“Okay, who bites an ice cream cone?” I demanded, taking a break from swirling my tongue inside the cone to get the ice cream clinging to the sides. “Seriously. Are you secretly a serial killer?”
Alec took another chomp of his ice cream, looking at me as if daring me to comment. “If I was a serial killer, it’d definitely be a secret, right? So I don’t think that’s the best question to ask.”
“Well, what should I ask?” I took a bite of the cone, and Alec raised an eyebrow. I stuck out my tongue at him. What did he expect? You couldn’t lick the cone, dammit. “How do I weed out the psychos, if I don’t go by their freaky ice-cream eating habits?”
Alec frowned down at his cone. “You could ask about whether I had any childhood pets, and what happened to them. How often I travel. Whether or not my parents had substance-abuse problems, or if I had trouble in school.” He broke off abruptly, an odd look on his face. I thought it was probably mirrored on mine. I mean, I didn’t think he actually was one, but…seriously? He added hurriedly, “Anyway, ice cream’s probably not the best barometer. Besides,” he said, his tone a little too chipper, like he was overcompensating, “I ordered mint chip. That’s normal. Everyone knows the psychopaths get chocolate with strawberry rhubarb.”
He could be a serial killer. No last name given, not from here—supposedly, anyway, and he hadn’t elaborated by telling me where he’d allegedly come from—and I didn’t know where he was staying. Or what he actually did for a living, beyond some kind of vague freelance work that might or might not be legal. And maybe construction.
Where he’d have access to lots of places where he could hide bodies, and equipment to bury them properly and cover them with concrete.
So sue me, I’d watched a few too many episodes of Mindhunter.
“Strawberry rhubarb is delicious.” I’d lost my appetite, though, and I couldn’t help edging very slightly away from him along the bench.
Alec stared at me for a minute, blinked, and then burst into a helpless paroxysm of laughter that I wouldn’t have believed he could produce.
“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” he wheezed at last, putting his hand over his eyes and rubbing at the corners of them. “Wow, that’s iron—I can’t—oh, fuck.” He looked at me, his eyes glistening with actual tears of laughter. “Gabe, I promise you, I am not a serial killer. Not secretly. Not any other way. And my only pet as a kid was a cat named Muffin, who died of old age while I was in—a couple of years after I moved out of my parents’ place. Also, for the record, strawberry rhubarb ice cream is an abomination, and you should be ashamed.” He knocked his knee gently into mine. “Seriously. I know saying I’m not isn’t all that reassuring, but what are the odds, right? You’d be more likely to win the lottery.”
The only people I could imagine would know that much about the origins of serial killers were either A, serial killers, or B, FBI profilers. Alec clearly wasn’t an FBI agent.
On the other hand, he seemed to have a fetish for parks, so maybe he just had weird hobbies in general? And he’d named his cat Muffin. That seemed promising. If it was true.
“Full disclosure,” Alec added with a sigh. “My sister named Muffin. But I never even pulled his tail, I promise.”
And he apparently still had that freaky mind-reading thing going. “I’m sure Muffin was grateful.”
“I’m not going to hurt you.” He sounded really, really intent, in a not-so-reassuring I’m capable of hurting you but I won’t way. And the glint in his dark eyes made me worry a little. “Seriously, I’m—I like you, Gabe.”
Even less reassuring. The implication that he might hurt people he didn’t like didn’t sit so well with me.
But…fuck it. I’d never won the lottery, either. And I preferred intensity to a total lack of anything that might hold my interest.
Alec smiled at me, and that clinched the deal. I hadn’t seen him smile once while I’d been watching him in the bookstore, but he kept smiling at me. Frowning, too, but if I made him smile at least as often…well, that definitely held my interest.
“Why don’t we walk around some more, and you can show me some boats.”
“I hate boats, and so do you,” I grumbled, but I popped the last of my cone into my mouth and got up, taking his hand when he offered it. His fingers closed around mine, warm and strong.
Yeah. I hated boats, but I could get over it if he held my hand like that the whole time.
