Too Hard to Handle (Black Knights Inc., 8, Band 8) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Julie Ann Walker is the USA Today and New York Times Bestselling Author of the Black Knights Inc. romantic suspense series. She is prone to spouting movie quotes and song lyrics. She'll never say no to sharing a glass of wine or going for a long walk. She prefers impromptu travel over the scheduled kind, and she takes her coffee with milk. You can find her on her bicycle along the lake shore in Chicago or blasting away at her keyboard, trying to wrangle her capricious imagination into submission. For more information, please visit www.julieannwalker.com or follow her on Facebook www.facebook.com/jawalkerauthor and/or Twitter @JAWalkerAuthor.

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Prologue

Goose Island, Chicago, Illinois

Thursday, 5:28 p.m.

"Calm down, dude. If you keep going on like this, your brain will explode. And I really don't want to get any of it on me."

Penni DePaul recognized the voice of the man speaking as she followed the redheaded behemoth named Geralt through the narrow gate on the side of the big warehouse that housed Black Knights Inc.

"It's not my head I'm worried about," came a booming bass response. "It's yours. I mean, Ozzie, man, you know that woman is buckets o' crazy, right?"

"Maybe," Ozzie replied just as Penni rounded the corner, stopping when Geralt's gigantic biker boots took root atop the patio pavers. "But if she is, she really puts the hot in psychotic. Am I right?"

Peeking around Geralt's massive back, Penni's eyes landed on Ethan "Ozzie" Sykes. He was sitting in a bright red Adirondack chair with his back to her. And from what little she could make out, he was looking pretty good for a guy who'd nearly had his leg blown off. The leg in question was secured in a brace and propped on the stone lip of a big fire pit built into the center of the courtyard behind the warehouse. The courtyard itself was surrounded by outbuildings and a fifteen-foot-high brick wall topped by razor wire and a crap-ton of security cameras.

To the inexperienced, Black Knights Inc. looked as it was meant to look, like the work area and living space for a group of rough and rowdy guys who built fantastical custom motorcycles in a not-so-nice part of town. The latter requiring all the high-tech security, don't you know? But Penni wasn't inexperienced. She was well aware of the cold, hard facts behind BKI's chrome and leather facade. On her last assignment she'd worked with Ozzie and two more of the Black Knights, and she could say without a shadow of a doubt that they did a whole lot more than design shiny things that ate asphalt for dinner and roared like steel beasts.

The motorcycle shop was nothing but a front for the most secretive, most whispered-about government defense firm ever to be redacted from all of Uncle Sam's files. Granted, it was a really excellent front, considering that the three guys she'd worked with during The Assignment-that's how she'd come to think of the mission that had changed her life forever-had all been a little bit scruffy and a whole lot tattooed. Handsome-as-sin Hells Angels look-alikes...

"And if you must know," Ozzie went on, "I happen to like crazy. It makes for really interesting conversations. Besides"-he took a swig from a beer with a red label that read "Honker's Ale"-"she seems like she'd be a hellcat in the bedroom."

"Kee-rist, man!" The guy who belonged to the bass voice was sitting at a picnic table laden with what appeared to be huge vats of potato salad, coleslaw, and baked beans. He plunked his beer bottle atop the table's surface with enough force to send foam geysering from the longneck.

"I know that pretty face of yours means you're used to women throwing themselves at your feet," he added, "but the only reason she flirted with you at the bar last night is because she's a fuckin' reporter who's been nosing around this place for years looking for a fuckin' story. So even if a nutso in nylons is your screwed-up idea of a cup of tea, her fuckin' J.O.B. should make any appeal she has shrink up quicker than an Eskimo scrotum."

The man certainly had a mad penchant for colorful descriptions. And f-bombs. And scars. His craggy face was lined with more than its fair share.

Penni didn't know exactly what she'd expected to happen after the taxi dropped her in front of the mammoth gates of BKI and she told Geralt, who'd been manning the gatehouse, that she needed to talk to Dan "The Man" Currington. But it certainly wasn't to be led to a backyard barbecue complete with smoking grill and three guys lounging around on mismatched lawn furniture while arguing about the merits and drawbacks of getting jiggy with some nameless newspaperwoman. The third man was wearing a green John Deere baseball cap and strumming an old Martin six-string, looking for all the world like he was completely ignoring the other two.

The smell of cooking meat hung heavy in the cool breeze. It competed with the wet, fishy aroma of the nearby Chicago River and the hoppy deliciousness of the open beer bottles. In fact, if it weren't for that whole security-camera/razor-wire thing they had going, Penni would have said the air around Black Knights Inc. was less supersecret spy-guy lair and more laid-back, good-ol'-boy hangout.

"Yeah." Ozzie nodded vaguely, scratching his chin. "The reporter thing is a bit of a drawback."

"A bit?" Scarface sent Ozzie an incredulous look, prompting the man playing the guitar to finally jump into the fray.

"I don't know why you're surprised, mon ami," he said and Penni instantly identified his smooth-as-silk voice and sweet-as-molasses accent from a phone conversation she'd had with him during The Assignment. His name was Rock. But while the famous Rock was big and bulky, this Rock was lean and wiry...and sporting a pretty spiffy pair of scuffed-up alligator boots. "You know Ozzie can't see past the upside of a thing, especially when that thing has boobs, until ya point out the downside of a thing."

Ozzie turned to grin at Rock. And even though he was in profile, Penni noticed the expression looked a little...different from the one she'd seen on his face three months ago. It was duller. Sadder. Harder somehow.

Her mind returned to the hotel bombings in Kuala Lumpur-the ones that had left her colleagues, her friends, dead-and started picking at the memory like a scab. What lay beneath burned and ached, but she'd learned a thing or two over the past few months. One of which was how to take a deep breath and push aside the ugly thoughts so they didn't rise up and overwhelm her in grief. She wasn't entirely sure time healed all wounds as much as it simply taught a person ways to stanch the chronic bleeding.

Geralt, heretofore known in her mind as the Carrot-Topped Colossus, must have sensed a lull in the men's debate. He cleared his throat and said, "Speaking of skirts"-his accent was one hundred percent Windy City, his words running together like cars colliding on the Eisenhower Expressway-"we got one here who says she's looking for Dan Man."

Penni was trying to decide whether or not she should take offense at being labeled "a skirt" when Scarface and Rock jumped from their seats. Ozzie craned his head around the side of the Adirondack chair. And suddenly she was...

Not scared, exactly. In her thirty-three years she'd faced down a lot worse than three flag-waving, gun-toting, pretend motorcycle mechanics. But now that she was here at Black Knights Inc., on the brink of telling Dan that she hadn't been able to get him out of her head since The Assignment, and that she-

"Agent DePaul!" Ozzie crowed, pushing up from the chair and grabbing the crutches leaning against it. He hobbled over and threw an arm around her shoulders, squeezing her tight. The move was made awkward by the crutch shoved in his armpit. "Forget about my fantasy shag-o-rama with ace reporter Samantha Tate," he told Rock and Scarface. Shag-o-rama? Christ almighty. "Because my future wife has just arrived!"

Uh-huh. Sure. Because while they'd worked together in Kuala Lumpur, Ozzie had gaily-and quite insincerely-asked her to marry him at least a half-dozen times.

She turned to grin at him now, grateful for his exuberant welcome and the balm it was to her frayed nerves. But her smile faltered when she saw his eyes.

He was different.

Gone was the spark, the bright golden glow that seemed to shine from within him. Now there were shadows lurking behind his sapphire irises. Deep shadows. Dark shadows. Shadows that...