Chasing Truth

by Julie Cross

  My stomach flutters with nerves, but I force out a laugh. “So you are trying to get me naked in Mr. Lee’s room? I might ask for a refund if this is how you teach self-defense.”

  I expect him to offer up one of his smooth lines, but instead, his hands come out from under my shirt. He tugs the material back in place. Even in the dark I can make out the creases in his forehead. “Don’t do that, Ellie.”

  “Do what?” I ask, suddenly self-conscious.

  He slides closer, pulling my legs around his back. “Don’t be that girl. The one who seduced Bret and let Davey stare at her ass. I know that’s not really you.”

  My throat tightens.

  “You’re allowed to be nervous,” Miles says. “I am. And I don’t want to pretend I’m not scared of this. Or of you. And me.”

  Any girl would be an idiot not to fall in love with Miles. He’s everything I don’t deserve. Fortunately for me, I have a long history of taking things that aren’t mine. I tighten my arms around his neck and hide my face.

  “I know I seemed experienced around the Holden A-crowd, but I haven’t really done much of this,” he whispers.

  I lift my head and look at him.

  “I don’t want to pretend to be cool with you, okay? My mom was right, I am shy,” he admits. “And I never wanted to—I just—” The smoldering look he gives me sends my heart flying out of my chest. “I never wanted someone so much that I could ditch that part of myself.”

  Somewhere outside of the puddle I’ve just melted into, I realize what he’s trying to tell me. I bring his mouth to mine. “Okay, I get it. No more artificially cool Ellie. Want to be done talking now?”

  “God yes,” he says against my lips. He grips my face with one hand and deepens the kiss, his tongue slipping into my mouth. He kisses me for an eternity, finally having time and space to slow down and savor every second.

  But eventually I pull away and nudge Miles back a few inches so I can get a good look at him. I push my hands beneath his T-shirt and shove it up and over his head. I’ve seen him shirtless too many times to count, but I’ve never really had the chance to touch him like this. My hands roam from his shoulders down his arms. He watches me the whole time, his gaze heavy, intense.

  Just to make things even, I finish the job he started a few minutes ago by removing my tank top. Miles immediately steps closer.

  “Under the circumstances…” I tell him. “I won’t yell at you for checking out my boobs.”

  In one quick motion, he picks me up and tosses me over his shoulder. “Just for that, we might have to take a walk outside.”

  But instead of opening the door, he sets me on the floor and then drops down beside me. I’m about to throw some choice words at him for tossing me around like a sack of potatoes, but all those words get stuck the moment his gaze sweeps over me. And for a second, I can see what his mom was talking about when she painted this picture of a shy, slightly sheltered Miles, combined with curiosity that drives an eleven-year-old boy to learn construction by building his own fort in the woods.

  Miles is a hands-on learner.

  He’s still staring at me, maybe searching my face for any hesitation. “Are you cold? I can build a fire…”

  I reach up and bring his face closer to mine. “Later.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Miles gives one last poke to the large flames bursting from the fireplace. He tosses a thick blanket over me and sits behind me, pulling me against his bare chest.

  I shiver. “Why is it so cold in here?”

  “I offered to build a fire an hour ago,” Miles says.

  “Yeah, well, I was distracted.” By sixty minutes of amazingly hot kisses that masked the cold room.

  He tucks the blanket tighter around us so no air can sneak in, and then his lips are on my neck, planting kisses in a neat row. I rest my head on Miles’s shoulder and close my eyes.

  “I could get used to this,” I say. “Going home is overrated.”

  “Me, too.” Miles slides my bra strap over and kisses my bare shoulder. “Except I am home.”

  Heat quickly fills the space beneath the blanket, and soon I’m plenty warm. Warm enough to begin thinking about what else Miles and I could do here alone, beyond the marathon shirtless kissing we already engaged in. As if reading my mind, his fingers land lightly on my stomach and begin to drift south. I uncross my legs and then freak out about it. Do I really want his hand there? I think so.

