Hell for Leather: Black Knights Inc. (9 page)

“Don’t shoot!” Ozzie yelled. “It’s just a dog!”

And, sure as shit, Mac’d already figured that out for himself. He glanced over his shoulder to see Steady sprawled on his back in the middle of the porch, his neck wrenched back, his arms over his head aiming his handgun into the front yard. Ozzie and Zoelner had taken up positions behind the front pillars supporting the porch’s roof, their weapons drawn, their fingers on the triggers.

Well, good to see we’ve all still got it
, he mused, turning back in time to witness—
oh, goody
—the big, yellow dog squatting down in order to take a mammoth dump on the lawn.

“Well,
that’s
not exactly what I was expecting,” he heard Ozzie mutter, amusement in his tone.

“Mac?” A muffled voice sounded from beneath him.
Ah, shit
. He’d jumped on Delilah quicker than a duck on a Junebug, and now the poor woman was probably suffocating under his not unsubstantial weight.

“Sorry, darlin’,” he apologized, pushing up on his elbows and staring down into her pretty face. There was a smudge of dirt on her chin, and her cheeks were flushed. But other than that, she appeared unscathed. He should have rolled off her. He
should
have.

He didn’t.

Because she was soft and lush, and for a moment, during which time he was quite sure he’d up and lost his cotton-pickin’ mind, he allowed himself to revel in the sensation of her beneath him. “It was a…” Holy crow, was that his voice? All low and growly? “…a false alarm.”

She nodded jerkily. But it wasn’t fear he saw in her eyes.
Hell, no.
Fear would not have had every cell inside him screeching to a stop. Awareness would. And that’s exactly what was plastered all over Delilah’s face. Her awareness. Of him. As a man…

And just as every cell inside him came to a grinding halt, so, too, did the rest of the world. The eerie sounds of the downtrodden neighborhood vanished. His teammates and the big, goofy dog appeared frozen in place. It was just the two of them. Just Mac and red-hot Delilah—her lush breasts brushing his chest on an indrawn breath, her green irises speckled with tiny flecks of gold. Up close like this, he could see that he’d been right all along. Her skin was completely, damnably flawless. Her lips plump and smooth. And speaking of… She opened her mouth on an exhale that tickled his chin and allowed her sweet breath to tunnel up his nostrils.

The stupid things flared of their own accord, and when she saw his reaction, she shifted. Just a little. Just enough so that her leg slipped to the outside of his. Just enough for her fun parts to directly align with his. Little Mac, never one to miss this kind of opportunity, swelled and strained against his zipper. His balls instantly tightened and began throbbing in time with his heartbeat. He was lost. Lost in the sight of her. In the feel of her. In the wondrous—

Slurp!
A warm, wet tongue curled under his chin, then journeyed the length of his face to tangle in his hair.
Slurp!
The action was repeated, and he looked up into the bright brown eyes of the Labrador.

Hello, reality. Where the hell have
you
been
the
last
twenty
seconds?

“Cut it out, you big goofball.” He pushed the dog’s massive head away as the world around him once more skipped into action. The Labrador sat back, thick tail thumping the grass, a doggy grin splitting its face. Then the beast let loose with a gleeful, “
Yorp!
”

The bark sounded like something that would come from the throat of a pubescent boy, cracking up an octave somewhere in the middle.

“Well, that’s a pathetically wimpy excuse for a bark if ever I heard one,” Steady muttered, turning over to rub his tailbone—the thing no doubt bruised from the ass-plant he’d done onto the boards of the porch.

“
Yorp!
”

“Yeah, yeah.” Mac pushed at that big, yellow head again when it started nosing in his direction, long, pink tongue poised to strike. “We heard you the first time.” He squinted at the flashing, silver pendant attached to the dog’s blue collar, and thought,
really
? “Fido, huh? I guess ol’ Charles isn’t real creative when it comes to pet naming.”

“His name is Fido?” Ozzie called from the porch, having holstered his weapon.

Mac was about to turn and nod over his shoulder when he felt movement beneath him. A soft, seductive sort of wiggle.

For
the
love
of
Christ!
He was
still
sprawled atop Delilah!