8
Gabe
“Dad wants you there, and so you’re going to be there, end of story.” I pulled the phone away from my ear, stuck out my tongue at it even though my brother couldn’t see it, and put the phone back up to my head in time to hear, “…someone who’s presentable. No weird hair.”
My blood pressure ratcheted up another impossible notch. Could Dave hear my teeth grinding? Almost certainly. My downstairs neighbor could probably hear my teeth grinding.
I’d missed some of what he said, but hearing it was superfluous. Same old song and dance. Fix your hair, take out your piercings, date an investment banker or a boring old-money yachter and stop embarrassing the Middletons.
“My hair is ‘weird,’ Dave,” I gritted out. “It’s purple right now. With some teal streaks. And I’m not dyeing it for some fucking shitshow of a cocktail party where I don’t know anyone and no one cares if I’m there anyway.”
“You’re coming. And of course you have to dye your—”
“Well, I’m not!” That came out in practically a shout, and I jumped off the couch, pacing across my living room. “I’m not coming, I’m not dyeing my hair, and I’m not bringing anyone. Obviously. Because I’m not coming.”
I had a sudden, breathtaking vision of showing up with Alec on my arm, Alec with his scowl and his unshaven jaw and his leather jacket. He’d scandalize them all even without anything weird about his hair. Just the way he’d be dressed…
And then I had another, even more breathtaking mental vision of Alec in a tuxedo looking exactly like James Bond—the Goldilocks version of James Bond. Not too hairy, not too smirky, just right.
But no. I didn’t know him that well yet, but he’d been low-key and unpretentious so far. He hadn’t asked a single question, not even obliquely, about my finances, and he’d paid more than his share on dates. A gold-digger he was not; I could sniff one of those out at a hundred yards. And he didn’t seem to have any interest in status or showing off, which made him even more perfect.
And made him extremely unlikely to want to go with me, even if I got up the courage to ask.
Dave had kept squawking in my ear, and I tuned back in with an effort. “…need to make an effort sometimes, Gabe. Dad needs the whole family there. This investment would position the company very favorably to…” Aaand I tuned back out again.
I strode into the kitchen and put the phone on speaker on the table, so I could ignore Dave while rummaging for a bottle of wine. Screw it. It was five o’clock somewhere—out in the Atlantic, I guessed, since it was two in the afternoon here. If I had a boat, I could go there.
Ugh, fuck boats, and fuck Dave.
Speaking of. By his tone, he’d starting building up to a crescendo.
“…I suppose if you must show up looking like you usually do, Dr. Wilson won’t be too put off, since he spent so many years teaching at Burlington University and he’s used to scruffy students. But you need to be there, end of discussion!”
I opened my mouth to tell him where to stuff the end of his discussion, and then my brain caught up to what I’d heard but not really processed. My hands went still on the corkscrew.
“Which Dr. Wilson? Dr. Steven Wilson?” My heart gave a little lurch.
“Oh, yes, you’re probably familiar with him,” Dave said, sounding disgruntled. He hated it when I wasn’t completely out of the loop, since he loved lording it over me so much when I was. “He’s still on the university’s board of governors.”
The very same board of governors I’d need to petition if I wanted to be reinstated into m
y doctoral program, in fact.
The lurch solidified into a too-aggressive pounding rhythm. Oh, God. Could I do this? Before I could think it over, I said, “When is it again?”
Dave snorted. “Like it matters to you. What, do you need to clear your busy schedule of getting day-drunk?”
I put the bottle down carefully and backed away, afraid he’d hear the cork pop if I pulled it out the rest of the way while I still had him on speaker. Dammit. Broken clocks were apparently right at two in the afternoon.
“When is it, Dave? You know I wasn’t listening the first time, and I can’t show up if I don’t know when it is.”
Dave’s long, gusty sigh whooshed through my phone’s speakers like a burst of irritable, patronizing static. “Friday night. Don’t make a dramatic entrance, just show up at seven like everyone else. At the factory. And your date better not be some freak. Black tie, Gabe,” he added in a growl.