  Miles, whose body language interpretation skills are too good for his own good, stops his hand, then moves it again, then stops a second time. I try to play it cool, but I start laughing. And shortly after, Miles joins me.

  “I think you just defined mixed signals,” he says.

  I laugh harder. “To myself as well.”

  His arm stretches across my midsection until his fingers are wrapped around my side. “Yeah, just gonna leave it here for now.”

  “You know what would help right now?” I turn my head to look up at him.

  “The rest of that bottle of wine from dinner?” he suggests.

  “Well, yeah.” I brave pulling a hand from beneath the blanket and rest it on his cheek. “But I was gonna say it would help if you let me channel my badass overconfident self. She’d tell you exactly where to put your hands.”

  “You mean she’d know what she wanted me to do,” he corrects. “As opposed to you, who aren’t sure?” I drop my hand and turn to face the fire again. “I think I’ll take my chances with you. Indecisiveness is kinda hot.”

  “No, it’s not.” I sigh. Why am I so weird like this? As me. And how is he so good at this? Doing it, talking about it. Maybe I misunderstood him earlier. “Since you said that you haven’t done this much, I take it that means—unless you meant that you haven’t done that much but you still have done it…at least once? That would make more sense. Or maybe more than once…?”

  Miles interrupts my painful stammering by laughing. His chest vibrates against me. “Jesus, Ellie. I’m seventeen, not forty. You make it sound like inexperience at our age is an oddity. I won’t quote you statistics, but I’m in the majority.”

  “Maybe it’s just odd to me.” I bring my knees to my chest and hug them. “I was fifteen. Guess that puts me in the minority.”

  He’s quiet for a long time, too long. I shouldn’t have told him. It had seemed more fact than personal until it sat right between us.

  “I was almost sixteen,” I add.

  “You’re right. It’s different for everyone. Fifteen isn’t that young.” Miles turns me around to face him. “But no, I haven’t done that before. Or yet. However you want to look at it.”

  And now I have to assume the topless girl tossing clothes from Miles balcony wasn’t what it had looked like.

  I scoot forward enough to kiss him. The blanket falls to the floor, and I’m pulled onto Miles’s lap, my arms around his neck, his hands in my hair, on my back, pressing us together. He unclasps my bra, slides the straps down my shoulders, and eventually separates us enough to toss the thing aside.

  My knees rest on the blue mats on either side of Miles and I’m half tempted to push him until he falls backward and then crawl on top of him. His mouth travels from my cheek to my chest and then back up again until his eyes meet mine.

  “I meant what I said that night at the dance,” Miles tells me. “Anything you want, Ellie.”

  I tighten my arms around his neck, let my lips touch below his ear, his collarbone. “I just want this—you close to me—for now.”

  His arms wrap around me, squeezing me tight. His hand moves through my hair. “I don’t think that other Ellie would let me hold her like this.”

  “No,” I agree. “She wouldn’t.”

  ...

  Sunlight streams into the guesthouse, making it look completely different than it had last night—more training room, less romantic getaway. Except it still feels romantic. Especially with my head resting against Miles’s chest, counting his heartbeats while he sleeps. His arm
is wrapped around me, a blanket covering us. I’m about to close my eyes and fall back asleep, but something crashes against the window. Miles jolts upright from beneath me, his eyes darting around the room, searching for a threat.

  We both spot the wet circle on the clear glass window at the same time. Another white ball hits the window in the same spot. Miles looks at me, a smile playing on his lips. “My parents.”

  “They’re throwing snowballs at the window?” My face warms and I crawl on all fours, scrambling to retrieve articles of clothing and toss them on. I make a grab for my sweater but Miles snatches it and slides it out of my reach. “Hey, I need that!”

  “Relax,” he says. “They’re just messing with me.”

  I’m about to tackle him for my sweater, but then I glance out the window and see Mr. and Mrs. Beckett walking away from the guesthouse hand in hand, toward the woods. “Where are they going?”

  “A walk probably.” Miles shrugs. “Or target practice.”

  I choke down the image of his parents armed. “Romantic.”

