No More Spies (Masters and Mercenaries: New Recruits #4)

Chapter One

Kala Taggart forced air into her lungs and tried to relax. Like this was a normal, everyday Saturday night. It was in some ways. She usually did sneak out of the house to spend time with Cooper, but tonight she was doing something different.

Tonight, she was going to make Cooper McKay hers. Her first. Her only because she was going to love Coop for the rest of her life. And she wasn’t going to fake die on him like her mom had, so there would be no need for whatever the hell they did on Saturday nights.

She was pretty sure she knew what they did and it was gross because…parents…but what she was about to do with Cooper would be beautiful.

And it was a nice night for it. There was a full moon illuminating the path from her house to his. Only three blocks separated them, but it was too much. She lived for these nights.

“You’re going to get caught one of these days, and Mom will ground you for life,”

her sister had said as she’d climbed out the window. She would give it to her dad. He knew how to lock down a house, but she’d figured out how to screw with the sensor in the window of the bathroom she shared with her sisters, and luckily it was big enough she could wriggle her way out and shimmy down the drain, avoid the cameras, and then she was free.

Honestly, she kind of enjoyed the exercise and was looking forward to the next time her dad redid the system. Getting one over on the old man was truly something to be proud of. She liked a challenge.

Cooper’s house wasn’t much of one. His dad wasn’t as crazy paranoid as hers. It was easy to move around the sparsely placed motion detector lights. She crept around the back of the house, working her way toward the door leading to the kitchen. Cooper always left it open for her. She’d done it at least a hundred times since she realized she didn’t actually have to listen to her parents when they told her to stay home. She had feet and they took her places.

Cooper was her favorite place.

“Hey.”

She nearly started at the sound but managed to play it cool. Coop sat on one of the lawn chairs by the pool everyone joked about. Like hey, do you remember the time we buried our enemies in your pool jokes.

Her parents were weird.

Of course, they might not be joking since her dad used to work for the CIA and her mom counted assassin in her previous professions. “Hey.”

She gave him the smile she only ever had for him. The truth of the matter was she had quite the reputation as a heinous bitch, and she was proud of it, mostly. But not with him. Never with him.

“You’re late,”

he said, standing. He was tall and lanky, and she could remember a time when they were the same height, but the last few years had put a foot on him and she hadn’t kept pace. “I was starting to get worried.”

“It took forever to get Travis to go to sleep. Seth pays no attention whatsoever to what’s going on around him, but Travis is more aware,”

she admitted. “And somehow he can tell me and Kenz apart.”

Cooper’s brows rose. It was his dumbass-said-what look. “Of course he can. I know you’re twins, but you are unique. I hate it when people pretend they can’t tell you apart. There’s no one quite like you, Kala.”

He was the only one who seemed to see her. Well, everyone saw her. He was the only one who didn’t think she was a bitch who happened to have a saintly sweet twin. Like she and Kenzie were mirror images of each other, but Kala was the evil version. Not to Coop. Coop saw her for who she was. He always had. Ever since they were kids.

It was why she loved him. It was why tonight was going to be their night, and then they would go to the dance together and everyone would know they belonged to each other.

And those mean girls who hung around because Coop was gorgeous and popular and on all the sports ball teams could fuck themselves.

“Hey, I heard something about Kyle and MaeBe,”

Cooper said, worry in his tone. “Is that woman back?”

Ah, Julia Ennis. Kyle Hawthorne was her cousin. Technically not by blood since he and his brother David were her Aunt Grace’s sons from her first marriage. But blood didn’t mean a lot in her circles. When Grace had married Sean Taggart, those brothers had become family. Kyle had played with her and her siblings, babysat them, always got them ice cream when they were kids. He’d been gone for a couple of years and everyone pretended like he was in the military doing normal military things, but Kala was excellent at breaking into records and listening when she wasn’t supposed to. She got grounded a lot, and it was her parents’ fault because there wasn’t much to do when she was grounded. Eavesdropping and spying were the only fun times to be had. “Yes. From what I heard this week, she’s been causing all kinds of trouble. She wants to kill MaeBe because she thinks once Mae’s dead, she can, like, move into her place or something. She’s pretty psycho.”