“Look, you should be grateful I’m even coming!” Too late. The phone’s screen lit up, showing me the call had ended. “Dammit,” I muttered to myself, eyed the wine bottle, and then snatched up my phone and stalked out of the kitchen in disgust.
I was not going to give Dave the satisfaction of getting drunk, even if he wouldn’t know about it.
The temptation to text Alec hit me hard, but I resisted. I’d seen him every day during the week since our lunch date and walk in the park, and it’d been at my instigation every time.
To be fair, I’d texted him when I woke up every day and hadn’t really given him time to try to get in touch with me first. To be even more fair, I’d probably been annoying him, even though he hadn’t said so. Maybe I’d been texting him early every day so that I wouldn’t have to be upset when he didn’t bother to get in touch himself. And maybe I needed to stop being self-aware. That only led to misery.
But I had to do something to distract myself from my annoyance with my brother and my fluttery feelings toward Alec, so I booted up my laptop and flopped down on the couch. I’d watch some Netflix, maybe. Or just scroll Facebook.
I ended up on the Burlington University chemistry department’s website, without my fingers receiving any conscious input. Looking at the stock photos of test tubes and serious-faced scientists having staring contests with lab equipment just made me sad. God, I missed that so much. Not the seriously-staring-at-experiments thing, since no one actually did that outside of nervous undergraduates doing their first titrations. The not-being-a-loser thing.
Honestly, I missed my research and my lab with a deep, miserable ache that I couldn’t soothe no matter how I tried to distract myself.
And Alec had made me think about it again, damn him, with his questions about why I’d ‘dropped out’ of my program and his comments about how I had to be smart to be in it in the first place. He’d made me wish I could’ve proudly told him all about the smart shit I did every day, and the much smarter shit I wanted to do. How I had goals, and was working to achieve them.
More subtly, the interest he’d stirred up in me, the passion, reminded me how it felt to actually want something. Spending time with Alec reminded me of spending time in the lab. I felt alive, and interested, and interesting, and I wanted to feel like that all the time—and for myself, not just because of a guy.
Although Alec had something else in common with tricky, often painstaking and pointless scientific research: he frustrated me like nothing else.
The day before yesterday, I’d lured him home with me and gotten him on my couch—and he’d put his arm around my shoulders while we watched a movie.
Yes, that was how far I’d fallen. I’d asked a guy I wanted to fuck to watch a movie with me, and then watched a movie with him. Everyone knew that was code for ‘Let’s ignore a movie while we screw around.’ Literally, everyone. My mother knew that, for fuck’s sake.
Except Alec, who left after the movie, with one quick peck on the lips and a few words about having to call in to the temp agency first thing in the morning.
To torture myself further, I clicked over to the page on the department’s website listing the grad students, and scrolled down. Jennifer Markham, Andrew Meng, Kaden Mueller.
No Gabriel Middleton. My gut clenched. Of course they’d removed me from the website. Of course they had, because I didn’t go there anymore. It hurt like a bitch, and I slammed the laptop shut and tipped my head against the back of the couch, squeezing my eyes shut. I missed my NMR spectrometer like some people missed their friends.
I mean, Marvin the spectrometer was my friend. Even after I’d spilled coffee on him that one time, he still worked. I certainly liked Marvin better than I liked Andrew Meng or Jennifer Markham, or God forbid Kaden Mueller, who heated up fish in the lab microwave.
I didn’t miss Kaden.
But I had to get my life on track. If my one bright spot consisted of a guy I’d only known existed for a few weeks, simply because he made my heart pound and he seemed to like spending time with me as a person and not just with my legs spread, then something had to give.
My phone dinged, and I picked it up half-heartedly, expecting a follow-up text from Dave with some kind of irritating reminder or other.
It was Alec.
Thinking about you. Want to get a late lunch?
Yeah, I still missed my studies and my colleagues and having the confidence that came with doing something productive and interesting in the world. But that all fell away for the moment. I hadn’t texted Alec; he’d actually reached out to me.
God, I was pathetic.
But at least I had a hot lunch date. I actually whistled on my way to get changed.
