The Whole Truth (The Supercharged Files Book 1) (16 page)

Chapter 14

Cactus of Mass
Destruction

What did he know? What did he
think he knew? Why was he here, and how had he managed to completely dupe me?

“Holy crap, were you here this
whole time?”

“You’re busted.”

“You spied on me?” My voice rose
as hysteria mounted. How had I not noticed him? Was he the bad guy? Was he
going to burn me out? “How did you sit there without me sensing it? What about
pair cancellation?”

“You know how,” he said with a
mask. He must realize I had no clue.

Or did I? I remembered with
sudden clarity that John had admitted Beau had a second ability. What could the
sneaky piece of shit do?

“You told me invisibility wasn’t
possible.” I hurled the clipboard at him, and he caught it with a surprised
expression. “Are you spying on everyone at YuriCorp? Selling us out?”

“Shut up, Cleo.” Beau stood.
“Lower your voice.”

“Lower my voice?” I yelled. “You
lied to me, and you’re a spy!”

Beau lunged; I stumbled and fell,
straight into the chair with wheels. When he hit me, we rolled back, past the
desk and into the filing cabinet with the potted plants on top.

Cactus and rocks scattered like a
grenade had hit. Dirt sprayed in all directions. Beau’s body pressed against
mine too intimately for comfort, and I struggled like a maniac, pushing and
punching.

He’d given Pavarti and Adam
Donning a stroke, and I was not going to be next.

“Cut it out, Cleo!” He grabbed
for my hands and missed. I landed a solid blow somewhere in the vicinity of his
forehead.

“Get off, get off!” His hips were
wedged between my legs. My skirt had ridden up to my hoo-hah and one of my
shoes flew across the room when I tried to kick him.

Beau restrained my wrists. His
mouth next to my ear, he growled softly, “Don’t make me hurt you.”

Something flopped inside me like
a cat rolling onto its belly in the sun. Beau had touched my arm in order to
take blood or skin samples, but otherwise I’d never been within five feet of
him. His fingers squeezed my wrists like iron bands, and his funky hair tickled
my cheek.

“Were you planning on hurting
me?” I twisted my head until I could see his face and any masks it happened to
have in the corner of my eye.

“Not until five seconds ago.”

True, but somehow not reassuring.
Was he or wasn’t he the saboteur? Adrenalin cycloned through me in a dizzying
torrent.

I squirmed, but it only mashed us
closer. His breath smelled like pineapple candy. His tie was askew, there was
dirt on his back, and I could see my pale, exposed thighs on either side of
him, one of my legs higher than the other. We looked like we were...

What a day to wear a skirt.

He slid down my body, forcing my
leg down with him, until his knees hit the floor and his belly was level with
my crotch. He still held my wrists.

Now I could see his whole face.
One of his eyes was starting to swell shut. The other glared at me so fiercely
I would have been taken aback under normal circumstances.

Under these, I was taken aback
and
unaccountably turned on.

What the hell? That horrified me
more than my fear Beau might be about to burn me out with a mutant vampire
ability. I bent my body like a paper clip, bashing the chair into the filing
cabinet again.

The metal drawers rattled, and a
cactus tumbled onto my head, needles pronging.

“Shit!” We both snatched at the
cactus piercing my scalp. Stupid! The spines jabbed my palms. “Owww!”

“Dammit, hold still.” Beau
carefully plucked the weapons-grade plant out of my hair. The pinpricks on my
scalp burned and tears welled in my eyes. Embarrassment, fright, humiliation,
stress, anger—all of it had to come out.

“Don’t burn me,” I begged. I
didn’t try to hit him or he’d pin me again. “We can work this out.”

“Burn you?” He dropped his hands
to my legs. My naked legs. “What are you talking about?”

If he wasn’t here to sabotage
YuriCorp via me, why had he been spying on me?

I opened my eyes very wide and
tried to ignore the tickle of salt water on my cheeks. “I’m going to scream.”

“Cleo, I just... Why the hell are
you crying?” In a familiar gesture, Beau raised a hand—off my thigh—and rubbed
his forehead and hairline. When he encountered the bruise around his eye, he
winced. “You weren’t even trying to fade when you asked Gladys Woo those
questions. This is a real assignment, Cleo, not a training mission. These
people paid us to assess the staff and make recommendations that are up to
YuriCorp’s standard.”

