Hell on Wheels (6 page)

Fuckin’-A
, there went his mind again. It was a problem under normal circumstances. With her standing arms’ length away? Man, it was a goddamned obsession.

He almost smiled when she started in, her tone defiant.

“Look, I spend all day long with five-year-olds. I sing silly songs. I color with crayons and make barnyard animals out of clay. I glue and glitter. I play Duck Duck Goose and Red Rover. I wipe bottoms and noses. I wear shirts with embroidered ABC’s and skirts that can stand up to three dozen grubby little hands. So,” she made a face that dared him to comment, “it helps to know underneath all that is the heart and body of a woman.”

“Hmm,” was all he could manage, rendered nearly comatose with lust by the challenging gleam in her eyes.

“Hmm?” she repeated disbelievingly. Thrusting out her chin, she rolled in her lips. “Okay, lookie here, bucko. Considering the amount of electronics I was unknowingly carrying on my person when I walked in here, it’s pretty obvious we’re going to have to suffer each others’ company. At least for a couple of days. And if we have any hope of getting along, you’re going to have to learn how to use actual words. For Pete’s sake, my kindergarteners have larger vocabularies than you.”

“Autoschediastic.”

“Huh?” She blinked up at him suspiciously.

“Juxtaposition.”

“What?”

“Verisimilitude.”

“What in the world are you doing?” she demanded.

He shrugged, loving the play of emotions over her animated face. “Proving I know more words than a kindergartener.”

***

Ali blinked.

Did
Nate
Weller
just
make
a
joke?

Nah. Couldn’t be. That would mean he had a sense of humor, which she was absolutely certain he did
not
.

“Then why don’t you ever
use
those words?” she demanded, hands on hips, glaring at him and trying to ignore the breadth of his shoulders beneath his T-shirt. “I swear, sometimes talking to you is like trying to converse with a tree.” A very big, very solid, very
male
tree.

He made the facial equivalent of a shrug. “The fewer I use, the more you use.”

“Sheesh,” she rolled her eyes at the man’s obliviousness, “that’s the whole problem. You clam up, which,
poof
,” she snapped her fingers, “just makes me talk all the more. It’s like I can’t help but spew forth words.”

Nate grinned and Ali’s heart stopped.

God, the man was beautiful. His smile transformed his face the way dawn transforms the night.

It was a good thing he didn’t whip that puppy out very often. The thing was a lethal weapon. Far more dangerous to a girl’s fragile heart than the rifle he’d used as his tool of trade while sniping for the Marine Corps.

“I like the way you talk,” he said simply, with a little shrug.

Uh, Billy Bob Thorton in
Slingblade
anyone? She stifled a chuckle.
Mmm, hmm. I reckon.

Then the import of what he said sunk in and she gaped at him. “You do?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, a shiny lock of black hair curling over his forehead. For some inexplicable reason, she wanted to stroke it between her fingers. See if it was as cool and silky as she remembered. Which was odd in the extreme since she didn’t like him. Preferred to stay as far from him as possible.

Well…save for that time on the beach…

Grief. Grief. That’d been guided by grief…hadn’t it?

Yes, it most certainly had. Anything else was just too bizarre to consider.

She shook her head. “But…but whenever I start to chatter, you always eyeball me like I’m some sort of bizarre bug that’s just crawled over your shoe.”

Ethan/Ozzie turned a chuckle into a cough and she was reminded they had an audience. Glancing over, she saw the guy try to appear industrious as he waved that black wand-thing over her empty suitcase.

Well whatever.
This conversation was far too compelling to worry about something as insignificant as another set of ears listening in.

When she swung her gaze back to Nate, his black eyes were shrewd. “There, you see?” she pointed at his face. “You’re doing it again.”

He sighed heavily and began a thorough examination of his boots. “I don’t mean to. I don’t think you’re a bug at all. I think you’re…” he shook his head and slanted a look at Ethan/Ozzie, who was no longer even trying to pretend he wasn’t listening. The guy was gawking in slack-jawed fascination.

Nate grimaced before he shrugged, seeming to search for the right words. “When you talk, you always sound so happy, so sunny.”

Ali was rooted to the spot, her heart beating a mile a minute while her brains scrambled like breakfast eggs.

Things were definitely getting weird. As if the whole day, nay, the whole past three months, weren’t already redlining her personal bizarre-o-meter, now Nathan “Ghost” Weller was actually being…nice. “I think…I think that might be the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she admitted slowly.

