna need to steal Spider’s ride and follow us to the private airstrip where our plane is waiting.”
“You mean appropriate Grafton’s ride.” Rock grinned and winked at Angel. “Right, Angel?”
The Black Knights thought it was hilarious that he insisted on using the term appropriate instead of steal or swipe or boost. Little did they know it was because of a conversation he’d had with Sonya more than a decade earlier.
A loud buzz sounded in his ears as he looked her way, hoping she’d forgotten about the day they’d snatched a guest register out from under the nose of a greasy Parisian hotelier.
No such luck.
He watched the blood drain from her face. Saw her throat work over a hard swallow. She stared at him, her eyes moving over his altered features, looking for something that might answer the question he knew screamed through her head.
“Appropriate,” she whispered. “That’s the word Mark always used.”
“Sonya—” He tried to grab her hand, but she yanked her fingers away, taking a hasty step backward. Her chest rose and fell in ragged breaths.
Shit. Shit! He could feel his web of deceit tearing away from its moorings. Filament by filament, all his lies were coming undone.
