He swiveled back toward the bar, but the hairs on the back of his neck almost instantly alerted him to the fact that That Woman had marched up behind him.

Slowly, with what he hoped wasn’t a patently false look of unconcern, he turned around. But before he could open his mouth, she whipped off her helmet and shook out her hair. He was accosted by the spicy-sweet scent of her perfume and the earthier aroma of the open road. Inexplicably, and to his utter horror, Little Mac, the idiot in his pants, defied all convention—not to mention the amount of liquor he’d imbibed—and lifted to half-mast.

Well, for God’s sake, he thought with disgust, mentally calling himself and Little Mac ten kinds of fool just as Delilah blurted, “Thank goodness you’re here.”

“Huh?” Okay, and even in his scotch-muddled state, he recognized his response for the gleaming bit of witticism it was not.

Delilah frowned. “Are you drunk?” She placed her hands on her hips. Her round, curvy, delicious hips. Her lovely hips that just begged for a man’s hands and—

Ah, hell…

“Maybe,” he told her, holding his forefinger and thumb an inch apart. “Just a little.”

“Goddamnit!” she growled, then immediately yelled for Brendan to bring over two cups of coffee.

“Hey, now. Don’t do that,” Zoelner objected. “I’ve been working all evening on this buzz and I—”

“Can it,” Delilah cut him off. Mac lifted his eyebrows in surprise. Not that Delilah wasn’t a speak-her-mind, in-your-face kind of broad, because she was. But this was something different. The tone she’d taken with Zoelner bordered on rude.

“I need you.” She pointed a red-tipped finger at Zoelner’s nose, causing the man to go cross-eyed when he attempted to focus on it. Whoa. What? She needed…Zoelner? Then she turned to include him in that stomach-churning statement. “I need both of you.”

Zoelner’s face pulled down in a considering frown. “Just to be clear, I’m not usually the kind of man who likes to share his pleasures.” Okay, and just the thought had a lurid emotion—not jealousy, definitely not jealousy—buzzing at the back of Mac’s head like a swarm of angry Texas yellow jackets. “But if you’ve a mind to—”

“Not like that,” Delilah hissed, color climbing in her already flushed cheeks.

All right. Something…Mac tilted his head, blinking…isn’t right here. Unfortunately, the discombobulating combination of scotch and Delilah’s nearness ensured he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Then she saved him the trouble of trying to figure it out when she blurted, “My uncle is missing. And I need you guys to help me find him.”

Well…hello, sobriety.

Chapter One

Outside Theo Fairchild’s Brownstone

Thirty minutes later…

Don’t panic…

Delilah Fairchild had been repeating those two words to herself for hours. She said them when her uncle wasn’t back at the motel when he said he’d be. She breathed them the first—and the thirtieth—time she called his cell phone only to be transferred straight to voice mail. She muttered them after a half-dozen inquiries to the area’s hospitals turned up exactly nada. She combined them with a rather poetic curse when the local police told her she had to wait twenty-four hours before the missing person’s report she filed would get any real attention—her uncle being an adult and all, and possibly just holed-up in a hotel somewhere getting his knob polished. For the record, the policeman hadn’t actually said that, but his intent had been clear. And she echoed them over and over inside her motorcycle helmet the entire four-and-a-half-hour, hell-bent-for-leather ride back to Chicago.

But the truth was…she was starting to panic.

Big time.

Of course, it didn’t help matters that two of the guys she’d been depending on to assist her in finding her uncle happened to be drunk as the proverbial skunks. When she stormed into her bar, intent on running upstairs to the apartment she lived in above the place in order to grab the spare keys to her uncle’s new townhouse, she’d been beyond relieved to see two of the Black Knights occupying center barstools.

That relief had lasted all of about ten seconds.

Because the only thing more exasperating than dealing with drunks was dealing with drunks when you desperately needed them to be sober.

And speaking of drunks…

A yellow taxi pulled up behind her motorcycle, its headlights bathing her in sharp white light. She raised a hand and squinted against it as she toed out her kickstand and hooked her helmet over the chrome handlebars of her Harley chopper. Bryan “Mac” McMillan and Dagan Zoelner, each wearing faded jeans, summer-weight leather jackets, and T-shirts advertising the custom motorcycles of Black Knights Inc., climbed out of the vehicle. Silhouetted against the light, they both looked big and mean—Mac much more so, with hulking muscles and a perpetual scowl—and, wouldn’t you know? They were just what she needed right now.

