by Tracey Ward
“What do you think he said?” Alex whispers to me, linking her arm through mine as we follow a few feet behind them.
I snort. “Something dirty.”
“Probably. Maybe.”
“Maybe? Have you met Campbell?”
“Yeah, and he’s been surprising me lately.”
“You think he said something sweet?”
“Oh God, no,” she scoffs. “But maybe something in between sweet and dirty. Something swirty.”
I shake my head. “I can’t even begin to imagine how to say something ‘swirty’.”
“And I love you for it.”
I smile at her, squeezing her arm against my side affectionately. I don’t do that often enough; show affection to her. But I feel it. Every second of every day. In every breath I take.
“I dreamt of you this afternoon,” she comments offhand.
“Oh yeah? Where were we this time?”
“I think it was Te Anau. And I didn’t dream of you, really. I kind of dreamt through you.”
Ahead of us Campbell laughs again, fully and from the gut, his head thrown back. Jonnie swats at him playfully.
I’ve never seen Campbell in action outside a bar. Running the game like this – charming and engaged – is just bizarre to see. And I can’t look away.
“You dreamt through me?” I ask Alex distractedly.
“Yeah. It was weird. You were going to the warehouse store with Jonnie but then you bailed. You said you needed bullets or something.”
I almost trip, I come to such a strong stop. I pull Alex around to face me, asking her intently, “What else happened?”
She half-smiles, confused by my sudden interest. “Uh, you took a walk down the street. You were looking for a shop. I thought you’d look for a sporting goods store but you ended up in a jewelry store.”
“What was the name?”
“Mason’s, I think.”
My heart is flooded with ice water. It creeps through my veins, tingling under my skin as the hair on my arms stands straight up. She was in my head. Alex dreamed of me in real time, in my head. She saw everything. She knows.
Or does she?
“What’d I do in the store?”
She eyes me closely. “Are you okay?”
“What’d I do?” I insist stubbornly.
“Not much. You talked to an old jeweler. You had a piece of our bird with you. He said it was a black diamond and that it was really rare. You gave it to him to look at and about then is when Naomi crept in and ruined everything. I started seeing shadows. The jewelers face started to melt, his voice going all weird.” She shivers visibly. “I screamed at you to run but you didn’t hear me. I woke up in a sweat. Campbell came running to check on me. I guess I screamed out loud.”
I nod my head slowly, feeling myself relax. She didn’t see everything. She doesn’t know why I was there.
“Nick, what’s going on? You’re freaking me out,” she scolds sternly.
I grin at her, my relief practically a tangible thing. “That wasn’t a dream, Alex.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You just described a part of my day today. Verbatim.”
Her jaw drops. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. You were in my head in the store. Everything you saw was real.”
Alex’s hands fly to her mouth, her eyes brimming with surprise and regret. “I’m so sorry!”
“Why?” I laugh.
“Because I was in your head. I was practically spying on you.” She lowers her hands, shaking her head. “I swear, I didn’t mean to do that.”
“I know you wouldn’t do it on purpose. Same way you didn’t do the dreams on purpose. It’s just the way we are, right?”
“I’ll try to never do that again.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“And, by the way,” she pronounces imperiously, “we are still undecided about who was to blame for the dreams, you or me.”
“You.”
“Also, where did you get a piece of the bird and how is this the first I’m hearing of it?”
“Hey, lovebirds!” Campbell yells at us from the other side of the yard. “You comin’ or what?”
I smile silently, refusing to answer as I thread Alex’s arm through mine again. I pull her into the lengthening shadow of the house. The sun is setting, a long day coming to an end, but it feels like it’s only just beginning. We’ll have to sort out this Naomi situation before it gets much later. We’ll have to find out how to get Liam on board with it while we’re at it. And we’ll have to have a long talk about what we’re going to do about finding Jokinen, because having Jonnie pop into the base every day to look for him is proving to be a very fruitless idea.
