Double Crossed

SITUATED ON THE UPPER EAST SIDE with a glorious view of the park, the Athenia Hotel was supposed to be some kind of Olympus, high in the clouds above the mere mortals, a place for playing and drinking and dancing like gods. But as Macey followed her father and mother out of the gleaming elevator and into the towering ballroom, she wasn’t exactly in the mood.

Sure, the Calloway Ball was supposed to be the charity event of the season, but before Macey had even entered the ballroom, she already knew precisely what she was going to find.

She saw the same food and the same band. The same old men flirting with the same young women. The same stories and canapés and people pretending they were there for charity and not just for a picture in the gossip columns on Page Six.

So Macey decided not to look at the room as the daughter of a senator and a cosmetics heiress. Macey found herself looking at it as a Gallagher Girl. She heard her Covert Operations instructor’s voice in her ear as she counted the exits in the ballroom (five) and the armed security professionals there to watch over VIPs (three). She mentally noted the best ways to block the cameras, and she eavesdropped on ten different conversations in four different languages. But still, Macey McHenry couldn’t help herself.

Macey McHenry was bored.

She was just starting to consider her escape (the fire exit near the kitchen seemed especially promising) when, at last, Macey saw something that she absolutely was not expecting.

A boy.

Oh, there were always plenty of young men at these parties. They went by names like Scooter and Mitchell and Beau and were frequently juniors or seconds or thirds. They went to schools like Colgan and Exeter and had hobbies that varied from polo to yachting, womanizing to rehab. But walking through the door right then was one boy who seemed, in a word, different from the others.

When Macey walked by in high heels and a strapless red dress with a slit high on her thigh, he didn’t stare. When she tucked her glossy black hair behind her ear, he didn’t notice. And when she allowed her blue eyes to linger a moment too long in his direction, he gave a small smile of indifference and turned and started across the crowded room.

For a moment, Macey studied him—the one puzzle in the room the Gallagher Academy hadn’t taught her how to break. She racked her brain, trying to remember if she’d met him at any of the many schools she had attended before the Gallagher Academy took her in, but the boy remained a very handsome enigma.

It was something of a game to her after that. He was tall, with broad shoulders and careless hair, in a designer tuxedo that he wore as if it was simply what he’d found on the floor by his bed that morning. With his roguish smile and cool indifference, that boy looked how Macey McHenry always felt—like he’d been born into a world of privilege and had spent his whole life not really caring whether or not it spat him out.

She watched him stop to pat the mayor on the back. He stumbled a little in the crowd, and his left hand disappeared ever so briefly inside the mayor’s tuxedo pocket. It was over in a flash, a blink, a second. And Macey was quite certain she was the only person in the entire room to have seen it, but that was just as well. At last, Macey had seen enough. And at last, the boy made sense.

Carefully, she walked through the crowd until she found him standing out on the hotel balcony, eating a jumbo shrimp with one big bite.

“You might want to put that back,” she told him. She leaned against the ledge, her hands at the small of her back. From there, she could look up at his square jaw and bright eyes. When he smiled down at her, despite her training, she might have swooned a little.

“Now what would that be?” He cocked his head.

“The mayor’s cell phone,” she told him. “It was so rude of you to slip it out of his pocket when he was distracted.”

The boy feigned offense. “Would I do that?”

“You know you did.”

“I don’t have a cell phone.” He held his hands out wide. “Go ahead. Frisk me.” He leaned a little closer and winked when he said, “You know you want to.”

“Nice try,” Macey said, totally immune to the flirting. “And it might work if I hadn’t seen you steal it a minute and a half ago.”

“Yes, but evidently you didn’t see me put it back forty-five seconds ago.” Then, as if on cue, a phone started to ring. “See,” the boy said, pointing at the mayor, who was searching his tuxedo jacket, finally finding the device not exactly where he’d left it.

And for the first time that evening, Macey was impressed. “Oh, you’re good.”

“Well, if Macey McHenry says so…” The boy turned from the railing and stepped back toward the ballroom, and again she felt the pang that something in this boy was familiar.