Free Born Wild by Julie Ann Walker

“We’ve got the Chicago Police Chief on our side.”
    Yep, they’d mentioned this Washington person on more than one occasion. “What’s your relationship with him?” she asked, wrinkling her nose. Visions of Mac and Billy being loaded into a paddy wagon and carted off to the clink ran through her head. Although…were paddy wagons even a thing anymore?
    â€œLet’s just say he’s one of the very few people living here in Chicago who is privy to BKI’s true calling, and he owes us a couple of favors. So stop worrying. Sit tight. Stay quiet. And let us take care of this, will you? You know, you’re lucky I let you come at all. I should’ve made you stay with Ace.”
    And, boy, oh boy, all the warmth brought on by his earlier words was instantly replaced by ice-cold indignation. Because if he thought Ace had put up a good fight when he’d been required to stay back at BKI headquarters to answer any calls that might come in from the Knights currently out in the field, he’d have been shocked to his core by the fit she’d have thrown had he tried to make her hang back. “Oh, yeah?” she nodded, channeling a little of her best friend, Becky, and smiling sarcastically, “over my dead body.”
    His face hardened, and a muscle started ticking in his wide jaw. “Yes, Eve,” he said, his voice quiet. Deadly quiet. “Your dead body, or the fact that we’re trying to keep you from being one, is exactly why we’re here. Now, you stay in the Hummer until we get back. You got me?”
    She glared at him, nostrils flaring, breath sawing from her lungs. She wasn’t the same girl she’d been twelve years ago. She could do this. She could . But he’d never see her as anything more than that shy, bumbling, backbone-less eighteen-year-old. And that bothered her even more than all the things Dale Pennyworth had done to her.
    â€œNod your head so I know you understand,” he demanded, reaching back to grab her knee, his dark eyes, even in the dimly lit interior of the vehicle, were diamond-bright, flashing with conviction.
    All the bravado she’d donned threatened to abandon her—especially with his warm palm burning a hole straight through her jeans—but she refused to let him see it. Instead, she narrowed her eyes and jerked her chin in a quick nod. And even though she was conceding—what other choice did she have?—she made very sure the look on her face called him a stubborn, autocratic, tyrannical A-hole.
    He lifted a brow, withdrawing his hand and— dangit! —why did she suddenly feel bereft? “Something more you want to say to me?” he asked.
    â€œOh, I figure you understand this expression well enough.” She pointed to her face, ignoring the tingling of her kneecap. “No reason to gild the lily.”
    She thought she saw one corner of his mouth twitch, and her eyes narrowed further.
    â€œSilence about a thing just magnifies it,” he murmured.
    And where had she heard that phrase before? Where had she…Then it hit her. “Really? You’re quoting Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at me right now?”
    â€œPayback’s a bitch,” he smiled, his big, square teeth blazing white in his tan face. “You used to love to sling literary quotes at my head.”
    She had?
    â€œI did?” She lifted a brow, thinking back. She had gone through a rather annoying pedantic phase at the end of her teens. “And did you find it as irritating then as I do right now?”
    â€œNah,” he lifted a muscled shoulder, and she could see he was biting the inside of his cheek. “I thought you were adorable. So full of love for books, head bursting with knowledge. It was quite endearing, really.”
    All her hot air left her like his words were pins and she was a balloon. Because what did a girl say to something like that? Thank you for being nice to me…for once?