She turned her head to look into Tristan’s brilliantly blue eyes. “You’re Twist. I mean, you’re Twist the TwistyTrader from the Sherwood Forest forums. And . . . that other place.” She didn’t want to name the Devilhouse because the new guy was listening through the headphones, too.
Tristan King was looking over his shoulder at her, still holding her in place with his arm. His expression went from a wince to a smirk in an instant. “Yes, and you’re QueenMod, aren’t you, princess?”
She nodded, pissed at how he’d somehow made her feel ashamed of it. “You know I am.”
Colleen Frost was drenched with fire sprinkler water and yet was somehow still slimy with stinky fear-sweat from being kidnapped and then chased by that asshole Sergey of the Russian Butorin bratva.
Which meant mafia. Bratva meant mafia. That was another thing Colleen had learned in the last few days that she desperately wished she hadn’t.
At least they’d escaped.
Probably.
And yet, even with all that, the raging fire in her brain was that she was pissed off as all hell at Tristan King, the tall, gorgeous, ripped, handsome jackass with the brilliant blue eyes who sat beside her in the helicopter.
Tristan was somehow—oh sweet baby Jesus, she did not know how the hell this had all come together, but God knew she hated it—he was also somehow the person known as TwistyTrader on the stock market internet forum that she moderated.
The TwistyTrader she’d gotten sexty with online.
The TwistyTrader she’d met at a place called The Devilhouse for a night she’d never forget, but oh, how she wished she could take it back just then.
The TwistyTrader she hadn’t been able to stop naughty-texting until right before she’d sneaked into Tristan King’s bedroom and boinked him.
Tristan King and TwistyTrader were both the same guy.
And she was going to freakin’ kill him.
“I can’t believe that we called TwistyTrader the ‘King of the Killer Whales,’ and you’re Tristan King.”
“Heh, yeah, that was quite a coincidence, wasn’t it?”
“Why are you faking a British accent?” she demanded.
Tristan was looking at her out of the corners of his eyes, the blueness of his irises barely visible in the low lights of the helicopter cabin and fading sunset as they flew over the California desert hills. “I’m not faking it. This is how I speak. Micah can tell you.” He held out his hand as he made the introductions. “Micah, this is Colleen Frost, my impromptu computer science consultant whom I seem to have put in deadly danger. Colleen, this is Micah Shine, an old friend from boarding school in Switzerland, where we met at the impressionable age of thirteen.”
Micah Shine, the new guy, leaned out and looked in her eyes, and she got a good look at his eyes for the first time. They were light gray and shimmery with aqua and green flecks like nothing she’d ever seen before.
Tristan continued, “Our English rhetoric instructor insisted the Americans learn how to speak ‘properly, without an accent,’ according to his standards. It stuck with some of us more than others. According to actual Brits, I have a light American accent. It now takes effort for me to speak like a Midwestern farm boy.”
“It’s true,” Micah said, leaning to look around Tristan at her, but he spoke with a neutral American nothing-accent. “Master Hamilton would fail you if you spoke with, and I quote, ‘an abominable native accent.’ Some friends of ours can’t move their jaws when they speak English at all.” He elbowed Tristan. “Remember when Hamilton used to tell Arthur Finch-Hatten he didn’t sound British enough? I think it scarred him for life.”
Colleen asked, “If you two went to a Swiss boarding school together, why doesn’t he talk like that?”
“Oh, I certainly can,” Micah said with a cut-glass British drawl. “I just don’t. Keeping it neutral American is enough of a chore for me without adding that on top.”
“Why is he calling you Twist?” she demanded. “Is Micah on the Sherwood Forest forums, too?” She leaned out, her cheek resting on Tristan’s arm. “You, Micah! Are you one of the Killer Whales? You’re the one we call Orca Asshole, aren’t you?”
Micah laughed. “No, but thanks for that.”
Tristan shook his head. “He’s not. We gave each other stupid nicknames in upper school that many of us carry to this day to personify the trauma of that place.”
The blond guy, Micah, cracked a smile and glanced down at his lap. “He’s not wrong. Le Rosey was an excellent opportunity to get away from problems at home, but a boarding school stocked with some of the wealthiest, most entitled teenagers in the world is not a utopia. It’s more of a training ground for future financial fraud defendants and supervillains.”
“What’s your nickname, then?” she demanded.
One side of Micah’s mouth lifted. “Just my last name, Shine. And I am turning my headphones off now. You two have something to talk about, and I am not at all needed.”
Click.
Colleen stared at Tristan over his arm that was still protecting her, trying to murder him with just the anger in her eyes.
2
Tangled
Colleen
Colleen fussed with the latch on the seat belt, trying to make the dang thing work.
When jamming the parts in didn’t seem to be working, she took a firmer hold on the harness over her shoulders, interlocked the two pieces of the buckle like a baby seat, and shoved the mechanism into the latch. “There, it’s buckled,” she said to Tristan. “Get off me.”
Tristan released the handle on the wall and took his own sweet time retracting his arm from across her.
When he wasn’t moving fast enough, she pushed his elbow out from in front of her face. “Seriously.”
“Pardon me for making sure you didn’t fly through the windscreen of the helicopter.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“Told you what? That I have a stupid username on an obscure stock market discussion board? That the night before I accidentally got you fired and then convinced you to work for me, I had a one-night-stand in a sex club with another woman, one who told me she never wanted to see me again? Why didn’t you tell me that you were QueenMod?”
Not the point. “You should’ve told me that you were the guy who met me at you-know-where and we did you-know-what! How long have you known that was me?”
“About two minutes before you put it together, I suspect. It did not occur to me that you might have been the Sailor Moon of my darkest desires from two nights ago. Sailor Moon seemed taller than you by quite a bit. Not that there’s anything wrong with petite girls. I just didn’t think you were her.”
“And that’s also weird because TwistyTrader seemed shorter than you are. I mean, he wasn’t short. He was super tall. But you’re enormous!”
“I’m six-four. I wasn’t a different height at the Devilhouse.” He squeezed his eyes shut and snapped his fingers, which Colleen couldn’t hear over the grinding of the helicopter rotors. “But you were. You came up to my shoulder while we were there, and now you don’t.”