Covert Assignment Read online

  “What? What’s wrong?” Marni was still aghast at how infrequently Elle spoke to her parents. Elle was pretty sure Marni talked to her parents at least a few times a week on the phone.

  “Nothing,” Elle said as she started searching through their stack of takeout menus. “I got into Virginia.”

  “What? Oh my God!” Marni jumped up, looking like she was ready to dance. She stopped, scrutinizing Elle more closely. “Why aren’t we dancing? We should be dancing.”

  “I don’t dance,” Elle said as she tried to decide between Chinese and Thai.

  “Even you should be dancing at that news,” Marni said. “You’ve wanted to get into Virginia forever! Wait: how did your father know? The decisions don’t go out until this spring.”

  Elle sighed. “He called in a favor.”

  There was a moment of silence. “Hell must’ve frozen over,” Marni said. “He actually remembered you and did something for you.”

  Elle managed to chuckle as she pulled out her phone. She shook her head at Marni’s questioning look about the cracked screen and ordered some shrimp pad thai. Shrimp was a little more expensive, but she deserved to celebrate, although she didn’t really feel like celebrating. Somehow, getting into Virginia’s JD/MBA program felt… anticlimactic.

  “So what have I been holding out on?” she asked Marni. She didn’t want to talk about her lack of enthusiasm for her father’s news.

  “That hawt guy you had lunch with at The Purple Pig.” Marni didn’t waste any time getting back to the important stuff. “He was smokin’.”

  Elle drew up short. She hadn’t been expecting that comment. Marni had seen her with Preston? Of course Marni would have. The Purple Pig wasn’t just her favorite place for lunch: both Tina and Marni liked it, too. Why the hell hadn’t she thought of that yesterday? There were plenty of other places she could have suggested for lunch.

  “Tina and I saw you, but we didn’t want to interrupt,” Marni went on. “Talk about trading up! That guy is a thruster. He has to be.”

  This made Elle’s cheeks grow even hotter. She was sure Preston was too, but he was her- her colleague. He was fantasy material. That was it. “That’s Preston,” she said. “He works for Anderson Advertising, the company that’s funding my thesis.” As Elle continued talking, she realized something: this was the first time she had consciously lied to Marni about something important (things like lying about surprise birthday presents didn’t count). “They need the project done fast, so they sent him down to work with me.”

  Marni’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “You get to work with that gorgeous guy?”

  Elle laughed. “Yep.”

  “It’s a sign!” Marni decreed, waving her highlighter in the air (she had been reading before Elle came in). “That guy was into you. Both Tina and I could tell.”

  Elle gave her a “get real” look as she found a bottle of pop to open. “We’re- we’re colleagues,” she said.

  “Lots of people meet their future spouse through work,” Marni pointed out.

  Elle laughed as she settled into the bean bag chair. “Preston is not my future husband.” Although, if there were some type of matchmaking service that found everyone their spouses and she got paired with Preston, it certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world. And that was a bitchy thought, Elle realized, since she had told Adam they weren’t over.

  “Maybe he’s your future husband, maybe he isn’t. He looks like he would be a fun fling if nothing else,” Marni said. “You deserve to have some good sex. It can be better than what you get with thumper.”

  Elle winced as she remembered wiping off her mouth after Adam left her in the lab. Marni was no stranger to having sex with no strings attached, but she was good looking enough to do that. “That is not going to happen. Period.”

  “Why? At least just tell me why,” Marni demanded as she flopped back down onto the futon.

  Elle drank some pop, enjoying the burn of the carbonation. “Adam sent me flowers today.” Which, she realized, she had left at the lab. “And gourmet chocolate.”

  “You deserve at least a diamond,” Marni said. “And not a ring, either. Something you can keep even after you kick his ass to the curb.”

  Elle rolled her eyes.

  “I’m telling you,” Marni said, “that guy is interested in you.”