Now, he really wished he could say he nonchalantly, just oh-so-casually rolled off her. That would’ve been the acceptable way to handle the situation. But considering he remembered, at that precise moment, that he’d gone and sprung the world’s hardest boner—the thing could’ve been used to cut glass—it should’ve come as no surprise that the jackknife maneuver he used to propel himself upward was one for the record books. The World’s Most Ludicrous and Uncoordinated Dismounts record books…

“Well, yeehaw, cowboy! Did that pretty filly buck you off?” Ozzie called. “And you call yourself a bona fide Texan?
Pssht.
”

Mac chose to ignore Ozzie because, really, how the hell was he expected to think of a comeback at a time like this? Instead, he reached down, offering Delilah a hand, and hoping beyond hope that she hadn’t noticed the spruce tree he’d been packing inside his pants while lying atop her.

No such luck. When he hauled her to her feet, the surprised, slightly speculative look in her eye—not to mention the deep flush staining her cheeks and that deliciously overripe chest of hers—told him she hadn’t missed a damn thing.

Well…hell…

“Holy hemp balls, Batman! Look at the size of this thing! It’s Goliath’s bong!”

Delilah was sitting at Charlie’s kitchen table and frowning at the personal income tax returns and financial records she’d found in the filing cabinet acting as an end table in the nearby living room. A needle in a haystack…that’s what she was looking for. Something nefarious in Charlie’s dealings that might tell her why
he
was missing along with her uncle. And Charlie
was
missing. Gone for at least two days, by her guess. You know, given the state of the dry, crusty food on the dishes stacked in the sink and the general mayhem the dog had created when he began to worry his owner wouldn’t return.

The cushions on the brown, threadbare sofa in the living room were shredded, cotton sticking out everywhere and littering the space in great, white wads that glimmered in the light of the two lamps flanking the front window. Toilet paper was strewn around the downstairs bathroom and glued to the wet linoleum floor—glued because Fido had been using the toilet as his water bowl and he hadn’t been very fastidious about it, dropping big, sticky blobs of drool and potty water everywhere. And then there was the bottom of the front door… It looked like it’d gone ten rounds with a wood chipper and lost. The wood chipper being Fido’s teeth and claws in his frantic bid for freedom from the house.

Poor
Fido…

She reached down to scratch the Lab’s soft, floppy ears and was rewarded with an adoring whine and the promise of eternal love shining in his soulful brown eyes. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s just the best boy in the whole world? Are you best boy in the whole world?”

“He’s probably the most mellow boy in the world if he lives with the guy who smokes this thing,” Ozzie said.

She glanced up from the dog to find Ozzie waving around a three-foot-long water bong in eye-bleeding orange. And, oh, how she wished the reason her uncle hadn’t been in touch with her was because he’d gotten himself good and baked.

If he’d pulled the ol’ Cheech and Chong, she’d be pissed at him for scaring her shitless and doing something that by Illinois law could get him thrown in the nearest eight-by-ten. But at least she’d know what to do… Namely, feed him copious amounts of White Castle and Cheetos and wait for the THC to wear off before hauling his stoner ass back home. As it stood, she was no closer to finding her uncle than she’d been
before
she left Chicago. And, to make matters worse, now she was dealing with
another
old Marine who’d mysteriously gone AWOL.

She glanced back down at the tax filings. There was something here. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Besides his Social Security and military retirement benefits, Charlie Sanders didn’t have any income. But there were expenditures listed in his—

The air around her heated as Mac brushed by her. She glanced up, only to find him not paying her the slightest bit of attention—
so
what
else
is
new?
Instead, he was in the process of making his third slow circle around the kitchen table. Squatting, he studied the orange and green linoleum floor as if in search of some miniscule piece of evidence. When he stood, she managed to catch his eye, but his expression was back to being dismissive.

So, we’re playing it that way, are we?
She lifted a brow, hoping the look she wore clearly relayed her thoughts.
We’re just pretending nothing happened out there in the front yard? We’re just acting like you didn’t pitch a stick of wood big enough and stiff enough to hang my bath towel on?

Mimicking her, Mac lifted a dark brow, his expression sliding from dismissive to inscrutable.

Okay. So I guess the answers to those questions are yes, yes, and yes.

