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“But you knew,” I said in a small voice.
The corner of his mouth lifted. “We never had a girl before. They weren’t prepared.”
I blushed. A finger betrayed me, fluttering up to my lip to pinch it to my teeth.
“Unfortunately I believe that’s our problem now. The boys don’t know how to respond to you.” The smile lifted higher. “I don’t think I was prepared for you, either.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned his head, removing his glasses. Without them, his face was softer, the perfect angles beautiful. He bent forward, as he leaned close to me, his face inches from mine. His gray eyes sought out mine again, now uncontested and breathtaking. “In the past few weeks, I’ve seen this little girl take on an entire school where the boys won’t leave her alone, a principal and a vice principal are hell-bent on taking her down with us, withstand hours of torture from her own mother, and a host of other problems crashing around her, only to bravely turn around and willingly want to face off again for the most unselfish reasons.” The smile filled in fully, something I wasn’t expecting and enough to get my heart racing. “You’re the strongest little beautiful creature I’ve ever met.”
The finger at my mouth pinched harder until I felt the bite at my teeth. I released it, shoving my shaking hand behind my back. “I don’t ... I ...”
“But now we’ve got a new job to do. If you’re still interested in sticking with us ...”
“I am,” I said, convinced, but blinked back when I realized I’d just interrupted Mr. Blackbourne.
He nodded, the gray eyes confirming. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask for your patience, and for your help.”
“What’s the problem?”
He opened his glasses again, putting them back on his face. He looked out at the lake again. “This isn’t going to be easy. The boys are having problems adjusting to you because you’re a girl.”
“I didn’t imagine they would dislike a girl.”
“They don’t dislike girls. The problem is they’re treating you like one.”
I couldn’t stop the half smile on my own face. “You’re worried about them treating me like a girl?”
“Like you’re incapable of making your own decisions,” he said. “Of not trusting your instincts. Or becoming jealous. Or wanting to babysit you. Or a host of other complications they enforce and don’t realize they do. It’s hard enough to work with you when you’re new to our group. It is understandable that you would hesitate to trust us at first. You’re finding your place and testing us. I know all that. It’s inexcusable that they’re unwilling to listen and trust you. I have tried to teach them better.”
My heart leapt at hearing his words. I knew it. I’d known it with North and the others. They weren’t trusting me. Of all the boys in the group, I never imagined Mr. Blackbourne being the one to understand me so well. “I thought perhaps if I joined the Academy, maybe that would help us both.”
He shook his head. “You couldn’t join us unless they trusted you, and you trusted them.”
I frowned. “Kota mentioned that.”
His eyebrow shifted on his head. “He’d told me he didn’t want you to join.”
“He said that, too.”
“Do you not want to now?”
I bit my lip, unsure. I had thought I wanted it, but maybe Kota was right, maybe I was interested for the wrong reason. My desire to become part of them, to really feel accepted, wasn’t going to happen in the way I thought. I realized I didn’t know enough about the Academy to make an informed decision. “I thought I did. I think I still do. Maybe I don’t know enough about it yet. I think I want to because you and the others are on the inside. I feel too out of the loop.”
He chopped his hand sideways through the air, as if cutting this off. “We’ve got time to worry about your Academy eligibility later. Before we can even approach that topic, we need to pull ourselves together.”
“What do I do?” I asked, desiring the answers. Mr. Blackbourne understood me. It was all I needed to know. Someone I could trust to talk to me, to tell me the answers.
“One at a time,” he said. He held up a single finger. “Move forward with us. Work with us at the school. Take the guys on one at a time, if you can.”
“How?”
“Listen to them,” he said. “You’ve got a natural instinct to how people feel, and what they’re saying without them telling you out loud. You’re also very clever. You know things they don’t, things I can’t teach them. You’re going to have to show them exactly what a girl can do.”
“What do you mean?”
His millimeter smile returned. “Like tumbling off of a balcony and walking away from it. Like when you sail across the top of a car hood and land feet first only to target and fire like a pro without any training. Like showing them they can’t boss you around by flipping one of them over. You’ve got a remarkable instinct in you.”
