Everyone who was swept away by Loveboat, Taipei will be thrilled to hear there’s a new adventure on the way from author Abigal Hing Wen.
Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies hits bookshelves this August from Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group. It follows best friends Tan Lee and Winter Woo who have a magical kiss at prom, but decide to cool their jets for awhile.
But of course, that doesn’t exactly go as planned when their parents take a trip to Hawaii and leave Tan and Winter to babysit Tan’s sister Sana. And when Tan’s ex-girlfriend shows up from Shanghai with money she stole from her billionaire father — and his thugs on her heels trying to get it back — it quickly turns into the most challenging babysitting gig ever.
Feiwel & Friends
Before long, a caper unspools through the San Francisco Bay area as Tan has to defuse a heist, unravel a conspiracy and protect his loved ones (not to mention his own heart) all while in the midst of a tricky love triangle.
Readers, meanwhile, may already know Wen’s work from her New York Times bestselling Loveboat, Taipei, which stole readers’ hearts in 2020. She also served as an executive producer on the Paramount+ film adaptation of the novel, Love in Taipei.
Read an exclusive novel from Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies, below.
Courtesy of Abigail Hing Wen
Chapter 1
Tan’s back hit the front door with a thud. Overhead, a tapestry of stars shone in the Palo Alto night sky, but they were lost on him. His senses were overpowered by Winter’s soft mouth. She tasted sweet, like the red gummy bears they’d devoured too many of tonight. As her fingers tightened in his hair, a jolt of sensations sparked down into his toes.
Fumbling for the doorknob, his thumb found the biolock. Even at an angle, a beep sounded. Dad’s good work. Mouths still locked, they tumbled inside into a cozy darkness. Their dress shoes sailed off into the shared collection of Lee family and Woo family shoes.
“Your room,” she whispered, which was the farthest from his sleeping parents — not to mention her bed lay in half of a partitioned suite she shared with her mom.
Winter clung to his arm, and they fumbled across the dark hallway, over the silk runner, and into his room. Sana’s bedroom door stood ajar across from Tan’s, but fortunately, his 5-year-old sister slept like a log. Winter shut his door silently. Moonlight flashed on the pearl pins in her coiled black hair as they crashed together again. The world inverted. On his bed, his tuxedo pants legs tangled in her bare ones. He felt drunk on the strawberry scent of her skin and the petals of his magnolia blossom boutonniere shredding between them. As he cupped the smooth line of her jaw, an ache burned inside him.
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He’d been wanting to tell Winter how he felt about her. It had been building slowly inside him over months. It was right there, on the tip of his tongue. But at the moment, her tongue was in the way. And he wasn’t in any rush to change that.
“Winter.” He breathed her name into their kiss. His lower lip grazed hers. She shifted against him, and then the thud of something hitting the carpet reached his ears. The dull sound was like a splash of water on Winter. She pulled away, creating a space between them that filled with cool air. Her brown eyes, rimmed with soft black lashes, opened wide and startled.
“What are we doing?” she whispered. “Kissing,” he whispered back.
Winter rolled over to the far side of his bed and hung her legs over the edge. She gazed down at the floor, at whatever it was that had fallen.
“We can’t do this, Tan.”
Tan sat up, too. His lips burned from Winter’s mouth. They felt tender and slightly sore, in a delicious way he’d never felt before.
“I’m sorry,” Winter said. “I guess … I guess I got carried away.” So had he, obviously. But their whole world was self-restraint, trained from the cradle. Didn’t it mean something that they wanted this so badly?
Winter bent over, and when she rose again, she was holding a vase in her hands. Moonlight caught the delicate gold lines on its peacock-blue painted surface. Rebecca, his ex, had given it to him, not for any reason. Just because. She was a gifts person. It’s not there because it matters to me, he wanted to explain. It was there—on his bedside table — on the side he didn’t sleep on— because he hadn’t gotten around to moving it somewhere else.
But Winter beat him. “You’re still hung up on her.” “I’m not,” he protested.
Winter’s face was obscured by shadows. He couldn’t read her eyes, which bothered him. He usually could, and he didn’t like not knowing how she was feeling. Especially right now.
Their kiss had started nearly two hours earlier. At prom, which they’d agreed to attend together at the last minute, after tickets opened up to sophomores.
After Winter asked Tan.
After Rebecca had ghosted him for four months and he’d sunk into a bleak, Rebecca-shaped depression.
After he finally made contact with her and found out she was dating another guy.
“I’m not hung up on her,” he repeated now. Which felt like the truth. And yet, why did he also feel like he wasn’t being entirely honest?
“Your parents are our landlords, Tan.”
Technically true. After Winter’s father passed away last summer, Fannie and Winter found the Lees’ in-law suite for rent on Craigslist. It was a spare bedroom with a bathroom between it and Tan’s room, intended for Mom’s widowed mother one day.
Their parents had become fast friends. So had he and Winter. Everyone thought Winter and Tan going to prom was sweet and adorable and the perfect way for him to return to life “AR” (After Rebecca).
But he’d never anticipated the magic of tonight.
Excerpted by permission of Feiwel & Friends, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group.
Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies by Abigail Hing Wen comes out Aug. 13 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