Then and there she decided that, just as she’d long suspected, Bryan “Mac” McMillan was a big, irritating, confusing, A-hole. A big, irritating, confusing,
holy-hell-hot-as-homemade-sin
A-hole. And to make matters worse—as if she
needed
matters to be worse at this point;
thanks, Universe, you giant dickwad!
—ever since he’d sprawled atop her, so warm, so heavy, so very much a
man
, blood had been rushing into parts of her that had been too long ignored. Well…too long ignored if you didn’t count the pulse setting on her handheld showerhead—which she most certainly did
not
. Because, if memory served, there was a vast difference between a man’s touch and that of her trusty stainless steel bathtub accessory. So, yes. Blood. Rushing. Parts too long ignored. And the sensation was driving her crazy. Crazy enough to throw caution, and all his repeated rejections, to the wind and jump on the man like he was a bouncy house.

“
Yorp!
” Fido sang demandingly, upset that her attention had turned from him.

“So sorry,” she soothed, resuming her petting, watching the dog’s entire back end swing to and fro with the force of his tail wagging.

“There’s nobody on the second floor, and the garage is empty save for a pretty cherry El Camino,” Zoelner announced as he descended the stairs and marched into the living room. “I called back to headquarters and had Becky run the plates. The car belongs to Sander. No real surprise there. Oh, and FYI, Becky told me to inform you guys that Ali delivered a daughter. Nine pounds, six ounces.”

“Mazel tov!” Ozzie crowed, then, “And, damn! That’s a big baby!”

Zoelner nodded. “Anyway, mom and baby are doing well. Though, supposedly, Ghost is a wreck.”

“And speaking of big,” Ozzie grinned, wiggling his eyebrows, “check out the size of this thing.” He brandished the bong in Zoelner’s face. “It’s Goliath’s bong!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Zoelner rolled his eyes, yanking the contraption from Ozzie’s hand and tossing it on the ruined sofa. “I heard you the first time. Very witty. Now shut up.”

“Any sign of a struggle upstairs or in the garage?” Mac asked. He posed the question to Zoelner, but he was staring at a kitchen chair that was tipped on its back. Eyes narrowed, he glanced over to the old-fashioned tin coffee cup turned upside down on the floor before turning to study the newspaper lying beside the table leg.

Obviously, Fido, hungry and looking for any small form of sustenance, had gone after the coffee mug Charlie had left on the table and, in the process, created this little tableau of mayhem. Which reminded Delilah…

She scooted her chair back and walked over to what she suspected was a pantry door. Turning the knob, she nearly lost her balance when Fido rushed ahead of her, barking ecstatically and turning in tight circles within the small space that was, indeed, the pantry. His thick tail whacked against her shins hard enough to leave bruises.

“Okay, okay,” she soothed. Then, spotting a thirty-pound bag of Hills Science Diet pushed into the back corner, she nudged Fido aside and used the large bowl she found inside the bag to scoop out a healthy portion of dog food.

“
Yorp! Yorp!
”

“Who’s a hungry boy?” she asked in that weird sing-songy voice women tended to don around infants and canines. “Who’s just about starving to death?”

“
Yorpyorpyorpyorp!
”

“I gotcha, big boy. Just a second.” She exited the pantry and set the bowl of kibble in front of the stove. “Here you go. Eat up.”

Fido attacked the food with gusto, his hind end swinging back and forth so forcefully he caused himself to stumble.

“Poor dog,” Zoelner observed before turning back to Mac. “And to answer your question, that’s a negative on any signs of a struggle upstairs or in the garage. All appears as it should.”

“Maybe they were abducted by aliens,” Ozzie posited unhelpfully.

“You’ve been watching too much of the Syfy channel,” Zoelner said, crossing his arms and tilting his head at Mac, who was back to staring at that silly, knocked-over chair.

“Yeah, right,” Ozzie scoffed. “There’s no such thing.”

“No such thing as aliens, or no such thing as watching too much of the Syfy channel?”

“Well, the second, naturally.” The look on Ozzie’s face was dubious. “Because
of
course
there’s such things as
aliens.
”

“Of course?” Zoelner’s lips quirked.

“Yeah. I mean, the universe is a pretty big place, right? And if it’s just us, that’s an awful waste of space.”

“You stole that from Carl Sagan,” Zoelner accused.

“No, I didn’t. I stole it from the movie
Contact
. Maybe
they
stole it from Carl Sagan.”

“Whatever.” Zoelner waved him off. “The point is, Charles and Theo were
not
abducted by aliens, and—”

“So, I get why ol’ Sander decided to stay tucked away in the middle of nowhere, holed-up in this hellhole of a crumbling house,” Steady interrupted, emerging from the door leading to the basement stairs. “The guy’s got a state-of-the-art grow room set up down there. It’s enough to make Jay and Silent Bob weep with envy.”

