May Contain Spies: A Spy Thriller (Meet Abby Banks Book 1) (2 page)

“No. I just kept hearing weird noises in the middle of the night. They kept waking me up,” I said as I reached back and touched my ear. Good, it was saliva free… for now. “It also doesn’t help that my cat has decided that my legs are something she must attack with unholy vengeance at four AM every morning.”

I don’t know why, but for the last couple weeks my cat had started acting like a crazy animal. She was a feral kitten we’d rescued from the neighbor’s dog about six months back, and she had never really gotten used to humans. You might say that she was deathly afraid that all people, other than me, were going to eat her. She had been particularly frightened as of late, and I just didn’t get it.

Now, every time I came home, she followed me around like a dog, jumping into my lap at all possible times and generally invading my personal space. At night, she had taken to sleeping on my feet, which seemed normal enough, but every so often she pounced on me, leaping on my legs like a terror and scaring the bejesus out of me.

“I’m surprised you still have that cat. You are the least likely person in the history of the universe to own a cat. And I thought your mom was allergic.”

“Why would I get rid of the cat? I like her fine. Besides, animals love me.” I smiled and glanced back at Lisa. Her notes were covered in weird drawings and that made me a little sad. Lisa never studied or took notes. She just got perfect scores on everything like some sort of super-genius robot. Then again, she could be a robot. Both of her parents were super-engineers, able to design tall buildings in a single evening. If anyone could design a genius robot daughter, it would be them.

“But Abby,” Lisa replied, “you’ve killed every single pet you’ve ever owned. You remember the summer of fish, don’t you?”

I did, in fact, remember the summer of fish. It was two summers ago, the summer before Lisa and I entered high school. For my ‘making it into high school without burning down the house’ gift, my mother had bought me a fifty-five gallon fish tank.

Lisa and I had poured through various fish books until we had selected a tankful of hopeful fishes that promptly died within a week. So we’d tried again. More dead fish. Every week for an entire summer, we replaced every single fish in the tank, and every single week they all died. I’d done everything I could think of to fix the problem, from checking the water every ten seconds to paying a creepy guy at the pet store to come help me with the tank.

No matter what we did, every stupid fish died. Then my mom had come along and put a single goldfish she’d won at the fair in my tank. The damn goldfish was still the only thing in the tank.

“I think a cat is a bit harder to kill than a fish,” I murmured.

“We’re not talking a single fish. We’re talking hundreds of fish. The pet store even has a rule about selling you things now. Normal people aren’t banned from buying fish at a pet store,” Lisa continued as the bell rang, dismissing us from the last class of the day.

I shoved my stuff in my bag and jumped to my feet. My stomach did a tiny flip flop as we headed toward the door. I was supposed to head straight to work. My mom would be waiting when I got there, and if I didn’t know any better, so would Stephen. This time, I was going to talk to him.

“So are you excited for your big date?” Lisa asked as we walked to her car. It was a beat up old Chevy that was older than Lisa by at least five years. Her parents had said she could have any car she wanted, and she’d chosen this thing. Someone had been trying to trade it in while she and her parents had been at the car dealership, and she’d declared it cute. She also said I was cute, so my self-esteem didn’t allow me to take her opinion of cute very seriously.

“It’s not a date. I’m just going to ask him what his deal is,” I replied.

“And then you guys are totally going to make out, aren’t you?” Lisa scrunched up her face and made kissy noises as she unlocked her car.

Without waiting, I threw open the back door of her car and was assaulted by a cloud of warm, stagnant air.

“Yeah, so, I spilled some grape juice this morning. I sprayed it with deodorizer though, so it should be okay soon,” Lisa murmured, getting into the car without further comment.

I hesitated for a moment and touched the floor in front of the passenger seat. My finger sank into the damp fabric. I sighed. There was no use in complaining about it. Silently, I got into the car and with an awkward sort of squelch, placed my feet into the swampy mess.

“So how much juice did you spill?”

“About half a liter but I sprayed deodorant, so it should fix itself,” Lisa assured me once again.

“And you aren’t the least bit worried about the horrible damage to your car, or the possibility of bacteria growing down there?” I inquired.