He shrugged again and she thought maybe there was a slight flush staining his cheeks.

Nate blushing? Forming whole sentences? Actually smiling? Had she missed the warning signs somewhere and been sucked into a parallel dimension? A parallel dimension where Nathan Weller acted like a human being?

“Grigg once told me you rarely spoke, but when you did it was usually something erudite,” she confessed while warily watching to see just what strangeness he might attempt next. “I didn’t believe him then. Now maybe I do.”

His face instantly darkened.

Startled by the swift change, she lifted her brows. “You don’t like to talk about him?”

“Can’t.”

She huffed out a peeved breath. He’d forced the word through a hard set of sawing teeth. “So we’re back to monosyllabic answers?”

He only grunted and she realized they’d gone one step further, back to mere guttural responses.

“Perfect. That’s just perfect,” she hissed through her own set of grinding teeth. She’d thought they were making some sort of progress…

Yeah, what a joke
.

She spun around, stomping toward the bathroom to remove her underwear. She wasn’t even going to
think
about the upcoming humiliation of handing over her
dirty
panties.

Crapola.

“Why don’t you start by telling us what brought you here, Ali,” Frank said as the three Knights in residence settled themselves around the conference table. The group was mighty thin, what with Steady in California at some fancy-dancy medical conference while Rock and Wild Bill were away covertly keeping an eye on a bigwig politician during his ill-advised trip to the Sandbox. He wasn’t even going to
think
about Christian and Mac and that goddamned Mossad agent.

Man, he absolutely
hated
having so many of his men out at once, especially when he wasn’t with them. It gave him a severe case of nut-shrivel every time because he was used to being in the thick of things, neck deep in reconnaissance or bad guys, not sitting all snuggly warm at a conference table.

But that was the price he paid, he supposed, for running his own crew. And it was a small price indeed when he considered the fact that it was in exchange for choosing which assignments they’d take and more importantly, having the green light to gather Intel and carry out those assignments as they damned well pleased without any input from some desk-surfing, thumb-up-his-butt, pencil pusher in Washington.

Of course, it also meant he had to deal with visitors who strolled into his shop at the most inconvenient times.

And speaking of that inconvenient visitor, Ali Morgan stared at the cup of coffee Patti placed in front of her like it was an unstable nuclear warhead.

Uh-huh. He and the rest of the guys preferred their caffeine able to stand up without benefit of a cup, but it obviously wasn’t for everyone.

Standing, he made his way over to the refrigerator where he removed a can of Coke, popped the top, and set it on the table in front of Ali before claiming her cup of coffee for his own and retaking his seat.

She shot him an oh-god-you’re-my-hero smile right before she chugged down a healthy slug of soda. Wiping the back of her hand over her mouth, she took a deep breath, gathered herself, and blurted, “Someone’s after me.”

Ghost twitched.

That was the only way to describe the subtle tightening of every single one of the man’s muscles.

Well, now, isn’t that interesting?

Frank recognized Ghost’s intensely neutral expression. It was obvious the man was rigidly controlling his responses because he was scared shitless he might give something away. Anything away. Frank could certainly identify with that unfortunate predicament. He found himself in the same situation every goddamned time Becky walked into the room.

And speak of the devil…

“Someone’s after you? Cool.” Becky flopped down in a chair, bringing with her the weirdly appealing combination of smells that were acrylic paint, motor oil, and the softly clean scent that was all Becky.

She unwrapped a Dum Dum. This one was green. Sour apple. He knew every Dum Dum flavor on sight because, pervert that he was, each time Becky popped a new sucker in her mouth, he fantasized about kissing her and tasting how that particular flavor would combine with her own personal essence to create—in his mind, anyway—ambrosia.

“Are you insane?” Ali gave Becky the stink-eye. “You wouldn’t think it was so cool if whoever was after you had broken into your home, planted bugs in all your underwear, and tried to mug you.”

“You’re bugged, too? Sweet.” Becky pulled a root beer Dum Dum—Frank’s favorite—from her hip pocket and slid it in his direction.

He stopped the sucker from skimming off the table with a slap of his palm. It was warm from her body heat. That warmth made a barrage of wildly erotic images flash across his frizzled brain.

Her, naked. Him, trailing the sucker over the skin of her hip and then licking away the stickiness with the flat of his tongue.

Fuck!

He’d like to say he could ignore the candy, but he knew if he stuck it in his shirt pocket, it’d only burn a damn hole through to his chest until he couldn’t concentrate on anything save for shoving it in his pie hole.

