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)
Because it looked so damned affected, like he’d practiced the poise of some kind of Bohemian SoHo hippie princess but just came out looking...looking...
Stuck up.
But Falwell sounded less stuck up and more plaintively confused when he just let out a single soft, almost hurt, “Why?”
Damon shrugged. Now that the realization had slapped the damned temper right out of him, he—well, fuck. He didn’t have words, and he sure as hell didn’t know how to answer that question.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he forced out. “He sure as shit can’t afford to miss practice. Too much longer and I won’t have a choice but to report it. Participation’s part of his scholarship. He gets seven days without a doctor’s note. He’s on four.”
Rian’s brows wrinkled. His gaze slid off Damon, flitting over the room, before settling on him again. Those hazel eyes didn’t look shallow now; instead they looked troubled, the set of his mouth pensive. “I wasn’t aware Christopher was on a scholarship.”
“Rich private schools operate a lot like universities.” Damon snorted. “Most of the kids here are rich. We got a few, though. Academic and sports scholarships. Though Chris’s family’s pretty set, so don’t know why he even needs it, but he’s gonna lose it if he doesn’t stop skipping out.”
“So you’re worried about more than your code of discipline, then?” Rian tripped out flippantly, his velvet tenor lilting. “I suppose I’ll forgive your rather presumptuous intrusion.”
“What fucking code of discipline? You—”
Damon stopped himself short.
God damn, he wished he could’ve gone another three or thirty or three hundred years without being more than peripherally aware of this snotty little man’s existence.
Because Rian Falwell was getting on his goddamned nerves.
“Look,” Damon growled. “I don’t give a fuck what you think of me or my reasons. What I care about is that kid fucking up his academic year. And since he always looked like a fucking kicked puppy when he said he was staying after, I had my reasons for thinking something bad was going down. And if he’s lying to both of us, something bad probably is. So...”
Rian jutted his stubborn lower lip out, his brows loftily arched. “So?”
“So what the hell are we going to do about it?”
“We?” Hazel eyes snapped. “As if I would ever—I—oh hell.” Rian sighed, bowing his head, one slim hand coming up to press his fingertips to the indentations on either side of his nose, just inside the corners of his eyes. His skin was so pale that his hands were white as the iridescent edges of oyster shells save for the very tips of his fingers, the knobs of his bony knuckles, and a crescent moon curve at the heels of his palms, flushed pink as if all the blood in that translucent flesh had gathered there; Damon wondered if he knew what the sun outside even looked like. “... I suppose we’ve got a responsibility, don’t we?”
“You sound so goddamn excited about doing your job.”
“It’s not my job that’s the problem,” Rian muttered, almost under his breath. “It’s you.”
“Trust me, the feeling’s mutual.”
“At least we agree on something.” With a thoughtful sound, Rian clasped his palms together as if praying, tilting them against his nose and lips until they bisected his face, his eyes unfocused. “What can we do? Even if we’re assigned as the boys’ primary caretakers, there are limits. Legal limits. Unless he’s involved in something illegal or life-threatening, there’s not much we can do if he’s not breaking the rules. Technically, skipping an extracurricular isn’t breaking the rules.”
Damon frowned, rubbing his forefinger and thumb along his chin and jaw, until he could press along the tendons over his temporomandibular joints, squeezing at them to relax a bit of the tension making his head and neck kink up in irritating knots. Unfortunately, Rian had a point.
That didn’t mean there was nothing they could do about it.
He tossed his head, turning in the cramped space—and trying his damnedest not to bump up against something that looked like a department store mannequin made out of barbed wire, and something else that looked like...he didn’t know, but it seemed fragile and he’d probably break it. “C’mon.”
“What?” drifted after him. “Why? Where are we going?”
“To talk to Walden,” Damon said grimly, ducking through the door and into the broader, neater space of the art classroom, long wooden worktables arranged in ordered rows and dotted with various student projects in progress. “And get to the bottom of this.”
As he threaded through the tables toward the classroom door, though, the faint sound of soft sandaled footsteps followed, then the creak of the workroom door closing, before Rian’s thrumming voice called his name softly, almost too sweetly.
“Damon?”
Damon stopped, keeping his back to Rian. Something about his name in that luring, richly enticing voice was even more irritating than the haughty, scathing sarcasm.