Page 83 of Tangled

“And your guy friends from school, like Micah who rescued us in a helicopter after we were kidnapped by the Butorins.”The one with the eyes.“And you said there were others.”

“Blaze and Logan,” Tristan said.

“Right. So, if Micah can rent a helicopter with an hour’s notice, he must be loaded. Are the others rich, too?”

“They’re comfortable.”

“Right. So they’re loaded. Have you done favors for them in the past?”

“Of course.”

“Like what?” she asked him, prompting.

Tristan waved his hand dismissively at the clouds and sea outside the porthole window. “Picked them up when they were stranded in the Andes in South America. Paid off and threatened a blackmailer. Talked a stalker out of murdering them. Rescued them when they were in the middle of a civil war. Saved their data from ransomware. Normal stuff.”

“Right, just normal stuff like that. Sothey owe you.”

“It’s not like that. They don’toweme.”

“But they’re contacts. They’re parts of your network. You aren’talonein this.”

“Yeah, I am, because I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

“But we canfixthis if we try hard enough, if we work together and come up with ideas,” Colleen told him.

Tristan tapped his phone that was lying on the galley kitchen’s tiny countertop. “I called Mary Varvara Bell whilst we were in Newark. She said that my deadline was Wednesday. Three hours after the close of the market on Wednesday, I will be considered in default, and court proceedings will be filed. When she said she ‘knew’ a judge, I assume sheownsa judge who owes her something. If I don’t get her the GameShack stock as I promised, I will lose everything, and then she paused and said ‘everything’again. When I asked her what she meant, she laughed and hung up.”

The oven timer dinged.

Colleen grabbed a hot pad and began pulling the silver foil trays out of the mini-oven. “Ew, creepy much?”

“I might as well accept it. We’ll arrive in Monaco by noon. I already have reservations at my favorite restaurant for dinner. Would you like to come with me? Do you like seafood?”

“I love seafood.” Colleen had eaten seafood exactly twice at Red Lobster. She’d grown up a poor farm girl in the middle of the high desert. “I can hardly wait.”

46

TwistyTrader

Tristan

Tristan was prepping snacks in the galley kitchen of the airplane because that’s what he’d seen airplane staff do. GetJets seemed to have stocked the plane with a week’s worth of food for four, presumably in case they crashed on a deserted island somewhere between New Jersey and France and it took a bit for the Coast Guard to find them.

Hell, a deserted island in the middle of the Atlantic might be safe from Mary Varvara Bell’s goons.

Probably not.

He continued warming the puff pastry-covered brie for the charcuterie plate.

A commotion, and Anjali slid to a halt at the entry to the galley, blinking rapidly with her eyebrows lifted.“What the hell?”

Colleen trudged up beside her with her hands crammed in her jeans pockets.

Anjali turned to Colleen and pointed at Tristan.“Him?”

“Yeah,” Colleen sighed.

“Tristan King is TwistyTrader, the King of the Killer Whales?”Anjali whirled and faced him, scowling. “Oh, I see it now. I see how you played us with the name and everything.” She spun back to Colleen. “Meeting him was a very bad idea and against forum rules. It was avery bad idea!”