He grabbed my arm and pulled me back behind the shelf so we were hidden again. “Eat fast?” he said around a mouthful of food. “You ever try to eat a frozen pizza? It’s fucking gross.” He grimaced. “And I think this has corn on it.”
I chuckled, a bit of my worry for my twin dying down as he joked. “It does have corn. Maybe it’s a European thing, like nude beaches.”
“I’d be okay if that was our next stop,” he said, tossing his last huge bite of frozen pizza into his mouth. He peered around the corner. “They’re microwaving pizza for the others and Georgie’s still eating. I think Plate is keeping pace with her. No, don’t look—“ he grabbed my arm before I could peer around again. “Don’t distract her.”
“She’s my damn twin,” I said. “Why’s she turning on me?”
“Maybe she’s afraid of failure.”
“Are you kidding me? She’s Georgie Price, world famous supermodel. She’s never failed at anything before.” She’d always been super cheery and even clingy when it came to me. Why was she pushing me away now?
“Everyone’s got fears,” Swift said. He leaned closer, craned his neck to check on our teammates, then looked back at me again. “What’s yours?”
“My fears?” I blinked rapidly, trying to pay attention to our conversation. My brain was a whirlwind of anxiety from this leg of the race, adrenaline, and…a little something else. Something that wanted Swift to lean a bit closer, and maybe steal a kiss.
Or two. Or three. I wasn’t picky.
“Yeah, what are your fears?” he repeated.
“Um. Heights, I guess. I haven’t really had a chance to test things but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like to be dropped off a thirty story building or anything. What about you?”
He grinned and reached out to tweak one of my braids. “Spiders.”
A giggle escaped my throat. I pictured this big, sexy, buff biker…terrified of a spider. “Really?”
“Really and truly. That shit’s not right.” He leaned a bit closer and tweaked one of my braids again. “And I really love it when you laugh, you know.”
His mouth was startlingly close to mine now. I pushed back against the shelf, seeing a camera out of the corner of my eye. “Everyone’s going to see…”
“Let them see,” he told me, and leaned in to brush his lips over mine in the briefest of kisses. “You know, if Georgie continues to give you the cold shoulder, you can always come bunk with me tonight. I’d kick Plate out into his own room for you.”
My breath caught. Holy crap, was that ever an invite.
“Uhhhh.” I lost the ability to say anything sensible. All I could see was Swift’s gorgeous face, and I could still taste his lips moving over mine. This guy was confidence and hotness and…and he had to have no freaking clue of who he was talking to.
I’m guessing if he knew I was a virgin, he wouldn’t have offered. Maybe I needed to tell him. I contemplated it, worried. If I said something, would he stop kissing me at every opportunity?
Because really, I was getting addicted to these stolen kisses.
“Done,” Georgie cried in the distance. “Clemmy, where are you?”
“Over here,” I called, scooting out of Swift’s embrace and racing back to my twin. I wrapped my arms around her in a big hug. “You did awesome!”
Now was not the time for getting angry at her. We had another leg of the race to run. But later tonight, when we had downtime? We were going to talk. We couldn’t keep going like this, having one good day and then a total breakdown over nothing the next.
“The clue,” Georgie squealed. “Let’s get the clue and go!”
I nodded and we grabbed our clue disk from the chef at the same time that Plate and Swift got theirs. My cheeks burned as we four sprinted to the exit, because I was thinking about that kiss again.
You can always come bunk with me tonight.
Oh lordy, lordy, I was in serious trouble.
Georgie flipped the clue and offered it to me. Instead of reading theirs, Plate and Swift gathered around me as I read aloud. The clue was split in half down the middle, and it was obvious that it was two identical pieces this time, meant to be separated.
I read the instructions. “It’s time to split up for this task. One of you will head to Bygdøy and put together a Viking ship. The other will ride the Holmenkollen Zipline in Oslo. You will each receive one half of a clue when you are finished with your task, and instructions on where to find your partner.”
