I WALKED DOWN the familiar hallway that led to the last place I wanted to go, or frankly, was even allowed to be anywhere near. But if I ever had a chance in hell of proving myself to JT, it was necessary.
I’d heard his “no” last night, but Donovan was right—I needed to make my apologies to not only JT, but the woman whose opinion mattered more to him than anyone else’s.
His mom’s.
Her secretary looked up from her desk as I approached, then did a double take. She shot to her feet with surprising speed, rounding her desk to step in between me and the door to Dean Hawthorne’s office.
“Mr. LaRue, you know you’ve been banned from this office. Don’t make me call campus security.”
I held both hands up. “I need to speak to the dean,” I said. “Please.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“Could you please check with her and see about making it possible?”
“Why?” The woman’s eyes narrowed, her disapproval of me evident behind her thick lenses. “So you can disrespect her again by trashing her office?”
“I—”
“No,” she said, raising her voice. “You need to leave.”
Sighing, I shoved my hands in my pockets in an attempt to show her I wasn’t a threat. At the moment. “I’m not leaving until I speak with her. Can you just tell the dean I’m here?”
“Unless she calls for you directly, I can assure you Dean Hawthorne doesn’t want you or any of your—”
The door to the dean’s office flew open, and she stepped out. “What’s going on out here?”
The secretary gestured toward me. “I’ve told him several times to leave. We need to call security—”
“You don’t need to do that,” I said, focusing on JT’s mom. “I’m not here to start trouble. I just want to talk to you.”
“I’ll call security right now.” As her secretary reached for the phone on her desk, Dean Hawthorne held her hand up.
“That won’t be necessary,” she said. “Weston and I have a few things to discuss.”
“But ma’am—”
Dean Hawthorne’s eyes cut to the woman, whose mouth snapped shut. When she set the phone back into its receiver, the dean turned toward me and inclined her head for me to follow.
I stepped inside her office for the first time since I’d gotten busted in it last spring. “Shut the door,” she said.
The air in the office turned icy as I slowly closed the door, and when I turned to face the dean, I noticed she was already behind her desk, immediately establishing who held the power in this room.
“Take a seat, Mr. LaRue.” She gestured to one of the chairs opposite her. “Unless you’d rather I flip it over for you first?”
I deserved that, and whole lot more, if I was being honest. But I kept my mouth shut. I was here to apologize.
“This works fine.” I took a seat as she took hers, and when she clasped her hands on the desk, I swallowed.
I’d been in plenty of situations where I was summoned to my father’s office to be reprimanded over the years. But knowing the dean had likely caught wind of what had gone down between me and her son had my balls scrunching up and hiding somewhere in my body.
Jesus. I could feel the sweat popping out on my brow. This apology had been a long time coming.
“Well, Mr. LaRue? I’m waiting.”
I shifted on the seat, tugging at the collar of my shirt, as I tried to decide how best to start. “I just wanted to stop by today and apologize for what I did to your office back in spring of this year.”
The dean’s eyes narrowed, and for the first time ever I noticed a resemblance between mom and son, as an image of JT glaring at me the same way the night before flashed before my eyes.
“And you chose today, of all the days between the beginning of school and now, to do that?”
“Um—”
“Um is not an answer, Mr. LaRue.”
“Yes,” I said, wishing the floor would just open up and swallow me whole. This apology tour was tanking. “What I mean to say is, I’ve realized that what I did to your office was immature and juvenile—”
“Don’t forget illegal.”
Illegal? She couldn’t be serious. “We didn’t steal anything. It was just a prank.”
“You broke into my office, Mr. LaRue. That is breaking and entering, which is, if I’m not mistaken, illegal. You’re lucky I didn’t press charges.”
Oh fuck. She was pissed. But unlike her son, who got fiery in his rage, she aimed to kill with an arctic fucking blast.
“Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”
“A problem you seem to have more often than not, from what I’ve witnessed lately.”
“Agreed. I won’t deny I’ve done some things I regret lately. And I’m sorry.”
God, I’d said that word more times in the last twelve hours than I had my whole life. But when you finally realized you were a shit, it was time to come clean.
“Anything else?” she said.
