Unlovable (38 page)

“
To my car. We’re going to
my house.”

“
I can’t afford to skip
school again.” Oh, shoot, TMI.

He stopped dead and turned. “Why did
you skip school?”

I smiled. “I’ll tell you when we get
to your house.” His lips pinched into a thin line, he took my hand
and continued toward his car, murmuring the entire way.

He also drove way too fast. “You
should slow down, it’s beginning to rain. Besides, you’re going to
get a ticket if you keep driving this fast.”

“
I know a cop.”

The rain was teeming down by the time
we arrived at his house. He lifted me out of his car and straight
into his arms, carrying me inside, our lips never parted. He held
me next to him in the kitchen, still kissing me, neither of us
wanting to move for a long time. He eventually set me down, keeping
his arms around my waist.

“
Do you have any idea how
much I missed this?” I stroked the raindrops off his
face.

He chuckled. “I have a pretty good
idea.”

I tried slipping my arms around his
waist, instead bumping into a gun holster strapped to his shoulder.
I instinctively stepped back.

“
I’ll put this away.” He
quickly removed the gun and walked toward the kitchen cabinet
beside the stove. He opened the small drawer and pressed down on
the bottom. A piece of the cabinet popped up.

“
False bottom,” he said,
pointing to the drawer. “It’s a great hiding place for my
guns.”

He had more than one? I didn’t ask,
there were some things I wasn’t ready to deal with yet.

“
Can I see it before you put
it away?” In my mind, the thing was huge. I wondered how much my
fear had exaggerated the size.

“
Sure,” he said cautiously.
He handed me a towel to dry my face and hair off with, setting the
gun down on the counter next to me.

“
Don’t worry, I unloaded
it,” he pointed out. I carefully picked it up off the counter with
my thumb and index finger. “Every night, well, every morning
the past couple weeks, I come home, clean and empty it.”

“
What do you mean every
morning these past couple weeks?” I said, gently setting it back
down.

“
I’ve been sleeping in my
car,” he shrugged. My mouth dropped open. “Did you think I was
going to just walk away and let those goons come after you? When I
said I loved you, I didn’t mean for a week, or maybe a year, I
meant always, in the good times and the bad, through thick and
thin. I’m playing for keeps here, Mags. I hoped, given some time,
you’d feel the same way and take me back.”

Humbled, I wrapped myself up in his
arms and laid my head on his chest. “Someone up there must truly
love me to have sent you into my life. I guess you’d better tell me
about your job,” I said bravely. “If I’m going to love an MET
agent, I should probably know more about it. As long as it doesn’t
involve math,” I warned.

He laughed. “No promises.”

“
I’ll start from the
beginning to give you a total picture. My dad was a Chaplin in the
military, and he was also an undercover agent.”

“
A spy?” I said with
intrigue.

“
Yes. He and Booker’s dad,
Clifford, were in the same unit. Clifford was my dad’s commanding
officer and his best friend. I guess you could say Booker and my
friendship is a family tradition. He’s like a brother to
me.”

“
Do you have any other
siblings?”

“
No, my parents had a
difficult time getting pregnant, so when I finally arrived they
were ecstatic. My dad started training me as soon as I could
walk.”

“
Training you?”

“
He wanted me to be involved
in espionage too, you know, sort of a father and son team. It used
to drive my mother nuts,” he laughed. “She’d come home from
shopping and find her kitchen booby-trapped.”

“
I take it she didn’t want
you to be a spy.”

“
No, she thought a doctor
was a safer profession. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a spy,
like every little boy.

“
My dad would spread out the
pots and pans around the kitchen floor, and I had to walk around
them without touching them. As I got older and my skills improved,
he’d push the pans closer together.

“
When I turned 12, he
started placing bubble wrap on the floor. Do you have any idea how
hard bubble wrap is to walk on and not make a sound?” He shook his
head. “It took me two and a half years before I could cross it
quickly and quietly, or
Poof
, as you put it, and not break
any bubbles. We used to sneak up on my mom and scare the heck out
of her!”

I laughed. “Did you have to move
around a lot being in the military?”

“
Yes. It made schooling hard
so I was homeschooled. My mom liked it because she could have her
influence over me instead of my dad’s all the time. She taught me
to cook, and we took a cooking class together in
France.”

As he spoke, I noticed he had a tiny
freckle on his left ear lobe. Why hadn’t I seen that before? I
stretched up to kiss it.

He shivered. “Are you
listening?”

“
You took a cooking class in
France,” I parroted back.

“
I graduated from high
school at 16, and went straight to college. I was able to get my
bachelor’s degree by the time I was 19.”

I pulled back. “How old are
you?”

“
21.”

“
You’re 21?”

“
Does that bother
you?”

“
No, I guess not. So that’s
why Booker keeps calling me Jailbait.”

He laughed. “That’s Booker. He must
really like you if he gave you a nickname already.”

“
What’s your degree
in?”

“
Mathematics,” he said
reluctantly.

“
The way you love math is
wrong on so many levels,” I said, shaking my head.

“
Come on, let’s go sit on
the couch.” He took my hand and led us into the living
room.

“
Good, my feet are killing
me.” Not to mention the fact that my knees were still a little sore
from being tossed around. We sat down, and he guided my feet into
his lap.

“
I’ll massage them.” He
pulled off my shoes and began rubbing my feet.

“
You and Booker must have
spent a lot of time together growing up.” I sighed when he rubbed
an especially sweet spot on my foot.

“
Yes, our families were
tight. Booker’s dad died of cancer when he was only ten, and his
mom and sister were killed when he was 16.”

