“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 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.