The blond guy, Micah, cracked a smile and glanced down at his lap. “He’s not wrong. Le Rosey was an excellent opportunity to get away from problems at home, but a boarding school stocked with some of the wealthiest, most entitled teenagers in the world is not a utopia. It’s more of a training ground for future financial fraud defendants and supervillains.”
“What’s your nickname, then?” she demanded.
One side of Micah’s mouth lifted. “Just my last name,Shine.And I am turning my headphones off now. You two have something to talk about, and I am not at all needed.”
Click.
Colleen stared at Tristan over his arm that was still protecting her, trying to murder him with just the anger in her eyes.
2
Tangled
Colleen
Colleen fussed with the latch on the seat belt, trying to make the dang thingwork.
When jamming the parts in didn’t seem to be working, she took a firmer hold on the harness over her shoulders, interlocked the two pieces of the buckle like a baby seat, and shoved the mechanism into the latch. “There, it’s buckled,” she said to Tristan. “Get off me.”
Tristan released the handle on the wall and took his own sweet time retracting his arm from across her.
When he wasn’t moving fast enough, she pushed his elbow out from in front of her face.“Seriously.”
“Pardon me for making sure you didn’t fly through the windscreen of the helicopter.”
“You should’vetoldme.”
“Told you what? That I have a stupid username on an obscure stock market discussion board? That the night before I accidentally got you fired and then convinced you to work for me, I had a one-night-stand in a sex club with another woman, one who told me she never wanted to see me again? Why didn’tyoutellmethat you were QueenMod?”
Not the point.“You should’ve told me that you were the guy who met me atyou-know-whereand we didyou-know-what!How long have you known that was me?”
“About two minutes before you put it together, I suspect. It did not occur to me that you might have been the Sailor Moon of my darkest desires from two nights ago. Sailor Moon seemed taller than you by quite a bit. Not that there’s anything wrong with petite girls. I just didn’t think you were her.”
“And that’s also weird because TwistyTrader seemed shorter than you are. I mean, he wasn’tshort.He was super tall. But you’re enormous!”
“I’m six-four. I wasn’t a different height at the Devilhouse.” He squeezed his eyes shut and snapped his fingers, which Colleen couldn’t hear over the grinding of the helicopter rotors. “Butyouwere.Youcame up to my shoulder while we were there, and now you don’t.”
She rage-whispered, “Those red boots you liked so much had five-inch stiletto heels and an inch of platform under the toe box. I was at least five-seven in them, maybe five-eight.”
Tristan chuckled, “Yes, thoseboots,”and then he practically growled through the headphones, “That must be why you thoughtI’mtaller now. I was only eight or nine inches taller than you when you wore those boots, but we have more like fourteen inches difference between us now.”
“And you had a British accent, which youhidwhen you walked into my GameShack.”
He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “I wasn’thidingit. I just didn’t let myself speak that way because it’s distinctive. I’d been in three other GameShacks that morning, asking about business and what sorts of inventory they had. The last thing I needed was for employees to start talking to each other about someBritishguy coming into their stores and grilling them about things that would affect the stock price. So I went back to my roots and put on my Midwestern Iowan accent for the day. Once we started talking, I couldn’t switch back.”
The adrenaline from being shot at by Russian mobsters was slowly leaking out of Colleen’s bloodstream. “I did think it was weird that you saidchunderandgormlesswhen you were yelling at my manager at GameShack. Those are British swears. You just saidgormlessagain to Micah.”
He shrugged. “I got carried away, but that cockwomble was mistreating you and was racist to boot. If he’d have come after me again, I was prepared to take him out behind the barn as his uncle should’ve.”
Colleen chuckled and shook her head. “That sounds more like an Iowa farm boy. But you had abeardunder your mask in the Devilhouse.”
He nodded. “I shaved it off the next morning before I did reconnaissance at the GameShack stores. Again, it would have been an identifying characteristic if employees talked to each other.”
“Huh. I guess so. I can’t believe neither one of us figured it out. God, I’m an idiot.”
His voice lowered to a Twist-like growl. “You’renotan idiot, and don’t talk about yourself like that. That’s a punishment later.”
Nowthatsounded like Twist.
