The Naturals (The Naturals #1)(34)

“Dean—”

A hand grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. Hard.

“He said he didn’t want to talk to you, Cassie.” Lia’s face was a mask of calm. Her tone was anything but. “Don’t turn back to look at him. Don’t say another word to him. Just go. And one more thing?” She leaned forward to whisper in my ear. “Remind me never to ask you for a favor again.”





CHAPTER 21


I walked slowly back down the stairs, trying to figure out what had just happened. What was I thinking, confronting Dean? He was allowed to have secrets. He was allowed to be angry that Locke had assigned me to read those interviews, knowing that one of them was his father’s. I shouldn’t have gone up there. I should have left him alone.

“Lia or Dean?”

I looked up and saw Michael standing near the front door.

“What?”

“The look on your face,” he replied. “Lia or Dean?”

I shrugged. “Both?”

Michael nodded, as if my answer were a foregone conclusion. “You okay?”

“You’re the emotion reader,” I said. “You tell me.”

He took that as an invitation to come closer. He stopped a foot or two away and studied my face. “You’re confused. Madder at yourself than you are at either of them. Lonely. Angry. Stupid.”

“Stupid?” I sputtered.

“Hey, I just call it like I see it.” Michael was apparently in the mood to be blunt. “You feel stupid. Doesn’t mean you are.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I sat down on the bottom step, and after a few seconds, Michael sat down beside me, stretching his legs out on the hardwood floor. “Why make thinly veiled comments about The Bad Seed instead of just telling me the truth?”

“I thought about telling you.” Michael leaned back on his elbows, his casual posture contradicting the tension unmistakable in his voice. “Every time I saw the two of you hunched over one of Locke’s little puzzles, I thought about telling you. But what would you have said if I did?”

I tried to imagine hearing about Dean’s father from Michael, who could barely manage a civil word where Dean was concerned.

“Exactly.” Michael reached forward to tap the edge of my lips, like that was the precise spot that had tipped him off to what was going on inside my mind. “You wouldn’t have thanked me for telling you. You would have hated me for it.”

I swatted Michael’s hand away from my face. “I wouldn’t have hated you.”

Michael gestured in the general direction of my forehead, but refrained from actually touching my face this time. “Your mouth says one thing, but your eyebrows say another.” He paused, and his own mouth twisted into a lazy grin. “You might not realize this, Colorado, but you can be a little sanctimonious.”

This time, I didn’t bother letting my face do the talking for me. I slugged him in the shoulder—hard.

“Fine.” Michael held his palms up in surrender. “You’re not sanctimonious. You’re honorable.” He paused and trained his eyes straight ahead. “Maybe I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I’m not.”

For a split second, Michael let those words—that confession—hang in the air.

“Besides,” he continued, “if I’d told you that between Redding and myself I was the safe option, I would have lost all of that carefully built-up bad-boy cred.”

From self-loathing to sardonic in under two seconds.

“Trust me,” I said lightly, “you don’t have any cred.”

“Oh, really?” Michael said. When I nodded, he stood up and took my hand. “Let’s fix that, then, shall we?”

A wiser person would have said no. I took a deep breath. “What did you have in mind?”

— — —

Blowing stuff up was surprisingly therapeutic.

“Clear!” Michael yelled. The two of us scuttled backward. A second later, a string of fireworks went off, scorching the floor of a fake foyer.

“Somehow, I don’t think this is what Agent Briggs had in mind when he built this basement,” I said.

Michael adopted an austere look. “Simulation is one of our most powerful tools,” he said, doing a passable imitation of Agent Briggs. “How else are we to visualize the work of the infamous Boom-Boom Bandit?”

“Boom-Boom Bandit?” I repeated.

He grinned. “Too much?”

I held my index finger up an inch from my thumb. “Just a little.”

Behind us, the door to the basement opened and slammed shut. I half expected it to be Judd, asking what precisely we thought we were doing down here, but Michael had assured me the basement was soundproof.

“I didn’t know anyone was down here.” Sloane looked at the two of us suspiciously. “Why are you down here?”

Michael and I looked at each other. I opened my mouth to answer, but Sloane’s eyes widened as she took in the evidence.

“Fireworks?” she said, folding her arms over her middle. “In the foyer?”

Michael shrugged. “Cassie needed a distraction, and I needed to give Briggs a few more gray hairs.”

Sloane eyed him mutinously. Considering the amount of time she spent down here, I could see why she might take any misuse of the crime sets seriously.