“I sprayed deodorant,” Lisa replied as though she wanted to end this conversation.

“Ah… I see. You have a dangerous amount of faith in that stuff,” I said with a smile.

“A world where deodorant doesn’t fix grape juice spills is a world I don’t want to live in,” Lisa said as she shifted the car into gear as she sped down the road. “It’s not a world anyone wants to live in.”

My mom was waiting for me at the restaurant. Sometimes I wondered how she had come into possession of the place since she had all the cooking skill of a half-frozen iguana. She burned water once. What kind of person burns water and decides it would be a fantastic idea to open a restaurant?

My mom.

Then again, she didn’t cook in the restaurant. Other people did that. She just handled all the business stuff and paid her staff, namely me, nothing to run the place. To say that Esmeralda Banks was a slave driver was being cruel to slave drivers. I’m serious. Last Christmas, Mario, the night cook, had given her a whip as a gag gift. It was now hanging in her office.

“Hello Pun’kin,” my mom said in her melodic voice that made her seem less like a businesswoman and more like Cinderella. I didn’t know what it was, but nearly every time I heard her voice, I could imagine small woodland creatures coming to her beck and call like they would for one of those Disney princesses.

“Hi, Mom,” I said as I slipped into the backroom to change into my formless uniform. My voice, unfortunately, could not summon wayward wildlife to my aid. In fact, most everything about us was pretty different. My mom was five-foot two inches with waist length blonde-hair, brilliant green eyes, and huge boobs. I, on the other hand, was five-foot eight inches with almond-colored hair, hazel eyes, and well, let’s just say that I sometimes wondered if the family boobs had decided to skip my generation.

I was also super-klutzy while my mom could have thrown a string through the head of a needle from fifty feet away. I guess hand and eye coordination skipped me too.

“How was your day?” my mom asked. I wasn’t sure if she actually wanted an answer. She asked me various questions about my day every day, but I’d put the actual listening to what I said ratio somewhere around twenty-five or thirty percent. Which, if she was a professional baseball player, would be an awesome batting average. For a professional mother? Not so much.

“It was awesome. Mr. Olson let us play jump-rope with the boa constrictors,” I replied, totally straight-faced.

“Really? How many jumps can a boa constrictor do before it gets tangled in the ropes?”

“Forty-two,” I replied with a smile. So she had been listening after all.

“Well, you’re on your own for dinner, dear. I’m fairly certain you won’t starve. Oh, and I hired another person. He’s starting today. Try and behave yourself.” With that, my mom was out the door. That was probably all the bonding time I was going to get for the day. She’d probably be asleep by the time I got home. Early to bed, early to rise and all that.

Then it dawned on me. She had hired someone? My mom, the infamous cheapskate, had hired another person? For the night shift? That didn’t seem right. Then again, I’d been begging her to hire someone so I could get some time off. Maybe this was an early Christmas gift? Whatever, I was going to train the new guy and be out of here before Stephen showed up to stalk me.

I hurried toward my station at the front. Someone was standing at the station next to mine, turned toward a customer so I couldn’t see his face. Still, he looked familiar, which made sense I suppose. He probably went to my school. Chances I knew the person were pretty high… and my mom hadn’t even asked me about it. What if it was someone I didn’t like? Or worse yet, someone I did.

I took a deep breath and forced myself not to blush or jump to insane conclusions before I had even said hello. One glance at the line told me that I should probably step up and help the new guy. He was probably going slowly because he didn’t know the register. That had to be the reason for the line. We were never this busy at three-thirty on a Wednesday.

“Hi, welcome to Esmeralda’s. How can I help you?” I asked, stepping up to my station and waving over the first customer in line.

He was an older gentleman with graying hair and a nice suit. A little too nice to be in a place like this. Now, granted, we got a lot of out of town business because we were the best burger place in town. Another thing that made no sense since my mom had made up all the recipes. But still. This guy’s suit had to have cost more than I made in a month, maybe a year. Why was he buying a six dollar hamburger?

The man smiled, his white teeth flashing as his hand flew up to point at the menu behind me. So he was one of those people who pointed at the menu as though I’d never seen it before. There was always at least one.

