by Lynne Silver
In his memory, Casey’s warm body had pressed against his, and he’d wrapped his arms around her, pulling her in close. His lips and tongue had known what to do despite their relative inexperience.
The Kiss—as he thought of it—probably hadn’t been that great. It was purely the glow of time settling on the memory. It was this kiss that kept Casey in his mind, even ten years after graduation. It kept her as the pinnacle of women and prevented him from getting serious about any of the women he dated.
“Uh, yeah, it’s me.” Then silence.
Way to be cool, Sam.
Luckily, he didn’t have to say anything at first, because she launched into discussing something that let him listen to her smooth and professional voice without paying attention to her actual words.
The second he’d picked up the phone, Sam was transported back to high school, and his stomach clenched as his sweaty palm gripped the receiver. He heard words coming out of Casey’s mouth and heard his own mouth making responses, which was tricky, considering his brain was in an alternate universe.
“Sam, are you there?” he heard Casey ask.
“Um, yeah. Still here,” he answered.
“So you can do it?”
“Yeah, of course. Wait, do what?”
“Can you come to give a talk on careers in law enforcement on career day?” Casey asked, sounding a little impatient. “What’s up with you? I thought you would’ve changed since high school, especially being an FBI agent, but seems like you’re still living with your head in computer code.” It was something Casey had often teased him about.
Ironic, really, since he was always on the ball and on point until she was in his space. Then he couldn’t stop staring at her long, almost-red hair and skin that looked softer than silk. As he’d gotten older, he’d also been nervous around her, waiting for her to tease him about leaving letters in her locker, but she’d never done that.
Casey Cooper was the one woman in the world who got his hyper-focused brain to short-circuit. If that wasn’t a reason to stay far away from her, he didn’t know what was. But circumstances and the alphabet had thrown them together time and again. They always had to sit next to each other at any large school ceremony, including graduation. They were placed in the same required classes such as Intro to World History, and worst of all, PE. Freshman year, PE had been co-ed. What sadist had invented co-ed PE for high schoolers? Someone who liked to watch underdeveloped adolescent boys get their asses wiped up and down a lacrosse field in front of girls, that was who.
Sam forced his mind back to the present day. “Yes. I can come do career day. And I’ll be at our reunion,” he blurted, and then remembered to add, “if work allows.”
“Oh, okay great.” Casey sounded as if she could not care less. “Gotta go.”
“Wait.” Sam remembered why he’d called in the first place. “Any chance Montgomery Prep’s been hacked recently?”
Casey’s tone suddenly sounded a lot less distant and a lot sharper. “Why do you ask? What have you heard?”
“I’m not at liberty to say,” Sam said cagily. It was a good tactic to let people think you knew a lot and they’d reveal more than you’d asked. Silence was his friend—an interrogation technique he’d picked up a few years back.
“As far as I know, we’re fine,” Casey said, “but I heard about Wooton.”
“What’d you hear?”
“That they were hacked and the parent body is freaking out that a lot of their personal information was leaked. It’s a total nightmare. Think about how much data a school has on each student and their family.”
There was an awkward moment of silence as they both remembered that back when Sam had been in high school, he’d hacked into the school’s database just to see if he could. The problem was that the wrong Cooper had come up and that was how he’d learned Queen Bee Casey’s dirty secret: that she’d also been a scholarship student, something she’d teased Sam about.
She was the only person ever, besides his coworkers, who knew what he’d done, and proving that adolescent boys were truly idiots, he’d gone to Casey in a lame attempt to bond with her over both of them being on scholarship.
Unfortunately, his plan had backfired, and instead of bringing them closer, Casey had been super angry, threatening to report his actions to the head of the school. To stop her, Sam had said he’d spread the word that she was on scholarship. For three years, they’d lived with an uneasy truce.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” she asked.
