AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Shaking his head, he moved back into the garage and grinned back at the mechanic watching him from Delbert’s pickup. In a gesture of friendliness, the man was shaking his head and grinning.
“She’s a fine one.” The mechanic, Chuck Leon, grinned and pulled at the dirty blond goatee he wore. “You could do worse in these parts.”
“Yeah, I could,” Noah grunted. “And I could get more mechanics too if you don’t want to work.”
Something flickered in the other man’s brown eyes. But he nodded slowly before bending to the motor and going back to work.
Noah wasn’t there to make friends with militia members, he was there to identify them and get their asses behind bars. But he had to admit, Leon was a hell of a mechanic when he wanted to be.
Noah’s eyes met Nik’s. The Russian was bent over the hood of the third car in the bay, while the fourth man was working the counter in the convenience section. Nik wasn’t the sociable type. The big Russian with his white-blond hair and icy blue eyes was more killer material than checkout.
Glancing back toward the road, Noah clenched his teeth and went back to work. There were more cars waiting in the parking lot outside. Nik seemed to be pulling in the college girls. They liked his rough looks evidently. More of Toby’s friends were dropping their cars off when they had to, and more of their parents were coming, stopping by, checking to see how things were going.
There was a rhythm developing, and Noah was letting it seep into him more and more. Just as Sabella was taking a firmer hold on his very spirit than she had ever had.
Enough so that he was beginning to wonder, when it was all over and done with, how he would manage to walk away from her again. The men of the Elite Ops were dead men except the current members of the former SEAL Team he’d fought with. There was no rebirth. Nathan Malone could never return. Not to Alpine, not this family, and to Sabella.
But walking away from her was going to be impossible.
“I’m convinced we need a girls’ night out.” Sienna stretched on the massage table as she, Sabella, and Kira Richards lay beneath the thin sheets in the massage room while talented hands worked at the kinks along their bodies.
“Girls’ night out?” Sabella mumbled. “I remember those. They were hell. I always had a hangover after hanging out with you, Sienna.”
Her friend snickered. “I’m sick of hanging around the house at night. Rick doesn’t come in till all hours, and when he does come home, he just goes to sleep.”
There was something in Sienna’s voice, some note of anger that Sabella remembered hearing several times in the past few years.
“You and Rick still fighting over his schedule?” she asked.
“Same old.” Sienna waved her hand indifferently. “But now that you’ve rejoined the land of the living, I thought a night out would be nice.”
Sabella pondered the idea for all of a second.
“My new mechanic needs supervision,” she finally said mockingly. “I’m supervising.”
Kira snorted. Sienna groaned. “I can’t believe you’re doing the nasty with your mechanic. Nathan would have had a fit, Sabella.”
There was a tense silence as Sienna’s comment struck a raw nerve. Sienna had been friends with her and Nathan, but she’d had more of a history with Nathan.
“Nathan would have wanted me to be happy,” she finally said softly.
“With another man just like him?” Sienna asked. “Come on, you’re on the rebound. The guy has eyes that remind you of your husband’s and the same attitude. Second best isn’t enough for a man like that. He’s going to go ballistic on you soon.”
“Then he can go ballistic the other way.” Sabella shrugged as though it didn’t matter.
But why wasn’t she more inclined to want to talk to Sienna about this? To share the knowledge building in her. She had always told Sienna everything. Shared everything with her friend, until Nathan’s “death.”
Now, she didn’t want to share this with anyone, though she admitted she had to bite her lip to keep from grilling Kira about Noah Blake, because she knew, knew to the bottom of her soul, that Kira knew everything Ian knew.
“I told you, get the sexual crisis out of the way,” Kira mumbled from her massage table beside Sabella’s. “Let her get the kink out of her guts, Sienna. She’ll feel better for it.”
That edge of amusement in the other woman’s voice could have meant anything.
“One of these days I’m going to make you pay for that advice,” Sabella warned her. “The man is positively possessive. He could make me crazy.”
Let her make of that what she would.
“Nathan was so easygoing.” Sienna sighed. “He never got jealous.”