Julia Ennis had been Kyle’s CIA partner. Because very few people in her family actually did real military time. Nope. They found out someone was connected to Ian Taggart and got the Agency invite real damn quick.

She was counting on it.

“I don’t understand the connection. Is she an old girlfriend? I asked Dad and he said it was classified.”

It was always good to have intel. Her parents had taught her information was a form of currency. Of course, she would never use it against Coop. She gave him everything for free. “He worked with her when he was with the Agency. From what I’ve pieced together she was actually a double agent for this group called The Consortium. They work for really rich people. Like an Illuminati organization. Anyway, Kyle found out and tried to kill her, but he didn’t do a great job. He also asked her to marry him, but that was before he found out she’s a traitor.”

“Shouldn’t she be hiding?”

Kala shrugged. Who knew why psychos did the things they did? “I think she’s doing what abusive shit men do. I think she believes Kyle belongs to her, and no one else can have him. Huh, when you think about it, it’s kind of feminist.”

Cooper’s eyes rolled. “No, it’s criminal. Kyle loves MaeBe. I think if he tried to kill this Julia person, she should want to break up. She sounds…intense. I feel bad for your cousin.”

Something seemed to be making him anxious. “Our dads will take care of it. I’m pretty sure Kyle’s moved Mae into the club. They’ll be safe there while the ’rents work things out.”

“Sometimes I think there’s not a lot to work out,”

Coop said enigmatically. He looked over the pool, the ghostly lights making him seem oddly distant. “Sometimes it doesn’t work and you have to make the choice to save yourself.”

The last thing she wanted was distance between them. Distance wasn’t what tonight was about. She moved into his space the way she’d seen her mom do to her dad a million times, putting a hand on his chest. “What’s wrong? Did something happen today? We don’t have to worry about my cousin and MaeBe. Dad won’t let anything happen to them. He likes Mae and he always tells me no matter how dumbass a family member is, it’s still our duty to ensure they don’t die.”

There was something grim about Cooper, but she could ease whatever was making him worry. She might think her parents going to a sex club every Saturday night was gross and unbecoming to persons of their advanced age, but they’d taught her how to take care of the people she loved.

He sighed, and his hand came up to cover hers. “Nothing really happened. I had practice and then I went to the movies with Mom and Hunter and Vivi. Dad was working on something at Sanctum. I’m pretty sure it’s the Kyle/MaeBe problem.”

Their dads had been close since they were kids. Alex McKay had been Ian Taggart’s best friend for the majority of their long lives. It only made sense she and Cooper would form an attachment—different but every bit as meaningful.

He was so gorgeous. It made it hard for her to focus. But she was a woman on a mission. She stepped back, sitting on the chaise lounge and leaving room for him to join her. It was a breezy night, a hint of fall in the air. Homecoming was a couple of weeks away, and this year she wasn’t going with him as a friend. “I’m sure the screwed-up Kyle situation is part of it, but my dad headed out with his tool kit, so something broke down. Dad likes to multitask when he can. I’m glad he has your dad since he’s not actually great at fixing things.”

Killing things was an entirely different story. Her dad was great at that, hence the possibility of the body under the pool.

One day she and Coop would have a place to bury their own bodies. Not their own own. The bodies of the people they were forced to take down in the course of their exciting careers as international superspies.

Unless, of course, Coop ended up playing pro sports, and then she would have to figure something out because she wasn’t going to be apart from her husband for weeks at a time. He was the only person in the world she would give up her plans for. She’d come to accept he was the dream. Turned out for all her smarts and surly demeanor, she was just a girl who loved a boy.

Coop sank down beside her. “You don’t want to go in?”

