“Fine.” He sighed, sending Zoelner a look that promised slow, painful retribution for bringing up this particular topic. “Agent Penni DePaul was part of the Secret Service detail attached to the president’s daughter when el Jefe”—that’s how the boys and girls of BKI always referred to the commander in chief…when he wasn’t in the room with them, of course—“saw fit to send me, Steady, and Ozzie in to provide backup support. Penni and I had to work together when everything went to hell in a handbasket because of Winterfield’s black-hearted treachery.”
Even had el Jefe not tasked BKI, and Dan specifically, with bringing in the asshole, he would have considered it his own personal mission. Not only did he have an inherent stake, given the hell he’d been through in Malaysia, but he’d also decided this job was the perfect opportunity for him to show all his friends and teammates that he was back to being an asset and not just a grief-stricken asshat. To thank them for putting up with his sorry self when he’d spent a year sitting at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, followed by another year doing his damnedest to crawl back out.
But fat lot of headway I’ve made on the mission so far. Winterfield was still in the wind. And Dan couldn’t think of a more ridiculous way to try to catch the guy than sitting around and hoping to see him pass by. But their Intel had only specified that Winterfield might be meeting a buyer in Cusco so…yeah. Whatcha see is whatcha get…
“And after it was all over?” Chelsea prompted, dragging his mind back to Penni. Although, in truth, in three months it’d never strayed all that far from the woman. Which was a problem. “Then what happened?”
“What do you think happened? The only thing that could happen, given she’s a Secret Service agent and I’m…” A widower. A drunk. A—
“A wannabe street punk from Detroit Rock City?” Zoelner supplied, pronouncing it Dee-troit.
“Hey, don’t knock Motown, man,” Dan harrumphed. “As Kid Rock once said, ‘Cars and rock ’n’ roll. It’s a good combo.’”
“I think Dan meant that she’s a Secret Service agent and he’s a supersecret, legally suspect, blacker-than-black operator,” Chelsea added not so helpfully.
“Legally suspect?” Now it was Zoelner’s turn to harrumph. “How many times do we have to go over this? It’s not that what we at BKI do for the president is illegal necessarily. It’s just that we sort of skirt around the edges of international law…or find the loopholes. And you’re one to talk. The evil shit The Company has been known to get up to makes all of us at Black Knights Inc. look like angels sent straight from heaven.”
“That mighta been pushing it,” Dan mumbled, hoping Zoelner had distracted Chelsea from the topic at hand.
He should have known better. “Zip it, Z,” she said, “and let Dan finish.”
Dan envisioned her pulling a bowl of popcorn into her lap and hunkering down for a long, sordid tale. So he was doomed to disappoint her when he finished succinctly with, “Long story short, we went our separate ways.”
For a couple of seconds, silence reigned in his earpiece. Then she made a rude noise. “Why do men do that?”
“Do what?” Zoelner asked.
“Leave out all the good parts?” she grumbled.
“Because those good parts are filed under None of Your Goddamn Business,” Dan informed her as a vision of Penni as she’d been the last time he’d seen her, mourning and exhausted, flashed through his head.
Agent Penelope Ann DePaul had the understated, honest type of beauty most men didn’t immediately pick up on. But the more you looked at her, the more breathtaking she became. Because not only did she have dark, shiny hair, deep brown eyes—kind eyes, that’s the first thing he’d noticed about her—and a set of legs that should be illegal, but she was the sort of woman who displayed innate grace and tended toward straight talk. The kind who’d never faked a laugh or an orgasm or—
Oh, perfect.
The thought of Penni in the throes of rapture, what she would look like with her head thrown back, her long neck arched, was enough to have the moron behind his zipper twitching with interest. And just in case Zoelner hadn’t yet noticed the untimely bulge behind his fly—the man had a mean eye when it came to details—Dan hooked an ankle over the opposite knee and surreptitiously stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket, pulling the material over his lap.
“Fine,” Chelsea harrumphed. “Be that way. But at least tell me this.” Dan groaned as if his nuts were caught in a vise. “You’re dreaming about her every night, right?”
Roger that. Dreams so hot, so vivid, he was surprised none of them had been wet. And considering he was currently sharing a bed with Zoelner? Yeah, talk about having some explaining to do.
Then again, he supposed his current dreams were better than the nightmares he’d been suffering for most of the past two-plus years. Nightmares of his wife covered in blood and dead in his arms, shot by a psycho right in the courtyard of BKI where she should have been safe, where he should have kept her safe…
He shuddered, hunching deeper into his jacket. He figured he was past the worst of his grief. He no longer spent his days wishing for death. But thinking back on that awful evening was still like scraping a fingernail over a raw nerve. He suspected it always would be.