When a Man Loves a Weapon (12 page)

Suds held her chin in his hand. “I thought you were engaged to Cam here,” he said, jerking his thumb toward Cam.

Riles bristled up into a fine hedgehog that would do the species proud, Cam crossed his arms, eyes narrowing, and Bobbie Faye knew she’d just turned beet red.

“She should be,” Cam muttered.

“I’m engaged to Trevor, Suds, remember?”

“We’re having scorecards printed next week,” Riles offered, “complete with a ‘player to be named later’ blank.”

Suds raked Riles with a military glare, his right hand spinning his wedding ring around his ring finger. It was the glare of an old military war dog to a young one, clearly saying that Suds wouldn’t have a single problem taking Riles out behind a barn and hurting him if he kept it up.

God, what she wouldn’t give for the chance to stick her tongue out at Riles, complete with a
nanny nanny boo boo
.

Riles had the decency to look properly chastised.

“Sugar Girl, Alex is bad news.” Suds turned to face her again, “You did good getting away from him. You need to stay away.”

“He has some information I have to have. I’ll make this quick and clean and then we’ll be outta here. Give me some time before you call the cops.”

Suds gazed pointedly at Cam, and—thank goodness—she thought fast enough on her feet this time to
not
say “he doesn’t count” and, instead, managed to say, “Cam’s helping.”

Suds turned to Cam, saying, “You carryin’, son?”

“Yes, sir. This is work related, so I’m technically on duty. So’s Riles here,” Cam nodded toward Riles. “Delta Force, Spec Ops, snipers.”

“Don’t tear up my bar.”

“I’m just going to go embarrass Alex, so he’ll talk. That’s all.” She tried to do a “Scout’s honor” pledge thingie. (Cam reached over and bent down the extra finger.) “Swear.”

Suds kissed her on the forehead. “Right. I’m calling my insurance company. Alex’s in the back room, playing poker.”

Cam nodded, and Bobbie Faye turned toward the room in question and led the way.

There she was, arms swinging, storming across the floor toward Trevor’s table, though she hadn’t seen him yet, waitresses wisely clearing a path in front of her as she looked
pissed off and scared. And determined. He loved her determination.

If he didn’t kill her for it first.

Because just as she crossed the room, his tablemates registered her approach, though no one had glanced at her directly. He felt their tension, felt the subtle undercurrent in the air, felt them shift in their seats to better enable them to reach for weapons they weren’t supposed to have in the casino and he knew . . .
knew
. . . suddenly, his intel hadn’t been entirely correct. He’d worried that this meeting had come too quickly, too easily, that there may be some ulterior motive, and the Bureau had not wanted to look a gift horse in the mouth.

There definitely
was
an ulterior motive. A target—and she’d just walked into the room. He could feel the way the men shifted, the way they seemed to
expect
her. The way they seemed coiled, waiting for her to draw nearer.

No way would his own office have told Bobbie Faye where he was, so she wasn’t there searching specifically for him (and she wouldn’t have been, if she’d known he was there undercover). While he hadn’t been able to call her, he’d sent a couple of coded texts telling that he was going to be delayed. She’d have hated that he couldn’t come home earlier, but she wouldn’t willfully blow his cover . . . so then what was she doing here . . . ? Fuck.
Alex
.

She still had not seen Trevor. Instead, she lasered in on Alex, who was sitting two chairs over. Alex, who had been forced to assist this mission or rot in prison, something Trevor had not been able to tell Bobbie Faye. Alex, who clearly would like to fuck up anything the federal government was doing, who knew Trevor and the Feds probably wouldn’t have ever found his hiding places in the swamp if Bobbie Faye hadn’t led them (inadvertently) across Alex’s secret pathways in and out of south Louisiana. Secret pathways which had made his black market arms business incredibly successful.

If Alex was responsible for pulling Bobbie Faye here and into jeopardy, then in the not-too-distant future, there were
only going to be parts of him residing in a federal prison somewhere. Very small parts.

The nightmare situation played out, slowly drowning him. He’d wanted her safe. She’d been through enough, she’d been hurt enough, and he fought back the anger at whoever had compromised her. The seconds ticked out as if God had decided each click of time would stretch to eternity before it snapped back, taking all sound and feeling with it, slamming home in a rush, a projectile intent on killing.