Disgusted by his lack of self-control where root beer-flavored Dum Dums and Becky Reichert were concerned, he angrily ripped off the wrapper and crammed the sucker in his mouth, managing to frown around it at her. “If you’re just going to offer up inane observations, why don’t you go back to whatever it was you were doing?”

“Because,
Frank
,” she emphasized his name and his eyelids twitched, “at the moment this is much more interesting.”

Ali glanced back and forth between them, one eyebrow raised. Everyone else at the table was so accustomed to their constant bickering they didn’t bat a single lash, which only served to exacerbate Frank’s frustration. He was supposed to be the shining example of how they should all conduct themselves, lead by example and all that bullshit, but he couldn’t seem to wrangle his temper—not to mention his libido—whenever Becky was around. It was a problem. One he’d yet to find a solution to.

“Fine,” he growled, unaccountably mad at her, and even more pissed at himself for his lack of self-control. “But if you’re determined to stay, zip it, unless you have something constructive to add.”

Becky pantomimed zipping her lips, while simultaneously managing to give him her patented, you’re-such-an-asshole look.

If she only knew…

He swung his attention back to Ali because continuing to scowl at Becky wouldn’t do a damn bit of good to further this conversation, nor would it do a damn bit of good for his redlining hormones. “Okay, let’s start at the beginning. You say someone broke into your home?”

“Sort of.”

“How can someone
sort
of
break into your home?” he asked, pretending he didn’t see Becky’s exaggerated eye roll.

“Okay, look, what I’m about to tell you is going to sound crazy and maybe a little paranoid.” Ali rubbed her temples as she sat up straighter. From what Ghost said, the woman was closing in on the twenty-five-hours-of-continual-consciousness mark, and he could tell she was starting that inevitable slide into mental oblivion. That place where the body was still moving, the mouth was still able to string a few largely coherent words together, but the brain was checking out.
Good-bye, see you in, oh, say four hours.

He’d been there more than a time or two himself. She needed to get some sleep and soon. But first they needed some answers, because she’d come into their shop so wired he was surprised her underwear wasn’t picking up signals from the Hubble Space Telescope.

“Why don’t you give us a try,” he told her. “We specialize in paranoid and crazy.”

She tried to laugh, but the strain she’d been under, combined with her lack of sleep, made the effort fall flat. Rolling in her lips, she looked around the table as if she’d suddenly lost her nerve, then, “It all started about a week after we found out about Grigg.”

Everyone at the table, including him, shifted uncomfortably.

She continued, unconsciously flicking at the tab on her soda with her thumbnail. The hollow metallic pinging was particularly loud in the strained silence of the conference room. “I came home from work one day and just
knew
someone had been in my condo.”

“Was anything missing? Moved?” Ozzie asked, leaning back in his chair and running a hand though his mad scientist hair. The kid might have terrible taste in music and T-shirts, but he had an IQ off the fucking charts.

“No, everything was just how I’d left it, but there was this…this feeling. It sounds dumb, I know��”

“Not as dumb as you’d think,” Frank assured her. “Intuition is a powerful tool. One each of us sitting around this table has learned to credit. Plus, given the level of technology you’ve been wearing beneath your clothes, I’d say your paranoia was on the money.”

Ali flashed him a grateful smile.

I’m just racking up the hero points with you today, aren’t I, sweetheart?
Right, if she knew of the wild fantasies he was entertaining about Becky, she would surely be wearing a totally different expression. The kind someone might don after catching the neighborhood weirdo garbed in nothing but a trench coat in the middle of July while walking by a playground full of kids—which was exactly how he felt when it came to Rebecca Reichert. Like a dirty old man.

Shit.

“Thanks,” Ali said, dragging his attention back to the subject at hand. “That makes me feel better. I really thought I was going nutso there for a while. And this is probably going to sound strange, but I’m kinda glad you guys found all those bugs on me. Now I know I’m not losing my mind.”

“So you get home from work and you know someone’s been in your place,” Ozzie prodded. Like usual, the kid’s brain was flying about ten steps ahead, gathering information and cataloging it into recognizable patterns. “What happened next?”

“Nothing,” Ali lifted a shoulder and unconsciously slid a little farther down in her seat. The woman was on the short path to going horizontal. “For a few days, that is. I thought maybe I was just being paranoid, thought maybe my personal radar was going haywire because of Grigg’s passing.”

Passing.

