Operation Prom Date (Tactics in Flirting, #1)(27)

“All it says is ‘what’s up?’” She turned the screen to me and practically shoved it in my face, so close the words blurred. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

Ignore him and keep hanging out with me. For no other reason than to have fun. Needing a distraction, I drove the few yards to park in my driveway. Of course when I stopped the truck she was still looking at me all expectantly. “Uh, type: just messing around with Cooper at the lake.”

“Yeah, but if he thinks I’m with you all the time, won’t he start thinking I’m with you, with you and stop talking to me?”

One can only hope. I knew that my hope was in vain, though, because that’d require him being a gentleman, and he wasn’t much of one. So he’d read between the lines and take it as she and I were messing around, and turn it into how he wanted to mess around with her, which sent enough heat through my veins that I wasn’t all that cold anymore. It’s what she wants. Why she’s here with you in the first place.

I tried to remind myself yet again that I was avoiding drama and getting carried away with Kate and the act we put on in public for her mission, and forced my reply through clenched teeth. “Trust me. Send the text.”

She spoke the words as she typed, the exact ones I’d fed to her, and then she sent the text about going to my house to her mom.

I wasn’t nearly as eager to take her inside after that stupid texting thing, but it didn’t change the fact that she needed warm, dry clothes. I called out for my mom as I ushered Kate inside, but she didn’t answer, so it looked like we had the place to ourselves.

I took her up to my room and dug through my drawers until I found a T-shirt and some sweats I’d outgrown years ago. I pointed her toward the bathroom adjacent to the guestroom so she could take a hot shower and get her body temperature up.

I broke off to my bathroom to do the same, and about fifteen minutes later, we met back up in the hallway. I took her wet clothes and tossed them into the dryer, trying not to let my eyes linger when I spotted the polka dot bra among her things. It had a pink bow in the middle.

Okay, so I failed at not lingering.

When I returned to my room, Kate was seated on my desk chair, twisting it one way and then the other. My too-long sweat pants pooled around her ankles and she had the sleeves of my hoodie rolled up. Her wet hair looked darker than usual, and it was messy, like she’d tried to finger-comb it, only to abandon the attempt halfway through.

I drank in the view, surprised by how much I enjoyed seeing her in my clothes, in my room, and a word that had no business being there popped into my head: mine.

But then my gaze lifted to her face.

She had on that fixated, calculating expression that instinctively sent trepidation through my gut. Those big green eyes came back from whatever planet they’d been visiting and focused on me. Something told me I wasn’t going to like the next words out of her mouth. “Mick didn’t text me back yet.”

Guess I was wrong. That’s not so ba—

“I assume you have a laptop somewhere around here? Can you pull up his social media profiles and help me do some light recon?”

And there it is.

“Hear me out,” she said, rolling the chair toward me. “Remember there’s a tight deadline.”

As if I could forget.

“And I just feel like I’m not utilizing every tool at my disposal, and clearly I need all the help I can get. With your input to guide me, surely I can figure out what I need to do to get to the next level. Plus, when I’m on my profile, I’m always worried I’ll accidentally hit Like on an old picture and look like a total stalker.”

Yeah, we wouldn’t want it to look like that.

“Not that I look all the time. Only once in a while, really.” One more scoot brought her knees to mine. She reached up and grabbed my hand. “Please.”

Two minutes later, we were seated on my bed with my laptop. I scrolled through my Facebook feed.

“You just passed a post that you need to go back to,” Kate said. “Quick. Go back, go back!”

I dragged my fingers on the scroll pad until she said, “There.”

A picture of a puppy and a kitten snuggling filled the screen. The post insisted that if you liked it, the world would magically be better to animals, and butterflies and rainbows would rain down amazing karma on you or some shit, but if you ignored it, you’d have bad karma for a year.

I glanced from it to Kate, then slowly scrolled past it again.

Kate tsked and shook her head. “So you’re saying you don’t need any good karma, not for animals and not for you? Even though you have a race coming up?”

“It’s more that I don’t negotiate with meme terrorists.”

Kate tried to hide her laugh. No doubt she liked every damn one of those posts, and because I’d clearly lost my mind over the girl, I found it incredibly endearing. If I had any good karma to give, it was hers.

“Looks like he posted something about an hour ago,” Kate said, reaching right over me and clicking over to Mick’s profile.

His pictures and deep thoughts filled the screen—I’d really been trying to avoid this. It was why I hadn’t just clicked on his profile from the beginning.

“Okay, now you take the wheel,” she said. “It makes me too nervous.”