I lingered outside the doorway of the private study room on the third floor of the library, unwilling to step inside just yet.
I still couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe my stupid luck. Of all the people who could help me—who were willing to help me—with my research project, it was Henry Knightly.
Stupid, fracking karma.
After breakfast at the café, I ran home through the rain and looked him up online. Or his family, rather. They were land barons, all right, had been for generations. When I’d Googled the Knightlys last year, digging up dirt when Knightly Hall was under construction, I had only scratched the surface. They did indeed own land all throughout North America, the biggest chunks around Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. Prime farm and cattle real estate.
What they must have done to the landscape, I didn’t want to imagine. They’d had no issue bulldozing a strip of green to erect their namesake building at Stanford. Why would they treat twenty thousand innocent acres in the northwest any differently?
Halfway through my statistics class, my phone had vibrated with a new email. Again, he’d asked me to send my outline. I put off the inevitable for as long as I could, but as I calculated how many days I had left before Masen would be breathing down my neck, I finally realized I had no choice. I sent him my outline and fifteen minutes later, he emailed back, wanting to meet.
“Are we doing this or not?”
I jumped at his voice coming from inside the study room. How had he known I was there? Had he seen my shadow? Heard me tiptoe toward the room? Jeez, could he smell me? Could money buy super senses?
“Spring, I’ve got my own class in an hour.”
I closed my eyes for a second, gripped the strap of my backpack, then entered the room.
Knightly sat at a small table, a stack of books off to the side, and one of those slick black mini-laptops in front of him. He wore the same shirt and tie as this morning, only the top button was undone now, and his tie knot was loose. It was a good look on him. Now if he’d flash one of those smiles, this might be bearable.
“Hey,” I said, “sorry I’m late, I—”
“It’s fine.” He didn’t look up as I sat down.
Okay, so we were back to Mr. Charm then.
“I’ve been going over your outline and the list of resources you cited,” he said, clicking the down arrow about twenty times, staring at the screen.
“And?” I asked when he didn’t go on. “And you think it’s crap, right?”
“Not all of it,” he said, highlighting a paragraph on the screen.
“Well, that’s a relief,” I muttered, leaning on an elbow. “I didn’t assume we were going to see eye-to-eye on this, obviously. I know about the land your family owns.”
He finally lifted his chin but didn’t speak. I’d expected him to jump in, to debate with me like at breakfast, to say something. But he was just sitting there with a blank expression.
His silence made me tense.
“I…I know what they—what you—believe in,” I added, unable to stop myself from filling the silence. “And you should know, I didn’t come here to argue with you, or to hear a lecture, or for either of us to change our minds. I’m here because I have no other choice. Just so we’re clear. Okay? Don’t think you can trash my whole belief system then walk away.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I haven’t said anything yet.”
I blinked. “Oh. Well… But I know what you’re thinking.”
A tiny smile twitched the corner of his lips, a hint of that same smile that had halted me at breakfast. “How could you know that?” he asked, smoothing down his tie.
“Because I know your type,” I said, choosing to continue the argument instead of focusing on how looking at his smile made me want to lick my lips. “You’ve got a finance degree, you come from money and drive a sports car. You voted Republican, didn’t you?”
His eyebrows lifted slightly. “Is that a crime?”
“I wish,” I muttered, turning to a clean page of my notebook.
“Wow,” he said, deadpan. “Anything else about me you’d like to get off your chest?”
Suddenly, everything Alex told me came flooding into my brain. How Knightly had been jealous, judgmental, accusatory, and then Alex was suddenly expelled from high school. The memory of what Knightly had said about me at the party—what I’d heard him say—was also front and center in my mind. And how he’d yelled at the movers to not touch his precious car, and how he hadn’t spoken one word to Julia.
He may have been helping me out of a pretty huge bind, but I wasn’t about to trust him, despite the way he was watching me with that almost-smile, and the way one stray lock of dark hair had fallen across his forehead, begging for my fingers to push it back then continue running through his hair.
I had to ignore that and remember the rest.
He was all I had. I knew I had to play nice, so I smiled as pleasantly as possible and sat back. “Nope, I’m all done.” I glanced at his computer with my outline on the screen. “Now it’s your turn. What do you really think?”
He angled his laptop so the screen was facing me. Aside from Professor Masen’s last assignment, I’d never seen so many red strike-throughs.
This was going to be a very long semester.
