Page 73

Grant’s bike and credit card were our saving grace.
After we finally got enough sleep and woke up around ten in the morning, we went to a thrift store for entirely new wardrobes—Caroline damn near wept over clean underwear—and then enjoyed a breakfast place. We didn’t talk much, but that was okay. She wasn’t much of a conversationalist. I was just happy to see her not looking miserable as she inhaled her French toast and chugged chocolate milk.
Not that I wasn’t stuffing myself, either. We hadn’t eaten since my shitty attempt at ramen. I was keeping pace with her, plowing through my pancakes and coffee.
By the time we were done, we were in food comas.
“Wheel me out, spitfire,” I said with an exaggerated groan.
Caroline rolled her eyes. “In your dreams.”
“No room. My head’s too full of you lying in bed under me as I?—”
The waitress teleported next to us. “Anything else for you?”
Caroline covered her face, but I saw her ears turn red.
* * *
From then on, it was Mission Impossible.
We spent hours upon hours planning how to make a move on Bates. We had ideas upon ideas, but there were always holes. We also had arguments.
Well, she argued with me.
“What?” I asked in exasperation. “It could work. We just need to get the Devils to?—”
“No,” she interrupted, annoyed, then bit into an apple with a vengeance. “He has a failsafe against that kind of shit.”
“Okay, what about…”
Nope, that was too naive.
“We could try…”
Nope, that would take a dozen more men to enact.
I flopped back on the bed. “If we fuck, maybe we can refresh our minds.”
Caroline swatted my knee. “Sex doesn’t work like that, Nathaniel.”
“We can try.”
“Good attempt.”
“I want to see your new panties,” I grumbled.
“Not until we figure out how to kill my father,” she said like it was reading a weather report. “Then you can see them on the floor.”
I sat up like a shot and rejoined her sitting at the edge of the bed, surrounded by notebook paper. Neither of us had our phones, so everything we did was the old-fashioned way with pens and independent thinking.
I kissed her bare shoulder, exposed by her tank top that revealed a good amount of her tits. “One hundred percent of my brain power for you, baby girl.”
Caroline was so laser-focused that she barely reacted. I was still surprised I could get away with calling her that. Knowing who she was, how she acted, what her personality was like, Caroline Bates was the last person I would give such a nickname to—until I fucked her so good she was the only one I trusted to call me by my given name.
“I have a plan I’ve been chewing on,” she said. “And more than half of your brain power is focused on what position you want to fuck me in.”
“Of course not, spitfire,” I purred. “I’m?—”