I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. It wasn’t like me to be this nervous, but if the dean didn’t accept my apology when it came to JT, then I had no hope at all of winning him back. And I couldn’t accept that.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to meet her stare head-on. “I care about your son, Dean Hawthorne. More than I’ve ever cared about anyone—well, except myself. And I know I fu—messed that up and hurt him”—another deep inhale—“but I swear I’ll never do it again.”
She leaned back in her chair, hands crossed over her stomach and those assessing eyes unblinking.
“Why?” she finally said.
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you care about him?”
I blinked at her like she was asking me for the codes to the nuclear missiles.
“Weston?”
“Huh?”
“Why do you care about JT?”
I thought back to his easygoing smile, the way he blushed whenever he got nervous or flustered, and the way he was able to take me down a peg or two without making it feel like an insult. He’d made me look outside the glitz and glam of my life, beyond the glass walls of my condo, to what else was out there, and the shocking thing was, I liked it—as long as it was with him.
“He’s good.”
The dean opened her mouth as if to respond, but I got there first.
“JT is good and I’m not. Trust me, I know. I’m probably your worst nightmare for him.” She lifted a brow, not disagreeing, but also not interrupting me, so I figured my best bet was to just keep going. “I get it. I’m a delinquent. I run with overprivileged snobs who don’t really need an education to further their careers, but who attend your university because our parents know it looks better to have some sort of degree. Nepotism and all that. But here’s the thing. When I’m with JT, I find myself stepping away from that crowd and looking at other possibilities beyond what is sitting on the platter at home.”
Dean Hawthorne let out a breath and shook her head. “I see how you might think that’s a compliment—”
“It is. I rode the train last week for the first time because I wanted to go on a date with your son. Do you know how monumental that is? I’ve never set foot on a subway platform in my life, and I was born in New York.”
The dean’s lips twitched, but beyond that, she didn’t move a muscle, and I was starting to wonder if ice queens needed to breathe.
“What I’m trying to say is, I’ll do whatever it takes to hang out with JT. I want to be good enough for him. I want to be better than some punk who breaks into your office and tosses it.”
I clamped my teeth down into my bottom lip in the hopes of shutting the hell up. I’d said what I’d come to say—I’d apologized and done my best to try to convince the dean I wasn’t a total shitbag.
Now it was up to her.
Dean Hawthorne pushed back from the desk and got to her feet, and I looked around, wondering if I should do the same. But I decided to keep my ass exactly where it was. I’d move when she gave me permission to.
“You know the one thing I love the most about my son, Weston?”
Oh God, was this a trick question? Could I phone a friend?
Dean Hawthorne leaned back against the edge of her desk, crossed her arms, and stared down at me.
“Uh, no, dean.”
“The thing I love most is that I trust him.”
I winced, and she nodded.
“Yes, and can you understand how his recent involvement with you might make me slightly uncomfortable about that?”
I swallowed around the sudden burst of frosty air coming my way, then cleared my throat. “I can, yes. But in JT’s defense, nothing he did was his idea.”
“Except the part where he fell for you.”
Nothing, and I mean nothing, she could’ve said then would’ve shocked me more.
“You look surprised.”
“I, um, yeah. I wasn’t expecting that.”
“For him to fall for you or for me to know?”
“Both?”
She shifted to her feet. “Let me be very clear about something. You are not who I would choose for my son. You are arrogant, reckless, and, more often than not, the cause of many complaints that get sent to my office, at least by association. But for some reason or other, my beautiful boy sees something in you, and…I trust him.”
Holy shit, what? JT had told his mom about me? That he had fallen for me? Why did she make it sound like there was still a chance?
The dean looked down at me, a confounded expression on her face. “Far be it for me to be the one to stand in the way of my boy’s happiness. You are who he wants, Weston, so prove me wrong.”
If I hadn’t been staring at her so intently, I might’ve missed what she’d said with the blood ringing in my ears. But I caught it, and fucking hell, that sure seemed like a blessing—or at least as much of a one as I was going to get from her—so I sprang to my feet, giving her a genuine smile.
“I’ll try my hardest.”
“Don’t try, just do.”
Not about to stick around and have her change her mind, I stepped around the chair and made a mad dash for the door.
Just as I was about to open it and get the hell out of there, I heard, “Oh, and Mr. LaRue?”
I stopped with my fingers on the handle and glanced back over my shoulder, waiting for one final threat, but she gave a small smile instead.
“If you’re serious about him…it’s Wednesday night. You know where he’ll be.”