Usually they ended up in his room, playing video games and listening to music or watching movies on his laptop and making out. It was how they’d spent every Saturday night for the last three months. It had been perfect and she cherished it, but it was time to move the relationship forward. High school would be so much easier once she and Coop settled things between them. “I do, but I thought we should talk first.”

There was the grimness again, like she’d brought something down on his head, something he couldn’t avoid. “Yeah, we should.”

Some of her confidence wavered, but she shoved the thought aside. “Good. I thought we should talk because homecoming is in a few weeks and we haven’t made plans.”

“I think we need to talk about Jimmy Roads first.”

He shook his head. “You promised you would stop.”

She bit back a groan. She’d kind of hoped he hadn’t heard about what had happened after the game. The fight—if one could call it a fight—had taken place yesterday, and she’d thought she’d gotten away with it. After all, the asshole probably didn’t want it to get around he’d been taken down by a girl. “He hit you with an eighty-mile-an-hour fast ball.”

She always tried to attend Coop’s practices. While it wasn’t baseball season, the team still got together to keep their skills sharp. They’d been playing a pick-up game Friday afternoon, and Jimmy was a dick.

Coop’s jaw tightened. “And you broke his nose. Do you know how fast I had to talk to make sure you didn’t get suspended? He wanted to go to the principal. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even suspend you. They would send you to alternate ed or kick you out.”

She’d thought the dude would at least have some dignity. She’d been wrong. Whiny-ass boy. “I didn’t mean to break his nose. I meant to have a talk with him. He’s the one who got handsy. I have the right to defend myself.”

Jimmy had been condescending. He’d parroted all the things Coop’s other “friends”

said. She brought him down. Coop was just being nice letting her hang around. Their dads were best friends so Coop felt like he had to be friends with her. She was pathetic since she was chasing a guy who was far above her. Not that her patheticness had stopped the guy from putting a hand on her shoulder and offering to take her behind the bleachers and give her what Coop was never going to give her.

He was lucky it had been only his nose she’d broken. But she wasn’t a whiny punk who was going to cry to Coop. She’d handled it.

“You wouldn’t have to if you would just be…normal.”

He took a long breath, seeming to try to keep himself in control.

“It’s normal to not want your boyfriend to get injured by a jackass.”

Maybe she’d been wrong. He’d used that word. The one she hated. Normal. She wasn’t normal. She wasn’t feminine. She wasn’t easy to get along with. Why couldn’t she be more like Kenzie? Or better. Why couldn’t she be as perfect as her older sister, Tasha? Kenzie was still weird. If she hadn’t had Kala around to give her cover, Kenz would have been considered super weird. But Tash was perfect.

I don’t know, Ian. I sometimes wish she was a little more like Tash. Life would be easier for her.

Her mom hadn’t meant the words unkindly—hadn’t meant for her to hear them at all—but Kala had taken them to heart.

Coop was the one who liked her darkness. At least he had. He definitely liked it on those late nights when she would sneak from her house to his and he would put his hands all over her and kiss her until she couldn’t breathe.

“I’m sorry.”

She needed to think about how her actions affected him. He probably thought she was emasculating him when she beat up the dudes who fucked with him. It had probably been pretty embarrassing, like he’d been the one who cried to her so she would deal with it for him. It couldn’t be further from the truth, but she could see Jimmy throwing those accusations in his face. “I should have let you handle it. I just got so angry with him.”

“I know. You never mean it,”

he said with a sigh.

She could still save this. Guys were hard on each other. The locker room, she’d been told, was a dangerous jungle. Personally, she’d never been much of a team player. She put a hand on his. “Let’s go upstairs. Talking sucks. Let’s make out.”

She squared her shoulders and pulled on every bit of bravery she had. “I’ve got an even better idea. Let’s do it.”

His head cocked. “Do it? Make out? We do that all the time.”

They did. In secret. In private. In public they were friends. Only friends. They weren’t ready to tell their parents they were something more. Or their siblings. Or their other friends. She was pretty sure Kenzie thought she was simply hanging out with Cooper. If Tash thought they were close to being really intimate, she would call their parents in. Only her best friend Lou knew they were getting physical.