I keyed in his order, turned to my new man-at-arms and gasped. There, standing next to me helping customers, was Stephen. Even in the stupid uniform that made me look like a sexless, curveless troll, he looked like a movie-star.

Stephen flashed a million-dollar smile at me and went back to helping guests. I gulped and put my hands numbly on my register as questions raced through my mind. Why was he here? Why had my mother hired him, the crazy stalker, of all people? Did my breath smell okay?

I shook my head and tried to ignore him and focus on my work. Maybe if I didn’t say anything he would just vanish from sight. Yet, even as I steadily worked my way through the throng of customers, doing my best not to even look at Stephen, I knew he was there. It was just too tempting to look over at him, to want to touch him to see if he was real. I know it sounds a little gross, but trying to ignore him was like trying to stop scratching at a scab. The more I tried to ignore him, the greater my urge to look at him became.

When the last customer had been helped, I sighed in relief and turned toward Stephen. He was already staring at me with those piercing blue eyes of his. If I could have, I’d have taken a step back. The breath I’d taken whooshed out of me as he took a step toward me and took my hand in his. I wanted to say something to him. Hell, I wanted to pull my hand from his, but his hand was so strong, so warm and comforting, that I just couldn’t bear the thought of pulling mine away.

I was strangely glad that Lisa had just dropped me off and decided not to follow me inside once she’d caught sight of my mom. If she saw me holding hands with Stephen in the middle of the restaurant I’d never live it down. I’d have to move, change my name to Veronica, and live out in the middle of a forest picking berries and foraging for wild roots… and I really disliked berries and roots.

“I asked your mom for this job so I could spend some more time with you.” Stephen’s smile seemed to light up the entire room, and the only thing I could do was nod dumbly. Part of me was freaking out. He had gotten the job so he could spend more time with me? Time sanctioned by my mother no less? This guy was good, a little too good…

The other part of me could have floated off into the clouds under the power of his smile. I’d never been the dopey girl in one of those movies that gets asked out by the captain of the football team or anything, but right now? Right now, I was pretty sure I knew how that girl felt.

Chapter 3

“I’ve been coming here for a while, I don’t know if you’ve noticed.” Stephen blushed and for a second, uncertainty flashed across his face. “I’ve been trying to keep a low profile.”

How could I have not noticed the super-hot guy staring at me every day for the past few weeks? Even if I wasn’t boy crazy, I’d have had to have been blind not to notice him. I swallowed once and tried to search for something to say, but as the butterflies fluttered around in my stomach, I couldn’t figure out how to talk. I couldn’t even make sounds, let alone words.

“Every day I’ve been trying to think of a good way to talk to you and every single day I got too embarrassed. Today, I finally decided I was going to talk to you,” he said, shaking his head as if dismissing an errant thought. “It’s important that I talk to you.”

He pulled his hand away from mine and wrung it nervously. I think this conversation might have sounded better in his head because it was sounding a little bit creepy to me. I mean, yeah, I was beyond flattered. This was exactly how it happened in those movies and everything, but… in real life, things like this don’t happen, and especially not to me, little miss average. I was neither special enough nor unspecial enough to have things like this happen.

Then again, he could have been waiting for me to say something. I wasn’t exactly holding up my end of the conversation. To be honest, I’m not sure what I would have said if I could have said something. When I replayed this scene in my head a few minutes from now I was going to come up with tons of awesome things I could have said. Unfortunately, right now my mind was tapping out.

“I… er… um…” I mumbled, my mouth moving awkwardly like a fish out of water. I was pretty sure I knew other words to say and that the ones I had said weren’t helping the conversation along. I just didn’t know why.

I put my hand on the counter and smiled dumbly. My hand still tingled from where he’d touched it. His skin was so soft, so smooth. I blushed again and tried to ignore the things that tightened low in my belly, tried to resist the urge to leap on him and kiss him all over. Part of me knew that if I tried, my shaky knees would collapse under me, and I’d topple to the ground, but strangely, I couldn’t think of a good reason not to reach out and run my hands over his well-muscled body.