Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 136425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 682(@200wpm)___ 546(@250wpm)___ 455(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 682(@200wpm)___ 546(@250wpm)___ 455(@300wpm)
“I’ll make the arrangements, and I’ll get you a tablet like the one you work on,” he promised.
“Thank you.” She picked up her fork.
Zach got to work on dinner. He was suddenly hungry again.
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 singing “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.”