Perfect Cover
Page 46

He attached the scanned copy of his butt and hit send.
“Remind me never to lose to you again,” he said.
“My heart bleeds for you,” I said. “Really.”
While he’d been typing, I’d been messing with my gel bra. I now had the bug in my hand. It was small, nearly invisible, and equipped to cling to any surface. All I had to do was find one. As this thought raced through my head, the phone in the office began to ring, and I visibly jumped.
“Do I make you nervous?” Jack asked.
“No,” I said, torn between being scornful and coming up with an excuse for my jumpiness, lest I tip him off to the fact that I had ulterior motives for what had, in all truth, been one of the best nights I’d had since my family had moved to Bayport. “I have phone fear.”
“Phone fear.” Jack repeated my words, no tone whatsoever in his voice, but his lips curled up. Reflexively, my lips mimicked the motion, and even though he didn’t move, it suddenly felt like the two of us were standing really close together.
The phone rang again and again, and with each ring, Jack’s eyes bored deeper and deeper into mine. I silently begged the phone to stop ringing. If it didn’t, something might happen here. Something big.
Something unexpected.
Something new.
Heeding my wishes, the phone stopped ringing. For a split second, there was silence, and then the answering machine picked up. “John. It’s Alan. I need to talk to you. It’s about Jack.”
At first, I was disturbed by the fact that someone was calling the evil law firm to talk about Jack. The two of us were standing mere feet apart, my entire body felt flushed, and Jack had never averted his gaze.
“Who was that?” I asked, my throat constricting with something I couldn’t quite describe.
“My uncle. He and my father don’t get along.” Jack didn’t offer any more explanation, and in the back of my head, somewhere behind my mind’s acknowledgement of the way my skin was humming and the rising ball of lovely dread in my stomach, I realized that Jack’s uncle sounded very familiar.
“So,” Jack said.
“So,” I repeated.
He inched toward me, and the look in his eyes made my heart jump.
All thoughts of voices gone, I stepped backward. Slowly, he advanced on me, and I backed up until my shoulders were pressed against the paneled wall. Trying to concentrate on something other than Jack’s lips, which were moving closer to mine by the second, I pressed my hand firmly against the wall, finally slipping the bug I’d been sent here to plant into place.
Mission complete.
“Care to share your thoughts with the class, Ev?” Jack asked. His face was so close to mine that I could feel his breath on my cheeks.
My thoughts were as follows.
He was going to kiss me.
I wanted him to kiss me.
I hated that I wanted him to kiss me. How one of those girls could I get?
Kissing him would be wrong. He was my mark. I was using him.
The entire Squad would probably watch this footage on repeat as soon as April’s party was over.
In that moment, I made three impulsive decisions.
I grabbed the charm around my neck and twisted it, turning the camera off completely.
I leaned forward and beat him to the punch, planting the world’s biggest, longest, hottest kiss on his mouth.
And then I punched him in the stomach, turned, and ran. It wasn’t until I got far enough out of the office and away from Jack that my mind started working again and I realized why the voice on the answering machine had sounded so familiar. I’d heard it before. It was a voice that had told us to infiltrate and bug the building I was standing in now.
Jack’s uncle was our Charlie.
CHAPTER 33
Code Word: Fire
Despite my postrealization, postkiss stupor, I made it out the big glass doors and into the elevator before Jack realized what (or rather, who) had hit him. Thanks to my nimble fingers pressing the “close” button with great fervor, the elevator doors closed just as Jack started to come after me, and I made it out of the building and into the parking garage before I realized that I was completely and utterly screwed.
I hadn’t driven here. Jack had. Jack, whose father was the head of the evil law firm. Jack, whose uncle was apparently the voice behind our orders. I shook my head to clear it. What was with me and forgetting about Jack driving? And I called myself a secret agent. I ran out of the garage, knowing that Jack wouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes behind me.
Jack, who was quite possibly the best kisser known to womankind.
“Need a ride?”
If you’d told me that I would ever, ever, under any circumstances be glad to see Chloe Larson’s little red car, complete with an eye-rolling Chloe in the driver’s seat, I would have suggested you get your head checked. But there she was, and I wasn’t about to look a gift cheerleader in the mouth. I ran to the car like a madwoman, flung open the door, and jumped in.
“Go,” I said. “Go, go, go!”
Thrill Driver that she was, Chloe needed no more encouragement, and seconds later, we were flying down the street. Fearing for my life, I grabbed for the seat belt.
“How’d you know?” I asked. Forget what I said about the whole looking the gift cheerleader in the mouth thing. My mind was doing some quick mental additions, and the fact that Chloe was Cheerleader Ex Number Two on the Jack front had me more than a little suspicious. Had she been planning on crashing our nondate? Or had she heard what I’d heard on the answering machine and thought to get me out of there fast? “And what were you doing so close to Peyton?”
Chloe was silent for a moment, and then she fessed up. “When your video feed went dead, I got a little worried.”
Back up there, Cheer-Girl, I thought. Chloe? Worried about me? Was this supposed to be one of those “what’s wrong with this picture?” quizzes I used to do in the waiting room at the dentist’s office? What had happened to Chloe Your-Mere-Presence-Offends-Me Larson? What had happened to all of her issues?
“And besides,” Chloe continued. “You alone at Peyton with Jack?” She rolled her eyes. “You couldn’t even handle standing next to him at the party. In case you haven’t noticed, you’re kind of new to the whole boy thing, and I thought someone needed to be here to do damage control when you had the big meltdown.”
I read between the lines: ninety percent of Chloe had been here for the Toby-Makes-a-Fool-Out-of-Herself show (and possibly to pick up the Jack pieces after it all went down), and ten percent of her had been vaguely concerned that I might be dead or something because I’d turned off my necklace cam.
At this point, a ninety-ten split with Chloe was about as much as I could possibly ask for.
“I did not have a meltdown,” I grumbled.
Chloe didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t!” I insisted. Sharing an incredibly impassioned kiss with someone and then belting them in the stomach and pulling a runaway bride (minus the bride part) was not a meltdown.
“Did he kiss you?” Chloe’s voice was matter-of-fact, but her eyes were just a little bit lethal.
“Ummm…no.” Technically, I had kissed him.
Chloe let out a breath. “Maybe the twins are slipping,” she said. “They were positive that he was going in for the kiss before the feed died.”
I stuck as close to the truth as possible. “I sort of…errr…” I took a deep breath of my own. “I punched him in the stomach.”
“Are you demented?”
I took stock of the situation. I’d just kissed my mark, who happened to be the most eligible bachelor at my high school, the son of an evil lawyer whose name was constantly on the top of CIA watch lists, the nephew of the voice behind our operation, and the ex-boyfriend of not one, but two blood-thirsty varsity cheerleaders. And then I’d punched him in the stomach and run.
I had to face the facts. For once, Chloe’s insult was right on target: I was obviously completely demented.
To distract her from that oh-so-apparent fact, I turned to the portion of this twisted equation that didn’t have me still going disgustedly weak at the knees.
“Jack’s uncle.” That was all I got out, all I was able to say.