Lord knows a lawsuit is the dead last thing any of us need right now…
“What are you doing here?” Eve asked, still towel-drying her hair.
She’d been in the shower when Toran buzzed from the front gate to say her father had arrived on the scene. And Bill and Ace had been in the middle of coordinating an emergency exfiltration for Ozzie and Steady who, like always, had managed to make trouble for themselves in some bug-infested South American hellhole. Which meant—oh, goody, goody gumdrops—he’d been the only one left to run interference on their unwelcome guest.
“I should ask you the same!” the elder Edens thundered. “What are you doing here? It’s like you enjoy getting yourself into situations that titillate the press!”
Mac turned to see Eve’s face fall, and he wondered if, perhaps, he’d still be forced to plant one in Edens’s kisser after all.
“Dad—” she tried, but her father just cut her off.
“I was contacted by Samantha Tate. And imagine my surprise when she asked me why my daughter had decided to shack up with a bunch of greasy motorcycle mechanics.”
“I’m not shacking—”
“Get your stuff. You’re coming home with me.” Edens threw his nose in the air, adjusting his baby blue silk tie. “And that’s final.”
Mac lifted a brow, sliding a surreptitious glance toward Eve. The poor woman’s face was so red it was almost purple, and she was chewing on her bottom lip so hard he was surprised she didn’t just gnaw the sucker right off. It was obvious that, even as a grown woman, she was used to doing as her father instructed. So it surprised him when she lifted her chin against the warm evening breeze and said, “No, Dad. I’m staying here.”
Well, look at you, honey. Way to go…
“Wh-what?” Edens sputtered, his face taking on a similar hue to his daughter’s. Only his wasn’t fueled by timidity or humiliation; it was fueled by fury. Patrick Edens obviously wasn’t a man used to hearing the word “no.”
“I’m staying here,” Eve repeated. “It’s safe here. Now, I know you don’t believe I’m in trouble, but—”
“You’re not in any trouble!” Edens spat. “Why do you keep insisting that you are when the police have assured you time and time again that it’s nothing more than a string of bad luck?” Edens pursed his lips, narrowing his eyes. “It’s because of Jeremy, isn’t it? I knew it was a mistake for you to move in with him instead of coming home to me. Well, we can remedy that tonight and—”
“No.” This time when Eve said the word there was some power behind it. Mac crossed his arms over his chest, content to let her handle the situation because she appeared to have it well under control.
Edens on the other hand? The man looked like he was about to blow a gasket. And sure enough, his face contorted into an ugly snarl, and he hissed, “Don’t you do this again!” His upper lip curled. “Haven’t you had enough of the press? Haven’t your recent mishaps and your new personal endeavors brought enough disgrace to our family?”
Eve stumbled back as if Edens’s words had gut-punched her, and Mac was just about to step in when she rallied, dragging in a deep breath and squaring her shoulders. “None of that was my fault, and you know it. Now go home, Dad.” Before Edens could answer, she spun on her heel and started marching back toward the warehouse.
“Eve!” Edens shouted at her back, but she ignored him, her chin held high.
Mac turned a considering eye on Edens, sucking in a breath through his nose. The air smelled like warm pavement, blooming flowers, and Edens’s top-shelf cologne. “Well,” he said, “I think that about does it.” Eve’s father opened his mouth to object, but Mac yelled to Toran who was watching all the commotion through the open window of the gatehouse. “Escort Mr. Edens here off our private property.” Edens sputtered like a kinked garden hose. “And if he puts up a fight, call the police.”
Then, he turned to follow Eve into the shop. And as he watched her long, determined strides, he couldn’t help but wonder if Wild Bill had misjudged the woman.
Black Knights Inc. Headquarters, 2nd Floor
8:20 p.m.
No, no, no. Something isn’t right. How the hell did the arson investigator miss this?
“You gonna invite us?” Mac asked, dragging Bill’s attention away from the high-resolution photos Jeremy Buchanan had provided. They showed Eve’s blackened, gutted condo, and if Bill was being honest, Buchanan had really come through for them in a couple of ways. First, he’d held his own as they escorted Eve to the Hummer—Bill had recognized that kill-or-be-killed look in the man’s eye, the look that said Buchanan had been willing to do whatever needed to be done in order to keep his cousin safe. And second, these files were straight-up cherry. Comprehensive and detailed.
He wondered if maybe, just maybe, he’d jumped to the wrong conclusion about the guy. Not that Buchanan wasn’t still an asshole. He was. No question. But there were quite a few people who thought Bill was an asshole, so that particular moniker didn’t hold a hell of a lot of water. Plus, the dude worked vice. He was a multimillionaire, trust-fund baby who preferred to get his hands dirty in the trenches to make the world a better place rather than sitting in some high rise celebrating the high life. So, yeah, maybe Buchanan wasn’t as ginormous a tool as Bill’d initially thought.
“Hey. I said, you want to invite us?” Mac repeated.
“Huh?” he frowned, his eyes darting back to the photo in his hand, his thoughts racing along with his heart. Most of the guys he worked with had metronome-steady pulse rates, but not him. Nope. He’d never perfected that little trick. Then again, unlike other operators, the adrenaline didn’t make him weaker or less logical. Hell, no. It did just the opposite, focusing him, sharpening his world and everything in it to a fine point. Except, for the life of him, he couldn’t guess what in the world Mac was talking about. “Invite you to what?”
“That party you got going on in your head,” Mac drawled. “You’ve been sitting over there making noises for the last five minutes.”
He had?
Bill glanced at the other two people seated around the conference table. Eve was gnawing her thumb down to what had to be a bloody stump, and Ace, holding the report on the condition of Eve’s Vespa, was frowning at him over the top of it.
Okay, so obviously he had. But that’s because he was onto something big, huge. And the only thing that tempered his excitement at having made this particular discovery was the knowledge that Eve had been right all along…
Someone was trying to kill her. Sonofabitch.
“The fire department used the old method of locating the fire’s point of origin by relying on lowest burn and deepest char pattern,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. That method had been proven faulty more than five years ago. “Which points to the drapes on Eve’s living room window. But what they didn’t take into account was that the fire burned for over six minutes after the initial flashover and before the CFD put it out. And that means it had time to change from a fuel-controlled fire to a ventilation-controlled fire.”