“Brooklyn, I want to,” he groaned, his lungs working like bellows, his heart racing, his cock thrusting unapologetically from the vee of his fly. “But I don’t have a condom.”
She shook her head. “Forget about it.” When she shoved his jeans and boxers down under his ass, his erection sprang forward. She grabbed it, wrapped her leg around his hips, and angled it toward her entrance. “I don’t care…”
And then she impaled herself.
Everything after that was a little sketchy. Dan hadn’t had many faculties working. But he remembered tight, hot, unbearable wetness closing around his shaft. He remembered their frenzied breaths as they screwed like teenagers up against the door of that bathroom. And he remembered it’d been over very quickly. Because her orgasm had hit her almost immediately, triggering his. And together they’d crashed into ecstasy. Ecstasy that was cut short when a fist pounded on the door, calling them back into action, back into the mission.
And suddenly everything made sense. Penni quitting the Secret Service—no way she could be required to put herself between her protectee and a bullet if she was carrying a child. Penni coming to Chicago to talk to him and then agreeing to fly all the way to Peru when she found out it was possible he could remain on his mission for months to come. Penni’s strange expression of fear and indecision when he asked her to help finish the assignment…
She’s pregnant. With my child. He knew it as surely as he knew the stars would all someday fall from the sky, as surely as he knew up from down and east from west, as surely as he knew he loved her. And now he wasn’t just terrified to lose her to this madman, he was terrified to lose their child too. Terrified to lose everything that meant anything at all.
“Penni?” Her name was a prayer, a cry, a question all rolled into one. Something hot and wet slipped down his face and dripped from his chin. With a start, he realized it was tears. His heart was aching with love and joy, his soul shaking with fear and dread.
“Yes,” she said, her own tears rolling freely. She choked on a sob. And that’s when Hat Guy shoved her away from him, straight into Dan’s outstretched arms.
He cried out when he felt her skin next to his, felt her arms go around her neck. Squeezing her tight, he reveled in the hot wash of her breath when she tucked her face into his shoulder. But never, not once, did he take his eyes off Hat Guy. He did, however, choke on his relief and gratitude when he said, “Th-thank you. Thank you. Now let us help you f—”
“There’s no helping me,” Hat Guy said, shaking his head, openly sobbing. “There’s no hope for me.”
Penni turned in Dan’s arms, but he refused to release her, determined to keep her close. “There’s always hope,” she sniffed, her voice full of tears.
Hat Guy shook his head and smiled through the anguish on his face. “Take care of that baby,” he said. “Children are life’s greatest joy.”
And then before Dan or Penni could so much as blink, the man shoved the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger…
* * *
Black Knights Inc., Courtyard
Saturday 5:49 p.m.
“Did you mean it when you said you believed in babies?” Penni asked Dan, her heart like a boulder in her chest. She knew the organ continued to pump blood, to fulfill its function, but it felt heavy, hard, cold.
After Mystery Man shot himself, the Knights had come running out of the shop, locked and loaded and ready for war. Even pint-sized Becky had been packing. And then for over an hour, the courtyard had been a scene of chaos. First all the men had run around, retrieving the wired C4—a real nail-biter scenario. The stuff was stable as long as no one pushed the ignition switch, but still… And then there had been the president to call and Morales, the director of the CIA. It’d been decided by all involved that the local authorities should be left out of it. You know, given no one wanted to answer any questions since no one knew any answers. Afterward, in typical woo-woo underworld spec-ops style, the body had been photographed, fingerprinted, sampled for DNA, and placed in a body bag—apparently the Knights just have those lying around—and shoved into the Hummer. Boss, Zoelner, and Chelsea used the underground tunnel to take it to who knew where. Penni didn’t care. She just wanted to go home and forget any of this ever happened.
But first there was Dan…