  “That guy belongs with… supermodels,” Elle said, “not a geek.”

  “You may be a geek,” Marni persisted, “but you don’t look like it.”

  When Elle rolled her eyes again, Marni sprang up and was dragging Elle out of her bean bag chair before she knew what was happening. Marni could not be stopped as she pulled Elle into the bathroom, where they had a large mirror that ran the length of the sink and countertop.

  “Look,” Marni insisted, holding Elle in front of her before the mirror. Although Marni was taller than Elle by a few inches, Elle’s, well, chunkier frame was wider than Marni’s. Elle wasn’t fat but she certainly wasn’t stick-thin, either, not that she needed reminding. After a moment of them both staring in the mirror, Marni took off Elle’s glasses.

  “Without those big glasses overwhelming your face, you look great,” Marni said, “although you look cute even with them.” She pulled out the elastic ponytail holder that held Elle’s hair out of her face, fluffing her hair up a little as it sprang loose.

  “I can’t see anything,” Elle said. “It’s all a blur.” This was true; she was very near-sighted. One of the first things she planned to get once she had a regular job was laser surgery for her eyes, but for now, contact lenses made her eyes water, so she was stuck with glasses.

  Marni sighed. “Even without you putting effort into your appearance, you’re pretty. If you tried-”

  “I’m not listening to this,” Elle said, pulling out of Marni’s grasp and putting her glasses back on. “I know what I look like.” She grabbed her elastic ponytail holder and gathered her hair back up. It was a nuisance to have it all loose and falling into her face.

  “You deserve more!” Marni insisted. “And the opportunity is right there for the taking!”

  The buzzer sounded, announcing the delivery of Elle’s dinner, so she went to answer it. But she couldn’t just forget about Marni’s words so easily. Was there an opportunity worth exploring?

  Chapter 12

  The next day Elle had a morning class and then went to the lab where Preston was hard at work. The flowers and chocolate were still on the table, undisturbed from the previous day. Elle made a mental note to take them home. A lot of people had access to the lab, so it wasn’t smart to leave things lying around.

  “Ready to strut your stuff?” Preston asked.

  Elle grinned. “Always.” She decided not to think about Marni’s wild ideas and just focus on work. He made work interesting, there was no question about that. Knowing she was working for the CIA was intriguing enough; Preston was icing on the cake.

  “So have you considered… continuing your association with us?” he asked.

  So much for fun. Elle sighed. “I found out last night I got admitted to my first choice for a joint law and business program,” she said and then wanted to stab herself in the eye. She wasn’t supposed to know that yet; it certainly wasn’t something she should discuss.

  Preston nodded, looking thoughtful. “Congratulations.” He moved the flowers aside so he could see her face clearly. “You don’t seem terribly… enthusiastic.”

  Elle shrugged. “I’ve wanted it for so long- my father first started talking to me about it when I was in grade school. Now I guess it feels… anticlimactic.” And then she wanted to kick herself. She was going to have to maim herself if she didn’t watch her loose lips. Why the hell was she talking about any type of climax, or lack thereof, with this hot guy?

  Preston’s smile suggested he hadn’t missed the reference. “Maybe it’s not the right match for you.”

  “This ‘match’ has been planned for a long time,” Elle said. “Years, as a matt
er of fact. It’s hard to just throw it away now.”

  “Things change.” Preston shrugged. “Commitment for the sake of commitment isn’t good for anyone.”

  Elle picked up one of the roses. It was still bright, the petals almost waxy. “Commitment is important. You can’t just drop things on a whim.” She faced his penetrating gaze. “I bet you work with detailed plans.”

  “Of course,” he replied, “but I’m flexible. It’s essential to take advantage of new opportunities.” Another laser-like gaze. “For any op.”

  Elle swallowed. Was she actually feeling tingly? “True- that’s true.” An awkward laugh escaped. “It’s just not me. I design models to organize data. Make order out of what looks chaotic.” That was often how massive datasets looked, too: chaotic, because they were. She enjoyed the challenge of figuring out the organizational patterns hidden in all that chaos.