But she was ready for everyone to know they were more than friends. What if he wasn’t?

“I think we should have sex.”

It was always best to be plain.

Cooper stood up so fast she nearly fell back. “Kala, we’re fifteen.”

She shrugged. She didn’t feel like she was fifteen. Given the profession she intended to go into, she might be middle aged. Of course, her father always said she’d been born forty years old, with a taste for Scotch and violence and a bitterness he admired. “Age is just a number.”

A laugh huffed from Cooper’s chest. “Yeah, well, I don’t think your dad would agree, and I also don’t think he would hesitate to murder me.”

This was not going the way she thought it would. “He won’t know about the sex. I can deal with my father. He’s not as bad as he seems to be. And we’ll be careful. I got a couple of condoms. My parents are super open about sex. He knows how much I care about you. It won’t come as some shock that we’re dating.”

“Dating?”

Cooper said the word like he’d never heard it before.

He was obtuse tonight. “Yeah. What do you call what we’ve been doing for the last three months? Every Saturday night.”

He seemed to think about his answer. “I don’t know. Hanging out. Playing some games.”

A pit opened in her gut. Maybe he’d been playing a game and she hadn’t realized it. “Hanging out?”

“Kala, I care about you, too,”

he said, his tone low. “You know I do. You know I think you’re gorgeous and funny, and I love the time we spend together, but…”

The breeze had seemed warm a moment before, but now it held a hint of a chill. That “but”

was going to change everything. That “but” was going to break her fucking heart.

He hesitated, so she helped him out. It was what friends did for each other. “But I’m a lot, right? I’m a righteous bitch and everyone hates me.”

He frowned. “I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to,”

she replied, already feeling her armor slide into place. It was sad. She’d come to look forward to spending these nights with him because she didn’t have to wear it. Somedays it seemed so heavy. “I have a question for you. What exactly did you think we were building up to with all the late-night make-out sessions?”

He paced, taking five steps to the edge of the pool and then back to the lounger. “I didn’t think we were building up to anything. Not now. We’re still really young. I know I’m supposed to do anything for sex, but I’m not ready, Kala. You’re talking about an adult relationship, and it comes with a lot of responsibility neither one of us is ready for.”

Ugh, she could hear his mom talking. Sometimes she thought life would be easier if Cooper’s mom had been a criminal like her own. Charlotte Taggart didn’t overanalyze every emotion she had. Dr. Eve McKay, well, emotional analysis was her job, and she’d passed the obnoxious behavior on to her son. “Or you don’t want me.”

He stopped and stared at her. “Of course I do. Kala, you know you’re gorgeous.”

Did she? Sure, her outer lining was physically attractive, but then she opened her mouth. Then she showed who she was on the inside, and it wasn’t pretty.

Would Cooper prefer her sister? Kenzie had all Kala’s outer beauty and not so much of her darkness. Kenzie wouldn’t have lost her shit on a guy playing baseball. She would have checked to make sure Coop was okay and then moved on with her day.

“I just… I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to take this any further than we do now. We have time. All the time in the world. I like our Saturdays. We don’t have to screw things up by being traditional. How about I make us some sandwiches and we play games and enjoy the rest of the night and pretend this whole talk didn’t happen? But you need to chill or I’ll have to ask you not to come to my practices. Okay?”

A weird numbness settled over her. It wasn’t anger. She knew anger and it wasn’t this.

This was her heart breaking.

He didn’t love her. He couldn’t. He didn’t want her. She wasn’t sure why he welcomed her every Saturday. Maybe he was scared of what she might do. She could be intense, and she was excellent at revenge. So fear could be the reason. Maybe he also liked making out and she was easy.

She’d been so sure of him. So certain that even when the rest of the world sucked, he was her safe place. It hadn’t mattered if everyone besides her family and her best friend Lou thought she was a psychopath, as long as Coop was there.

