Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118125 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 591(@200wpm)___ 473(@250wpm)___ 394(@300wpm)
And he didn’t want to look at him while Rian said his name that way.
“What?” he asked, clipping the word through his teeth, then snapping his mouth shut.
“...could you put a shirt on first, please?” Rian asked in that same beguiling tone, and Damon snarled.
“Why?”
“... I live with Walden. I know what he’s like.” And this time there was no mistaking that sweet, bewitching tone for anything but what it was: lightly mocking laughter, as Rian breezed past Damon with an arch sidelong look, hazel eyes sly beneath raised brows, glowing in their frame of smoky black eyeliner. “Just put a shirt on, Mr. Louis. Trust me.”
Not as far as I could throw you, Damon thought, but just let out a noncommittal sound.
Before reluctantly following Rian from the room, and wondering just what it was about the man that just...just...
Royally pissed Damon off. More than he had any right to be. Especially when if he’d admit it out loud...
He’d been in the wrong.
Goddammit.
Walden first. Apologies later.
Even if he wasn’t quite sure which one he was dreading more.
But, well...
Some things just had to be dealt with.
And Rian Falwell was apparently one of them.
Chapter Two
Rian supposed he’d give Damon Louis a touch of credit in that he did, in fact, put a shirt on before they reconvened outside Assistant Principal Lachlan Walden’s second floor office.
The problem was...it was hard to really call that scrap of white fabric a shirt when it was thinner than gauze, and Damon must have used it as a towel to absorb the sweat filming his body; the shirt clung to his torso in a wet-soaked, translucent layer, molding to the tight flow of an athlete’s honed muscles.
As Damon approached down the narrow hallway in a casual, graceful jog, the only spot of color against gray-worn wood, his body pulled and flowed like a piece of powerful machinery moving in time to music, and Rian caught himself picking out the sketch lines in his body: where he would overlap lines for the obliques, how he might taper the line weight to indicate depth and motion, how he would shade the joining of the anterior head muscles to the pectorals, and how the stark crease between them tightened and relaxed in and out of focus with each flex of Damon’s shoulders in rhythm with his strides.
But as he drew to a halt on the opposite side of the doorway marked Assistant Principal L. Walden, Damon scowled, swiping his still-damp hair out of his face. “What? Why are you looking at me like that? I put on a fucking shirt.”
...what?
Oh.
He had been staring, hadn’t he?
And he...he really didn’t know why.
Clearing his throat, Rian looked away, lifting his chin and thinning his lips—and only hoped his face didn’t look as red as it felt. “I meant something a little more presentable than a T-shirt.”
“I haven’t fucked with a dress code since the Navy, and I’m not about to start now.”
That probably explained the scars: thick corded ridges visible even underneath the shirt, when the soaked white fabric let the deep, tawny brown of Damon’s skin show through, and brought out the lighter lines of scar tissue making furrows and puckers against his flesh, things that whispered of bullet wounds and worse.
And Rian wasn’t curious about Damon damned Louis, or what had sent him from the Navy to a secluded hole in the wall like Omen, Massachusetts, hidden away in a private boys’ boarding school most people didn’t even know existed unless they had the right connections, knew the right people, or had the kind of wayward sons many wealthy families liked to disavow responsibility for.
“You’re fucking staring at me again,” Damon grit out, one eye twitching.
Rian caught himself, retreating a step, then huffed and looked away. “Excuse me.”
“You got that much of a problem with my damned shirt?”
“Why would I?”
A flat stare fixed on Rian. “You seem to have a problem with everything else about me.”
Just your breathing, Rian thought, suppressing a growl. “Can we talk to Walden and get this over with?”
Damon made a thickly disgusted sound and leaned over Rian—so close that in proximity, without the heavy smell of fresh clay drowning it out, Rian could smell the heat and sweat of his body, a darkly musky warmth—to thump the heel of his palm against Walden’s door. “Be my fucking guest.”
“If the two of you are quite done with your rather loud bickering,” drifted through the door, commanding and cold and ever-so-slightly irritable as always, “you may enter. You have ten minutes.”
With one last glare, Rian cleared his throat and tore his gaze away from Damon yet again.
God, that man annoyed the hell out of him.
He distracted himself by pushing the door of Walden’s office open. He’d probably seen Lachlan Walden in the office more than in their shared suite—where, the few times Rian had caught a glimpse past the firmly closed door of Walden’s bedroom, the space had been just as spartanly neat and organized as his office, furniture so minimalist that the cubicle looked much more expansive than it was.