I blushed, disbelieving he’d bring all those things up. He had heard about North. “What if I don’t know what to do?”
“You can talk to me at any time,” he said. “Call me or send me a message. I’ll come find you. Every time. I promise.”
I nodded. “I’m sorry for not calling you sooner.”
He pursed his lips, his eyes unyielding. “I know why you hesitate. It was for the same reason I had for not telling my mother I wanted us to leave my father and never return. I thought I might push her away and she wouldn’t care about me anymore. Don’t wait. You don’t have to be afraid of bothering me or letting me know when the guys are doing something overwhelming. I’ll help you. We’ll get this family back together. When that happens, we’ll see about what to do after. Family first. Academy second.”
I nodded. “Just tell me what to do.”
He tilted his head toward the shore. He walked slowly up along the dock with his hands in his pockets. “North took things pretty hard yesterday. He blames himself for it all.”
I blushed. “I made it worse when I ... when I flipped him.”
“You did the right thing,” he said. “You showed him that he can’t bully you into trusting him. It’s what he’s been needing. And to be honest, I’m glad you did it in front of the others. They’ll know better than to try.”
“I might have hurt him.”
His millimeter smile returned. “The day you actually physically hurt one of my boys, I want to hear about it. I’ll reprimand them for being caught off guard by a pretty face.”
My mouth popped open. Did he just ...
“But North has been on a rampage since you won’t talk to him.”
I flinched. “What’s going on?”
“He dismantled that Jeep of his. Last I heard, he was starting on the truck. The Jeep is unsightly, but we do kind of need that truck. I don’t really have the time to go get another one outfitted.”
The Academy used North’s truck? “If he’s angry with me, shouldn’t I avoid him until he calms down?”
“You do calm him down. Or you can if you talk to him.”
“Last time I did, I ended up arguing with him.”
Mr. Blackbourne stopped a few feet short of his sedan. He turned to me, gazing down at my face. “Yes. You had the right idea. You need to continue to argue back.”
“Isn’t that ... not nice?”
“No. Listen to what he has to say and if you disagree, speak up and say so. He’ll listen. Sometimes you have to say it louder but he’ll hear you out. The way North shows how he cares about you is by telling you, sometimes louder than he means to.”
“He yells because he cares?”
“He yells to show he cares about you.”
“What if he doesn’t care?”
“He won’t talk to you.”
I remembered Luke telling me about North, about how a long time ago, when Luke and North first met, that North refused to talk to anyone. Luke thought he was deaf and learned sign language just to try to communicate with him. Luke, too, didn’t like
it when I had teased him once that I wouldn’t talk to him. “So I messed up when I tried to walk off. He thought it meant I didn’t care about him.”
“Don’t let him getting loud or angry upset you, or try not to. I know it might not be easy. You’re very sweet, but sweet doesn’t have to be quiet and meek. If you need to walk away because it is too much, tell him that. Tell him you’re not leaving him, but you’re too upset to talk to him any more right now and you’ll talk to him later. Just don’t tell him you won’t talk to him anymore. He hates that.”
My face heated, realizing my mistake. “I’d told him I was done talking.”
“Which is why I’m down two vehicles and a pair of brothers. Luke can’t leave the premises because he’s worried North will run out of vehicles and might go find a car that doesn’t belong to him to dismantle.”
I nodded, steeling myself for what I had to do. I had to swallow the pride back. North needed me. I wasn’t going to let him think I’d abandoned him anymore. “Can you take me to him?”
NORTH REPAIR
The Taylor property was far beyond what I’d envisioned, and the moment I laid eyes on it, I couldn’t have imagined what I thought otherwise, because it was exactly what it should be.
A run down Victorian house sat to the right of a large clearing, with a large forest surrounding it. On the left were a couple of trailers. One looked completely run down. The other looked nearly new, with a few repaired places where paint had been reapplied. The house looked in severe disrepair, with broken windows along one edge, covered up with boards.