“I do see the irony, yeah,” Sam responded softly. He swallowed and stared at the headshot of Casey on the Montgomery Prep website, which he’d pulled up during their conversation. Yeah, he still had it bad for her. “Casey, I never really apologized for what happened. I was an idiot to look into those records, and once I did, I never should’ve told you what I’d seen.” He swallowed and reached a finger out to stroke her face on the screen, pulling back before making actual contact.
She snorted. “Yeah, because you could lose your job if I ever decided to tell the FBI that you once were a hacker, not to mention you would’ve been kicked out of school if I’d told on you.”
“Actually, the FBI knows. I told them during my interview process.”
Casey was silent over the phone, and then she said, “It was your good luck I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it to hide my own scholarship.”
“I would’ve deserved it. I shouldn’t have blackmailed you.”
“Damn straight.”
“I hadn’t wanted to upset you,” he said. “In my own awkward way, I was trying to be sympathetic and tell you there were worse things in the world than being on scholarship. Instead I ended up being an asshole who blackmailed you, which I never wanted to do. You should’ve called my bluff. I wouldn’t have said anything about your scholarship.”
“I understand that now,” Casey said, sounding softer and sweeter than Sam had ever heard from her. “I…” But whatever she was about to say, he wouldn’t find out, because she broke off and then finished with, “Why were you asking me about the hackings? The private school community is small, but not so small that they’d share their dirty laundry with me.”
“Gotcha,” he said, disappointed that the moment of sweetness was gone. He’d always suspected that whomever could break through Casey’s diamond shell would discover pure powdered sugar underneath, and for too many years he’d tried to be that boy. Now, as a man, it seemed he was still trying.
“You know who to call if Montgomery Prep is hacked.”
She gave a low, sexy chuckle. “Will do, but let’s hope you never hear from me.”
Ouch. “See you at the reunion,” he said, but she’d already hung up, which was a good thing because he undoubtedly would have done something stupid, like ask her to be his date to the reunion. Yeah, like she didn’t already have a date, and if she didn’t, she still wouldn’t want to go with him.
Sam slowly rested the receiver in the cradle and cursed out loud. Loud enough to get a glance from his across-the-cubicle-wall neighbor.
“Bad case?”
“It’s nothing,” Sam said. It was nothing, and he was pissed as hell that two seconds on the phone with Casey Cooper had reverted him back to the insecure, underdeveloped geek that he had been in high school.
It was ten years later, and he’d grown a little past six feet, worked out every day in the gym with the result of decent muscles, and had a brain muscle that surpassed the external physical ones. According to his last few girlfriends, smart was sexy. So, all in all, he was the total package, and he had to remember that the next time he interacted with Casey Cooper.
In fact, maybe if she saw him in person, she’d see him as he was now and not how he’d been. If he saw her in person, maybe he’d see that she was just a woman, maybe even not as fabulous as his last girlfriend.
Except his last Facebook stalk had revealed that she was prettier now than she’d been in high school. She’d finally allowed herself to eat mor
e than three Tater Tots, and her breasts and ass, which had been spectacular before, were now hovering in the out-of-this-world plane.
The more Sam thought about it, the more he liked the idea of seeing her again. He didn’t want to see Casey for the first time at the reunion. He wanted to see her sooner. He’d wanted to see her a lot during the past ten years—eight, really, if you counted their freshman and sophomore years at college, which Sam didn’t since Casey and he had barely seen each other except in passing.
Since you couldn’t call someone you hadn’t been friends with out of the blue to ask them to hang out, he’d never contacted her. He had a reason now. A legit reason. He needed more information on how the administration of a private school operated, and she might help him to see a pattern in how the school crimes were connected. Who better to help him than Casey? He’d show up at the school without an appointment tomorrow. Surprise her and see how she handled getting thrown off her game.