But he wasn’t there. Not really.

She thought about what he’d said before. His words hit different once she knew the truth.

She wasn’t going to cry. She wouldn’t give her tears to anyone if she couldn’t give them to him.

“Kala?”

She stood, her heart a dull thing in her chest. “What you said before, was it about Julia Ennis or me?”

He looked a bit shocked. “What?”

“You said sometimes it doesn’t work and you have to save yourself,”

she parroted back, the words bitter on her tongue. “Is this you saving yourself, Coop? You weren’t ever going to take me to the homecoming dance, were you?”

“Why do you care?”

Cooper asked, a surprised look on his face. “You don’t even like dances. You call them stupid. Like you call everything fun about high school stupid. Like you call all my friends stupid.”

His friends were stupid. “Your friends all hate me.”

“You don’t do anything to make them like you.”

He seemed to be warming to the argument. “You meet someone and immediately pull some crap.”

“It’s called being myself.”

“This isn’t you. This is some phase you’re going through. I need you to get through it faster because I don’t want to spend my entire high school experience apologizing for my girlfriend,”

he shot back.

“A phase? I’m in a phase? What was I before? Sweet and docile?”

Where the hell was this coming from? “This is who I am, Coop. You’ve known me since we were in diapers. Did you think I would turn into some sweet thing who decorates your locker before the big game? Who sits around and waits for you to notice me?”

“Maybe it would be better if you did sit around and wait because what you do now is start freaking fights,”

he said, throwing up his hands. “I knew we couldn’t have this talk. I told her…”

And she was afraid she knew who “her”

was. It might be easier if she thought he’d had this talk with some other girl. Some other girl would give him advice so she would have a better shot at him. Some other girl hadn’t been around all of her life. This was worse. “Did you talk to your mom about me?”

He went still, and for a moment she thought he might not answer her. Then he sat back down, his hands threaded together like he didn’t quite trust himself. “We were talking about what Kyle’s going through. It worries me.”

Oh, this was bad. “We’re not Kyle and Mae in this scenario.”

“I didn’t say that. I just think you’re intense and sometimes we need to…”

He said a bunch more stuff, but she didn’t hear it. It was a lot of word salad, and it didn’t mean anything. She’d heard the important stuff. Intense. How often had she heard the word? She wasn’t the Mae in his metaphor. Or was it a simile? She should have paid more attention in English, but she spent all her time thinking about a boy. Who thought she was like Julia Ennis. Which meant he thought she was a monster.

He was still talking, complaining about how often she got grounded.

“She told you to save yourself? Your mom?”

At one point in time she’d called Eve McKay Auntie Eve, though they didn’t share any blood. A few years before she’d dropped the honorific since she needed there to be no family ties between them. The fact that Cooper had been adopted meant nothing. He was a McKay and not her cousin.

“She said I can’t control what other people do and sometimes when a person is drowning, they end up dragging the person trying to save them down, too,”

he admitted.

He was trying to save her? From being herself? She didn’t know how to be anyone else. Sometimes she pretended to be Kenzie to fool everyone—because no matter what Coop thought, they were perfectly identical—but she wouldn’t want to live like Kenzie.

He wasn’t saving her life. He was saving what he valued.

The tears were there. He was choosing. His friends. His place at Johnson High School. A hole opened up inside her. A hole she hadn’t realized he filled. Well, there was one thing she could give him. The last thing she would give him. Starting this moment, she would cut him out of her heart. She wouldn’t hate him. Wouldn’t love him. Her goal was to look at him and feel nothing. “I won’t drag you down, Coop.”

He took a long breath, and there was an odd relief in his expression. “Good. My mom was right. This was a hard conversation but a necessary one. I know you don’t want to drag me down. I know you don’t want to cause trouble.”

Oh, but she did. It was there. The need to push whatever button was in front of her simply to see what it did. The impulse to sometimes burn the world down because it pissed her off. Trouble was fun. Trouble might be her true native language. “I won’t cause you anything at all. Good-bye, Coop. Next time you see me, pretend you don’t know me.”