Luckily, Alex just given me a much better one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
MAX
I’m giddy over the fact that I got inside Jonnie’s bunker, and I don’t even know if I’d be happier if that was code for her lady bits. I’m pretty sure this is cooler. No offense to Jonnie. Or her bits. I’m sure they’re very, very nice.
But her bunker is boss.
The space is the same size as the first floor upstairs, but with a few big changes. There are no fireplaces, first of all, because underground. Second, there are televisions everywhere because, again, underground. What else are you going to look at? There’s another library, only smaller. Smaller living room, smaller kitchen, no dining room, a bathroom that doubles as the laundry, and three bedrooms where the extra space will allow. None of them are very big, but it’s a bunker. What do you expect?
It’s not as posh as it is upstairs, and Jonnie explains that she had the house professionally decorated in case she has to have contractors come out to do repairs. When they walk in, it needs to look like a millionaire’s home away from home, otherwise her entire cover comes into question. But in the bunker, it’s more her style. It’s simpler. Warmer. Less modern and more ranchy with rough walls, raw wood, and brightly colored quilts on the beds. My mom would call it rustic chic, minus the chic. I don’t know if she’d like it, but I do. Or maybe I just like how good it feels compared to being topside in the house. How much like a home and less like a suicide note.
After our tour of the bunker, we needed to kill a few hours to give people time to sleep before calling a team meeting and taking our vote. Nick and Alex brave the house, going inside to check on Liam. We agree not to bring up the topic of the bunker with him until we take our vote. If the majority votes it down without him, Naomi isn’t coming down here anyway, so why bring it up? It’s a cross-that-bridge-if-we-come-to-it kind of situation, and none of us are looking to rush over those raging waters if we don’t have to.
With Alex and Nick gone, I’m left alone with Jonnie. It seems like a bad idea on somebody’s part, I’m just not sure who’s. Not mine. I think it’s perfect. So are her eyes. Her nose. Her lips that frown at me as I smile at her from the kitchen.
“Why are you smiling at me like that?” she asks uneasily. But she’s grinning because she likes me. She likes the way I make her uncomfortable.
“Are you ready to tell me yet?”
“Tell you what?”
“How you paid for all this.”
Her grin fades. Her eyes fall. She looks at the ground as her hands come together, her delicate fingers threading through each other anxiously. She glances at the stairs to the solid metal door sealing us in. Sealing out the outside.
“Will you tell anyone else?”
She’s not asking me not to tell anyone. She’s asking what kind of man I am by nature. Am I someone who knows a secret when I hear it? Or am I the kind of person who has to be told?
Fun fact – I’m both.
I shrug, crossing my arms over my chest. “Depends on how juicy the secret is. Sometimes I just can’t help myself.”
“I think you can.”
“‘Won’t’, then.”
Jonnie looks up at me under her eyelashes. It’s not a tactic,
not on purpose the way most women flirt. It’s still beautiful, though; her rich, brown eyes in shadow under her brow. Dark and searching, penetrating even without her ability.
“I stole it,” she confesses unapologetically.
I smirk. “I figured.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“Because I wanted you to tell me.”
“What does it matter if I told you when you already knew?”
“Now I know you trust me. That’s good information to have.”
She looks away, detangling her fingers. Her hands fall limp at her sides. Relaxed. “I wouldn’t say I trust you.”
“No, but you want to. And that’s even better information to have.” I unfold my arms to brace my hands against the bar between us. “Who’d you steal it from? Old Man Evans?”
“Who else has that kind of money?”
“Not Liam, now.”
“No, he does. Trust me. His mom was rich and she left him everything when she died. Not his dad. His fortune is his.”
“How much are we talking? How much did you take from the doc?”
She hesitates. Licks her lips nervously. “Eight million.”
I laugh, smacking my palms down on the counter loudly. “Dang, D.B. Cooper!”