Chapter Three
Chemistry Class, Sophomore Year
Casey yawned and tried not to think about lunch, which was her next period. Today was Tater Tot day in the cafeteria, which she considered her personal hair shirt to wear on Tuesdays. She’d eat exactly one cup of lettuce—and only one cup—without dressing. The homecoming dance was in two weeks, and Amanda had said she could borrow her blue dress. Mom had already said heck no to a new dress, and Casey refused to wear her cousin’s hand-me-down, which was totally out of style. She had to lose five pounds if she wanted Amanda’s dress to fit. Plus, her thighs were looking super huge lately.
Her stomach growled embarrassingly, earning a side glance from Sam Cooper. Why did teachers at this school love seating their students alphabetically? It meant she spent half her life next to Sam, the biggest loser in the grade. So what if he had the highest GPA? All he talked about were computers and that stupid Buffy the Vampire Slayer show. And yet, she saved every one of those little notes he left in her locker—notes he thought she didn’t know were penned by him. She’d throw them away tonight. Probably.
“Stop looking at me,” she whispered.
Instead of looking away, he stared steadily at her as if he could see all her secrets—the ones she tried hard to conceal. She looked away, and the periodic table under her own gaze grew blurry as she concentrated on staving off the sharp pain in her stomach. She swore she could smell the fried potatoes from the cafeteria all the way here, even though the chem lab was in another building.
“Lunch is soon,” Sam whispered. “Ten more minutes.”
She removed her palm from her abdomen. “Shut up. I’m not hungry.”
He gave her a strange look, which she ignored. Ten interminable minutes later, the chimes sounded; no buzzer for the sensitive ears of D.C.’s elite children. Casey shot to her feet and gathered up her books. As usual, her friends and hangers-on circled her.
“Going to lunch, Casey?”
“Wanna sit together?”
She ignored that. If you had to ask, you weren’t getting a seat.
“God, Mrs. Jimenez is so boring. I thought I was going to start snoring.” That came from Lawrence Posner, one of her friends and captain of the school tennis team.
“I know, right?” she replied. “Total snoozeville.” They started to exit the classroom together. Lawrence had a girlfriend, but he also flirted with Casey, creating a healthy friction between the girls. “I swear I’m going to fail this class if I can’t stay awake during it.”
“I can help you,” Sam spoke up from behind them.
Lawrence glanced around. “Didn’t see you there, Cooper.” A snide reference to Sam’s size. “You could get a private tutor,” he said to Casey. “I have one for English. She writes all my essays for me.”
“Maybe,” Casey said noncommittally.
Those private tutors cost a whack. She’d looked into it when all her friends admitted to having a host of academic tutors and private coaches for tennis or softball pitching lessons. It seemed every parent in D.C. was willing to pay to make sure their child had an edge. She’d have to sharpen her own edge. Her mom could never afford private tutoring for anything. She’d also been lying about failing chemistry. By busting her ass and studying every night, she suspected only Sam’s grade in the class was higher.
They’d left Sam behind and merged in with the crowd heading to the lunchroom. It was as far from her old public middle school cafeteria as one could imagine. It was carpeted and had small wooden tables that seated four to six people, although you could push them together to get a bigger group. Sometimes Casey allowed it, but usually she required exclusivity among her crew. If everyone got a seat at the table, it would cease to be desirable.
She got in line to grab her tray and a thick ceramic plate. The line for Tater Tots was behind her, and she ignored it, turning instead to the salad bar. She piled on some leafy greens, a cucumber slice, a tomato, skipped the dressing, and then headed for her usual table by the window, which overlooked the field and had a view of downtown D.C. On July Fourth the school opened its fields to the public for fireworks viewing.
Amanda and Tania were already at the table and shifted to make room for her. Both had full bowls of Tater Tots. Lucky bitches. Neither of them had to worry about their weight. And if it ever became a problem, their parents would probably hire personal trainers for their darlings. Or pay for liposuction.
“God, Casey, you’re so healthy. How can you say no to Tater Tots?” Tania asked around a mouthful of potato that Casey wanted to rip out of her lips and Hoover into her own.