  Miles jumps to his feet and holds out a hand for me. “Come on, we have work to do.”

  “Work?”

  He nods. “For real this time.”

  “Wait, so last night… That wasn’t a self-defense lesson?”

  “No.” He tries to looks serious but cracks a smile. Then he grips my waist, tugs me closer, and kisses me. But it’s over before I even have a chance to really enjoy it. “Enough of that. No more joking. No more kissing.”

  Normally, I would keep pushing him, but his tone combined with the scary scenario he painted last night stops me. Instead, I give a quick nod and commit myself to doing everything he tells me, minus the snark.

  Soon I’m drenched in sweat, bruises forming in various locations on my body. But I get why Miles wants me to do this, why his dad wants me to. There’s satisfaction in taking control. That part isn’t new for me; only the kicking and punching are new.

  CHAPTER 41

  I shift in the passenger seat and groan when pain radiates from muscles I’ve probably never used before. “What did you do to me, Beckett?”

  Miles grins, but there’s a hint of sympathy on his face, maybe a little guilt. Good. “You’ll be fine. Tonight’s lesson will loosen you up again.”

  Tonight’s lesson? God no. But since I’ve committed myself to trust Miles, at least in this one area, I bite back my retort. We’ve just made our way around D.C. and aren’t far from home now. “How long before you see your parents again?”

  “Christmas, hopefully,” he says, his eyes on the road.

  “That’s right.” I recall the phone conversation Miles had with his dad the night of the dance. “In Turkey.”

  “Only if I learn Turkish, and I doubt I’ll have time. Kind of got a lot on my plate at the moment.”

  “Like gathering names of druggies for the FBI.” Yeah, so I haven’t committed myself to ending all snark between us.

  His hands tighten on the steering wheel. “No more worrying about my schoolwork. I’m number three in my class. I didn’t get there by being an idiot.”

  No, I sigh to myself. You got there by following the rules—taking names and numbers and handing them over to the proper channels.

  I lean my head back against the seat and stare out the window. I can’t shake the image of the FBI hauling Justice and Dominic out of the school in handcuffs. And then there’s Bret, who does have a conning secret side, but he probably deserves jail about as much as I do. Or Uncle Clyde, for that matter. So who am I to judge him? Then again, why should it matter to me what happens to any of them? Hadn’t I set out to take Bret, Dominic, and his circle down for Simon’s sake?

  Except every time I try not to care, I replay the conversations I’ve had with Justice, the ones where she came to life, working so hard to make my room beautiful for no cost. And all the online chats I read between Simon and Dominic, all the dirty looks Dominic’s given me since school started back in August—grief masked as hate. I used to think of the kids at Holden as an alien species—a culture I needed to learn and mimic in order to infiltrate. But now I’m not so sure we’re that different.

  Miles reaches for my hand, lacing his fingers through mine, sending a jolt through my body. How are we supposed to go back to being platonic partners? My face warms and my heart flutters just thinking about last night, about his skin against mine. I suppress a shiver. It wasn’t just a hot make-out session this time. He told me things; he looked at me and saw me. It’s not easy to go backward after that.

  And I feel like I really helped him through things last night. He was overwhelmed, needed someone to vent to, to put things in perspective. It’s hard not to obsess over the details of Simon’s death. Especially after the photos and Connie’s mentions of the angle of the weapon, the ice cream—

  “Oh my God!” I shout.

  Miles jumps; his foot shifts to slam on the brake. “What?”

  “Oh my God,” I say again, quieter this time. “The ice cream—”

  “Ice cream?”

  “Pull over!” Okay, this is the part of the story where we die in a car crash, the important piece of a giant puzzle dying with me. I draw in a breath and speak in the calmest voice possible. “I mean pull over at your convenience. In a safe location. Everything is fine.”

  Miles nods, his eyes on the road. But tension rolls over him in giant waves. Luckily, there’s a rest area three miles down the road and soon we’re parked in front of a picnic table.

