Julie Walker - Born Wild

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.”

He glanced around at the faces looking back at him, expecting something more than a series of wide-eyed blinks. Then he reminded himself not everyone—very few people, in fact—understood the mechanisms by which explosions, and the resulting flames, operated, and he tried to put it in layman’s terms.

“It means the fire didn’t originate from the curtains lit by the candle. It means the fire originated by the front door and spread toward the air coming in through the open window. See,” he slapped the photo he’d been examining down on the conference table and turned it around so the others could see, tapping the image with his finger. “Whoever started this did so with a quick-burning and, my guess would be, brutally hot accelerant that was poured under the door and lit. It turned the place into a tinderbox in minutes. But it burned the longest and hottest by the open window where the air could fuel it, which is why the arson investigator mistook that for the point of origin.”

“So I was right,” Eve whispered, her eyes as round as hand grenades. “Someone wants me dead.”

“Jesus, Eve.” Ace scooted his chair closer to hers and threw a muscled arm around her shoulders. Bill tried very hard to ignore it this time, but when Eve reached over and clutched Ace’s hand, he recognized the green-eyed monster sitting on his shoulder for what it was.

For Christ’s sake, man! Cut that shit out!

Although, honestly, he wasn’t sure if he was mentally yelling at himself or Ace. And for a brief moment he was thrown back to earlier that afternoon, when Eve’d curled her delicate fingers into his waistband and the simple feel of her knuckles brushing his back had damn near lit him on fire. That small touch had been more erotic than some of his more memorable full-on make-out sessions, which just proved how far he hadn’t come in his long, oh-so-long, too- damn-long journey to forgetting about one Miss Evelyn Edens.

Well, shit on a stick…

“How in the world did you manage to get out of there alive?” Ace asked gently, giving Eve a squeeze and jerking Bill from his unwelcome thoughts.