“I prefer salad,” Casey said and turned the subject away from food. She pushed the lettuce this way and that, bringing a lettuce leaf to her mouth every two minutes.
“So,” Amanda asked, “are we going shopping tomorrow after school?”
“Yes,” Tania said enthusiastically. “I need new shoes for the dance.”
Casey could almost hear her mother asking if Tania “needed” new shoes or simply “wanted” new shoes. Casey “needed” new shoes, but it was never going to happen. Her mom was barely affording their mortgage and even with the tuition assistance, school was expensive—as her mom reminded her every night. Not to mention all the therapy bills her mom was racking up. It’d be cheaper for her mom to write in a diary than pay a hundred dollars an hour to cry on a stranger’s couch. Imagine how many shoes Casey could buy for that money, but if it helped her mom finally, she’d go barefoot.
“Can you go, Casey?” Amanda asked.
“No, I’ve got other plans,” Casey said, trying to sound cool and mysterious, like her other plans might involve Matt Damon or a senior boy and not her after-school job.
“Oooh, is it Ben?” Tania asked. “Has he asked you yet?”
Casey smiled. “He called me last night.”
Her friends squealed in unison, and then hid their reactions as a tall shadow fell across the table. “This seat taken?”
“Maybe,” Casey said coyly, looking up at Ben Jonas, the junior who’d called her last night to ask her to the homecoming dance.
He ignored her and sat down anyway. “Can’t stay long,” he said, shoveling in bites of Tater Tots and the meatloaf Casey avoided like the plague. “Have to go to the tech lab. Got to print out a paper before sixth period.”
“Is the computer lab even open during lunch?” Tania asked.
“Of course,” Casey said. “There’s a whole group that go in during lunch to play computer games.”
“Nerd alert,” Ben said, and Casey joined in the laughter.
“Those nerds will probably end up richer than all of us with their own tech companies,” Amanda said insightfully. Casey didn’t usually give her enough credit, but the kids at Montgomery Prep were smart. In this case, she was right. The so-called nerdy kids hanging out in the tech lab were like uber-geniuses or something, and their king was Sam Cooper.
Casey hit send on the email just as her speakerphone buzzed with Annie’s voice sounding frantic. “Ms. Cooper.” When did
she ever call her Ms. Cooper? “Someone from the FBI is here.”
Casey’s heart leapt into her throat at hearing the FBI was calling on her until she looked up and saw Sam Cooper filling her office doorway. Oh, that FBI. Her heart didn’t settle down right away, because she was in slight shock at her first glimpse of Sam in eight years. He looked good. Really good. Like, she-wanted-to-move-around-her-desk-to-give-him-a-hug-and-see-how-taut-those-muscles-were good.
Guess her mother had been right, and the nerdy guys from high school sometimes grew up to be the good ones. She’d always known—even as a shallow, self-absorbed teenager—that Sam Cooper was one of the good guys. But she hadn’t known he’d grow up to be this hot. Would a crystal ball have changed her behavior toward him in high school? Maybe. Likely not. No, she’d never been outright mean, but she never would’ve gone out with him either. Silly her. Now his sandy-blond hair was cut in a sleek style, making him look every bit the mysterious and dashing FBI agent. She gave in to the impulse, walking around her desk to throw her arms over his shoulders and let their chests press together.
“Sam. It’s good to see you in person. Did you say something about visiting me on the phone yesterday?” Wow, he’d definitely filled out. The muscles under her hands were taut and sinewy.
He grinned down at her, still keeping his arms clasped behind her spine, holding their bodies together longer than was appropriate, but she had no complaints. Clearly it had been too long since she’d been on a date if Sam Cooper was getting her this hot from a simple hug.
“Nope. Thought I’d surprise you. Do you have a minute?” he asked.
Reluctantly, she released him and pointed to one of the two chairs in front of her desk. “For you, I’ll make time. What’s up?”
