18
For one tiny second I have the urge to press a heeled boot right into his gut for freaking me out like that, but I’m swimming in conflicting emotions and can’t seem to pick one long enough to take any action. Or to move at all.
But then Miles opens his eyes and looks up at me, and I’m so relieved to see his perfect face that I drop down on the floor beside him. “Are you okay? I’m sorry, I didn’t know—”
He nods, the wind still knocked out of him, and I stop rambling and just stare, blinking several times to make sure I’m not imagining things. I open my mouth to ask him what he’s doing in New York City, but he recovers quickly, springs to his feet, and brings me with him. He scans both ends of the hallway and then tugs me into a dark alcove that serves as an entryway for a law office that apparently is closed on Sundays.
Out of harm’s way and watchful eyes, and with both of us upright, I look him over, unable to turn off my investigator mode. First thing I notice is that the sling is gone. His hair is longer than the last time I saw him, hanging slightly over his ears, and brushing his collar in the back—a clear violation of the Marshall Academy dress code. He’s wearing dark jeans, a dark-gray shirt, and a navy ski jacket. The hair definitely lacks the military schoolboy vibe, and the outfit screams guy-who-might-be-hiding-a-black-ski-mask-in-one-of-those-pockets.
But Miles moves one step closer to me, and all I can see is blue. Light blue surrounding dark pupils. His hands land on my arms, and my insides warm. I shake my head, refocusing. “You were following me earlier, weren’t you?”
Miles nods, takes another step closer. “I can’t believe you did that move so well. I don’t know whether to be offended or proud.”
“You’ll be offended tomorrow when the bruises show up.” My heart is still climbing back down from my throat, my brain still attempting to process the fact that a minute or two ago I was on the phone with Sharp and Sheldon, with no idea if Miles was even alive, and now… As much as I want to play it cool, I can’t. One second, I’m looking at those blue eyes that have been absent from my life since our December tenth Christmas dinner, and then I’m throwing my arms around his neck and squeezing way too tight to be cool and casual.
“You’re okay,” I say stupidly, and then I press my face into his T-shirt collar, inhaling. He even smells like Miles. Like the sweatshirt I’d borrowed from him a while back and never returned. I jerk back suddenly, just enough to see his face. “You are okay, right? No one is after you or—”
He lays a hand on my cheek, his thumb gliding over my skin. “I forgot how pretty you are. Forgot how much I love the sound of your voice.”
I’m not too far gone to notice his lack of answer. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” he says simply, like I should have known this. “I know my parents called you last week. I didn’t show up last Sunday like we’d planned. Then I heard Aidan called my school. Dominic’s been texting nonstop. I figured you must be…”
With his face only a couple of inches from mine, Miles seems to forget his words, and soon his mouth is on mine. And we’re kissing like two starving people unable to articulate why or even how our previously hot-and-cold relationship had grown warmer and heavier despite the long break. His arms envelop me, and my hands slip inside his jacket, tugging him closer. And for a moment—just a short moment of weakness—I want to be done with this. Done spying on my dad, done worrying about my mom, done feeling guilty. I just want to be a girl making out with her boyfriend. If I could have that, I might even consider Miles’s offer from a month ago of running away with him to military school.
But then I remember that Miles is clearly not at military school and we are clearly not a regular teenage couple.
With great effort, I release my hold on him and gently nudge some space between us. “I have to go. I left my—”
“What are you doing here?” he asks, his face displaying both disappointment and concern, which tells me he knows this is more than a school field trip for me. “That was supposed to be my first question, but then I”—he clears his throat—“got sidetracked.”
There’s no reason I can’t trust him with this information, and keeping details about my family nearly split us apart for good. But I did tell him about my past and he still wanted to be with me. After I promised him I was done with that life. I keep my gaze focused on his chest, unable to look right at him. “You know how my mom is in prison?”
Miles’s jaw tightens, but he nods. “I remember.”
I give him the forty-five-second version of how I tangled myself into this undercover operation, and he listens without interruption until I’m finished. “Ellie, you’re putting yourself in the worst position possible. You can’t trust these FBI agents. They only care about catching the bad guys. You sure as hell can’t trust your dad. It’s a lose-lose situation.”
The nerves, the fear that bubbles up in me upon hearing Miles’s assessment, is a testament to how much I must value his opinion. That scares me even more than his warning. “My family is up to something bad, really bad. Clearly the FBI is too incompetent to figure it out, so I have to get to the bottom of this. I can’t just walk away knowing what I know.”
I’m prepared for him to argue, to toss more logic at me, but something I said changed the game. He stares at me, silent for a long moment, and then says, “Okay.”
My forehead wrinkles. “Okay?”
“I get it.” His kind eyes fill with warmth. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
Before I can ask how or why he gets it after telling me I was in the middle of a losing game, Miles pats the vibrating phone in his pocket and attempts to hide the panicked look that has just taken over his face. “I have to go.”
“That was my line.” I hear footsteps in the distance, from the stairwell by the sound of it, and I look at Miles and raise my eyebrows. Did he know someone was coming? “How did you—”
He interrupts me by pressing a kiss to my lips, and I’m immediately reminded of him kissing me like this after we’d been locked in that dungeon in the woods and Jack and his gang of assassins gone wrong had just decided it was okay to kill us. He pulls away and whispers, “Be careful, Ellie. Promise?”
What happened to “call me if you need anything”? Does that mean I won’t be able to call him? But I don’t get to ask because Miles jams a key into the door of the law office, slips inside, and seconds later, he’s on a ledge outside more than two dozen stories above a very busy street. Don’t go out there. Don’t even look out there.
Miles is clearly running from something—or someone—otherwise he would have used the stairs and the front doors like a sane person. If I go after him, I could ruin his hiding efforts. And I’ve worked hard to not be that girl who wouldn’t take his word and had to dig up everything for herself. I’d put Miles and his parents at risk with some of the stunts I pulled, and I won’t do that again. I’ve watched Miles Spider-Man climb his way up to our apartment balcony in mere seconds; he knows what he’s doing.
I step out into the hall just as the door to the stairwell opens. Bruno is moving quickly like a man on a mission but stops when he sees me.
“Hey, Ellie…” He glances over my shoulder then back at my face. “There you are. I was looking everywhere. The boss needs you downstairs.”
He may have been looking everywhere, but clearly it wasn’t me he wanted to find. “Sorry, I’ve been trying to find a drinking fountain, but no luck. At least not on floors twenty-three through twenty-six. And now I really need a drink—all those stairs.”
Bruno points a thumb back at the stairwell. “Twenty-seven has a soda machine.”
“See? Vigilance does pay off.” I flash him a grin. “I was almost there.”
“Sure does,” he says. “I’m gonna visit the little boys’ room. I’ll see you back at the agency in a few.”
We part ways, and I walk as quietly as possible so I can study his pace. Either Bruno really needs to relieve himself or he’s trying to catch up to someone who clearly wants to get away. Maybe someone who climbed out a window and walked onto a ledge twenty-six stories up just to get away.
Someone like Miles Beckett.