Julie Walker - Born Wild

Holy smokes, honey, you’re way off.

“We carry ourselves like a group of guys who’ve seen the darkest side of life and who’ve learned not to trust their fellow man,” Mac insisted.

Delilah didn’t try to disguise her look of disbelief. “Fine,” she spat. “So whatever side business you have going,” Mac growled like a grizzly bear, but Delilah ignored him, “may not be a contributing factor to what happened in my bar tonight.” And saying the words must’ve reminded the woman of the one she’d lost, because her chin trembled, and Eve’s immediately threatened to follow suit—the stupid sympathetic thing! But Delilah kept it together, which helped Eve to do the same. And after dragging in a steadying breath, Delilah continued, “But the questions remain,” now she turned to pin a pointed look on Eve, “why did they come here to kill you and who were they?”

“Those are the questions, now aren’t they?”

Eve spun when she heard her cousin’s voice. He was marching down the alley with his badge clipped to the waistband of his jeans and murder written all over his handsome face. She’d never been so happy to see him in her entire life. “Jeremy!” she choked, running to him.

He caught her in a fierce embrace. “Jesus Christ, Eve! I came the minute I heard it over the radio. Are you okay?”

“It w-was awful,” she sobbed, pressing her nose into his light blue button-down shirt and dragging in the familiar smell of his cologne.

“Yeah,” he nodded, gently pushing her back so he could run his eyes over her from head to toe. “I heard that, too.” And if she thought he’d had murder written all over his face before, then mass murder was written all over his face now that he saw the bruises on her throat. He hooked a thumb under her chin to tilt her head back, but she batted his hand away.

“It’s nothing,” she assured him. “I’m fine.” His lips twisted, his eyes calling her bluff. “O-okay,” she admitted. “I’m not fine. But I’m alive. And that’s more than I can say for s-some.”

Dang it! Her lower lip started to wobble again, which caused Jeremy’s jaw to saw from side to side.

“This isn’t your fault, Cuz,” he assured her. And, yep, everybody kept telling her that, but somehow she just couldn’t bring herself to believe it. “Nod your head so I know you heard me,” he commanded. She nodded just so he’d hush up about it. Her guilt and culpability weren’t anything she wanted to talk about. At least not right now. “Good.” He threw an arm around her shoulders, leading her back to the group where his attention immediately turned to Bill and Mac. “So, the CPD knows why they came here. To off Eve.” The way he said it had tears once more pricking behind her eyes. She must’ve shaken or something, because he squeezed her closer to his side, his fingers firm on her shoulder, offering her the comfort of his strength. “But the jury is still out as to who they were.”

And now they’d come full circle, hadn’t they? Because that was the question Delilah had posed before Jeremy arrived on the scene. She met Delilah’s red-rimmed gaze head-on. “I swear to you, I have no idea.”

Delilah searched for the truth in her face, and she must’ve found it, because she nodded. And then her expression sharpened. “All those things I’ve been reading about you in the paper…Those weren’t accidents, were they?”

Yep, and talk about astute. Maybe Delilah should join the gang at Black Knights Inc. The woman was certainly proving she had the instincts for it. Without hesitation, Eve laid it all on the line—she figured Delilah deserved that—and told her about the fire, the mugging, the cut brake lines, and the police closing the cases. “And when nobody would believe me,” she finished, “I went to Black Knights Inc., hoping they could help me figure out who’s doing this.”

Delilah’s green eyes narrowed, and she blinked rapidly as if she were physically trying to take it all in—and having trouble in the endeavor. Eve had to admit, it was quite a tale. “Because Mac is a former FBI agent,” Delilah finally murmured, “you thought he’d be able to succeed where the CPD failed?”

“Yes,” she said, hoping Jeremy didn’t feel her stiffen at the question. “Th-that’s what I figured.”

Delilah fell into a long silence as she glanced off into the distance. The thousand-yard stare…Eve remembered Becky referring to such a thing, but until this moment she wasn’t sure she’d actually ever seen it. Then again, she’d never taken part in an all-out gun battle either, so, yippee! Lots of firsts today!

Mac was the one to finally break into the quiet pall that’d momentarily fallen over the group. He lifted a hand toward Jeremy. “Mac McMillan.” His deep Texas twang was softer than usual. “Sorry to be meetin’ you for the first time under these circumstances.”

