Moving as silently as I could, I leapt into the Jacuzzi and pressed myself against the bottom, using the side to obscure myself from view as best I could. I spent exactly three seconds seriously hoping that Kann—assuming that he was the one who’d crashed our spy party—wouldn’t come into the bathroom, and another two hoping that Tara had opted for hiding herself over attempting to seduce our mark.

Despite the fact that their threat levels weren’t that high, the TCIs were on the Watch List for a reason. Jacob Kann was dangerous, and as I thought of my partner out there with him, I had to push down the urge to go charging out of the bathroom, half-dressed, and take him down. Only the incessant training that had been drilled into my head over the past month—do not physically engage a mark unless specifically instructed to do so; protect your cover and trust your partner to protect herself—kept me from doing just that, and the training only held me off for an additional six seconds. Luckily, in that time, Jacob Kann muttered several curses about females under his breath, grabbed what sounded like a set of keys off of a dresser, and stomped back out the door.

Cautiously, I stuck my head out of the bathroom and saw Tara maneuvering back through the window.

“Hang from the ledge?” I asked her.

“Dove into the bathtub?” she returned.

I threw my top on instead of responding, and she grabbed my hard drive out of the computer. “Lucky for us, Kann is oblivious,” she said, tossing it to me with one hand and hitting the computer’s power button with the other. “Ready to run?”

I caught the hard drive and slipped it back onto the chain around my neck. “Run?”

Tara shrugged, seemingly nonplussed by our brush with getting busted. “He came up here to pick up his car keys,” she said, “and we still need to tag his car.” With that, she ducked back out the window, and I followed, a little bewildered, but in too much of a hurry to ask.

“Fire escape,” I noted as we started taking the stairs down two at a time.

“Leads directly to the parking lot.”

“Convenient,” I said.

“Fast,” Tara said, her tone completely conversational.

“We may have to jump the last flight if we want to beat Kann to his car.”

“Like I said,” I told her. “Convenient.”

After that, we just ran. Most people vastly underestimate the amount of conditioning done by the average cheerleader. I was in the best shape of my life, and it wasn’t because of the spy half of our gig. Moving in perfect synchrony, Tara and I reached the top of the last flight, and in the interest of saving time, we flipped ourselves off the side, braced and ready for impact. Like the good cheer girls we were, we stuck our landings. I met Tara’s eyes for a split second, and she nodded toward my chest—and the tracking chip that was somehow, miraculously, still in my bra.

“You go,” she said. “I’ll run interference if you need more time.”

She was the senior partner, and that was an order. I didn’t question it, I didn’t resent it. I just followed it. I slipped the chip out of my bra, and still moving at warp speed, scanned the parking lot and zeroed in on covered parking. Given his luxury digs, our mark definitely seemed the type to shell out a few extra bucks in order to park in the shade. After that, the Bentley wasn’t hard to find.

Within seconds, I was under the car, fastening the chip into place. Working with the last of my momentum, I rolled out the other side just as Tara intercepted our mark several cars down.

“Have you seen a blue ribbon?” I heard her ask, and even from under the car, I could make out the sexy pout in her voice. “My friend seems to have lost hers.”

Realizing that Tara had given me the perfect excuse for being on the ground near Kann’s car, which probably would have appeared somewhat sketchy in most situations, I ripped the ribbon out of my hair and then popped to my feet.

“Found it!” I held the ribbon up triumphantly and hoped that it never occurred to Kann that I might have been up to something other than ribbon chasing.

One look at our mark’s face told me that he wasn’t the type to go gaga for cheerleaders. In fact, all evidence suggested that he was the type to roll his eyes and dismiss their missing ribbons out of hand.

Perfect.

I started walking away from Kann’s car, and he brushed past me to get to the driver’s-side door. My back to the car, I walked toward Tara. Behind me, I could hear Kann’s keyless entry beeping, and I glanced over my shoulder to see him reaching for the door handle.

And in that moment, that single quarter of a second before Kann pulled the door open, I remember wondering why I’d looked back. And then the moment was over, Kann opened the door, and with a sonic boom, the entire thing exploded into flames.

Tara reacted faster than I did. She dove on top of me, forcing me to the ground and out of the way of flying debris. My head hit the pavement, and the last thing I remember thinking before losing consciousness was that if Tara had been a second slower, or if I’d been any closer to the car, I’d be dead.

CHAPTER 9

Code Word: Naked

Jack is standing next to me. My hands are sweating. I think he’s asking me to dance, but there isn’t any noise coming out of his moving mouth, and really, he should know better than to make any such requests. I don’t dance.

The world around me jumps violently, and when it finally stands still again, I’m dancing, and I don’t understand why. As we’ve already established, I don’t dance. And yet…

My body is moving faster than I can mentally keep track of the motions. I have no control over the spastic, sensual movements, and Jack’s just standing there, looking at me, and all of a sudden, I’m wearing my cheerleading uniform, and Jack is Lucy, and she has a giant fish in each hand.

No, not fish. She has knives. Or is that dynamite? Wait, it’s Chinese throwing stars. Definitely Chinese throwing stars. She throws them at me, and all of a sudden, the stars are fish, and I’m not wearing anything but a towel. And then Lucy is Jack again, and the battle star fish have exploded into confetti.

“And this year’s homecoming queen is…” The voice on the loudspeakers sounds suspiciously like Ryan Seacrest. The words echo in my head—tiny, audible portents of doom.

Jack stares at me with an ironic smile on his face. My heart thumps viciously in my chest, and I wish to God I was still dancing, because even that was better than this.

“Toby Klein!”

It takes me a moment to process that they’ve said my name and another to realize what it means. No. Oh, no.

All eyes are on me, and when I look down to avoid their stares, I realize that I have much bigger problems than any tiaras in my immediate future.

The towel is gone, I’m naked, and Jack is staring at me. Again.

“Toby.” Tara’s voice broke into my mind, and it was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as consciousness seeped slowly back into my body, I realized that I had a headache roughly the size of North America. On the other, however, waking up made me realize that the whole thing with the nakedness and Jack and being the homecoming queen was just a nightmare, and that was a Very Good Thing.

“Ow.” I put my thoughts into words as coherently as I could.

“I know,” Tara said. “You took a pretty hard hit to the head. We need to get it checked out.”

I blinked several times and then set about trying to figure out where I was and what Tara was talking about. I’d just realized that I was in the backseat of Tara’s car when her words finally triggered something in my mind.

“Hit to the head. As in my head and the ground? Or my head and flying debris? Because the car…” I trailed off.

“Oh, God, the car.”

“You’re okay,” Tara said, her voice low and smooth.

“You’re going to be fine.”

I sat up, slowly, and Tara leaned toward me. She took my head in her hands, and peered carefully at my eyes.

“Your pupils aren’t dilated,” she said. “Can you track my finger?”

I followed her French-manicured index finger as it zipped back and forth.

“Headache?” she questioned.