May Contain Spies: A Spy Thriller (Meet Abby Banks Book 1) Read online

  May Contain Spies

  J.A. Cipriano

  Copyright © 2015 J.A. Cipriano

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  For my son Damon,

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  Chapter 1

  Good girls did not smile at strange, new boys. And I was a good girl, wasn’t I? I thought I was, but when I saw Stephen, it made me wonder… not if I was a good girl, oh no, it wasn’t that simple because, when I stared into Stephen’s sapphire eyes, I wondered if I wanted to be a good girl.

  Stephen was so beautiful that looking at him was like watching the sunrise. It wasn’t just his high cheekbones and his perfect nose that made him look so damn good. It was more how he carried himself, how his clothes clung to his body just so and in that way to show off his muscled physique. It made me want to jump over the counter and run my hands along his chest, made me want to feel his skin pressed against mine.

  I swallowed. My mouth hadn’t been dry before he had walked up to the counter, had it? He said something, but I couldn’t hear it over the hammering in my chest. My heart was beating so hard, it sounded like a runaway train.

  No one in my entire sixteen year life had ever made me feel this way before, made me want to leap onto them and never let go. It was a new sensation for me, and that alone made it scary. He was so pretty that I almost forgot…

  His golden brows knit themselves together in confusion, and I shook my head. With deftness I hadn’t known he possessed, he placed a forty-two ounce drink cup on the counter and gestured at it with one perfect hand. His fingers were so slender and delicate. They looked like something out of a jewelry commercial. Yet, they had a sense of strength to them I couldn’t quite define, a certain nimbleness I had never seen before.

  “Diet Coke,” he said, and his words were like rich cream, full bodied and definitely bad for you. They danced over my ears and sent shivers down my spine, tightening things low inside my body. “No ice,” he continued.

  I don’t know how I did it, but I somehow managed to nod dumbly at him, and swept his cup off the counter. Ha! I didn’t knock it over… not that time at least. A smile crept along his face until he was beaming, and it was like someone turned on the sun. I blushed and took a step back.

  Hastily, I turned my back to him as I headed for the soda machine. I was also suddenly aware of how ridiculous I looked in my bright red and white uniform. It even had a matching hat.

  The worst part was that the uniform had no curves to speak of. I knew the reason why, my mom hadn’t wanted to sell sex in her restaurant, and she felt that putting everyone in one of these things helped that.

  I reached up and tucked a loose strand of brown hair beneath my cap and sighed. Stephen Jacobs had been coming in here every day for the last two or three weeks. I hadn’t seen him before, and I only knew his name because I’d seen it on a credit card he’d used to pay a couple times. Truthfully, our exchanges had been limited to his standard order of chili fries and Diet Coke, which, I’ll admit struck me as a bit strange. If you’re going for the chili fries you might as well get the regular Coke.

  Still, there was something about him that made me want to tie up the angel on my right shoulder and leave him in a dumpster, and it wasn’t just his natural good looks. Sure, I liked to look at him, who wouldn’t? With his tousled blond hair and good-natured smile, he was definitely eye-candy. Yet, there was something… alluring about him. Whatever it was, he was definitely making something in my gut say “me gusta.”

  “One Diet Coke, no ice,” I called as I turned back around.

  The way Stephen Jacobs stared at me made my insides turn to mush. When he looked at me I didn’t even feel like a person. I felt like a thing, a thing someone might want to possess. He smiled at me, but the look never reached his eyes. They were as cold as a glacier as he tapped one finger to his forehead in a salute.

  “Thank you,” he said in that same sing-songy dream voice he used. He turned and went back to his table and sat there… staring at me. I glanced at the wall clock. I still had three hours left on my shift. I sighed again and turned to glance around for another worker, but I was the only cashier who worked this shift. The only other person here was the cook.

  Stephen was still staring at me. He raised his Coke toward me as though toasting, and in that moment, I knew he was dangerous because if given the opportunity, I’d well… I glanced down at my register as a blush spread across my cheeks. It was going to be a long night.

  The next hour crawled by like a snail swimming through molasses. Then again, it hadn’t helped that I kept alternating between staring at the clock and trying to think of reasons to go talk to him.

  When the night finally ended, Stephen disappeared, vanishing into the ether like a ghost before I could work up the courage to say even a single word. That had been about an hour ago, and now I was home staring at a backpack full of homework. Part-time afterschool jobs and homework was not a good combination.

  I flopped down at my desk and sighed. Which was pretty much when my phone rang, scaring the crap out of me. I snatched the phone from my desk and glared at it.

  “Hey Lisa,” I said into the phone. “What’s up?”

  “Did you see Stephen at the restaurant today? He’s totally into you, Abby,” my best friend, Lisa, told me without even so much as a “hello, how are you?” “If I had a guy that hot staring at me every day, I’d be all over him.”

  I smirked into my cell phone. I could always count on Lisa to be totally boy crazy. The walls of her room were covered in pinups of the hottest new singers, shirtless of course, and she often carried around a small binder in which she would continually write her name, Lisa Ann, with whomever she was crushing on at the time’s last name.