“Oh man, we’re splitting up?” Plate clapped his hands and hooted. “This shit gets crazier every time I turn around.”
I looked at Georgie. “What do you want to do?”
“Why don’t Plate and I pick a task and go together and you and Swift do the other? We can share taxis again and help each other out.” She glanced at the doors of the supermarket, where another pair of teams raced inside. Team Daddy. Shit. Everyone was catching up. We needed to move fast. No time to debate….and talking to Georgie right now was like walking on eggshells. “Do you want to pick?”
She looked over at Plate.
“Viking ship?” he asked. “It sounds kinda badass to me.”
She nodded. “Viking ship it is.”
Which meant I was going to zipline. The thought made me want to puke up the pizza I’d just eaten.
“Now, wait a moment–,” Swift began.
“It’s fine,” I said quickly, and separated the pieces of the clue, handing half to Georgie. “Let’s just get out of here and get this done quickly, all right?”
“Let’s go,” Georgie called to Plate, and ran for the first cab. Swift grabbed my hand and we raced for the other.
We crawled inside and handed the driver the instructions for how to get to the zipline.
“I can’t believe you volunteered to do this,” Swift said. “You’re scared of heights!”
Yeah, but I was more scared of what was going on with my twin. For a moment back there…she’d seemed perilously close to breaking. For now? Whatever Georgie wanted, Georgie was going to get.
Chapter Twelve
“So…that was a disaster. And this time it wasn’t even Georgie’s disaster.” — Swift, Team One Percent, The World Races
We split the taxis and Swift and I got into one, Georgie and Plate into the other. Georgie waved at us as we pulled away, and I tried not to feel a stab of resentment for my twin. Oh sure, she was going to have all kinds of fun building a Viking ship. Me? I was going to fling myself hundreds of feet through the air, tied to nothing but a cord and a harness. Just the thought of it was already making me nervous. I rubbed my sweating palms on my pants.
Swift gave the directions to the taxi driver, and then we were off. He sat back on the seat and looked over at me. “Please tell me Georgie’s not normally like this.”
“She’s not normally like this,” I echoed. “Seriously. I have no idea what has crawled up her butt lately, but this is insane. She’s usually the most even-keel, easygoing person I know.”
“You need to talk to her. She’s going to end up sabotaging you guys, and I don’t want you bringing us down.”
I gasped, because that hurt. Bringing them down? After we’d saved them? “Heaven forbid my team slow your team down.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said wearily. “It’s just…it’s important that I win, all right?”
“We all want to win,” I said grouchily. First bagging on my twin, and now this? “All of us can use a million dollars.”
“Some of us more than others,” he muttered. “I’m not trying to pick a fight with you, Tiny.”
“Then quit saying jerky things and making me feel defensive!”
He stared out the window of the cab, and I crossed my arms and moved to my side of the cab. We both ignored the cameraman in the front seat who was filming all of this.
Being on competing teams was hard, especially when you liked someone. Especially when half of your team was self-destructing and you had to defend that pers
on and you weren’t sure why.
The taxi stopped in a parking lot, and ahead, I could see a giant metal ‘thing’ rising into the air an impossible height. “What is that?” I asked.
“Holmenkollen is a ski jump,” the taxi driver said helpfully.
Oh, yippee. Could this day get any better?
“Wait at the bottom of the jump for us, all right?” Swift told the driver, and handed him money.
“Ya,” the man said in accented English.
We got out, leaving our bags in the trunk. I strapped my fanny pack full of money and my ID at my waist and started to head for the ski jump when Swift grabbed my wrist.
“Hang on, Tiny, we need to talk.”
“I don’t feel like talking right now,” I told him stiffly. “Let’s just go and get this nightmare over with, all right?”
“No,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me, holding me against him despite my struggles. “I want to clear the air first.”
