Sweet Liar (Candy #2)(90)

Biting my lip, I nodded. “He spotted me. Somehow he got behind me in the alley next to the building and surprised me.”

Jonah’s eyes narrowed. “Did he touch you?”

“He didn’t get a chance.” I grinned a little smugly. I was learning self-defense too. Tonight was the first chance I’d had to use it.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, startling me.

Giving Jonah a desperate look, I glanced at the screen and saw it was exactly who I’d feared. My father. He had to have found out what happened by now. As much as I wanted to avoid his disappointment, I had no choice but to answer it.

“Hi, Dad.” I turned away from Jonah to talk, which made no sense because he could still hear me just fine.

“Are you okay?” My father’s voice sounded steady and calm, revealing no hint of his mood yet.

“I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

I exhaled heavily. “I honestly don’t know. One minute, the guy is sitting in his office at the bowling alley. The next, he gets up and pulls the shade down for the first time ever, completely blocking my view of the place. So I go around the building to try to see him from another angle and, bam, there he is. He came at me out of nowhere.”

“So you punched his lights out and ran?” He chuckled.

I tensed, not liking that my father was laughing at me. “Yeah, pretty much. I’m sorry I messed up. It won’t happen again.”

“Following him wasn’t the point, Candy. The exercise was to see how you reacted when Pete confronted you. The idea was for you to get yourself out of the situation using the cover story we gave you.” He laughed again. “Good thing the organization offers a dental plan.”

My mouth fell open. “You mean he knew I was following him the whole time?”

“Yes, and he was very vocal about how menial it was for him to participate in your training exercise. He was looking forward to scaring the living daylights out of you. I can’t say I mind that things didn’t go down that way, but you can’t resort to violence in every situation. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, sure,” I replied distractedly as my mood lifted. “But I did get out of the situation, so I didn’t fail.”

“No,” my father answered with clear amusement in his tone. “You didn’t fail.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Jonah and he smiled at me.

“So Pete isn’t coming after me?”

“Not until the laughing gas wears off.”

Ha! Take that, Pete. Maybe a good dental visit would help him with his hideous breath too.

“Tell Jonah hello for me, and have him drive you home now. It’s a school night.”

“Okay.” I grinned at the phone, counting down the days until graduation. Only fourteen left, and then I’d have the whole summer to spend with Jonah before starting college and continuing my training. I’d grudgingly agreed to go to college, but I was staying local, going to the same school as Jonah.

He was completely out of the organization now, taking graduate classes and thinking about applying to law school eventually, which sounded pretty boring. He’d probably be good at it, though, because he won at least half of our arguments, and no one usually won against me.

“Did you know?” I asked after ending the call.

He nodded, trying not to grin. “It’s the only way I’d agree to stop talking you out of going into the organization. Your dad had to keep me in the loop.”

After everything that happened with Victor, at first I was completely turned off to it myself. But my father stayed in, and so did Heather. She was training now too. When Heather and her parents so willingly used their connections to help the people I loved, my thinking began to change. There were good people and bad people in every walk of life. I couldn’t let one bad person prevent me from having the career I’d wanted for as long as I could remember.

Even though I still wanted to be in the organization, I knew I couldn’t kill people like my father did. The cold-blooded person he became when he shot Victor that night was not a person who lived inside me. That wasn’t who I was, but I could do other things. I could still work for them and live a life that was exciting and fulfilling. I could find my own place within the organization the same way I was finding my own place in the world.

“My dad says you have to take me home now,” I said, not moving.

“Uh-huh.” Jonah came around the bar and walked toward me. “He knows that it takes ten minutes to get from here to your house if I drive the speed limit. If I drive like a maniac, I can do it in five. That gives us five.”

“Who knew you were such a math whiz?”

He grinned wolfishly. “I’m a whiz at lots of things.” Picking me up by the waist, Jonah sat me down on top of the bar. Then he settled between my legs and loosely wrapped his arms around me.

“What time do you have class tomorrow?” I asked.

“I’ve got ethics at ten,” he said, resting his forehead against mine.

I rolled my eyes the way I always did when he mentioned his ethics class. Talk about irony. What would his ethics professor think if he knew what his girlfriend’s father did for a living?

“Can I just say that I hate the fact you were in a situation where you had to deck someone tonight?” he asked.