Play Mine (Brooklyn Dawn #3) - Cari Quinn Page 0,96

and held up his hands. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not blaming any of you. It was just crap luck. I rolled and I lost. It could’ve been worse, right?” He let out a dry laugh. “At least I didn’t tattoo Minnie Mouse on my bicep.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jamie demanded.

In lieu of an actual explanation, he turned around and pulled down the waistband of his jeans. The lazy turtle tattoo made Jamie cup her hand over her mouth. “Damn, that’s um…”

“Hideous. I was fucking roofied or something, and I stole a Lambo, got myself arrested, and oh, yeah, at some point, I chose to get that as a tramp stamp.”

“Roofied.” Lindsey’s voice was flat. “Someone put something in Teagan’s drink. Thank God she didn’t drink it. Who the hell would have done that?”

“We have a line on who it might be, and we’re looking for her to bring her in for questioning.”

“Her?” Jamie cocked her head. “Did you get a sicko female after you, High Tea?”

I shook my head. “That would make more sense than this.”

Lila didn’t acknowledge us, just continued seamlessly. “Unfortunately, a couple of your bandmates chose to go rogue and play Nancy Drew to meet with her, which did not happen. So, now she’s MIA, since they were as subtle as a tank.” Lila gazed at me before shifting her attention to Cooper. “Did either of you get the memo about not going off on your own, especially not on investigative sojourns that accomplish absolutely nothing?”

“How did you hear about the meeting?”

Cooper’s hand clamped on my shoulder, but he wasn’t fast enough to stop my mouth.

I winced. “I mean, we made a mistake, but—”

“But I wasn’t supposed to know about it.” Lila flashed a thin smile. “I got that message quite well.”

Noah aimed a steely glance over my head. It wasn’t difficult to guess who it was directed at. “As did I.”

“Look, we made a decision. When the call came in, we figured if Teagan met with Priscilla, maybe she could get a line on if she was really who she said she was.”

“Did you get that line?”

Cooper shuffled his feet. “No. She never showed.”

“Wonder why? Could it be that she saw you and my brother-in-law loitering out front? Not your bodyguard though, because you gave him the slip. He thought you were at home in bed. Meanwhile, Teagan and my sister-in-law were walking into a potentially dangerous situation to meet with someone who may or may not be who she says she is. Who most likely doctored Zane’s drink.”

“Ricki told you?” Cooper asked. “Fuck.”

Even I knew to cover my face at that one. “She didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to talk about it.”

“She knew we slipped our security though.”

“So sorry you neglected to fill her in on the full secrecy surrounding your idiotic plan.”

“Or the rest of us,” Noah added. “I thought you called me because you were worried about Teagan. Instead, you were just sending me off to spin my wheels.”

“What do you mean he called you?” I craned my neck to look up at Cooper. He had already paced away to brace his hands on the frame of the window across the aisle. “When?”

“When you were sleeping,” he replied before returning his attention to Noah. “And I told you the truth. We had—have—suspicions that woman isn’t really Priscilla Jones. I did a preliminary search and couldn’t get anywhere. So, I figured you had resources I don’t. Stupid me, thinking that you’d be willing to help.”

“I did get somewhere. We will exhaust all our resources to find out if she is truly who she says she is. But I should have known about that meeting.”

“We both should have known,” Lila put in. “Period.”

I was still pissed. No one appeared to care how I felt, but I was going to voice it, anyway. “I woke up looking for you, and you weren’t there. I was having a panic attack, and you were on the phone, plotting with Noah? Talking about things you should have talked about with me first?”

Silently, Lindsey laid a hand on my arm in support.

“You needed rest.”

“You needed to be straight with me, if what you found warranted a phone call to Noah.”

“Did you just hear me? I said I didn’t get anywhere. And I intended to tell you about talking to Noah, but you woke up first, and you were freaking out. I wasn’t thinking about the pissing match I’d just had with him.” Cooper jerked a thumb toward