Jonnie smiles slowly at my reaction. “Who is D.B. Cooper?”
“You, you thieving little minx.” I point to the stool on her side of the bar. “Come sit down right now and tell me how you did it. All of it. Every detail.”
She laughs, taking a seat across from me.
I lean on the counter on my elbows, putting my face only a foot and a half away from hers, my expression enraptured. “Go. Hit me with it.”
“There’s not much to it.”
“Still, though.”
“Okay, fine. Dr. Evans hated technology.”
“Ironic.”
“Right? That’s what I thought, but I think he mainly hated computers. He was a theorist, a surgeon, and a scientist, but he was not MAC man. I saw him throw an iPad at the wall once when he couldn’t get it to work.”
“Who hasn’t done that?”
“Anyway,” she continues, easily ignoring me, “he was terrible with passwords too. He couldn’t remember them. He could name every bone in the human body off the top of his head, but he couldn’t remember his email login. So he wrote them all down. Every login for every account he had with the password for all of them.”
“Where did he keep them?”
“On a sticky note under his keyboard.”
I drop my head down hard on the countertop. It lands with a frustrated thud that makes Jonnie laugh lightly. “Pet peeve of yours?” she chuckles.
I lift my head, nodding heavily. “My mom. She keeps her passwords in a saved note in her phone. Perfect little hacking package.”
“She hates technology too?”
“No, she loves it. She just doesn’t totally understand it, which might be worse than straight up hating it. My dad and I are her on call IT support.”
“She’s lucky to have you.”
“Everyone is.”
She rolls her eyes at me, grinning. She doesn’t argue.
“That’s how you did it?” I ask, resting on my elbows again. Putting my hands on the counter next to hers. “You stole his passwords and drained his accounts?”
“Not exactly. I took the passwords, yeah, but I didn’t want to get caught right away so I got my own account and set up automatic transfers from all of his into mine. It took a few years and a lot of interest accrual, but eventually I had taken over two million dollars.”
I grin at her proudly, moving my hands closer. Just barely brushing the back of my knuckles against hers; the touch so light it could have been an accident. “And he never noticed?”
Jonnie blinks, her body going perfectly still. “If he did, I never heard him say it. His name was on the account I created so if he looked at it, it looked like just another one of his. But if he looked closely, he’d see my name on it too. He probably thought his money was shuffling around, bouncing from banks on every coast to avoid taxes. It always looked like the money was still there somewhere.”
I nod in understanding, my eyes on hers as I run my fingertips up and down her little finger. She inhales slowly. She knows it’s not an accident now. And I know it’s no accident when her finger lifts, exposing her palm to my touch.
“How did you get the rest?” I ask her quietly.
“On the day Alex and Nick broke us all out of the clinic, I ran to the first computer I could get my hands on. That monster she made was taking the whole building down. I was worried the power would go out before I could drain all of his accounts into mine. And I was right. I didn’t get all of them, but I got another six million out before I had to run or die.”
Is it wrong that it’s hot hearing her talk about stealing? It’s a cyber-crime which is the unsexist of all the sexy ways to steal because there’s no skin-tight cat suit, but it still does it for me. Almost as much as the feel of her soft skin against mine as our fingers slowly dance together on the white Formica between us. We’re not quite holding hands. They’re in constant motion, our fingers orbiting around each other, skimming and tickling by in this mesmerizing way that makes me shiver from the base of my spine.
Jonnie sees it. It makes her smile. Which makes me smile. And then we’re just two idiots in a bunker together with tangled fingers and grins on our faces, and the weird thing about it is I’m not thinking ahead to what happens next. To what my next goal or my next move is. I didn’t even plan this one. It just happened. I wanted to touch her so I did. And she let me. And it’s great. It’s enough.
For now.
“You’re not going to turn me in, are you?” she teases.
“I don’t know yet. My silence might cost you.”
“Whatever it is, I’m sure I can pay it.”