If only they were sober…

Of course, as her Uncle Theo liked to say, she could wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one filled up faster. Which in this case meant drunk or sober, she was taking Mac and Zoelner any way she could get them.

“So, what are we looking for here?” Zoelner asked, coming to stand beside her. The guy stumbled slightly when he tipped his head back to take a sip of the coffee she’d made Brendan pour into Styrofoam cups. He swayed again when he glanced up at the three-story brownstone her uncle was in the middle of restoring to its former glory. The dimly glowing streetlamps cast the building’s warm rock facade in sharp planes and dark shadows. And for some reason, perhaps it was nerves or maybe it was the adrenaline that had been flooding her system all day, but it struck her as slightly…foreboding. Perhaps even…malevolent?

Okay, and now you’re being ridiculous, she scolded herself. “We’re looking for an address book, a phone number, anything that might tell me where Charlie lives or…or even something that has his last name written on it would be helpful.”

“Charlie?” Zoelner inquired.

“The friend my uncle went to see.”

“Ah.” Zoelner nodded, taking another slightly unsteady sip of coffee as Mac passed loose bills to the cab driver through the open window. She was gratified to discover his path to sobriety seemed considerably farther along than Zoelner’s. As the taxi drove away, he strode forward on legs that appeared remarkably steady, his big square face drawn in a set of harsh lines made more severe by the shadowy light of the city street. Between the two men, Zoelner was the more classically handsome, with slate-gray eyes, high cheekbones, and wavy brown hair.

But there was just something about Mac…

Maybe it was the intensity of his piercing blue gaze, or the character in his slightly crooked nose. Perhaps it was the stubborn jut of his substantial jaw or that too-damn-sexy dimple in the center of his chin. Or it could be that he seemed to emanate danger in a sort of testosterone-laden cloud, something felt but not seen. Although, in all honesty, it probably had much more to do with the fact that to meet him was to fear him. Just a little. Or a lot. And she’d always kind of had a thing for bad boys.

Mac was definitely a bad boy. The guy had an alpha male swagger that could be spotted a hundred yards away. And when you combined that with the mystery of him—he was an ex–FBI agent turned secret agent who was now working undercover as a motorcycle mechanic—it drove her absolutely nuts. We’re talking barely-able-to-keep-her-hands-to-herself, panty-dropping nuts.

Unfortunately, Mac had made it abundantly clear her feelings weren’t returned. The big jerk. Of course, the silver lining here—if such a thing could exist in this god-awful situation—was that the sting she usually felt when thinking about his repeated rejections was completely eclipsed by the far more pressing fact that, you know, her uncle seemed to have vanished into thin air. Poof! Houdini couldn’t have done a better job had he tried.

Damnit, Uncle Theo! Where the hell are you?

She mentally hurled that question into the ether. But like it’d been doing all day, the ether chose to ignore her, refusing to point her in the direction of the man who, after her parents died in a terrible car crash, gave up his bachelor lifestyle in order to settle down and raise a brokenhearted seven-year-old girl. The man who was father, friend, and confidant all rolled into one. The man who was the one person on the entire face of the planet she could call her own…

The tears she’d been holding at bay burned behind her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. One, because she wasn’t a crier, damnit! And two, if she let them fall, it would be like she was admitting the possibility that the worst might actually come to pass. That she might never see Theo again and—

“So, fill me in on what you know so far,” Mac commanded in his slow-as-molasses drawl, yanking her from her thoughts. It was just as well. Those thoughts had been heading down a gloomy path. One she wasn’t willing to tread. Not yet, anyway.

“What I know so far?” she asked with a snort that was far too close to a sob for comfort. “Well, that’d be a big ol’ helping of jack with a nice side of squat.”

Okay, and that sounded slightly more petulant and decidedly more ungrateful than she’d meant it to. She was glad they were here with her. She really was. Because waiting the prescribed amount of time for the Marion police to do something wasn’t an option. Not when she figured the first twenty-four hours after a person went missing were the most critical. Not when she knew that enlisting the help of the bad-to-the-bone boys over at Black Knights Inc. could give her a leg up. Which meant she should be falling to her knees and thanking them for hopping-to without a second’s hesitation instead of answering what was a rational, straightforward question with a mouthful of biting sarcasm.