Partner Games
Page 11

As I struggled to come up with something to say, Swift squeezed my arm and slowed his steps a little more. “Hey,” he murmured. “Let’s stop for a minute, okay?”
I gave him a puzzled look. “Um, okay?”
He stopped and put his hand on the side of my neck and pulled me in close. I froze as he leaned in. Was he going to kiss me? Just like that?
“I’m trying to make it look like we’re flirting, okay?” he said in my ear, voice low. “Help me make this look good, all right?”
“Okay,” I breathed and slid my arms around his waist. I pulled him closer and pressed my body against his.
“Uh…not that good, Tiny. I’m only human.” His hand tightened against the side of my neck. “Jesus, you’re pretty.”
That startled me. A hot blush crept up my cheeks and I avoided looking at him. “So…um, what’s this about?”
“Your sister,” he murmured in my ear, and I felt his lips move against my earlobe. Oh gosh, it was going to look like we were making out if someone saw us, wasn’t it?
Did I care? I wasn’t sure I cared. Swift was gorgeous. My fingers dug into his shirt, twisting. “Um, what about my sister?” Um, what about anything? I couldn’t concentrate. He smelled spicy and clean, like fresh deodorant…which shouldn’t have smelled as good as it did.
“She okay?”
I tried to pull away from him, and to my surprise, he pressed his mouth against my neck. Oh. Right. My nipples perked and I was suddenly glad for the socks in my bra to hide that fact. “Um, why wouldn’t she be okay?” I asked as he pressed his mouth against my neck. Oh jeez. If this was fake flirting, what was real flirting like?
“Plate said she totally lost it on that last challenge.”
“It must have been hard,” I said automatically, ready to defend my twin.
“That’s just it,” Swift said, moving up to nibble at my ear before continuing. “He said it was a cakewalk. You just matched up clothing and you were done. Ours was the hard one.”
I didn’t understand. “W-what do you mean?”
“I mean, I think something’s going on with your sister.” He moved forward, and then pressed a light kiss to my mouth before grinning at me. I stared at him dumbly until he winked.
Right. This was all pretend so he could pass the message on to me. Of course, I didn’t need some fake flirting to know that. I was Georgie’s twin. Something was clearly wrong with her. But I also knew my sister, and knew that asking her directly was the wrong way to go about it. There was more than one way to get a secret out of Georgie, and the best way was patience.
“Thanks for the warning,” I murmured to Swift.
“You bet, Tiny,” he said, and kept a hand at my waist. “Should we catch up to the others?”
 
 
Chapter Seven
 
 
“So I figured we’d fake flirt for a bit, right? I’d pass her the info, we’d be good. Except…Jesus. She smells so damn good and her skin’s so soft that I sorta forgot all about the ‘fake’ part. And now I’m going to spend the rest of the race with a serious case of blue balls.” — Swift, Team One Percent, The World Races
 
 
We sat down at a restaurant and the waiter arrived, chattering happily in Quechua, and took our drink orders. Both Georgie and Plate got sodas, while I hesitated over the menu.
“Chicha? Cerveza?” the waiter asked us, pen in hand. Beer?
Swift and I shared a horrified expression at the word chicha. I shook my head and put the menu down. “Water. Agua.”
“Same,” Swift said, and the waiter nodded and left. As he did, Swift looked over at me and grinned. “I think I’m going to be off corn anything for a while.”
I knew just what he meant. I could still taste all that hard, purple corn in my teeth. “I hope all the challenges aren’t like that. I might lose a filling at this rate.”
He chuckled.
Awkward silence fell.
We sat in a booth at a local restaurant, and it was hopping despite the weird hour. I could see lots of tourists at nearby tables, and there was a souvenir stand at the far end of the restaurant that sold Machu Picchu gear. Instead of the teams sitting together, Swift sat next to me and Georgie sat next to Plate.
Which, of course, made me feel super awkward. I pushed at my glasses. I wasn’t the kind that double dated. I was the kind that liked to fade into the wallpaper. The fact that Swift wasn’t letting me? It left me rattled.
And I kept thinking about that weird almost-kiss we’d shared on the walk here.
“You ladies having fun on the race?” Plate asked as he dug into a complimentary bowl of chips on the table. Swift took a handful for himself, I nibbled on one, and Georgie ignored them entirely.
I looked at my twin, curious to see how she’d answer.
“It’s been interesting so far,” Georgie said with a shrug. “I liked seeing Machu Picchu. I don’t like being in last place, but I’m interested to see where they’ll send us next.”
“It’ll be Europe,” Plate said confidently. “They want to see us getting our Swiss Alp on, I bet.”
“You think?” Georgie smirked. “Or you just dying to wear some lederhosen?”
“That’s Germany,” I corrected. And then all eyes turned to me, so I stuffed the rest of my chip into my mouth and proceeded to chew.
“So, what is it you do again?” Swift asked, looking over at me. There was a pause as the waiter brought our drinks, and then all eyes turned expectantly to me again. “Something with dinosaurs, right?”
“Sort of,” I said, after I swallowed. I shot Georgie a helpless look, because I hated talking about myself, but she was busy playfully squeezing a lemon slice into Plate’s soda while he mock-wrestled her for it. Kids these days. I shot Swift another helpless look, but his gaze was on me and he actually looked…interested. I licked my lips and took the risk of nerding out on him. “So, there are different kinds of paleontologists. There are the ones that study dinosaurs, and there are ones that study invertebrates. I study invertebrates, and I focus on one particular era.”
His brows drew together. “Okay. Do you mind if I ask why? It’s like every kid’s dream is to muck around with dinosaurs, but you’re skipping them? Is there a particular reason?”
I grinned, because it’s not often I get to geek out about my job around regular people. “So the further back you go, the crazier things get. My particular area of specialty is the Devonian era. Everyone thinks about the end of the dinosaurs at the Cretaceous, but imagine it twice as bad – that’s the Devonian. So many more families of creatures were wiped out in the extinction events then, and some of the events only affected sea creatures. It’s fascinating to imagine the wildlife that must have been in the seas before the extinctions took place.”
“And you like…what were they called?” He seemed interested in what I had to say.
“Ammonites,” I gushed. “They’re the circular looking sea-shell creatures in fossils.”
“Are they crabs?”
“That’s just it,” I said happily. “We think they wandered through the open waters of the ocean. They weren’t bottom dwellers. They’re an entirely different sort of creature. And the female has a larger shell than the male.”