“It’s fine—“
“It’s not fine,” he said, voice husky. His hands gripped my waist and he tried to meet my gaze despite me looking away. “I hurt your feelings and I’m sorry. It’s just…really important to me that we win the money.”
“And like I said—“
“I’m not on this race because I like to compete, or I want to see the world, Tiny,” he interrupted, voice low and gentle. “I’m happier at home, puttering around in my garage and working on cars. But my dad…” his voice broke and then he cleared his throat. “My dad has cancer. Insurance only covers so much. He can’t work while taking chemo, so I’m trying to win for him. That’s why it’s so important to me.”
The knot in my throat became huge. “Cancer?”
“Yeah. So if I come across a little asshole-ish and driven, it’s because I want to bring home the money for him.”
I got it now. I thought he was just obsessed with winning the money so he could soup up his car business, or whatever it was he’d planned on doing. I knew if I won I was going to help fund the latest dig and not worry about making an income while I pursued my love of fossils. That suddenly seemed…a bit selfish. “Oh.”
“I mean, I know everyone needs the money. It’s not that my need is less or more than anyone else’s. But I just wanted you to know. Because this is important to me, and you’re becoming pretty important to me, too.”
And that kind of made everything a little better. I nodded and we linked hands and headed toward the building.
As soon as we entered the building, there was a long line of people that wrapped around the room, waiting for the elevator. An area had been cordoned off for The World Games players, and someone gestured us through to the front. I shot a few apologetic looks at curious people as we raced forward and got to the front of the next elevator. Great, not only were we dealing with heights, we were cutting in line. It was just another thing I wasn’t keen on.
We got in the elevator and two of the ever-present camera crew followed us in. The thing was full of windows, which would show us just how high we were going. Which was not what I wanted to see. I sucked in a breath as the thing inched ever upward, and then backed away a step. “I hate this.”
“Breathe,” he said, his hand going to my neck and rubbing it. “Seriously. Breathe.”
“I am breathing.”
“You’re breathing way too fast. Are you going to be able to do this?” He shot me a concerned look. “Do we need to go back and have Georgie switch with you?”
The thought of admitting defeat to my volatile twin did not sit well, especially when I was supposed to be the steady one. “I’m good. I can do this.”
The wind rose and the elevator gave a little shake.
I whimpered and buried my face against Swift’s shirt. “I’m wrong. I can’t do this.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said, voice soft. His hand stroked my braids. “So tell me about the ammonia things.”
Ammonia? I pulled back and stared at him. “What?”
“The dinosaurs. The ammonias.” His lips twitched.
“The ammonites?” I corrected. Was he teasing me? “They’re called ammonoidea. And there’s eight different classes of them.”
“Sounds fascinating. Name all eight for me.”
That was a weird request. “Why?”
“Because it’s distracting you and you need a good distraction.”
He wasn’t wrong about that. I pressed my cheek against his shirt and closed my eyes, thinking. “Well, in the Devonian period – that’s my specialty – there’s four different kinds. Anarcestida, Clymeniida, Goniatitida, and Prolecanitida. Then when you get into the Permian, there’s Ceratitida. Triassic is, um…” I had to think, because his hand was stroking down my back and it was distracting me. “Phylloceratida. And the Jurassic period had Lytoceratida and Ammonitida, but I don’t really study those.”
“Because they hung out with the dinosaurs and you liked your ammonoids in the primordial soup?”
I chuckled. “I don’t know, I really like the very early stuff. I feel there’s so many people who like dinosaurs and are interested in Tyrannosaurus Rex, but to me, that’s like taking a book and flipping to the second to the last chapter. I like to see the early things so we can learn about what evolved and how things changed. And it’s amazing to see something hundreds of millions of years old and how complex it is. Like the siphuncle.”
“The whatty-what-uncle?”
“It’s a thin tube that connected the body to the chambers of the shell. It would pump water out of the chambers and allowed the ammonite to control its buoyancy. It’s marvelously clever and a lot of the earliest ammonites had the siphuncle on the bottom, which—“
The elevator lurched and screeched to a stop.