  “And you’re very talented at it,” he said. “Just doesn’t seem like it would be used much in the legal arena. The corporate world could use it, but the corporate world is rather… dull.”

  Elle shuddered at the idea of working in corporate America. One of the reasons she rarely saw her father as a little girl, besides the fact that she hated his she-demon as much as the she-demon hated her, was because he always had to work. Between working and his new wife, there just wasn’t enough time for a daughter from a failed marriage. Work that sucked up her life did not appeal to her in the slightest.

  “I have zero interest in going corporate. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with a joint degree in law and business; I just figured it would give me options. My father always said, you can do pretty much anything with those degrees except practice medicine.”

  Preston said, “That’s the reason I went to work for the Agency: my father did it. I thought he was off saving the world, just like in the spy movies.”

  Elle wondered how much he could tell her about being a spy. “Is it just like in the movies?”

  “Kinda.” He grinned. “Although there are a lot more dull moments. But the important thing about a career is that it’s the right match-the best match- for you.”

  Elle realized she was pulling the petals off the flower, as if the answer lay at the center of the rose. “Knowing what’s the best match is the tough part, isn’t it? Especially since everything has its dull moments.”

  “But some things have more dull moments than others,” he said. “The dull moments are tolerable when you’ve made a good match.”

  Elle just held a bunch of petals in her hands now. That was the challenge: figuring out what was actually a good match and not just career-wise, either. “I wish there was a way I could develop a model that predicted the right match for me.”

  Preston smiled. “Sometimes you just have to sample things and see which variables end up being significant.”

  She tweaked models all the time with new variables, but it had never sounded so tempting.

  ***

  Over the next few weeks, things began to settle down, even if they weren’t “normal” by a long shot. Elle took her classes and spent many hours working with Preston. Jack and Henry sent a steady supply of data through the regular channels (they were still using the Anderson Advertising email addresses) for Elle’s search algorithms and models. The data Elle’s algorithms and models tagged looked like game players chatting to her, but apparently they were more than that. Preston knew how to decipher them. She didn’t have the clearance to know the details, but he could tell her that much.

  Working with Preston was… intoxicating. He kept her on her toes. Elle enjoyed having him around. Normally she worked in solitude, since each of Clark’s graduate students worked on separate projects that he oversaw. She even missed Preston on the occasional day he had to go somewhere. She never knew where he went but found herself actually worrying about him until he returned. Preston even found Adam’s ongoing stream of gifts amusing, but Adam didn’t find anything about him amusing.

  One night Elle and Adam were studying together in the lab. Adam had invited her over to his place a few times, but she still felt it was best not to put herself in an awkward situation. She knew better than to invite him to her place: Marni was still on the warpath. So they hung out together on campus, and the lab was a quiet place for them to work where they could spread out their laptops, books: everything they needed to study.

  “So how are things going with your thesis?” Adam asked as he stretched his back. They had been studying for a couple of hours.

  “Good- great, actually,” Elle said. “My models are really refined at this point: they separate players into specific groups with a high degree of accuracy.”

  “Are the groupings consistent?” he asked. He understood this stuff nearly as well as she did.

  “Over 95% of the time,” she replied, unable to keep a note of pride out of her voice. It was good to be able to talk about this with him. No one else, not even Preston, understood what she was doing as well as he did.

  He grinned at her. “Nice!”

  Elle stretched herself. She needed to remember not to hunch over her laptop so much. Or do more yoga. Adam didn’t bother to hide it as he checked her out. She was glad she wore a bra with a little bit of padding. Not much but any little bit helped, especially when wearing a sweatshirt. Bella surely didn’t need padding. She sunk back into her chair.

  “Preston helping you a lot?” Adam asked.

