Chapter Eighteen
“Chrissakes,” Dan said, blowing like a bull, his hands planted against the bathroom door on either side of Penni’s head. No matter how he struggled to pull in oxygen, he couldn’t seem to catch his breath. It didn’t help that she was staring at him with those dark, luminous eyes and—
“Yo!” A voice from the past sounded on the other side of the door, causing Penni to squeal and duck under his arm. She retrieved her trousers, panties, and shoes in one frantic scoop as a hard fist landed on the wood. Bam! Dan bent to hastily jerk on his jeans and briefs. “You in there, Dan The Motor City Madman?”
Hell’s bells, how long had it been since he heard that nickname? Not since he said sayonara to the Teams and joined Boss in building BKI.
“Anderson?” he called, quickly buttoning his fly.
“Yeah, man. The hotel manager said you’d be down here in a storage room, but we stopped when we heard noises comin’ from the ladies’ john. Everything okay in there?”
Okay? Well, that was debatable. He decided to ignore the question and instead went with one of his own. “Holy shit, dude. I didn’t expect you guys for another three or four hours.”
“Lucky for you,” Leo Anderson replied, his deep chuckle muffled by the door, “we happen to know a pilot insane enough to take off in that hellacious crapper of a squall. You remember Romeo, right?”
Dan glanced over his shoulder to find Penni smoothing her hair back into her ponytail. She’d managed to pull off some sort of crazy, phone booth, superhero-esque redressing. Because not only were her trousers zipped, her shirttail neatly tucked into her waistband, but her shoes were back on, too. Huh. Impressive. Did the Secret Service practice fire-drill appareling or something? If so, he needed to ask her for some pointers.
“You’ve got a little mascara…” he whispered, indicating the skin beneath her left eye and not allowing his gaze to ping down to her ass when she spun to face the bathroom mirror. She licked her finger and scrubbed the makeup away. And, yeah, so maybe he gave her tight little booty the briefest, teeniest of glances before turning back to throw open the door.
“Of course I remember Romeo.” He flashed a grin he hoped hid the fact that he’d been half-naked and rubbing up against the lovely Agent DePaul barely thirty seconds ago. “How could I forget the guy who flew that old decrepit Huey in a series of crazy eights just for shits and giggles?”
Seven men in jungle fatigues who ranged in size, shape, and coloring stood on the other side of the bathroom door. And one look at their familiar faces as their eyes skipped over his shoulder to Penni told him he hadn’t quite succeeded in pulling off that whole nothing to see here; just go about your business shtick. Their expressions varied from minor curiosity to smirking insight.
Well, shit on a stick.
But speaking of familiar faces, he experienced a fleeting pinch of…hmm…he guessed the best word to describe it would be nostalgia. Because Lieutenant Leo “The Lion” Anderson and his group of SEALs had that squinty-eyed, shaggy look that said they’d recently been or were about to go on a mission to a part of the world where the women wore burkas and Americans were considered enemy number one. The same type of place where an overabundance of body hair gave them a sort of camouflage within the local population.
Not that working for Black Knights Inc. didn’t come with its own perks in the form of covert missions to the globe’s most notorious jungles and deserts. But since BKI was the darkest of the dark operators within the United States, Dan’s jobs tended be looser, his objectives less defined than the cut-and-dried sorties routinely carried out by the military. And it was that simplicity—if balls-to-the-wall raids, assaults, rescues, and offenses could ever be called simple—that he found himself missing right now.
Then again, maybe he was merely feeling sentimental for a happier time. A time when he thought himself indestructible. When life was nothing but adventure and intrigue. When his wife was still alive.
His wife…
And, sonofabastard, that brought him back around to Penni and—
“Speaking of shits and giggles, if I remember correctly,” Romeo said, his speculative gaze swinging away from Penni to land on him, “I was the one doing the giggling. And LT here”—he slung an arm around Leo’s shoulders—“was the one doing the shitting. Of his pants, that is.”
Leo’s mouth curved down in a frown as he shrugged off Romeo’s arm. “What’s this?” he drawled, lifting his middle finger toward Romeo. “Why, it’s my asshole antenna. I’m happy to report you’re comin’ in loud and clear.”