“What look?” Ozzie asked innocently.
“The one that says you know what color panties I’m wearing.”
“Well, I can’t help that.” Ozzie grinned, reaching up to adjust an invisible tie around his neck. “Guessing the color of women’s drawers is just one of my many talents.”
“Ozzie…” Boss warned.
“Now back to this sorority house toilet seat comment,” Ozzie blazed ahead. “I thank you for the vote of confidence in my manly prowess, but if we’re talking manwhores, we need to turn the spotlight off me and shine it on this guy sitting beside me.”
“Me?” Steady hooked a thumb at his chest. The firelight flickered across his swarthy, Hispanic features and flashed in his laughing black eyes. “I’m not the one who goes through women like Kleenex, cabrón.”
“Pfft.” Ozzie waved him off. “I may technically,” he stressed the word, “have a few more notches on my bedpost than you do.” Dagan rolled his eyes. Surely they weren’t keeping a running tally. Surely. “But at least I’m not the high king of one-night stands. At least I’m gentlemanly enough to take them out to dinner a couple of times afterward, make some kind of connection. I think you’re known around town as Mr. One-and-Done!”
“Okay, children.” Boss clapped his hands together. “That’s enough.” Frank “Boss” Knight was well versed in riding roughshod over a group of overgrown men who liked slinging bullshit at one another almost as much as they liked dangerous missions, high stakes odds, and bright, shiny new weapons. Usually Dagan enjoyed the good-natured camaraderie, the relentless ribbing. But not tonight. Tonight he either wanted to wallow in his own self-pity or find something to take his mind off the weight of his unremitting guilt. The scotch had been helping him, albeit marginally, to do both… “Let’s not forget we’re here to celebrate the imminent birth of a little hellion,” Boss continued. “So how ’bout those beers, Steady?”
“Coming right up,” Steady said, but Mac stopped him before he could fish the bottles of Honkers Ale from the sea of ice. Part of Dagan couldn’t help but grieve the lost opportunity for a frosty brew. Because, unfortunately, the last blessedly numbing drops of Lagavulin had worn off right about the time he was chasing Mr. Timberlands down the street.
“We’re gonna have to pass on the suds, folks,” Mac drawled while simultaneously trying to bat Delilah’s administering hands away from his side. From out of nowhere—or maybe from out of one of the saddlebags on her Harley—Delilah had produced a travel pack of tissues, and she’d been doing her best to tend to Mac’s stab wound ever since. It’d been Dagan’s experience that most women took the Boy Scouts’ always be prepared motto to heart.
“And while we’re on the subject,” Mac continued, flashing Delilah a look of utter exasperation when she refused to quit dabbing at his injury all while making tutting noises like an old Jewish grandma, “we need you guys to put a lid on this little celebration, too.”
Holy fuckballs, do those two have it bad, Dagan thought. And it was his heartfelt belief that should Mac ever wise up and stop wearing his ass as a hat—he knew Mac’s history, knew just how sordid it was, but the guy gave new meaning to the phrase once bitten twice shy—then Dagan would have the honor of bearing witness to another fairy-tale ending.
“What? Why?” Becky asked. Then she noticed Delilah’s ministrations. “Whoa.” Her chin jerked back. “What the hell happened to you, Mac?”
“Delilah stabbed me,” Mac deadpanned.
Delilah sputtered like a backfiring motor as Boss hooted with laughter, gleefully slapping his knee. “And I’m sure you totally deserved it!”
“I most certainly did not,” Mac harrumphed, crossing his arms over his chest, his brows angled down his slightly crooked nose.
“Of course you did,” Ozzie declared. “You have, after all, been taking those penis-enlarging pills recently.”
This time it was Mac’s turn to sputter. “I most certainly…what the hell are you talkin’ about?”
“The fact that you’ve been a bigger dick to Delilah in the last handful of months than ever before,” Ozzie asserted, his eyes sparkling with mischief. The whiz kid turned to bump knuckles with Steady as a dull roar of laughter competed with the snap and crackle of the fire. Dagan couldn’t help it, despite this night and the horrendous anniversary it observed, he felt his lips twitch. Ozzie had a biting wit that was equally amusing and annoying, depending in large part on whether or not you happened to be the one on the receiving end of his rapier repartee.
“Shut the fuck up, Ozzie,” Mac growled. Dagan wasn’t surprised to discover the ex–FBI agent had fallen into the Ozzie’s Sense of Humor is Annoying group on this particular occasion.
Ozzie quickly replied with, “Seriously, though, Mac. Just give me ten minutes alone, and I might be able to help you remove that giant stick from your a—”
“Ozzie.” Mac’s eyes were drilling into Ozzie with so much force it was a wonder the guy didn’t spring a couple of leaks from the set of through-and-throughs in his head. “Don’t push me tonight.”
“All right,” Ozzie capitulated, sighing dramatically. “We’ll just leave it where it is then. All safe and secure.”
Mac opened his mouth to respond, then snapped it shut again, shaking his head. “Look, folks. We don’t have time to—” He sucked in a hissing breath when Delilah hit a particularly sore spot. “Ow! Damnit, woman! Will you leave off, already?”
“And let you bleed out?” she yelled back, her pretty green eyes overly bright even in the dim light cast by the fire. “I’ve already stood by and watched one man bleed to death because of something I did! I’ll be damned if I stand by and watch it happen again!”
A stunned silence settled over the group as everyone looked on in fascinated horror while one of the toughest women they knew went ahead and lost her shit. It started out slowly, with just a slight wobble of her lower lip. Then her stubborn chin followed suit. Finally, her chest heaved once, and it was game over. The waterworks exploded like a main pipe had busted.
Mac looked stunned for all of a half-second, before his big, Irish face caved in on itself and he yanked the flame-haired bartendress against him, hugging her tight and muffling the sounds of her pitiful sobs into his chest. So, Brendan hadn’t been joking about Delilah’s trouble in dealing with her friend’s recent murder. And that, combined with the overpowering and stone-cold terror she’d been feeling all day, had finally gotten the better of her.
“Shh, darlin’,” the big Texan crooned, rubbing a hand down her hair and kissing her tenderly on the forehead. “Shh, now. There’s no need to—”
“Zoelner?” Boss snagged Dagan’s attention. The man’s craggy face was pulled down into a fierce frown, causing the scar cutting up from the corner of his mouth to pucker angrily. “What the hell is going on?”