“Oh, that.” I stalled for time as
I wiped tears with the back of my hand. Logic trickled through the panic. Beau
had been in the lab when the other attacks had occurred. When Pavarti had been
burned out, he’d been in the lab with me. Ditto with Donning. He’d been spying
on me today because, shock shock, he didn’t trust me to do the job.

Just to be certain, I asked, “Did
you have anything to do with what happened to Pavarti Singh or Adam Donning?”

“Of course not,” he said without
a mask. “Why didn’t you try to fade with Gladys?”

I couldn’t think of a good
excuses so I gave him a bad one. “I didn’t think I needed to. John said admin
would be retained.”

“You should make the effort.
Damn, you blacked my eye.” He prodded the area gingerly.

“You lied to me about what
chameleons can do.”

“That’s not important. Why did
you hit me?”

“Well.” I glanced down, as did
he. His hand splayed on my thigh, my pale flesh gleaming between each dark
finger, only a couple inches from my bright green drawers. “Why don’t you get
off me and we can discuss it?”

For a minute, he didn’t answer.
Didn’t move, either. But he did raise his eyebrows.

“Dude,” I said, my face tingling
with not-chameleon heat. “Back away from the underpants.”

“Nice panties.” He smirked, his
fingers wriggling. Wriggling! Close to
there
.

I straightened and shoved. “You
pervert, I’m going to—”

John burst into the room like my
knight in grey Brooks Brothers. “What’s going on in here? I heard yelling.”

Beau landed on his butt at John’s
feet. Unfortunately, not on a cactus. I shoved my skirt down.

Behind John, seven or so
employees of Wyse Money within earshot of the crash hovered in the closest
cubicles. Beau glared at everyone. “Cleo tripped and knocked over the plants on
the filing cabinet. She punched me in the face when I tried to get a cactus out
of her hair.”

John rushed past the desk and
hauled me out of the chair. “Are you all right?” He brushed my hair back and
peered deeply into my eyes. His fingers cupped the back of my head. “Are you
hurt?”

“I’m fine.” I touched the back of
his hand and smiled.

“Good, good.” He seemed to
realize what he was doing and stepped away just as quickly.

Was that tender concern on John’s
face? Did he know Beau could sneak around like that? “I need to ask Beau a few
questions.”

I mugged suggestively, but John
didn’t catch on. “Later. We should get this cleaned up. Walker, where did you
disappear to? I needed you in that last session.”

“Bathroom,” he lied. “I dropped
by to see how Cleo was doing.”

Here the whole time. She
shouldn’t be alone,
said his mask.

John seemed convinced. “I’ll find
a janitor. Cleo, use the small conference room for the rest of your
interviews.”

“She’s not ready,” Beau insisted,
glowering at me.
It’s too dangerous.

I couldn’t tell if Beau was
worried about my performance or something else, like the saboteur. “I’ll be
ready as soon as I get the cactus spines out of my hand,” I said to everyone,
conscious of our audience. “No need to check on me. You both have other work to
do.”

John glanced between us before he
edged past Beau out the door. Pausing in the hallway, he said, “You coming,
Walker?”

“After I get some ice. We’re not
done, Cleo,” Beau fingered his shiner. “We’ll finish this later.”

Not sure which “this” he was
talking about, but he was wrong. We weren’t going anywhere near anything he
wanted to finish.

~ * ~

Gladys brought one of her dogs to
work the next day. She hadn’t been lying about her dogs’ behavior, but today
the hairy beast was barking its head off. I was surprised nobody had made her
take it home yet.

The conference room was on the
same floor as Gladys’s office. I was working with John while Beau had the small
conference room for one on ones. The yapping stopped about midmorning, only to
start again as we neared the lunch hour. The yaps intensified to tiny, yodeling
howls I was sure the people on the floors around us could hear.

“Damn dog,” one of the financial
analysts in our session muttered.

I had to agree. Today was a
disaster of disorganization, noise, and three very grouchy consultants.

If it wasn’t the dog barking, it
was the door opening as people came and went from the conference room with no
respect for the sanctity of our session. If it wasn’t the door, it was
incessant warbling of the damn computer or cell phone or whatever it was right outside
the conference room. Every time I wandered into the hall to smash the annoying
device to pieces, it stopped.

