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

I say Luke?
    The whole thing was insane. An undercover…what? Policeman? Government agent? Spy?
    Ooh, a spy. That was quite sexy, actually.
    I wondered if he’d have any other stuff to spy on? I wondered if he’d been spying on me?
    Pervert.
     
    Four in the morning and I was on my way to work again. When the alarm went off, I muttered my usual “I have got to get a new job,” but like I said, that was my morning mantra. I never did squat about it. I mean, everyone I trained with had moved on to supervisor level, or to dispatch, or down to the ramp. The really smart ones left. It was really only just me who was still on check-in.
    Chalker, my brother, said I had a lack of direction. Well, it was fine for him. He knew when he was five what he wanted to do. “I wanna be a rock star,” he said when he saw Back to the Future and how cool Marty looked with his guitar.
    I saw Back to the Future and wanted to be an inventor. Or a mechanic at the future car garage. Or a gunslinger in the Old West.
    By the time I was ten, I had run through every possible career, from pearl diver to Tom Cruise’s personal assistant (that one was crushed when Chalker pointed out I was already taller than my hero). When it came time for my unutterably boring careers interview at school, I was told to play to my strengths and apply to university to study whatever I was interested in.
    And thus we have the great academic drive to utterly belittle a university degree by making sure even the illiterate have one. I actually know someone who’s half qualified to be a teacher, and she can’t read words longer than five letters. They’re so desperate to send you off to university that even when Chalker stood up and said he’d no interest in taking A levels, they still tried to persuade him that studying Schubert for another two years would be really worthwhile to a future rock star.
    And me? I’m so directionless that I applied to six universities on the sole premise that they were the same ones my boyfriend wanted to go to.
    His great plan was to become an accountant. I should have seen it coming from that. His name was Pete, he worked in a supermarket, he was okay in a boring sort of way, and the only thing I remember actually liking about him was that he fancied me. When I was eighteen, I was so fed up of being single I just took the first guy who came along who was a) taller than me and b) not into hard drugs. Now, of course, I know better. There are so many arseholes out there—it’s sooo much better being single. I don’t have to shave my legs or anything.
    Okay, forget I said that. That’s gross.
    Two months into an English Lit course (what everyone studies when they don’t know what to study, right?) I walked into his room to find him boning the tart from down the hall.
    I was really insulted. If he was going to cheat on me, it could at least have been with someone really hot.
    So I packed up and left. I think I intended to go to some other college at that time, but it was Chalker who made me realize that wasn’t what I wanted to do at all. He was doing what he wanted, and it made him happy, and my parents hadn’t kicked him out yet. That and my gran died, so I moved into her flat temporarily, and just never moved out.
    Truth was, I didn’t know what I did want to do. That was really why I was still doing my job at the airport. I didn’t seriously hate it, despite how much I complain. I didn’t really like it, either, but I figured a lot of people actively hated their jobs, so I was a step ahead.
    According to my roster, Luca was supposed to be on shift today, but I didn’t see him as I trudged up to the office and signed in. Angel was there, looking tired but excited at the prospect of going home in an hour. The unexpected bonus of working nights.
    Cow.
    “I’ve got you on a desk next to Sven,” she winked. “You’re checking in the Stavanger so you’ll be able to ask his advice a lot.”
    I smiled gratefully. Angel understood my desperate need to be close to the beautiful people. There really weren’t a lot of hot men around here, so I had to take what I could get.
    Angel, of course, could get anyone, or really anything, she liked. Her mother was a famous actress and model, her father a songwriter. Between them they generated enough royalties to keep Angel living in a very nice style. Plus she had inherited her mother’s tiny blondeness, with big blue eyes and glossy curls. If I didn’t adore her so much I’d