Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 694(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138775 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 694(@200wpm)___ 555(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
I heard her ahead of me, her voice muffled as it was absorbed by books older than Ceasar. “It’s just you guys tonight?”
“Amanda said she might come later. Where’s your little student?” a smug male voice answered.
The voice was a faint, as if drifting through a hundred years of dust in the air. But whoever this guy was, he wasn’t going to be smug for long.
“Sorry, I meant, where’s your hotshot jock?”
“Right here.” I rounded the corner, prepared to make sure the brains knew who was in charge, but then I stopped dead, staring at the two guys sitting at the table. As they stared right back at me.
Fuck.
This was going to be a long night.
11
TORI
Kyle strode toward the table looking both tall and confident. I wished there were a few more people here for his first session… it might have made our arrival less of a big deal. Instead, Jayden and Lucas were staring up at him as if he were from Mars.
“This is Kyle. Kyle, this is Lucas and Jayden.” It was just an introduction—why was I nervous?
Maybe because of the really uncomfortable silence.
Finally, Jayden spoke up. “Hey, man.”
“Hey,” Kyle said back. Lucas just gave a curt nod.
Jeez, did men even know how to talk? Couldn’t one of them have said it’s nice to meet you? And then it hit me, the way they were staring at each other. Or glaring at each other, at least in the case of Lucas. This wasn’t their first meeting.
I paused as I reached for the back of a chair. “Wait, you guys know each other?”
Looks flew around the room, ones I couldn’t interpret. Finally, Jayden answered. “We went to the same high school.”
Oh! I opened my mouth, about to ask if they’d been friends, but then I snapped it shut because it was rapidly becoming obvious that they hadn’t been friends. Not with the tension in the air. It wasn’t hard to guess at a possible reason why. Kyle was a good-looking athlete, probably a really popular guy. Lucas had been the super smart kid. It was probably safe to assume that they hadn’t gotten along—and that perhaps Kyle had even bullied him. But I didn’t know that for sure, and maybe I wasn’t being fair to Kyle.
I looked up at him, wondering if he was going to leave, given the chilly lack of welcome, but he gave me an easy grin, as if it didn’t matter. He pulled out the chair in front of me, gesturing for me to sit.
Unsure what else to do, I did just that, grabbing onto the table when he pushed the chair in in one swift move. Then he settled on the other side of me.
Lucas’s gaze flicked between Kyle and me, and I wished I knew how to ease this tension. “What are you working on?” I asked him.
I got back a one-word answer.
And two from Jayden when I asked him.
So… small talk wasn’t going to be on the agenda tonight.
I turned to Kyle. After all, he was the one I was supposed to be helping. “Why don’t you work on the—”
“Got it,” Kyle said, and he opened his notebook.
God, this was going to be a long night.
It was hard to study when Lucas kept glaring at me. Except I eventually realized that the daggers from his eyes weren’t aimed at me but at Kyle. Kyle was sitting so damn close to me, it was a bit hard to tell.
Normally, it wouldn’t have been a hardship to have a gorgeous baseball player practically looming over me. But I wasn’t naive. Star athletes didn’t go for women like me. No, this was some kind of power play.
I froze as he rested his hand on the back of my chair, his fingers grazing my hair. His body was angled toward me as he read from the textbook that both our classes used. Or pretended to read. But what he was really doing was laying claim to me.
Not because he wanted me—but because he wanted to piss off Lucas.
And, from the glower on my usually mild-mannered friend’s face, it was working.
Something had to be done, and it was my job to do it. Kyle was my responsibility—I’d been tasked with making him learn the material, and he clearly wasn’t getting much done tonight. And Lucas and Jayden were my friends, yet I’d forced them to be in the company of a man they clearly didn’t like.
Crap.
After another minute of thought, I raised my arms, stretching. As I casually swung them around, I ‘accidentally’ almost elbowed Kyle in the face, and he was forced to back off. Jayden and Lucas were staring at me, but I kept pretending that I was just innocently stretching. But I probably wasn’t fooling anyone, because when I snuck a quick peek at Kyle out of the corner of my eye, he looked amused as hell.