“Likewise.” Jeremy shook his hand.

“They were hired guns,” Billy blurted, and everyone in the group turned to stare at him.

“What?” Jeremy was the first to recover. “How do you figure that?” Eve seconded that question.

“Two reasons,” Billy said, and something in Eve told her she wasn’t going to like where he was going with this. “The first one being that the nature of the other attempts on her life led us to believe whoever is behind this thing is someone she knows.”

Sweet Jesus help her, she couldn’t begin to fathom who that could be…And the fact that Jeremy instinctively hugged her closer, a slight tremor running down the length of his big body? Well, that just made it all the more terrifying. Because he was Jeremy, the guy who’d punched out Todd Stockwell for pinching her butt from beneath the bleachers. Jeremy, the guy who’d raced to her rescue the night she found out her marriage was a sham. Jeremy, the guy who put seriously bad men behind bars on a daily basis. He wasn’t supposed to get scared. But she could tell he was. He was scared. Scared for her.

“And considering how the witnesses described these two men,” Billy continued, “they don’t exactly sound like the types to find themselves on the inside of Eve’s social circle.”

Erm…yes, so that was putting it mildly. The only guy she knew who even came close to wearing gold chains was Preston Ferrell who sometimes, for a laugh, donned the gold medal he’d won in the 1998 winter Olympics.

“Okay.” Delilah cocked her head, looking far steadier, suddenly, than Eve was feeling. This is bad, a little voice whispered through her head, followed immediately by, this is really bad. She wanted to tell the little bugger to shove off, because she knew things were bad. They had been for months and—“So,” Delilah continued, “what’s the second reason?”

“Well,” Billy said, and the look on his face when he slid her a quick glance? Holy cow, it was enough to give her nightmares.

Don’t say it! she wanted to scream at him. Don’t say what I don’t want to hear! Don’t say what I’ll never be ready to hear!

“The second reason is that, since we knew someone was out to get her, we were very careful on the drive here to ensure nobody followed us.” Which would explain their convoluted route to the bar. “And that means those two gunman,” oh, God, and suddenly she knew exactly where Billy was going, “had to have received notification of her whereabouts. Which begs the question…” Now, he turned toward her, and before he even opened his mouth, her world dimmed. Everything around her faded to black, and her vision tunneled down to a single point of reference: Billy’s hard, uncompromising face. “Who did you call, Eve? Who knew you were here?”

Bill watched as Eve’s lovely, tear-laden eyes blinked rapidly, and he cursed himself and the bastard behind all this for making her go through it. But there was no other way. And he needed to know who she’d called…

Of course, he could tell from the way her face drained of blood, from the way her nostrils flared unnaturally wide, that she was having trouble grasping the reality of the situation.

The truth hurts? Yeah, whoever came up with that little nugget should be crowned High King of the Understaters, because from the look on her face, the truth not only hurt, but it tore apart her whole friggin’ existence, her whole sense of self and what she knew to be real.

“No,” she shook her head, her chest rising and falling with each panting breath—he called himself ten kinds of asshole for noticing how it made her breasts press against her thin blouse. She looked around as if the world had suddenly changed shape. As if up was down, and black was white. “No,” she choked again, wrenching away from her cousin’s embrace. “It can’t be.”

“Who?” he demanded. But it didn’t do any good. She was lost in her own denial, shaking her head and whispering, “No, it can’t be,” over and over again.

“Her father,” Delilah piped up.

Eve swung on the woman, screaming, “No!”

“I heard her talking to him and—”

“No!” Eve yelled again, reaching up to fist double handfuls of her own hair.

Bill went with his gut and dragged her into his arms, ignoring the fact that Buchanan narrowed his eyes at the move. Eve fought initially, writhing in his embrace, beating his chest, but she had no more strength than a kitten. And in seconds, her struggling stopped and she collapsed against him in a sad, sobbing heap—which was so, so much worse than her pitiful fighting had been.

His hardened warrior’s heart bled for her. And once again, their sad history was forgotten, all the hurts and disappointments trivialized when compared to a father’s ultimate betrayal. He silently promised to kill Patrick Edens…slowly. But aloud he crooned, “Shh, Eve. It’s gonna be okay. We’ll figure this out. We’ll—”