Alec
Gabe sighed in satisfaction as we strolled out of the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant he’d promised made the best pho in Vermont. He hadn’t been lying. The day had been a little cooler than average for May, but I felt pleasantly warm and relaxed from the food. The strip mall sat only a few blocks from his condo, and it wasn’t a busy neighborhood. A few people out and about, a couple of cars passing. Clear skies, but windy. Pleasant. I drew a deep breath, getting mostly fresh air with only a little tang of car exhaust. Some days, Burlington almost managed to be bearable.
And Gabe…he managed to be more than bearable. Every time I saw him, he got more so. Usually I hated people after having to talk to them for more than ten minutes. Fifteen, on a good day. But the way Gabe smiled made me want to smile more than I had in years—and it hadn’t taken me long to figure out how vulnerable he was, under the hair and the piercings and the cocky, fuck-me attitude he put on a lot of the time. It made me careful with him, kinder and less abrasive than I tended to be.
More than that, it made me want to be careful with him, and not out of some calculated act. Just because he deserved it.
“So what are you doing this weekend?” I asked. Christ, I was so lame. Standing here next to him, with the whole evening ahead of us if we wanted, and I’d already started thinking ahead to the next time I could see him.
Beside me, Gabe went a little tense, and I went from mellow to on alert in a second. No, I didn’t really think he had any nefarious plans, but…not completely out of the question. On the other hand, a date with another guy seemed far more likely.
And what the fuck was wrong with me, crack FBI special agent that I managed to be most of the time, that the former possibility bothered me way, way less than the latter?
“I have something on Friday night, but I’m mostly free,” he said after a moment, sounding a little strained.
Definitely full alert.
“Yeah? Should I call you on Saturday, or is this the kind of ‘something’ that goes into the next morning?”
Gabe stopped and looked up at me, his lips parted like his mouth had actually fallen open in shock.
Yeah, okay, I’d sounded like a jealous asshole, there. And I hadn’t even slept with him. What kind of crazy person kept sex off the table and then freaked out when the guy he’d been seeing got some elsewhere?
Oh,
yeah. The kind of guy who’d gone undercover and couldn’t fuck his target without being an even huger dick.
“Are you seriously asking me if I’m planning to get laid on Friday night?” He sounded more shocked than pissed. I figured pissed would be coming next. “Because I could be, if you wanted to sleep with me,” he added, with a glare to really drive his point home. Yep, there it was.
“You said it was okay if we took it slowly, Gabe.” And he had, when I’d come over to his place to watch a movie the other day.
That didn’t mean he had to take it slowly with anyone else, though.
“And I meant that,” he said. “But—oh, forget it.” His shoulders slumped, and he turned away, gesturing up the hill. “Head back to my place, maybe?”
I fell into step with him, though I didn’t press my luck by trying to take his hand. “Look, if you have a date, it’s okay. But I’d like to know either way.”
“It’s not a date. It’s a family thing.”
Ah. That explained his attitude, and I felt like a hundred-pound weight had just lifted off my shoulders.
“Some swanky party for an investor my dad’s trying to schmooze,” Gabe added disconsolately.
My heart started to thump for a set of reasons totally different from the usual where Gabe was concerned. Fuck, finally. I’d been waiting to try to bring up the subject of his family’s company. For one, I’d needed to wait until he felt more comfortable with me, and for two, I’d needed a good opening. I’d hoped that after another week or two I might be able to casually broach the idea of visiting the company headquarters, hopefully by pretending an interest in the manufacturing aspect of the business—although his disgust for boats in general made that dicey. But maybe his interest in me would outweigh his distaste for anything with a hull.
I hadn’t even dared to hope for Gabe to introduce the subject himself.
“Sounds kind of boring,” I ventured, trying not to sound too eager. And it did, honestly, if I’d meant to pay attention to the party itself. Outside of work obligations, I’d rather babysit my sister’s kids after they’d spent the whole day eating pure sugar than fake-smile my way through a corporate cocktail party. “Where is this thing? Somewhere nice, at least?”
Undercover (Vino and Veritas) Page 8