Chapter Eight
Week One
There was a trick to making sure the irritable donkey Lacey called The Fabulous Miss K didn’t land a kick. Oh, Devi had taken a couple to the shins at first, but she had it down now.
Keep the feed bag in her left hand. Use her right hand to distract the aforementioned angry donkey. For some reason jazz hands worked on her. While she was Bob Fosse-ing the fuck out of her right hand while singin.
“Defying Gravity”
from Wicked—had to be from Wicked, she’d tried some Six on the girl and that ended with bruised shins—she managed to top off the feed and somehow fill the water trough.
The chickens were so much easier.
Three days on the farm and it felt oddly comfortable to walk into this barn and clean out the stalls and make sure that donkey that had obviously escaped from the bowels of hell got her feed.
“So you’re sleeping with him?”
She had the cell on speaker phone and thanked the universe that Zach Reed was apparently way smarter than anyone gave him credit for.
He assured her the line was safe and she could call anyone she liked.
Lou, he explained, was doing the same thing on the other side of the world with some of the tech she had developed.
None of the tech they gave her put phone numbers in Devi’s brain.
She explained that she knew how to call people by pressing their names on her contact list or saying hey, Siri, call Brianna, and that didn’t work here.
So he had programmed her numbers and made this weird sat phone/cell hers.
She could even text and had all the emojis.
He was getting annoyingly likable again.
It had only been a couple of days, and she was fascinated all over.
Not that she was showing him.
“I am not. I mean I am sleeping with him, but I’m not doing anything else with him.”
Except eating every meal, watching British quiz shows while they drank afternoon tea, and playing games and spending most of her days with him. Only that. Nothing else.
After the first day, she sat in on the daily briefing that Lacey and Zach had—sometimes Arthur would join—and Lacey had gotten used to having a non-spy at meetings. She’d had a long talk with Devi about how she would play in her entrails if she betrayed them, but honestly, she was used to that. She’d heard many a lecture from her cousins, and her uncle was really invested in entrails and medieval torture.
But that was all.
It wasn’t like she turned to him in her sleep and woke up with his muscular arm wrapped around her waist and felt safe and warm and whole for a moment.
“Well, let me tell you the spy kids are looking for you,”
Bri said in a hushed tone.
“They are totally looking for you.”
Daisy was there, too.
“They’ve got a setup in the conference room at The Hideout because they don’t want to use the stuff at the McKay-Taggart building. Mostly because Uncle Ian is all like ‘give them some time; let Zach work this out.’ But Kala is having none of that. She thinks Zach knows where his mom is, and she wants a word.”
“Wait, is that a talk or is Kala going to kill someone?”
Bri asked.
She wasn’t wrong. Her murderiest cousin could mean either.
“I’m hoping for talk. According to Zach, he and Kala have an understanding. Hey, what are you doing? That is not your feed, Miss Rachel. Shoo. Damn chicken.”
The chicken named Miss Rachel was the obvious alpha chicken, and she liked to wander everywhere and get into all the other animals’ food. And they let her. Because she was kind of mean. She was absolutely the queen of the chickens.
Devi rather thought she could take some cues from Miss Rachel.
“You’re dealing with chickens?”
Daisy asked.
“Did you get one of those egg aprons?”
“Oh, if only I could eat the eggs. I’m in veganville North Wales. Wait. Maybe you shouldn’t tell Kala I said that.”
She was a terrible spy. Like awful. Oh, it wouldn’t be pain or torture that made her talk. It would be gossip. All anyone had to do was set her two besties down, give them a bottle of tequila, and let the state secrets flow.
Lacey might have a point, but then if they wanted to keep their secrets, Zach shouldn’t have brought her to this… She wanted to say hellhole, but it was a bucolic paradise where she sometimes sat and talked to the pigs. They were surprisingly good listeners. And they did not judge.
“Are you okay?”
Daisy asked.
“I could tell my da they’re horribly mistreating you and he will find you.”
Daisy’s dad, Liam O’Donnell, was considered the deep thinker of McKay-Taggart. Uncle Li had been her mom’s partner for years, and they now handled the trickiest of cases, the ones that involved some kind of mystery because between the two of them, there wasn’t one they couldn’t solve. Likely over a burger and some beer.