“God, what a morning,” John said
when we were finally alone. He pinched the bridge of his stopped-up nose. “I
feel like I haven’t had caffeine in a week.”

“I thought you only had one
caffeinated beverage a day.” I was on my third soda. “How hard could it be to
go without that?”

“Today, it would be impossible.”

Beau staggered into the
conference room, his dark skin ashy. His shiner from the day before had mostly
faded, but he still looked like crap. He closed the door behind him and
collapsed into one of the chairs.

“Caffeine,” he groaned. “My head
is killing me.”

“You too?” I had a tweaker
myself, but not the cerebral hemorrhage both of them seemed to have. “It’s the
dog,” I guessed. “Or that broken computer.”

“What computer?” John fished two
more sodas from our personal cooler and dried the water with a napkin. Teams
used to bring coffeemakers, but after Pavarti’s burnout, they’d been outlawed
by Al as too easily tampered with.

“The annoying piece of crap
outside. Windows machine, no doubt.” As if on cue, the beeping started again.
“There it is again. You don’t hear that?”

Both men shook their heads.

“How can you not? It’s not like I
have, ah, unusually good hearing.” Although my lie sight did have auditory
aspects, I’d never noticed my hearing was more acute than the average human. I
was no Al.

“Neither of us have unusually
good hearing, either,” John said, “but women typically have a greater
sensitivity to high-pitched sounds than men.”

“It’s not that high,” I said.

Beau gulped cola and rubbed one
temple like he could poke the pain out the other side. He hadn’t tried to
“finish” anything with me last night, and I hadn’t had a chance to ask him any
penetrating questions about being invisible and other hidden talents.

“I need pain killers,” he said.
“Does anybody have anything?”

“We aren’t supposed to bring
medicine on site. Security protocol blahdee blah,” I said.

“Someone will need to go buy some—for
all of us,” John said.

“You really don’t hear that
beeping,” I repeated. Then I whispered, “Can you hear me now?”

“Yes,” Beau growled.

“That’s crazy. It’s right
outside.” I opened the door. Everyone was at lunch, so I couldn’t ask whose
computer was on the fritz. The electronic trill increased until I wrinkled my
nose.

Or maybe that was the sight of
Gladys striding down the corridor, her squirming, barking Pomeranian in her
arms. Saliva dripped from the dog’s teeth, and its black eyes were glassy.

“What’s wrong with your dog?” I
yelled from the doorway. The twin commotion of dog and computer practically
deafened me.

“You don’t have to yell.” Gladys
reached me. “Jojo and I are going home early, but I wanted to introduce you
first.”

I didn’t think the dog wanted to
meet me. It writhed, snapped, and scrambled free of her arms.

“Jojo, get back here, you naughty
girl!” Gladys lunged for the dog and missed.

The dog tore in a circle like a
demented, long-haired footstool while Gladys swiped at her. I bent over to
help, but the animal dashed into the conference room.

“Yip, yip, yip, yip!”

At the dog’s entrance, Beau
glanced up, past Gladys and me. A frown creased his brow. The computer noise
quit, thank God, and he straightened. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Who was he talking to, an empty
cubicle?

Gladys stuck her hands on her
hips. “Young man, I work here.”

Beau jumped out of his chair and
ran toward the door. Unfortunately, Jojo had reached him and he tripped, trying
to avoid a canine smooshing incident.

The dog continued its sprint
unscathed. Beau, for the second time in two days, barreled into me.

I staggered back, Beau in my
arms. It sounds like dancing, but it wasn’t. His knobby-haired skull thumped my
cheek. Since I’d worn slacks and flat shoes, I had better balance. We didn’t
fall.

As soon as we stopped careening
like two drunks, he shoved away from me and took off down the empty corridor
without a word.

“What’s his problem?” Gladys
said.

“Sociopath.” Okay, that wasn’t a
polite way to refer to a teammate in front of a customer. “I’m being catty. He
has a headache. I bet he’s going to get aspirin.”

John exited the conference room,
the panting dog in his arms. Jojo was trying to lick his face.

“You little devil,” Gladys said.
“This is my girl Jojo.”