The Survivor - Cristin Harber Page 0,46
It couldn’t have been far from how he felt.
“Let me guess.” She stiffly returned to her seat. “You plan to be as obnoxious as possible until we go our separate ways?”
He smirked. “How’s my plan working?”
“All right you two. Enough,” Halle demanded.
Hagan glanced at Angela and Parker. Angela didn’t seem to know what was going on, and Parker seemed to orbit somewhere between laughing his ass off and standing in solidarity with Jared.
Jared held up his hands. “No more talk of penetration testing.”
Despite the dynamics of the room, Hagan almost laughed. He bit the inside of his mouth and prayed that he could show the smallest slice of control. He’d never claimed to act mature. The nature of his job forced him to find humor in the shittiest of situations. This meeting wasn’t the shittiest situation, but it had to be the most uncomfortable. Lord, give him strength to finish this meeting without fighting his boss or laughing out loud.
“If you can’t control the urge,” Amanda said, “you just say pen testing. It’d be less of a distraction, Boss Man.”
“Noted,” Jared grumbled.
Something that sounded suspiciously like choking laughter came from Parker. Hagan wondered how he’d gone his entire life without attending a meeting where someone had said penetration. That had to be impossible. Off the top of his head, he recounted a half-dozen missions in the last six months that required him to breach a line or infiltrate enemy barriers, and yet today that word sounded as inappropriate as … finger.
Hagan dropped his chin and pinched his eyes shut, knowing damn well that if he were to look up, he wouldn’t be able to keep it together.
Shuttlecock. Diphthong. Dreamhole. Hagan rubbed his temples. Innocuous words from long-finished crossword puzzles had come back to haunt him. His dirty mind did one better, ensuring that he somehow heard words like kumquat, dongle, and angina in Amanda’s voice.
“Everything okay over there?” Jared demanded.
Hagan’s thoughts had transformed into weirdo pervy word lists. Hell, his grandma had had angina. This meeting might ensure his place in hell if he weren’t careful. “Yeah. Fine.”
Jared opened his booklet again and flipped a few pages. Everyone else took it as a sign they could get down to business. Hagan skimmed the first pages and stopped cold. Newlyweds.
He glanced up. No one seemed shocked as they read the briefing contents. Was he the only one who hadn’t put two and two together? Amanda and Halle had discussed the benefits of a cover that operated as a couple. In theory, he’d digested that information. But to see the details of their coupledom written in black and white. Newlyweds, no less. As if he wouldn’t have had sex on his mind already. But that word equated into lots and lots of sex.
Angela pushed a shoe-box-sized container toward the center of the table. Hagan realized that he’d spaced on the discussion. Amanda reached for the box and extracted three smaller boxes. She opened the first, and without much fanfare, shut it and slung it across the table to Hagan.
Hagan eyed the box, not ready for what was inside. How the hell could he face off with his boss over a woman but let a fake marriage make him feel as cagey as a captured lion?
Amanda settled in her chair again. Two unopened boxes remained by her side.
Hagan refocused on the briefing and turned to the details of their joint operating agreement. Nothing much to see except for legalese.
He turned another page and skimmed. The summary read a little wordier than Titan’s usual mission briefings, but nothing out of the ordinary. Then Hagan read the first details of their cover. He’d never worked a job like this before.
Pieces of their cover surprised him. Hagan glanced up, confirming, “You’ll stay Amanda?”
She nodded. “And you’ll stay Hagan. There’s too high of a risk that the casino’s security system might register an unacceptable time variance if we interacted with different names.”
“You’re saying a fraction of a second could blow our cover?”
“Yeah,” Parker agreed. “We’ve kept what we have to and slightly adjusted everything else.”
Hagan reviewed his information. “We live in Bardstown, Kentucky.”
“Right,” Parker said.
“Because I grew up in—”
“No!” Amanda held up her hands. “Don’t share anything with me unless it’s on this paper.”
Jared sighed. “That ship has sailed.”
She ignored him. “Are we on the same page?”
Back to this again. Hagan ground his molars. What choice did he have? Then again, until Jared started poking him with a stick today, Hagan had been okay. He studied his