For longer than I would care to admit, I just stare at Cass. Nate. Wes. Whatever his name is. Once again, in the face of what should be a fight-or-flight response, I completely freeze. I have no idea how to process everything he’s just told me. Not only is his name different, but he’s also just completely rewritten all my memories of him.
Every exchanged glance, every shared moment between us, starts to warp into something unrecognizable. He wasn’t really a prisoner? I guess that makes sense why the guard would have been willing to leave me behind with him during the riot. But I have a harder time reconciling the rest of it. There is no Cass. Cass is dead, for all intents and purposes. He never even existed. This man, this Wes, is all that’s left of him. But who even is he? Why did he spend so much time drawing me, writing me notes, memorizing naughty Bible verses? Was it all just part of his undercover mission? Was any of that real?
My memories of Cass have always been complicated. But now they’ve been decimated. Was he leading me on the whole time? And for what—a distraction? Out of boredom? Or was it just to see if he could? The memories of our time together continue to taunt me. Cass drawing me. Cass smiling at me across the table. Cass seeing me—me, Nina, not Agnes.
But now those same images don’t flood me with warmth. They are barbs thatcut and burrow and sting. My one happy, perfect memory turned out to be nothing. Empty. Cass is dead. Cass never even existed.
I want to throw up. I want to scream. I want to cry. But just like always, the feelings are frozen inside of me. In the face of emotional danger, I can’t fly or fight. I freeze, and all I can do is stare at him, willing my eyes not to flood with tears.
The Wes standing in front of me now furrows his brow with concern, some of his snarkiness from earlier dissolving. “Hey, are you okay? You look like rigor mortis just set in.”
Maybe notallof the snarkiness. I blink back at him, drawing in a breath to steady myself. “Undercover FBI?” I echo weakly.
It barely scratches the surface of what I’m feeling, but it is at least a part of my confusion that I’d like to have resolved.
“I was on a mission to gain the confidence of one of the other guys in the Bible study group,” he informs me. “You remember Big Tom?”
I can say with all honesty that I do not—although, by the name alone, he seems like a hard guy to forget. But I guess I was pretty preoccupied at the time, what with falling in love with someone who didn’t actually exist and breaking my vows and bringing shame upon my family and all.
“Anyway,” Wes continues, correctly interpreting my silence for a no, “it all went to seed after you, and I ...” He gestures between us awkwardly. “I got pulled from the case. Almost lost my job.”
“Hmm.” I try to sympathize, but it’s difficult under the circumstances. “Well, Ididlose my vocation, so.”
Wes at least has the good grace to grimace. “Right.”
In a roundabout way, though, I guess I have my answer. Kissing me wasn’t part of his mission if he’d been pulled from the case for it. So could that mean ... the rest of it was real, too?
Even through my thick fog of confusion, learning who Cass, whoWes,really is, it’s impossible to deny the pull I still feel toward him. Impossible to keep my eyes from darting to his full, soft lips, to keep myself from remembering how they felt on my neck, the shell of my ear, my?—
“And now?” I prompt, both to divert my train of thought and because I feel I deserve an answer. “You’re undercover again—on a television show?”
The question makes Wes cagey. His face shutters off. “I’m not really at liberty to discuss.”
He sounds so official and serious, so unlike himself—or thehimselfI thought I’d known—that I have to stifle a laugh. Wes catches it, though, and despite himself, his face twitches, like he, too, is fighting back some mirth at the preposterousness of the situation we find ourselves in. “Come on, now, Agnes. I’m a serious federal type. I can’t just go around spilling all my secrets.”
His tone is playful, and a smile tugs at the edge of his lips. He always had such a nice smile. I avert my gaze, smoothing my hair behind my ears. “It’s Nina. Short for Antonina. Agnes was my religious name.”
“Huh.” Wes says it like he’s going to have a hard time wrapping his brain around this new information. Well, welcome to the club, buddy. “Which do you prefer—Antonina or Nina?”
The question throws me. I can’t remember the last time someone asked me that. Uncle Aaron always calls me Antonina, and most everyone else in my family has followed suit, except for Harmony. So I answer to that name readily. But with my parents, then my friends, it’s always been Nina. I can’t imagine my friends calling me by my full name, no more than I can picture Uncle Aaron calling me by my nickname. “I ... don’t know,” I answer stupidly.
His face furrows, but before he can probe any deeper, I hastily change the subject. “Am I in danger being here? On set? My family’s here, too, staying at the Donner Lodge.”
As soon as I say it, I realize how selfish I’ve been, staring at Wes’s lips and thrumming at his nearness. If the FBI is investigating someone involved with the show, my entire family might be in harm’s way.
He places a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Relax. You’re safe. The person we’re investigating has a history of white-collar crime, allegedly. No history of violence, nothing that will put anyone in physical jeopardy. Just don’t give out your bank account information to a charming stranger, okay?”
I try to feel reassured by Wes’s response, but I’m a little too distracted by his hand on my shoulder. The warmth of his skin seeping through the thin cotton of my blouse. How many years have I castigated myself for my weakness in kissing him? Suddenly I’m not entirely convinced I wouldn’t do the exact same thing right now if he asked me to. If he slid his hand on my shoulder a little lower, used the other to grip me by the waist and pull me close ...
No. Nope. No.Nina, get ahold of yourself. I’m really not usually like this. I never was the teenage girl with crushes. I barely noticed the boys around me, and usually I wished they wouldn’t notice me so much. Even when I could acknowledge a person was good-looking, it was purely on a superficial level. Their attractiveness had no pull over me. I liked to read about relationships in stories, but only when I could sense a true emotional connection between the characters. The lure of the physical body on its own didn’t make much sense to me. I didn’t understand the weakness of the flesh that Uncle Aaron was always preaching about over the pulpit, the hormones that were meant to make people lose their common sense and make terrible decisions.
Instead I went through life wondering what all the fuss was about. I’d thought I was immune, but maybe my hormones were just more selective. When I met Wes, it was like I’d been a seed packed in cold, frozen earth, and suddenly it was spring. That’s how it felt being near him. Like I was feeling the sun for the first time.
And he still has that same pull, that same power over me. I feel it everywhere all at once—his nearness, his touch, his eyes on me. My heart racing. My skin flushing.
Sucking in a deep breath, I step away from him. Away from temptation. “I should get back to work. They’ll be wondering where I am.”
A lie. No one even knows my name yet; I think they’re all confused why Sienna and Rae made them hire someone new at the last minute, especially when that someone has no experience and no visible fashion sense. Buthedoesn’t need to know that.