Frank hated the euphemisms people used while talking about death. What was so wrong with that word? Death. Dead. Die. It was direct, simple, so much more succinct than, say, giving up the ghost or kicking the bucket, or, his personal favorite, pushing up daisies. Though technically more accurate than the previous two, that last one sounded far too happy and sunny in his opinion. Maybe it was because he’d dealt in and with death for most of his adult life, but he preferred to call a spade a spade.

Grigg was dead. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

“But about a week later,” Ali continued, “I walked into my classroom early one morning and…same thing. That feeling like someone had been there. But this time I had proof. When I went back through the history on my computer, I saw someone had logged on to my machine around midnight the night before.”

“Could you see what they were looking for? What files they accessed?” Ozzie asked.

“No…I, uh, I’m not that tech-savvy. And I guess, looking back, perhaps I should’ve called in one of those companies…the Geek Squad or whatever, to see if they could figure out what’d been done to my PC, but then school let out for summer break and I started to see him and I completely forgot about my computer.”

“
See
him
?” Dan “The Man” Currington asked the question they were all thinking.

“Yes,” she made a helpless gesture, “sort of.”

“Any way to clarify that?” Dan pressed.

Ali took another deep breath and slipped a little farther down in her seat. She rested her head on the back and blinked rapidly at the ceiling, then she suddenly pulled herself upright again.

That-a-girl, just keep it together a little while longer.

“Okay, again, you have to understand I thought I was going crazy, but I kept seeing this guy out of the corner of my eye. Never full on. Just a glimpse here or there. In the parking lot at the grocery store, a few cars behind me at a red light, walking into the ice cream shop across from the place I always get coffee. It’s like I’d catch a glimpse…then he’d be gone. But yesterday, right after some big brute of a guy tried to mug me,” she waved everyone off when they started making noises of concern. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t hurt, and the big jerk didn’t get my purse, thanks to the help of a giant bumblebee and a loaf of French bread.” Again, she sliced her hand through the air. “Long story for another time.
Anyway
, so right after my mugger ran off, I see the guy who’s been following me for months come out of the deli across the street.

“Now, my adrenaline was pretty high because of the mugging, so I call to him and guess what he does?”

“What?” Becky asked, eyes bright with excitement. The damned woman loved trouble, lived for it and, much to Frank’s chagrin, too often found it.

“He took off!” Ali exclaimed. “Just jumped in his SUV and burned rubber. Headed in the same direction as my mugger, mind you. I started after him—”

There was a collective gasp heard around the table.

“Yes, yes,” she rolled her eyes and pressed forward before anyone could throw in their two cents about what a colossally dumbass move that had been. “I know. Stupid, right? But I was so sick of feeling like I was going crazy. Don’t worry, though. One of the guys who helped me fight off the mugger kept me from following.”

Ozzie whipped open a paper-thin laptop, tense fingers poised above the keys like a snake getting ready to strike. “Vehicle make, color, model?”

Young Einstein had dropped his charmingly affable facade. Now he was all business. This was
his
specialty. Give the kid a few scant bits of information, and he could use his crazy-mad computer skills to find you the remaining pieces of the puzzle because, according to Ozzie,
everything
could be accessed through the World Wide Web and the lightning-fast fingers of a clever hacker. And Ozzie was as clever as they came.

“Sorry,” Ali shook her head. “I’m about as good with cars as I am with computers. It was black, I can tell you that much. Black and big. Like a Ford Explorer or a Chevy Tahoe.”

“So it was a domestically made SUV?” Ozzie asked, already typing away on the keyboard while his eyes remained glued to Ali’s face.

Mad
skills.

Frank congratulated himself for about the thousandth time over his decision to recruit Ethan Sykes away from the Navy.

Again Ali shook her head. “I’m not sure. But I did get a picture of the license plate.”

Ozzie instantly stopped typing. In the resounding silence of the room, you could’ve heard the proverbial pin drop.

Becky was the one to break it.
Of
course
.

“Kick
ass
, sista. Way to keep your head about you.”

Ali blushed prettily and bit her lip. Out of the corner of Frank’s eye, he thought he saw Ghost’s jaw twitch.

“Thanks.” Ali smiled. “But before you congratulate me too much, I’m not sure it’ll be that much help. It’s fuzzy.” She pulled her BlackBerry from the back pocket of her jeans and punched a few buttons. “By the time I grabbed my phone, the vehicle was pretty far away, and I had to zoom way in…”