Ah, the marijuana.
Delilah
knew
she recognized that smell when she was standing out on the porch. And it hadn’t been the dried-out, skunky aroma like the kind emanating from the bong—the odor of
used
Mary Jane. It’d been the earthier, almost sweet smell of freshly growing weed. Not that Delilah was an expert or anything. But her roommate in college, Sarah Moore, had been a philosophy major and had kept a couple of pot plants flourishing under a UV light in her closet for…wait for it…strictly “medicinal/experimental purposes.” Feel free to insert eye-roll here.

Of course, the presence of the jolly green downstairs could also account for the discrepancies she’d seen in Charlie’s financial records. So then the question became, was it possible his disappearance, as well as her uncle’s, was some sort of drug deal gone terribly wrong? As her stomach took a nosedive into her biker boots, she posed her theory aloud.

“Are all the plants still there?” Mac asked Steady, continuing to stare at that stupid chair until Delilah was forced to glance down at the thing.
What
in
the
world
is
so
mesmerizing
about
it?
But no matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t discern anything exceptional about the standard wooden ladder-back.

“
S
í
, hermano
,” Steady replied, his Puerto Rican accent lilting in the stale air of the house. “Everything appears to be in order. Nothing missing that I can tell. Nothing moved.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.” Mac shook his head, blue gaze narrowed, the too-sexy dimple twitching in his chin as his substantial jaw sawed back and forth.

“What doesn’t?” she asked.

“If Sander was attacked and taken because of some sort of dust-up between pot growers,” Mac explained, “if it was a turf war gone bad or something, then whoever eighty-sixed him would’ve grabbed his plants. They’re too valuable to leave here to rot.”

Attacked
and
taken. Eighty-sixed…
None of those words were ones Delilah wanted to hear.

“What makes you so sure he was attacked and taken?” Zoelner asked, still eyeing Mac curiously. And when Mac reached up and rubbed a wide palm over the back of his neck, Zoelner lifted a brow. “Is that Spidey sense of yours acting up again?”

Okay, and that was the
second
time Zoelner had used that term. “What in the world are you guys talking about?” she demanded. “What
is
Spidey sense?”

“Spidey sense is Spider-Man’s sixth sense about danger,” Ozzie supplied. “Except Mac’s superpower comes more in the form of an uncanny ability to piece together subtle clues.”

“Uh-huh.” She nodded, not one to believe in the black arts of extrasensory perception. “You’re kidding, right?”

First
aliens, now this?
Maybe she’d been wrong to enlist the help of the Black Knights for this particular undertaking. Because, apparently, they were all batshit crazy.
Who
knew?

“It’s not a sixth sense
or
a superpower,” Mac assured her, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s just good, ol’-fashioned FBI training.”

“Okay, good.” She nodded. “So then to reiterate and rephrase Zoelner’s question, why does your good ol’-fashioned FBI training tell you that Charlie was attacked and taken?”

“For the record,” Ozzie interjected before Mac could speak, “I’m
still
leaning toward alien abduction.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake…

Delilah, along with the rest of the group, watched as Mac walked over to the coffee cup. Using the steel-toe of his biker boot, he flipped the mug over. Beneath it was a small brown puddle of dried coffee.

“At first I thought Fido here,” the dog’s tail went from a side-to-side wag to a full-on circle at the mention of his name, “knocked the chair over in an attempt to get at the mug on the table,” Mac explained. And, yup. That gelled with Delilah’s take on events. “But then I saw there was a ring of coffee surrounding the lip of the cup. No way the Lab would’ve left that if he was after its contents. He’d have pushed the mug around until he lapped up every last drop. So, then if Fido wasn’t after the coffee, I asked myself,
why
is
the
cup
on
the
floor?
”

Delilah lifted a brow, glancing from the coffee mug to Mac.

“No one?” Mac’s eyes sparkled in the lamplight as his gaze swung around the group. “Okay, then. Let me demonstrate.”

He bent to pick up the tin mug and the newspaper. Then, he righted the kitchen chair before settling himself in it. Holding the paper in his left hand, the coffee cup in his right, he called to Zoelner. “Come up behind me. Grab me and drag me backward like you’re tryin’ to wrestle me out of the house.”