“It’s a steel box the size of a room.” “Yeah, isn’t it great?”

“How on earth are you going to market something that insane?”

“We’re calling it ‘The Bobbie Faye Survival Kit’.”

“Dude. You’ll never keep up with the orders.”

—Zachary Steele and Russ Marshalek on
Facebook

She’d expected to cause a scene.

The one thing Alex hated? Was a scene. If she had to throw in a couple of trapeze artists and a monkey fucking a football to draw attention, she would have.

And Alex was here. In her sights, across the main salon, at the back of a little poker room just through the archway; he hadn’t seen her yet—he was watching the dealer as he shuffled the next hand.

He’d placed bets with Nick against Trevor. And had not thought to hide.

She wasn’t sure when he’d gone completely delusional, or when his survivalist instinct had self-imploded, but she was already writing the condolence card in her head as she approached. She noted that these men at the card table weren’t his regular gunrunning buddies. For one thing, there were far fewer tattoos and no one was avidly staring at the ESPN footage of some car race on the big flat-screen TVs ringing the dark-paneled room, or dipping snuff and spitting in a spittoon, or wearing an “I shaved my balls for this?” t-shirt. What
did
register was how way-the-hell out of his element Alex was, especially if the thousand-dollar suit a couple of seats over was anything to judge by. Then she noticed the guy’s diamond cufflinks, and if those suckers were real, the suit probably cost ten thousand, and she couldn’t compress the little thrill of delight at the thought that Alex might, just
once, get his ass handed to him. Wall Street Guy was looking down, checking the time on his diamond-encrusted watch when Alex caught the ripple of attention in the room and turned, frowning her direction.

Which is exactly when she felt Cam and Riles pull up, their steps stuttering, not keeping time with hers, and she could have sworn a lightning bolt of shock and dismay ran straight through them. They’d taken up subtle, defensive stances on either side of her, scanning the crowd. From Alex’s and their body language alone, she knew, somehow, that everything had taken the Express to The Land of Dumb Ideas.

There was something different in the expression in Alex’s eyes in that split second, that
holy shit, we’re screwed
expression that she’d only seen a couple of times before. (Once, she remembered, was when she caught him with one of her friends from college going at it like bunnies in her car. She had a vague memory of a sledgehammer and his prized Corvette being involved after he’d explained that her car had more room.)

She glanced around the bar to see what had caused her skin to prickle, and she had the eeriest feeling that she’d seen something she should have registered. Alex leaned back in his chair, disgust practically oozing from his pores. His dark Cajun looks were mesmerizing, but that was like saying water was slightly wet. Half Cajun, half Cherokee (or so he claimed), still wiry, and with angular, harsh planes to his face that somehow made him angrier-looking than she remembered. If there was a World Record for Mean and Nefarious, Alex held it.

“Alice Michelle, you shouldn’t be here,” he snapped.

Alice Michelle?
Shit. Calling her any other name had—long ago—been his signal for “pay attention, dumbass.” Back when she thought “dark and dangerous” were cute and having a boyfriend who needed to talk in code was adorable, rather than a clue to illegal activity. Or maybe he knew her well enough to
know
she was going to cause a scene and he was trying to distract her because he was evil and . . .

“We . . .” Her body vibrated, hummed, and the back of her neck tingled; what was off . . . off . . . what? Something was definitely wrong and her body shivered with awareness, sudden anxiety curling through her toes. “. . . uh,” losing all forward motion, trying to assess what had caught her in an undertow, “we need to talk.”

Well,
that
came out forceful and scene-making. Call the Oscar people, quick.

His black eyebrows teased together in a puzzled question, like she was supposed to understand something, but why in the hell should he start expecting her to understand his nonverbal cues now when she had never understood the man before? He’d always been nonverbal and clandestine at heart, too much the poet mercenary, and she didn’t do subtle all that well. Alex glanced over to the Wall-Street Guy and said, “Third stupidest thing I did.”

The first, he’d once said, had been to date her. The second had been to teach her to shoot.

He’d already turned his back to her, dismissive. Fine, he wasn’t going to talk to her voluntarily? She would blurt out the first lines of the love poem (she was going with the worst one first). But before she got out the first sappy line, Riles closed a hand around her elbow, pulling her back away from the table, and Cam maneuvered himself between her and the rest of the room. Neither man had said a word, and Riles’s bald lack of scathing commentary amplified her own pinging radar.

