Free Knight in Blue Jeans by Evelyn Vaughn Page B

coin-operated Laundromat to make sure that this time, he could at least be clean. Not that he expected another chance to take her in his arms and kiss her.
    Laundromats rarely improved his mood, either.
    Only when he caught a light-rail south to the Westmoreland station, and stopped by Greta’s to see how the security had held, did things click into place. Mitch’s latest fixer-upper of a car drooped tiredly in the yard. Although Mitch often drove a cab to earn extra money, he had to do it illegally, borrowing the taxi and permit. The rest of the time, he practiced his mechanical skills on downright embarrassing vehicles—which at least ran.
    Greta didn’t answer the door.
    Trace—and the cocker spaniel—did.
    Trace was eating a cinnamon bun.
    “Hey,” the larger man greeted, swinging the door open wider as if welcoming Smith to his abode, and not Miz Kaiser’s. “She made breakfast.”
    Smith stared. “What are you doing up and out before noon?” Trace often did construction when he was home in Louisiana, but while he was in Texas, he mainly focused on fighting. For money. It was a nighttime activity.
    “Up.” Trace licked a bit of frosting off his big thumb. “Not out.”
    Automatically crouching to scratch the welcoming, wiggling Dido behind her silky ears, Smith took in Trace’s bare feet. “You spent the night?”
    “She offered! She’s got all kinds of spare room.” Apparently sensing Smith’s annoyance, Trace grumped, “Mitch stayed over, too.”
    “I asked you guys to finish the security system, not to crash here!”
    In answer, Trace popped the last of the bun into his mouth, folded his arms, spread his stance—and blocked the doorway more effectively than any security bars could have.
    Smith had to grant him that one. “Breakfast, huh?”
    Trace grunted but pivoted out of the way, and Smith headed back toward the kitchen with his four-legged shadow. He tried not to glance toward the panel that hid the Sword of Aeneas.
    He failed. Was the wall humming, or was it…?
    Just him.
    Mitch, equally disheveled, bent to pet the returning Dido while he grinned up at something Greta had told him. “So you just flashed him?”
    “I was wearing undergarments,” Greta clarified primly.
    Smith wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this, but a laughing Mitch had caught sight of him in the hallway. “Hey, Smith! Back when women were still supposed to just wear skirts, some jerk told Greta she must be a guy for wearing pants, and she flashed him to prove him wrong! How great is she?”
    Trace, following Smith into the old-fashioned kitchen, perked up. “Someone flashed someone?”
    “Greta,” Mitch agreed, then hooted at the face Trace pulled.
    “Unless I’m looking straight at you, I can still see you,” chided Greta gently, even as she poured a cup of coffee and turned to hand it to Smith.
    “No offense.” But Trace’s expression didn’t vanish as he dropped comfortably into a chair.
    “Ah.” Smith took the coffee with a murmur of thanks and inhaled deeply before taking a sip. “To be forty years older. Really,” he insisted when Greta waved the seeming compliment away. “The way things have been going this last year, I’m not especially confident about making it five years more, much less forty. So what’s this about my employees taking advantage of your kind hospitality, Miz Greta?”
    Trace snorted. “Employees?”
    “That term,” Mitch explained, as Smith took another swallow of good, hot coffee, “implies some form of wages. From you. To us.”
    “I invited them,” Greta insisted. “First for dinner, if Mitch would give me a ride to the market—it was the least I could do,after all that work you boys did on the security system. Then it seemed such a shame to send them out, once night had come.”
    “Them being scared of the dark and all.” Smith arched a challenging brow at Trace.
    “I haven’t slept so well for years.” Settling herself into a third kitchen chair, Greta