I, Spy? (Sophie Green Mysteries, No. 1) (Sophie Green Mystery)

Malpensa too, I take you to dinner.”
    He sauntered off, and I allowed myself the luxury of checking out his fine arse. Hey, a girl can look.
    The woman who was next to check in looked mildly stunned and very jealous, and it wasn’t until I saw her watching Luca that I realized why.
    “He was joking,” I said. I hope .
    “If he offers you dinner, you take it,” she said, and I smiled.
    “Do you have any bags?”
    I checked her in and noticed she spent the whole time looking over at Luca. And his arse. The next passenger was Italian. I could tell as soon as he swaggered up, looking cool, still wearing his shades even though he was inside, in England, in April. He looked over his shades at me.
    “Where are you flying to?”
    “Roma,” he rolled the R. “Is Rome in Eenglish.”
    I snorted, then realized he hadn’t been joking. “Right,” I said. “Can I have your passport, please?”
    He spent the whole time looking at my chest, especially when I stretched over to tag his bag. But, hey, it is a rather impressive chest. I can’t really complain.
    “You are ver’ pretty,” he told me as I handed him his boarding card.
    “Thank you.”
    “A Eenglish rose, si ?”
    “ Si . Thanks. Here’s your boarding card.”
    Now naff off, you’re creeping me out.
    Halfway through my shift, I was pulled off the desk. “Can you board the Edi for me, love?” Paola asked, looking up at me, very tiny and adorable. Paola was seven months pregnant, and I swear, the baby was bigger than her. Apparently she was thirty, but I felt like calling a children’s charity on her, because she only looked about twelve. And then there was me, almost a decade younger and looking like her nanny.
    I took a fresh gate report out of the drawer and headed off. So I was heading away from Sven the Sublime, but I was also getting away from check-in. Any respite was welcome.
    I liked working at the gate because you got time to yourself. There was maybe ten minutes of frantic action when the flight boarded, but you had to be there an hour before departure. For quite a while, there wasn’t a lot to do but mess around changing the status of the information screens and making announcements that people rarely listened to.
    The domestic departures satellite was quiet. There was a Ryanair flight boarding as I went past, but my end of the lounge was empty. The Edinburgh flight wasn’t very full and I didn’t need anyone else to help.
    I messed around getting everything to my liking, seeing how many people had checked in, looking for funny names, changing the flight status to “open” and listening to the radio burbling away behind the coffee stand.
    “Hey, sexy,” called Dino, the coffee guy. “You look hot.”
    “You too, Dino,” I called back, rolling my eyes. See what I mean? They saw blonde hair and big boobs and some instinct kicked in. Must hassle female. Must make innuendoes. Must make her blush.
    Okay, well, I stopped blushing when he did it in front of a flight full of people. Now I played along. He shut up faster that way.
    I checked the status screen again. The plane callsign wasn’t quite right and I called up Ops to check.
    “No, darling, it’s a Titan plane we’re using for Edi,” Kelly from Ops told me. “Got three off tech today. Just do them a little announcement so they don’t wander all over the tarmac, will you?”
    Another Titan plane? I seemed to board more of them than Ace planes. Stupid piece-of-crap cheap planes.
    I put down the phone and picked up the microphone. Learning announcements was a jump-in-and-swim experience, and most of us made them up. You put on the sing-song voice and repeat yourself over and over, hoping they’re listening and won’t start bleating in panic when they see the wrong logo on the wings.
    “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a passenger announcement for all passengers traveling on the Ace Airlines AC109 flight to Edinburgh. We would like to inform you that, due to a technical problem, the service today will be operated by a Titan Airways aircraft. Please board as normal through gate eighty-seven and follow the Ace Airlines staff to the steps of the aircraft when you are called forward for boarding. We estimate this to be within the next twenty minutes,” I said, glancing at my watch.
    It didn’t matter how long I thought it was going to take to start boarding, I always said twenty minutes. It was just long enough for people to forget how long ago you said it. “On behalf of