She turned and started walking across the backyard with far less care than she had entered. One of the motion-activated lights came on, but she simply moved through. If her shadow was the last thing he saw, it was okay with her.

How could she be doing this?

How could she walk away from him?

He was the best part of her day. He was supposed to be her dad. Not gross-like. He was supposed to be Ian to her Charlotte. She was supposed to get what her parents had, and there was no way it would be like that with anyone but Cooper. No way. She wouldn’t ever feel this way again. She wouldn’t ever love again. He’d been her shot.

She’d never actually had a shot.

“Hey.”

Cooper was suddenly behind her. “What is that supposed to mean? Pretend I don’t know you?”

She stopped. It would be far smarter to keep walking. They didn’t come back from this. His mom didn’t like her. An ache pulsed through her. She’d always thought Eve liked her. She wondered if Alex thought she was bad for Cooper, too. Yes, it would be better to walk, but these were her last minutes with him and she couldn’t lose them. No matter how brutal they became. She turned his way. He was ghostly, caught in the shadows from the pool and security lights. “It means if you ignore me and I ignore you, then you get what you want. No one will think you’re friends with the nasty bitch, and you can move forward and become everything Mommy wants you to be. You might be homecoming king one day if you play your cards right and hang with the popular people.”

“Don’t bring my mom into this. She didn’t mean it that way.”

There wasn’t any other way to mean it. “You have to save yourself from me, Coop. Except I’m a motherfucking hero. I’m going to do it for you. You want to let assholes like Jimmy walk all over you, who am I to complain?”

He wouldn’t be hers to defend. He would be on his own.

Except he wouldn’t be. He would have all his friends, and all the kids they grew up with would likely take his side because he was Cooper and she was…she was who she was.

“He’s not walking all over me,”

Cooper argued. “I was crowding the plate. It’s baseball. Are you planning on beating the crap out of the guys guarding me when I play basketball?”

“Not anymore,”

she admitted. She gave him a shrug like none of this truly mattered. “You’ve made yourself clear. It’s fine. I’ll move on to the next guy.”

She wished she hadn’t said the last part. The look of pain on Cooper’s face would stay with her forever. Except it wasn’t pain she saw in his brown eyes. It was so much worse. It was pity. “Kala, there’s no next guy. I’m sorry. I’m not handling this well. I don’t know how to tell you we’re moving too fast and I’m not comfortable. I’m fifteen. I care about you. I really do, but you are so intense and I’m not ready.”

He never would be. She would always be too intense. Always too much. He would find his sweet girl to take to homecoming, and then he would go through a string of them until he finally settled down with his white picket fence and two point five kids.

She would probably be dead by then, and it wouldn’t matter. He’d always been a dream. Maybe he represented a part of herself craving some normalcy.

She wasn’t going to get it. “You snooze, you lose, bud. Have a good high school experience. It’s when you’re going to peak, so enjoy it.”

He went pale.

Fuck. “I didn’t mean that.”

“I know,”

he replied. “But it still hurts.”

Yes, she should have kept walking. “Well, I’m sure your new friends will comfort you. Look, there’s no way for us to avoid each other so how about we agree to be polite.”

“I don’t want to be polite, Kala. I only know if we get together now, I don’t think we’ll be together in the future. I don’t think we make it through. It would be better to be friends now and see what happens.”

Friends? She’d never really been his friend. “Sure. But in the spirit of our new friendship, I’ll forego these Saturday nights. I don’t think friends should do what we’ve been doing.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let it get this far. That’s on me. Kala, I’m sorry I let you think…”

She wasn’t going to stand here and listen to all the ways he’d played her. She hadn’t thought he was capable of playing her. “No need. We understand each other now. You’ve said what you needed to say. Good-bye. Follow me and we’ll have a problem.”

When she walked away this time, he stayed in the shadows.

* * * *