“I need time here, Dais. Please tell everyone I’m fine. I can handle some vegan meals. Lacey is actually good at them.”
It was the first time talking to her friends, and she had to hope they would be honest with her.
“Can you tell me how Landon is doing? Does he hate me?”
“Oh, he was in the doghouse for a while, but then he helped Harlow Dawson kill a bunch of what he called criminal douchebags, and now Big Tag likes him again,”
Daisy promised.
“Nate said Landon is fine, though he is currently taking what he called the don’t-lose-the-girl course. We’re all helping out. Every couple of days he’s supposed to watch one of us, and we’re supposed to get away from him. I tried climbing out of my dad’s second story office and managed to break one of the limbs on the big oak, but Landon totally caught me.”
“Uncle Li is paying for his chiropractor because he didn’t really catch her, more like she landed on him, but Big Tag gave him a pass,”
Bri explained.
“I’m supposed to try to escape from The Hideout on Saturday. I’m going to have Marley Brighton distract him with her boobs.”
She missed them. Missed the club they all belonged to.
Missed sitting in the lounge with Zach and pretending everything was perfect. It had felt perfect.
But she was starting to wonder what had been perfect about it. Had it been having her friends around her? Being in a place she loved? Not knowing exactly who Zach was?
Or had it felt perfect because Zach was the person she was supposed to be with, and damn all his problems.
“That sounds like fun,”
she said, shooing the chicken away again and easing out of the stall. She moved on to the sweet old race horse with the gimpy leg who loved treats and wandering around the fields. She pulled the carrot out of her pocket and offered it up.
“Please tell him how sorry I am.”
“You can tell him yourself when you come home,”
Bri promised.
“Now let’s talk because since you’re gone, Kala is letting her sisters and her mom handle the whole wedding, and she said she didn’t care what her wedding dress was like.”
Oh, no. This was a drama that could kill the planet.
“Kenzie and Tash will put her in something froufrou, and Kala will run. I have to fix this.”
She hung up and immediately called her cousin.
“Tell me where you are. I told Zach I would keep him in the loop. I did not tell him he could kidnap my cousin.”
Kala was smart, but the last time Devi checked her cousin wasn’t psychic.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Like I don’t already have that programmed in. Zach did a good job, but I have smarty pants on my team. The number changes, but Lou’s figured out how to ID it,”
Kala said in her grumpy fashion.
“She hasn’t figured out how to locate it, but she will. I’ll be on your doorstep in a couple of days, and Zach and I are going to talk.”
“He didn’t kidnap me. I mean he sort of did, but it’s come to my attention that I am not entirely innocent in all of this, and I suck sometimes. So I’m taking a time out. Trust me. I’m not under lock and key. I’m currently in a barn.”
There was a gasp over the line.
“He’s keeping you in a barn? I thought at least he would be banging you in some luxury hotel.”
She was confused.
“I thought you didn’t want him to kidnap me. Now you’re mad he isn’t banging me?”
Kala sighed.
“I just thought at least you two could work a couple of things out because you, my cousin, have been brutally bitchy since he left. A couple of good orgasms and maybe you’re happier.”
She wished her cousin was wrong.
“I did not call to talk about my lack of a love life, nor do I want to discuss why I won’t sleep with a man who lied to me. I called to warn you.”
“Shit.”
Kala’s voice went low.
“He’s in trouble, isn’t he? Is it that woman he’s working with? He won’t give me any info on her, so I think she’s shady as fuck. Like I have a feeling about her.”
Kala kind of had that feeling about almost everyone.
“Lacey is fine. You don’t have to worry about her.”
“Her name is Lacey?”
Kala asked, and then she sounded further away like she was holding the phone out.
“Lou, we need to find a chick named Lacey. Probably not her real name.”
Again. Terrible spy. The good news was she could distract her cousin.
“If you let Kenzie pick your wedding dress you’re going to look like Little Bo Peep. She will drown you in lace and put you in a hoop skirt.”
“Wait. What? Why would she… Oh, shit. She won’t be dressing me. She’ll be dressing herself. She’s in a whole ‘woe is me, the world is against my love’ phase because she hasn’t talked to Ben in a couple of weeks. Devi, you have to help me.”
She settled on a bale of hay.
“That I can do.”