  “The ice cream,” I repeat, urgent this time. “In the crime scene photo.” God I wish I had the damn thing with me. I was too afraid to bring the stolen police report into the home of CIA operatives. Miles has it locked up in the secret room.

  His forehead wrinkles. “What about it?”

  “There was a spoon on top of the carton,” I recall, pulling the image back to my frontal lobe. “And another one on the table beside the carton.” I study Miles, waiting for it to click, but the wrinkles stay on his forehead. “Think about it…we know the DeLucas—Dominic’s parents—were home the night Simon died. We know the Gilberts were not home. And we know Bret Thomas followed Simon to Dominic’s house, watched them make out and then drove off—”

  “Bret never saw them go inside,” Miles mutters. “Simon’s car was still running…”

  “And there were two spoons for that tub of ice cream at the Gilberts’ later on that night,” I conclude. “Simon probably invited him over since no one was home at his house. Got ice cream for them. Maybe he showed him his gun. Maybe they had a fight and things got out of control.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Miles’s eyes are wide now, his knuckles white from gripping the steering wheel. “Dominic broke into their house. His prints were there when we dusted, but not mentioned in the police report.”

  “And if Simon brought him back to the Gilberts’ place that night then that explains why Dominic knew how to get in the house.” I add, “He could have watched him punch the alarm code, maybe they dodged the security cameras. Definitely not hard to do, especially for someone who lives there.”

  “He didn’t go back there looking for a killer.” Miles’s jaw clenches. “He went back to cover his tracks.”

  Those final words fill the empty space in Uncle Clyde’s car. Both of us sit in silence, breathing hard from the adrenaline rush. Finally, Miles strings several swear words together and shakes his head. “I really didn’t think it was him. Dammit.”

  Me freakin’ either.

  For several seconds, Miles looks lost, unable to move, but then he straightens in his seat and turns to me, speaking firmly, “Seat belt.”

  The moment my seat belt clicks back into place, he throws the car in reverse, then quickly shifts, speeding forward onto the interstate. I grip the door handle. “I take it you have a plan?”

  He nods.

  “Does it involve showing up at Dominic’s? Because I’m not sure killing him will—”

  “We’re only about twenty
minutes from the FBI field office,” Miles says.

  “What?” My stomach flips and flops even more than it had while declaring Dominic DeLuca a murder suspect. “No, we can’t—”

  I take one look at Miles and stop talking. There’s no way I’m reasoning with him on this one. No way he’ll change his mind, which means I have twenty minutes to decide if I’m gonna tell him why I’m really not excited about walking into an FBI office. Or jump out of a moving car.

  Aidan once told me that the FBI’s biggest flaw is its lack of a clear method of sharing intelligence between field offices. And it proved true when I was interviewed after Simon’s death. Twice. No one here knew me. Agent Sheldon’s office is hours away.

  By the time Miles is pulling off the highway and circling the local field office lot for a parking spot, my worries have shifted from concern for the security of my own secrets to Miles’s.

  Before he hops out of the car, I grab his shirtsleeve and wait for him to turn toward me. “We can’t go in there without a plan. A good plan.”

  “We don’t need a plan, we’re handing over information. That’s all.”

  I grip his sleeve tighter. “You can’t become another Kathleen French. I’m not ready for you to disappear yet.”

  “Ellie…” Sympathy fills his face. “It’ll be okay.”

  Unfortunately, my trust issues prevent me from accepting that BS. “There has to be a way to tell them our theory about Simon without blowing your cover. Isn’t that the number one rule of the McCone honors program? Doing everything in your power to protect the program’s mission, which I believe is to remain covert, correct?”

  “You’re not going in there by yourself,” he says firmly.

  Damn. There goes plan A. “Okay, we’re both going in. Just give me a minute to think.”

  He looks skeptical, but nods. “One minute.”

  .

  “Both of you saw these photos?” Agent Riley asks. He’s been listening to us talk for at least twenty minutes with barely any interruption.

  Miles and I glance at each other, and then Miles clears his throat. “No. I didn’t see them.”