“I don’t want money.”
Her smile quivers at the corners, her eyes sparking with interest. “What do you want?”
“Starbursts.”
She laughs, sitting back in her seat. “You have an addiction,” she accuses, trying to pull her hands away from mine.
I don’t let her. I keep hold of her gently, smiling when she lets me. “I have a craving. A craving is not an addiction.”
“That’s really what you want?”
“It’s either that or a kiss. And since I really doubt you have any Starbursts on you right now, I guess a kiss is what it’s going to have to be.”
She narrows her eyes at me pensively. “Starbursts or a kiss? Those are my only two options?”
“Or both. I’d take both.”
“Greedy.”
“Hungry.”
“Clearly.”
I tug on her hand playfully. “What’s it gonna be? Sugar or sugar?”
She grins, shaking her head. “I guess it’s going to be sugar.”
My heart actually stutters. It feels weird, like I’m dying. Or being betrayed. I don’t get nervous, but as Jonnie stands up to come around the counter to my side, I feel something churning in my stomach. Not the sick dread feeling Naomi gives me, but something else. Something familiar. Something that feels a lot like adrenaline.
I like Jonnie. I’m not even gonna play and pretend that I don’t. And if you want a reason why she’s made a mark on me – why her and not the parade of girls before her – I can’t give you one. She’s no hotter than they were. Probably not funnier. Possibly smarter. But all in all, running the stats on each and every girl against Jonnie, the numbers don’t add up in her favor. But here I am, looking at her in a way I’ve never looked at anyone before. As she looks into me in a way no one else ever possibly could, and I wonder if that’s it. If her ability is what sets her apart for me. Maybe, but I think it’s just her. Some unquantifiable thing about her that defies analysis and explanation.
The scientific section of my mind hates that answer.
The adventurer inside me loves it.
Jonn
ie stops in front of me, looking up at me with a hesitant smile, her body so much smaller than mine it’s unreal. I’ll have to stoop to kiss her. Or I could lift her up onto the counter to level the playing field. I put my hands on her hips loosely, testing the waters. Her expression doesn’t change and she doesn’t push me away. But she does put her hand in her pocket for some reason.
She pulls out a long, yellow stick and slaps it hard against my chest. I instinctively cover her hand with mine before glancing down.
Starbursts.
I laugh when I see it. “No way.”
“Yes way,” she confirms smugly. “I remembered. And I thought it might come in handy. It seems like everyone negotiates with you eventually. I wanted to make sure I had currency.”
I tighten my hold on her hip. “Oh, you have currency.”
She pats my chest with her hand holding the candy before deftly sliding it out from under my grasp. “And now so do you.”
She backs away until my other hand drops from her waist.
“No kiss then, huh?” I ask, only half-joking.
“I’ve gotta give you something to work for. Otherwise, what’s the fun?”
“I can think of a lot of fun things we can do that involve kissing. Like, a lot of things.”
“I’m sure you can. And I can be really fun. Like, really fun, but not today.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Day after?”
“No.”
“Wednesday.”
“No.”
“Fat Tuesday.”
She grins. “No.”
“Black Friday?”
“No.”
“I’m running out of options here.”
“I know,” Jonnie laughs, turning her back on me. Heading for the door to the stairs.
“Where are you going?” I call after her.
“To check on my horses.”
“Can I come with you?”
“Can I stop you?”
I smile, ripping into my candy as I follow her out of the bunker. “I’d love to see you try.”
∞
Two hours later we finally have our meeting. Nick and I lead everyone down into the bunker so they can see the inside. They need to know what kind of conditions we’re talking about in here. Everyone is present except for Liam, Naomi, and Gwen, who is still passed out cold. Beck carried her effortlessly down into the bunker, dropping her off in the one of the bedrooms where Nick looked her over before the meeting, frowning sharply the entire time. He came to the same conclusion I did. She’s unconscious.