I whimpered and clung to Swift.
“We’re there,” he said, patting my back. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Are we high up?” I asked in a thin voice as the doors opened. I couldn’t bring myself to look. I clenched his hand in my sweaty one.
“I can’t lie. It’s pretty high,” he admitted, stepping forward and holding the elevator door for me. “But look. There’s a sign-in sheet and a lot of safety equipment, and someone’s going to double-check it before they let you loose. You’re totally safe.”
I trailed behind him nervously, knowing I was being a baby about this. Heights was a common fear. It was something lots of people were scared of. No big deal. The equipment here was safe or they wouldn’t have all those people waiting below for their chance to go down the zip line.
I repeated this to myself over and over again as we signed in. Swift made me sign in first, which was sweet.
I guess he knew that if he went first and left me, I might chicken out. This way, I had to go.
One of the workers arrived and gestured for my camera-man to step aside. “Here. Let’s get you geared up.”
I gave Swift a wide-eyed look of terror and he nodded at me encouragingly. I stepped forward and stood still as the worker had me put on a leg and waist harness and a Y-type strap that went over my back and chest. I stared at Swift the entire time as he was geared up by another employee. He was the only safe thing to look at. There were windows everywhere that showed us just how high up we were.
Then we put helmets on and cameras on selfie-sticks were attached. It was time to go outside.
The employees opened the door and gestured we should go outside, and a gust of strong, brutal wind ripped inside, ruffling my braids. Ahead, I saw a platform and a line, and nothing but air.
I whimpered again, shutting my eyes.
“Come on, Tiny,” Swift murmured at my ear. He took my hand and put his other hand at my waist and propelled me forward. “I got you. We got this. All we have to do is let them strap you to the line, okay? Then you’re going to have a quick ride down to the bottom and we get our next clue. If we do this fast, we have a jump on the others. Won’t that be awesome?”
“Awesome,” I said faintly. Wasn??
?t awesome. I was going to puke out of sheer terror.
“And once we’re done, we’re about due for a rest stop.” His voice was low and sweet in my ear, all sultry and seductive. “And you know, my offer stands.”
“Offer?” I breathed. Oh, oh, his dirty offer for me to sleep in his room. I thought about it. I thought really hard about it. Georgie would give me shit, but she would understand. I think even she wanted me to hook up. But the timing was so crappy. And I was the most awkward girl ever when it came to being sexy around a guy. Hell, I’d just spent the last five minutes talking about siphuncles and buoyancy in prehistoric cephalopods.
“That’s right, babe,” Swift said, and gave me a nudge forward. Another employee took me by the hand and began clipping me into what felt like a dozen carabiners. “You and me, rest period tonight.”
I looked at the cameras, and the slope that seemed to go on for a million miles below me. Oh god. My mind was a foggy haze. I needed to tell him that I wasn’t experienced. Not like he was expecting. “Hey, Swift?”
“You can go any time now, ya?” the employee said and gestured at the endless ski ramp that I was supposed to go over on the zip line. Hundreds and hundreds of feet straight down.
Yeah, I was gonna barf, but I needed to do this. Georgie needed me to do this. Swift needed me to do this so he could take his turn. I stood up on wobbling feet, and waited at the precipice.
The employee gestured for me to go.
“What is it, Tiny?” Swift asked.
“I’m a virgin,” I blurted.
“You’re what?” His jaw dropped.
The cameraman swiveled around past Swift’s back, and I realized with horror that I’d just blurted out my status to the entire world. Oh shit.
I stepped off the ramp and into the air, and the zip line hissed. I screamed as it flung me down the ski-jump.
Maybe I’d get lucky and it’d drop me off the edge of the planet.
Chapter Thirteen
“Are you freaking kidding me?” — Swift, Team One Percent, The World Races