Impulsively (Dante's Nine MC) Read Free Page B

Collins.”
    I shoot him an exasperated look and hurry across the buzzing
office. Dozens of eyes follow my exit. The entire office is wondering what a
senior FBI agent could possibly want to talk to me about—little old me, with my
nerdy education and rosy cheeks. If only these guys knew what I was being
tapped for. If only I knew any details about this mysterious opportunity Mitchell’s offered—or rather
insisted, that I take.
    Forget
cupcakes , I think to myself, I
need a beer and a burger to think this one through .
    Chapter
Two

     
     
    I drag the thick-cut French fry through the pool of ketchup
on my plate and happily pop it into my mouth. Glancing around the
midcentury-style diner, my eyes alight on the sunburst clock on the wall. It’s
nearly eight o’clock, which means that Milo is almost an hour late. In the
early days of our on-again, off-again courtship, I would have tried to convince
myself that his chronic flakiness didn’t bother me so much. But after the
better part of a year, I no longer do. The dude is always blowing me off, and
it’s getting old.
    As if sensing my displeasure from afar, Milo finally pulls
up and parks his hybrid car outside the diner. I can see his nose wrinkle in
distaste as he steps out into the fading sunlight. He’s not exactly a
burger-and-fries kind of guy, and it shows. As tiny as I am, my
sometimes-boyfriend is even tinier. He’s got a few inches on me, but his hips
are certainly more narrow than mine. He is cute though, in a geeky sort of way.
He’s all graphic tees, skinny jeans, and impeccable taste in bands no one’s
ever heard of. Milo’s the kind of guy I’ve always ended up with: nonthreatening,
brainy, and more than a little condescending. In other words, someone I could
beat in a push up contest with one hand tied behind my back.
    Milo works in Silicon Valley, making way too much money for
his own good. He’s been trying to persuade me to ditch the FBI and come work
for his creative agency ever since I moved to California. I can’t seem to make
him understand that developing apps and branding websites would be the furthest
thing from fulfilling for me. He’s been known to call my job at the Bureau
“grunt work,” often when we’re in front of his pretentious, tech-sector
friends. We’re not exactly the perfect pair, but we’ve known each other since
our undergrad days at Pace, and he’s the only person I really know in LA. Like
it or not, he’s all I’ve got out here, or anywhere, for that matter.
    I grew up on the other side of the country, in a little town
outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was just my parents, my little brother
Brandon and I on a few acres of wooded land. The time I spent roaming around
the woods with Brandon—shooting soda cans with our BB guns and climbing trees
all the way to their flimsy top branches—was wonderful. But the hours we spent
at home with our unhappily married, dismissive parents? Not so much. They
drank, they fought, and they basically ignored us. But at least we had each
other.
    Brandon and I were best friends. He was only a year younger
than me, with the same red hair, slight build, and blue eyes. People always
assumed that we were twins, and we may as well have been. Our school was tiny,
and there weren’t many other kids who lived close enough to play with, but I
hardly minded. I got to spend my childhood scraping up my knees and learning to
spit instead of fussing with makeup and fretting over boys. I never had any
close girlfriends. Still don’t. But that continued lack of sisterhood is the
only thing that bums me out about having been attached to my brother at the
hip. Especially given what happened when we grew up and left home.
    We both escaped our toxic parents and went to college in big
cities. I left for New York to study at Pace, and Brandon headed for Philly to
attend Temple University. It was there that he lost his life to a stray bullet,
loosed during a shootout between cops and local gang