“Hang on,” she told Cam, “the plan was to—”

“You are
never
planning anything
ever
again,” he snapped, low and harsh.

They had eased one—and only one—step back when a barely twenty-one-year-old heavily tanned waitress plopped a tray down on a table, pointed a French-tipped finger at her, and griped, “I know you!” in the same tone most people would use for “There’s a clogged sewer drain!” She stepped between them and the door, and as Riles reached to move her out of the way, she dodged, shouting, “I lost three hundred dollars buying a really crappy car because of you! You
used to do all of those car commercials for Zippy Ed’s Car Emporium. You’re Bobbie Faye!”

And as the waitress shouted her name and took a swing at Bobbie Faye, Alex and the men from the poker table came out of their seats. Poker chips flew, cards fell, drinks spilled, chairs tumbled, and nothing, not the poker-playing men from Alex’s card game who were now reaching for her, not Riles throwing a low kick blocking one of them, not Cam elbowing the other in the face, not Suds ratcheting a shotgun behind them,
nothing
compared to meeting the eyes of the Wall Street Guy as he came up and over the table.

Trevor.

She had looked straight at him, and hadn’t recognized him.

“Go!” he shouted, but she stood rooted to the spot. Relief, fear,
shock
jammed her body, riveting her in place.

He was, in a word, stunning. His short hair, neatly styled, the suit even more beautiful as she saw him in motion, its charcoal color emphasizing the lines of his shoulders, the shirt a crisp pristine white, the tie impeccable, the mustache goatee framing his grim line of a mouth—nothing,
nothing
seemed the same except his wild blue eyes, which expressed, now that she met his gaze again,
hellified pissed off
.

Relief surged through her, swamping her body, threatening to take her legs out from under her as the determination that had kept her standing and moving forward abated with a sudden ferocity.
He was alive
. He was okay. He was . . . shouting at her to
go go go
as he came toward her.

Oh holy goatfuck.

She’d just screwed up whatever undercover op he’d been running, and now at least two men from the table seemed intent on grabbing her, and for the life of her, she couldn’t fathom why. Riles and Cam dragged her backward, people shouted, bodies tripped and fought and plunged, and through it all, her eyes locked onto Trevor’s, the shock of having not recognized him burning through her.

A distinctive smoke smell filled the air from somewhere
nearby and the fire alarm blared a sharp, jagged screech through the plush-carpeted rooms, and a second later, overhead sprinklers spewed water in overlapping circles. Suds shouted instructions as waiters and ushers and casino staff scrambled to regain some semblance of calm for the frantic mob of disoriented gamblers. Trevor sliced through the crowd even as Riles and Cam yanked her backward. The men Riles and Cam had downed had risen again, heading for her until they caught sight of Trevor; they both reversed immediately, out of his reach, moving opposite directions as they melted into the swarm.

“We can split up,” Riles suggested, his stare tracking one of the men as Trevor arrived at her side.

Trevor shook his head and she felt an odd dissonance—no long hair shaking in its wake. “No idea how many there are and I don’t want to get picked off—we get out,” he said, one hand on her elbow, having taken Riles’s position as Cam led and Riles followed, guns out. All she needed was a flag and a sash draped across her chest, Miss National Without-A-Clue, and the debacle would be complete.

He was safe
.

She hadn’t recognized him
.

They pounded through the soggy main salon, weaving through people who ran and shouted and Crap on Toast, did she ever owe Suds again. He’d poured her mom into more cabs than Bobbie Faye could count, had called her dozens of times when Lori Ann had ended a night at his old place, too drunk to drive home, and this is how she repaid him.

She was pretty sure that the all-purpose formal apology she had learned from Mrs. Russ in high-school English wasn’t exactly going to work this time.

The lights flicked off and the place paused with a startled hush. Then the low emergency lighting blinked on and Bedlam said, “Hi, honey, I’m home,” as everyone went Officially Batshit. These, clearly, were the kids who didn’t pay attention during school fire drills because they were probably off playing hooky, necking behind the bleachers. At least four felonies occurred in her peripheral vision as
gamblers-turned-thieves took advantage of the chaos, scooping up chips from abandoned tables and relieving wealthy, distracted women of their jewels.