The Naturals (The Naturals #1)(5)

He gave me a knowing look. “No expectations, no disappointments.”

I couldn’t tell if that was his appraisal of my current mental state or the motto by which he lived his own life. In fact, I was having trouble getting any handle on his personality at all. He’d traded his striped polo for a formfitting black T-shirt and his jeans for khaki slacks. He looked as out of place here as he had at the diner, like maybe that was the point.

“You know,” he said conversationally, “I knew you’d come.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Even though you told me not to?”

He shrugged. “My inner Boy Scout had to try.”

If this guy had an inner Boy Scout, I had an inner flamingo.

“So, are you here to take me to Special Agent Tanner Briggs?” I asked. The words came out curtly, but at least I didn’t sound fascinated, infatuated, or even the least bit drawn to the sound of his voice.

“Hmmmmm.” In response to my question, Michael made a noncommittal noise under his breath and inclined his head—as close to a yes as I was going to get. He led me around the bull pen and down a hallway. Neutral carpet, neutral walls, a neutral expression on his criminally handsome face.

“So what does Briggs have on you?” Michael asked. I could feel him watching me, looking for a surge of emotion—any emotion—to tell him if his question had hit a nerve.

It hadn’t.

“You want me to be nervous about this,” I told him, because that much was clear from his words. “And you told me not to come.”

He smiled, but there was a hard glint to it, an edge. “I guess you could say I’m contrary.”

I snorted. That was one word for it.

“Are you going to give me even a hint of what’s going on here?” I asked as we neared the end of the hall.

He shrugged. “That depends. Are you going to stop playing Who’s Got the Best Poker Face with me?”

That surprised a laugh out of me, and I realized that it had been a long time since I’d laughed because I couldn’t help it and not because someone else was laughing, too.

Michael’s smile lost its edge, and for a second, the expression utterly changed his face. If he’d been handsome before, he was beautiful now—but it didn’t last. As quickly as the lightness had come, it faded.

“I meant what I wrote on that card,” he said softly. He nodded to a closed office door to our right. “If I were you, I wouldn’t go in there.”

I knew then—the way I always knew things—that Michael had been in my shoes once and that he had opened the door. His warning was genuine, but I opened it, too.

“Ms. Hobbes. Please, come in.”

With one last glance at Michael, I stepped into the room.

“Au revoir,” the boy with the excellent poker face said, punctuating the words with an exaggerated flick of his fingers.

Special Agent Tanner Briggs cleared his throat. The door closed behind me. For better or worse, I was here to meet with an FBI agent. Alone.

“I’m glad you came, Cassie. Take a seat.”

Agent Briggs was younger than I’d expected based on his phone voice. The gears in my brain turned slowly, incorporating his age into what I knew. An older man who took pains to appear businesslike was guarded. A twenty-nine-year-old who did the same wanted to be taken seriously.

There was a difference.

Obediently, I took a seat. Agent Briggs stayed in his chair, but leaned forward. The desk between us was clean, but for a stack of papers and two pens, one of which was missing its cap.

He wasn’t naturally neat, then. For some reason, I found that comforting. He was ambitious, but not inflexible.

“Are you finished?” he asked me. His voice wasn’t curt. If anything, he sounded genuinely curious.

“Finished with what?” I asked him.

“Analyzing me,” he said. “I’ve only been in this office for two hours. I couldn’t even guess what it is that has caught your attention, but I figured something would. With Naturals, something almost always does.”

Naturals. He said the word like he was expecting me to repeat it with a question mark in my tone. I didn’t say anything. The less I gave him, the more he’d show me.

“You’re good at reading people, at taking little details and figuring out the big picture: who they are, what they want, how they operate.” He smiled. “What kind of eggs they like.”

“You invited me here because I’m good at guessing what kind of eggs people like?” I asked, unable to keep the incredulousness out of my voice.

He drummed his fingers over the desktop. “I asked you here because you have a natural aptitude for something that most people could spend a lifetime trying to learn.”

I wondered if when he said most people he was referring at least in part to himself.

He took my continued silence as some kind of argument. “Are you telling me that you don’t read people? That you can’t tell me right now whether I’d rather play basketball or golf?”

Basketball. But he’d want people to think the answer was golf.

“You could try to explain to me how you figure things out, how you figure people out, Cassie, but the difference between you and the rest of the world is that to explain how you just figured out that I’d rather get a bloody nose on the basketball court than tee off with the boss, you’d have to backtrack. You’d have to sort out what the clues were and how you’d made sense of them, because you just do it. You don’t even have to think about it, not the way that I would, not the way that my team would. You probably couldn’t stop yourself if you tried.”