Page 17 of The Honeymoon Hack
Malcolm made a sound that might have been agreement or amusement. When I looked at him, he was studying a book on the table next to him, with apparent fascination.
“Speaking of which,” he said too casually, “you two must have developed some effective shorthand over the years. Any inside jokes? Shared experiences that might help sell the marriage?”
“We have plenty of those.” I grabbed socks from my drawer, counting pairs to keep my hands busy. “Like the time we stayed up forty-three hours straight trying to crack an encryption protocol. Or when Will convinced me to help him rebuild a Tandy TRS-80 from scratch. Or?—”
“Have you ever kissed him?”
The socks fell from my hands. Heat flooded my face—worse than the negligee, worse than the condoms.
Scarlett threw a pillow at him, which bounced off his head and into his lap. “Malcolm.”
“I’m just asking,” he continued as he tossed it back onto the bed, while winking at my sister. Was he really flirting with her at a moment like this? Of course he was. He couldn’t stop himself when she was in the same room. “It could help with the cover. If there were ever anything?—”
“There wasn’t.” I bent to retrieve the socks, grateful for the excuse to hide my face.
“You’ll be fine,” Scarlett said, and something in her tone made me look up. She was watching me with the protective big-sister expression she’d perfected when we were kids. “You know why?”
“Because I have no choice?”
“Because you’re brilliant. You analyze, you adjust, you overcome. It’s what you do.” She picked up the jewelry bag from the bed. “And because the hardest part of any cover ismaking the relationship appear real, but you and Will already have a foundation for that. All you’re doing is showing a piece of yourself you usually keep hidden.”
She pulled out the ring box, opening it with a small click. The gold band sat nestled in white velvet, simple and unassuming. A young tech couple’s practical choice. Nothing romantic about it. Not even an engagement ring with an ungodly diamond that would spin around on my finger anytime I started typing too fast.
“Try it on,” Scarlett said. “You need to get used to wearing it.”
The metal slid over my knuckles. It sat there, foreign and strange, like a variable in the wrong equation.
“How does it feel?” Malcolm asked.
“Like costume jewelry.” Except it didn’t. I twisted it around my finger, watching the light reflect off the surface. It was surprisingly beautiful in its simplicity.
My phone buzzed again. Will:Car’s here. See you at the airport.
I stared at my phone in one hand and the ring on the other. What was I getting myself into? In less than thirty minutes, I’d be on a plane with the team, heading toward a mission I wasn’t trained for, pretending to be married to my best friend.
Chapter 7
Will
“We absolutely cannot saywe had a beach wedding in the Maldives, Malcolm,” I said over the hum of the Reynolds private jet engines. The idea wasn’t even worth my looking up from my tablet. “If anyone at Mnemis has actually been there, we’d be caught in a lie immediately.”
I sat in one of the rearmost seats at our work table. Facing me, Malcolm and Scarlett had an array of paperwork spread out in front of them, reviewing and tweaking the undercover dossiers to work with the new mission parameters.
“Fine, but you need something romantic.” Malcolm pushed up the sleeves of his light gray sweater. “A civil ceremony doesn’t sell the love story.”
“It sells practicality,” I countered, glancing up briefly. “Which is exactly what two career-focused network technicians would prioritize.”
Brie had been pacing the length of the main cabin, muttering more to herself than anyone, for the past half hour. Without pausing in her step, she said, “The Mnemis HR policy explicitly states married couples get priority for shared residentialquarters. We can just say we got married quickly after we got the job offers.”
“Good point.” A surge of relief flowed through me. Despite her initial panic about going undercover, she was now fully immersed in preparations, her brain active enough that she couldn’t focus on her worries. “Occam’s razor. The simplest explanation is usually the best one.”
“Also harder to trip up on details,” Brie said as she passed Emmett.
He lounged on the divan in the mid-cabin, his attention fixed on the flat-screen television mounted on the opposite wall. “Looks like Tropical Depression Fifteen has strengthened to a tropical storm. Lorenzo.” He gestured toward the weather map on screen. “And Sixteen isn’t far behind, though they’re saying it should stay out to sea.”
Scarlett turned in her seat to see the screen. “Lorenzo’s heading for the Leeward Islands. That puts it well south of us for now, but we’ll need to monitor it.”
The jet hummed steadily around us as we continued our flight toward Miami. Two months of meticulous planning for this mission, and in the span of a few hours, everything had changed. After twelve months working remotely from London, this wasn’t how I’d imagined my first direct action job would go—paired with Brie instead of Ashley, thrust into an operation I’d been nervous about even before the personnel change.
