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

Eton?”
    “Mmm.”
    “You went to Eton?” Did they allow anyone as sexy as Luke at Eton? “Don’t tell me, you were head boy.”
    Glaring at me, he mumbled, “Prefect.”
    Jesus. I never even considered applying for prefect at my school. As far as I could see all it meant was reduced lunchtimes as you policed the dinner queue while the dinner ladies gossiped. My form tutor told me to apply and I remember asking her to tell me why without using the letters C and V. She shut up.
    “Eton prefect.” I was still shaking my head. “RAF, SAS, you must think I’m such a pleb.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “So, what, are your parents mega rich? Titled?” Hey, that would be cool.
    “No,” Luke said sharply. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
    I shrugged. That was a back-off tone. “Okay.” I looked back at the screen and started reading aloud to fill the silence. “‘Hey to all in Temperance. I’ve hardly been back since I joined the army. I spent three years as a Ranger before leaving to work for a communications company. I now travel all over the world and hardly get back to America, let alone Ohio, although I sometimes see my brother in New York. But I have e-mail connections and would love to hear from anyone in Temperance, especially those who went to Temperance High with me. Harvey.’”
    Jesus.
    “Bingo,” Luke said.
    “He was a Ranger?”
    “He could have made that up.”
    “He could have made all of it up! Harvey’s got to be a pretty common nickname for someone with a name like Harvard, don’t you think?”
    I looked up hopefully. Luke was shaking his head. “That’s him. He even told them the same story he told you, he’s in communications. That’s his excuse for travelling all over the world.”
    I stared at the screen. “It doesn’t say anything about college,” I said triumphantly.
    “So?”
    “If you went to—” I opened up the window with the alumni page on it “—Princeton, God, you’d tell people about it.”
    Luke frowned. “You ever been to Ohio?”
    “No.” All I knew about Ohio was that it was where Christian Slater killed people in Heathers , and Jennifer Crusie set her books. “You?”
    “Yeah. Full of small towns.” He grabbed my old school atlas off the bookshelf and flipped through it to North America. “Do you see Temperance, Ohio, on there anywhere?”
    I made a face.
    “If you went off to Oxford or Cambridge, wouldn’t everyone in the village know about it?”
    “No.”
    “Well, no maybe not, because this village is full of commuters who only step outside their front doors to go to work, but in a regular small town, like Ohio is full of, everybody knows everybody. Everybody would know that James Harvard went to Princeton. His mom would have told everybody. He wouldn’t need to put it on the website.”
    I wrinkled my nose. “I still think it’s not him.”
    “Well, I think it is him. And I think we need to go and check out his hotel room at the Hilton.”
    “Why?”
    “Erm, because he might be Wright’s partner?”
    Oh, right. Wright. With all the stuff that had been going on I’d almost forgotten.
    “Okay,” Luke said, going into my bedroom and opening my wardrobe doors. “Harvey got distracted by you at the Buckman Ball, so maybe you can distract him downstairs in the bar while I search his room.”
    “Luke—”
    “Come on. Pursuit of justice and all that.”
    “What about Chris Mansfield? Aren’t we pursuing justice for him?”
    Luke came out of my bedroom holding the Gucci dress. “Chris was killed because of his involvement with the Wilkes takedown. And that’s also probably why you’ve been targeted.”
    Targeted. When he put it like that, I felt so much un safer.
    “And the Wilkeses may or may not be involved with Wright…”
    “Possibly as saboteurs. Or smugglers. Or maybe just as associates who were in the wrong place. The point is, we find Wright’s partner, we might just find Chris’s killer.” He held the dress against me. “Does this fit?”
    “I don’t think it’s your colour.”
    He made a face. “You’re funny. You need to wear something that will make Harvard stay in the hotel bar.”
    “It’s lunchtime!”
    “So?”
    “One, he’s not going to spend that much time in the bar, and two, he could be out.”
    “So much the better.”
    “And three, he’s already seen that dress.”
    Luke blinked. “You just happened to have it with you in Rome?”
    “I bought it in Rome.”
    He stared