Read Online Experiment in Terror 04 Lying Season by Karina Halle - Free Book Online Page B

Palomino.”
    “ The face breaker!” Seb cried out with a dorky guffaw and then started slow clapping.
    “ Easy now, Seb,” Dex told him and then shot me a cheeky look.
    I sucked in the urge to retort something snarky and just smiled at the three of them. “I’m the face breaker. Nice to meet you all.”
    I sat down across from Rebecca and Seb and next to Dex. Seb asked the couple how the move had been going. As Dex and Jenn explained, I took stock of Rebecca.
    She was quite breathtaking, with an old-fashioned kind of beauty that fifties film stars were famous for. She was dressed in a lacey grey V-neck shirt that was well filled out and added to her classic look. Her hair was as jet-black as mine but cut into a chin-length bob with angled ends. Her eyes were dark and sexily hooded, her nose was long and broad, her lips were angular and made for the maroon lipstick she was wearing. Aside from her skin tone, which was so pale she was almost translucent, she could have passed as Dex’s sister.
    She hadn’t greeted Jenn when we arrived, only Dex and me, which I thought was odd since the two worked together. I mean, they were the Wine Babes. If only my cousins knew I was having lunch with them, they’d totally die.
    She took her eyes away from whatever Dex was saying (I was doing a pretty good job thus far of drowning out anything that sounded too coupley), and placed them on me. Unlike Dex, though, her eyes weren’t mysterious or intrusive. They were just frank and regarded me with a strange sort of respect that I wasn’t used to.
    “ So, Perry,” she said in a rich British accent. It took me by surprise but then I realized I had never heard her speak on Wine Babes before. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t seen more than one minute of the show. To watch it had been like pure torture, though, in retrospect, it would be a piece of cake after this week.
    “ It’s so nice to finally meet you,” she continued. “We’ve all heard so much about you; we’ve been watching you almost every week, yet for a while there, I think we all thought that perhaps you were a ghost yourself.”
    “ Nope,” I said, smiling at her and noticing that the other conversation had stopped and now everyone was looking at me. “I can be scary but I’m definitely no ghost.”
    “ So what was it that Dex said that made you punch him?” Seb asked, leaning low on the table in excitement.
    “ Sea Bass, shut the fuck up,” Dex said, reaching across the table to smack him.
    I glanced at Rebecca, catching a sort of come on, spill look in her eyes and then looked at Dex, whose attention was now on Jenn on the other side of him.
    “ It’s hard to remember,” I said, leaning back in my chair and crossing my arms. “I think it had something to do with the fact that he confiscated my phone because he didn’t want me checking my emails while I was ‘on the job’ or maybe it was that he planned on keeping us on the island on my actual birthday because, to quote/unquote, he didn’t think anyone in my family would actually notice if I wasn’t around.”
    Now, though this was all completely true, I said it in a purely jovial tone with just the slightest bit of edge to it. And the way everyone at the table laughed and gasped, I could tell they thought it was shockingly hilarious. But Dex was looking at me in total surprise. I could almost hear his gruff, shocked voice in my head asking, What are you doing?
    I gave him a quick, unimpressed look and tried to hide my smile.
    “ Well, Perry, you’ve done what we’ve all wanted to,” Dean said, flashing his broad smile at us. He was extremely likeable. He leaned across the table and held out his hand for a high five. I attempted to return it but Dex stuck out his own hand and held my arm down.
    “ OK, OK, so I deserved it. You guys done with the witch hunt now?”
    “ Are you done being a shithead?” Rebecca asked with a cool smile.
    Seb and Dean let out a simultaneous “Oooh” like the