  “He doesn’t help me,” Elle said, a bit irritated at the implication she couldn’t do the work alone. “He doesn’t know about models. He’s using the data after I sort it.” She realized she better watch herself. This project was confidential.

  “Figures,” Adam said. “He doesn’t look like the type who would even begin to comprehend what you do.”

  “So this is your jab at Preston for the evening, huh?” She rolled her eyes but couldn’t help being a bit pleased. At least Adam cared, right? A sense of competition might even help keep him on the straight and narrow.

  “It’s not a jab,” Adam insisted. “Just- a fact. I know what it’s like to carry someone whose technical expertise is limited to posting on the internet.”

  “Yeah,” Elle replied, keeping her tone even with effort. “I guess you do.” The only difference was that there was no way she was “carrying” Preston. If she tried to do what he probably did in the field, she would likely end up dead in under twenty-four hours. If she tried to do what Bella did… well, she probably could do what Bella did, if she got some hair extensions and bought a pair of breasts.

  “Oh, come on,” Adam said, scooting his chair closer so he could slide his arms around Elle’s waist. “You know she doesn’t hold a candle to you.”

  On one hand, he was right: the two of them were in completely different categories. Which categories were considered appealing… that was where Bella probably had her beat. Adam never even mentioned her sext. She bit her lip, annoyed that heifer had come up yet again. Adam got her attention when he pulled her even closer.

  “We fit, you and me, right?” Before she could reply, he gave her a kiss. His hands slid under her sweatshirt, but the tank she wore under it kept their skin from touching. It didn’t stop his hands from sliding up until he was squeezing her breasts through her t-shirt and bra.

  “Adam.” She needed to stop this. When he touched her, it aroused many emotions but not necessarily the right ones. On one hand, she wanted him to continue. On the other, she wanted to kick him for doing this with another girl. Yet she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell him to stop as he pulled the tank out of her jeans, and then he was touching the bare skin of her torso as his hands glided up.

  “I’ve always wondered what it would be like…” Adam said between kisses as his fingers fumbled with her bra. When she knew they were going to have sex, she wore a front-clasp bra, since he struggled so much to get it off, but today she was wearing one that fastened in the back. He didn’t let that stop him, however; he just pushed the cups up. Feeling his
hands on her bare breasts got her heart going.

  Elle wasn’t sure she wanted to do this, but she wasn’t ready to tell him to stop, so she didn’t resist when he pulled her to the floor. That, unfortunately, was not the best move. The floor did have carpeting, but it felt like the carpeting was right over a concrete slab. If there was padding it was very thin. It didn’t seem to be a problem for Adam, but then, he was on top of her, so she guessed it wouldn’t be.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said as he continued to kiss and stroke her.

  “I- I’ve missed you, too.” Hadn’t she missed him? She should have. They hadn’t slept together since before Christmas.

  Adam began to kiss down her throat, leaving a very wet trail. She forgot all about the wetness when his lips reached her breasts, however. She could feel him and how hard he was through both of their jeans. Well, she had always heard make-up sex was hot. This could be her opportunity to find out. The floor wasn’t that hard…

  And then he bit one of her nipples.

  “Ouch!” Elle couldn’t stop herself from popping up, which caused her head to hit the bottom of the chair she had been sitting in just a few minutes before.

  “Oh- I’m sorry-” Adam sat up, pressing a hand to her forehead.

  “You know I don’t like that,” she snapped. She’d heard of “love bites,” but his teeth could rival a beaver’s.

  “I’m sorry- I couldn’t stop myself-”

  “Bella may like that-” She didn’t know where that had come from, but the words popped out of her mouth.

  Adam started, surprised by her words, as she pulled her bra down and then her tank and sweatshirt. “No, don’t do that-”

  “This is not a good place,” Elle said, trying to push her tank into the waistband of her jeans. It was too awkward sitting on the floor so she gave up. People let their tanks hang out beneath their sweatshirts anyway. She stood up. “The floor’s too hard.”