“
How?” I was
mortified.

“
Home invasion robbery. The
robbers thought they’d killed Booker too. My dad happened to stop
by and found him, he was barely alive. If he hadn’t gone over when
he did, Booker would have died.”

“
That’s
horrible.”

“
It was touch and go with
him for a while. He eventually pulled through and moved in with us.
I was only nine at the time. To me, he has always been my big
brother.

“
When he turned 18, my dad
pulled some strings and Booker joined the military under my dad’s
command. He took to the spy world like a duck to water. My dad once
told me he’d never seen anyone as talented as Book. He said the
only thing that scared him was Booker’s “save the world” mentality,
and the danger he put himself in trying to rescue
someone.

“
Booker was with me when I
found out my parents died in the plane crash. I was 19, and had
just graduated from college, he did for me what my parents had done
for him.

“
He’d finished his tour of
duty a couple years earlier, and had gotten involved with the DEA,
convincing me to join him, and we both ended up working with the
local MET. We’re still under the DEA, but we focus on drug
enforcement in urban areas throughout western New York, like here
in Port Fare.

“
I didn’t know there was a
serious drug problem here. I mean, I know kids who do drugs, I just
didn’t realize it was enough to merit the MET.” I remember Zack
trying to get me to smoke pot with him. As far as I knew, he never
dipped into the hard stuff.

“
When the three heroin
deaths hit here last summer, we both wanted to work the
case.”

“
Do you still think my mom
and I are involved?” I looked him straight in the eyes to watch his
reaction.

“
No, not you,” he said
carefully. “When Booker first asked me to get close to you and see
what I could find out, I told him he was wrong about your
involvement. He felt that physically you fit the profile, and he
wanted me to find out for sure. Plus, there was strong evidence
that your mom was involved.”

“
She’s not. I searched the
house from top to bottom. There are no drugs anywhere. And Cole did
a drug screen on her, it came up negative.”

“
Maybe she and Hoffman are
just friends then.”

“
He’s a heroin dealer?” That
was why they suspected my mom. The phone rang interrupting our
makeup session.

“
Hold on.” He looked down at
his cell phone. “It’s Booker, I better answer.”

“
Hey, Book. No, not yet. Oh,
really,” he said, his expression grew dark. “I see. Anything else?”
There was a long pause, and his eyes flared more than once. “Thanks
for letting me know, I’ll take care—No, Booker, I want to. Fine.”
Whatever was going on, it wasn’t good. “I see your point. Make sure
you do it right. Thanks,” he said, snapping the phone shut
firmly.

“
Is everything alright? Did
he find out more about the Dreser brothers?”

“
No, nothing
new.”

I decided now was a good time to start
being supportive and didn’t press him for more
information.

“
So do you have a code
name?” I teased, trying to lighten the mood.

“
Kid. Booker’s called me it
my whole life. It doesn’t help that I have a baby face
too.”

“
What about Booker?” Maybe I
could get some ammunition for the next time he called me
Jailbait.

“
He had several different
names he used for missions. He liked to switch it up. His last
name, Gatto, literally means
cat
in both Spanish and Italian, so he was partial to
powerful cat names like panther, or black tiger. The guys used to
tease him about it. They’d call him things like Miss Kitty, or
Garfield, pretending they had forgotten his real code name. He
didn’t think it was that funny.”

“
Hmmm, that’s good to know,”
I said, already making a mental list of all the cat names I
was going to use on him.

“
Don’t push him too hard,
Maggie,” Seth said, reading my expression. “He can be one mean
little kitty.” I can hardly wait to see Booker again!

“
I’m glad there are no
secrets between us, Maggie. Let’s promise never again to keep
anything important from each other, anything personal
anyway.”

“
I promise.” I held out my
little finger and wiggled it. “Come on, pinky swear.” He rolled his
eyes as we intertwined our little fingers. “These are eternally
binding, ya know.” He nodded, kissing our little fingers as if to
seal the deal.

“
Alright, let’s test this
little pinky swear. How did you get those bruises?”

“
You set me up again. You
forgot to mention MET agents are devious.” He threw his head back
and laughed, and the sound filled my heart.

“
It happened Thursday after
the pep rally.” He began rubbing my calves, it felt even more
amazing than the foot rub, and I almost forgot what we were talking
about. “Focus, Maggie,” I mumbled aloud. “Hillary and Zack planned
it so I’d show up at his locker as she started kissing you. Hillary
thought one kiss from her, and the two of you’d fall madly in love,
forgetting I ever existed.”

He let out a snort. “As if that could
ever happen.”

“
Zack assumed I’d jump into
his arms for comfort.”

“
Comfort? Nothing else?” He
arched a brow.

“
Okay, he was hoping for a
little more. He grabbed my face and forced me to kiss him. That’s
what these bruises are from.”

“
And then?”

“
He followed me out to the
parking lot where we began arguing again. I was able to convince
him to leave, and that’s pretty much the whole story.”

“
How about your knees?” He
slid the legs of my jeans up over my knees so fast I didn’t have
time to pull them away. He gasped when he saw the cuts and bruises.
They looked worse today than the day it had happened.

“
Dwayne,” I hissed under my
breath. I yanked my legs away and stomped over to the
kitchen.

Seth followed. “Can I see your arms?”
I thought of hiding them behind me except why bother. “I thought we
weren’t going to keep important things from each other, Maggie? I’d
call this important.”

“
No, I told you what
happened, he was a little out of control, but I handled it,
and
I’m planning on
talking to Mrs. Volkel about it, so this is no longer an
issue.”