  Still though, except for the time that she had accidently fallen in that one guy’s lap at Homecoming last year, I was positive she had never even touched a boy before. It was easy to be boy crazy in your mind, not so much in practice.

  “No you wouldn’t, Lisa.” I laughed into the phone. “You’d totally do the same thing as me, which is be struck totally dumb the second he started talking to you. You’d probably turn bright red like at Homecoming last year with Russell Grant.”

  Russell Grant had been the aforementioned boy who owned the lap Lisa had collapsed into. Not one to make a scene, Russell had tried to help her up, but they’d wound up so tangled together in the gobs of pink and purple fabric that made up her dress, he’d fallen on top of her. To make matters worse, they’d actually rolled into the middle of the dance floor, so twisted together by their clothing, they’d both had to partially undress in front of the whole school before the teachers were able to free them.

  “Nope!” Her voice echoed in my ears, a little too loud for the conversation we were having. “That event freed me. I am at perfect peace with my body now. I am sure I could go right up to that boy and not be struck deaf and dumb.” I knew she was nodding to herself on the other end of the phone. In fact, I was pretty sure she had already slipped into daydream mode.

  “Yeah… maybe,” I sighed. “But I don’t think it’s meant to be. I can’t help but think that even if something did happen, well it wouldn’t be all ponies and sunshine.”

  “I bet he’s got a third nipple.” And here we go. Lisa was about to launch into a tirade about how he probably had some kind of deformity and was hiding it because no one could look so ooey gooey delicious and not have some ki
nd of debilitating flaw. Then, when I’d start to defend the fact that he probably didn’t have a tail or secret arm, she’d pronounce I did, in fact, like him. She’d even draw out the word like. That’s when I’d hang up on her. You might say I’d been to this particular rodeo before.

  “Um… Leese, I think I’m just going to skip to the part where I hang up on you. It’s getting late, and I’m trying to get ready for bed. Besides, I still haven’t studied for that math test.”

  A loud sigh emanated from the phone. “Fine, but when you get to problem twenty-three, the answer is twenty-seven. It’s easier if you work it backwards. You won’t be able to figure it out otherwise.”

  “I will too! I’m not as dumb as you think I am,” I snarled into the phone.

  “Uh… huh. That’s why you have a perfectly good guy crushing on you, and you haven’t even asked him his name. You found out by sneaking a look at his credit card.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Lisa replied. “Get to work. The first ten problems… those are the easy ones.”

  She hung up, and I was left listening to an empty phone. Just because Lisa was the class smarty pants didn’t give her the right to call me stupid. I was in all the same classes as her… I just didn’t get the grades she did. But no one else did either! I grumbled and flopped down on my bed. In truth, I’d finished my math homework while I was at work. I just didn’t want Lisa to bother me about Stephen anymore.

  I didn’t know what it was about him, but he just made me uncomfortable. Whenever I was around him, no scratch that, whenever he was close to me and I was looking at him, I became a complete klutz. I wished I had a better explanation for it, but I didn’t.

  I had even gone so far as to try and track him down one day at school, but I hadn’t even seen him there. What’s worse is not only had no one seen him at school, no one had known who he was. That made no sense. A guy that hot would surely have attracted the attention of Shelly Johnson, Folsom High’s resident queen bee. She’d have definitely dumped her slavering idiot of a boyfriend in a heartbeat for a chance at a guy like Stephen.

  The only place I ever saw Stephen was in my mom’s restaurant. He always showed up just a few minutes after my shift started and always left a few minutes before it ended. The only time Lisa had seen him was when she’d come to visit me after school today. She’d sat there drooling until my mom had asked her to help in back. Then, Lisa suddenly had tons of things to do and had scampered home.

  My mom was great like that. She always knew how to make Lisa go away when I couldn’t. It was a real skill, let me tell you, because, even though she was my best friend in the whole world, she could be a little grating at times. Still though, Lisa was right. I should at least say something to Stephen. If he was going to sit and stare at me all day, the least he could do is engage me in thoughtful and meaningful conversation.

  I smiled and stared at the ceiling of my bedroom. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I was going to talk to Stephen Jacobs, and I was going to say more than “would you like to make that a large?”

  Chapter 2

  I yawned and glanced at the Spanish slathered across the board in near-unreadable print. Of all my classes, Spanish was the one I liked least. I just wasn’t very good at it. There were just too many rules that I never bothered to memorize, which was likely the reason I wasn’t good at it.

  Our teacher turned, faced us, and ran one boney hand through his hair before pointing back at the board. This was our queue to copy what had just been scrawled on the board. Mr. Hawthorne was, to put it nicely, a dry husk of a man. Watching him move around the classroom was like watching a rickety scarecrow get tossed about by the wind. His clothes seemed to dangle off his aged frame as though they might have once fit him, but he had lost so much weight that they made him seem even scrawnier and feebler than he might have otherwise. I wasn’t quite sure how old he was, but I was pretty sure it could be measured in centuries. I yawned once more and shook my head.

  “Why on earth do you keep yawning, Abby? You’ve been doing it all day. Did a certain someone keep you up all night long?” Lisa grinned and poked my ear with the eraser end of her pencil. I swallowed once. Lisa regularly chewed on her eraser and now I could feel Lisa-slime on my ear.

  “No. I just kept hearing weird noises in the middle of the night. They kept waking me up,” I said as I reached back and touched my ear. Good, it was saliva free… for now. “It also doesn’t help that my cat has decided that my legs are something she must attack with unholy vengeance at four AM every morning.”

  I don’t know why, but for the last couple weeks my cat had started acting like a crazy animal. She was a feral kitten we’d rescued from the neighbor’s dog about six months back, and she had never really gotten used to humans. You might say that she was deathly afraid that all people, other than me, were going to eat her. She had been particularly frightened as of late, and I just didn’t get it.

  Now, every time I came home, she followed me around like a dog, jumping into my lap at all possible times and generally invading my personal space. At night, she had taken to sleeping on my feet, which seemed normal enough, but every so often she pounced on me, leaping on my legs like a terror and scaring the bejesus out of me.

  “I’m surprised you still have that cat. You are the least likely person in the history of the universe to own a cat. And I thought your mom was allergic.”

  “Why would I get rid of the cat? I like her fine. Besides, animals love me.” I smiled and glanced back at Lisa. Her notes were covered in weird drawings and that made me a little sad. Lisa never studied or took notes. She just got perfect scores on everything like some sort of super-genius robot. Then again, she could be a robot. Both of her parents were super-engineers, able to design tall buildings in a single evening. If anyone could design a genius robot daughter, it would be them.

  “But Abby,” Lisa replied, “you’ve killed every single pet you’ve ever owned. You remember the summer of fish, don’t you?”

  I did, in fact, remember the summer of fish. It was two summers ago, the summer before Lisa and I entered high school. For my ‘making it into high school without burning down the house’ gift, my mother had bought me a fifty-five gallon fish tank.

  Lisa and I had poured through various fish books until we had selected a tankful of hopeful fishes that promptly died within a week. So we’d tried again. More dead fish. Every week for an entire summer, we replaced every single fish in the tank, and every single week they all died. I’d done everything I could think of to fix the problem, from checking the water every ten seconds to paying a creepy guy at the pet store to come help me with the tank.

  No matter what we did, every stupid fish died. Then my mom had come along and put a single goldfish she’d won at the fair in my tank. The damn goldfish was still the only thing in the tank.

  “I think a cat is a bit harder to kill than a fish,” I murmured.

  “We’re not talking a single fish. We’re talking hundreds of fish. The pet store even has a rule about selling you things now. Normal people aren’t banned from buying fish at a pet store,” Lisa continued as the bell rang, dismissing us from the last class of the day.

  I shoved my stuff in my bag and jumped to my feet. My stomach did a tiny flip flop as we headed toward the door. I was supposed to head straight to work. My mom would be waiting when I got there, and if I didn’t know any better, so would Stephen. This time, I was going to talk to him.

  “So are you excited for your big date?” Lisa asked as we walked to her car. It was a beat up old Chevy that was older than Lisa by at least five years. Her parents had said she could have any car she wanted, and she’d chosen this thing. Someone had been trying to trade it in while she and her parents had been at the car dealership, and she’d declared it cute. She also said I was cute, so my self-esteem didn’t allow me to take her opinion of cute very seriously.

  “It’s not a date. I’m just going to ask him what his deal is,” I replied.


  “And then you guys are totally going to make out, aren’t you?” Lisa scrunched up her face and made kissy noises as she unlocked her car.

  Without waiting, I threw open the back door of her car and was assaulted by a cloud of warm, stagnant air.

  “Yeah, so, I spilled some grape juice this morning. I sprayed it with deodorizer though, so it should be okay soon,” Lisa murmured, getting into the car without further comment.

  I hesitated for a moment and touched the floor in front of the passenger seat. My finger sank into the damp fabric. I sighed. There was no use in complaining about it. Silently, I got into the car and with an awkward sort of squelch, placed my feet into the swampy mess.

  “So how much juice did you spill?”

  “About half a liter but I sprayed deodorant, so it should fix itself,” Lisa assured me once again.

  “And you aren’t the least bit worried about the horrible damage to your car, or the possibility of bacteria growing down there?” I inquired.

  “I sprayed deodorant,” Lisa replied as though she wanted to end this conversation.

  “Ah… I see. You have a dangerous amount of faith in that stuff,” I said with a smile.

  “A world where deodorant doesn’t fix grape juice spills is a world I don’t want to live in,” Lisa said as she shifted the car into gear as she sped down the road. “It’s not a world anyone wants to live in.”

  My mom was waiting for me at the restaurant. Sometimes I wondered how she had come into possession of the place since she had all the cooking skill of a half-frozen iguana. She burned water once. What kind of person burns water and decides it would be a fantastic idea to open a restaurant?

  My mom.

  Then again, she didn’t cook in the restaurant. Other people did that. She just handled all the business stuff and paid her staff, namely me, nothing to run the place. To say that Esmeralda Banks was a slave driver was being cruel to slave drivers. I’m serious. Last Christmas, Mario, the night cook, had given her a whip as a gag gift. It was now hanging in her office.