I’d been so annoyed with him when he’d first shown up, with his thoughtless invasion of my space and privacy.
It hadn’t even occurred to him that I might have other plans. Plans that were more important to me than him.
Because that’s the kind of arrogance men like him have.
Wasn’t it?
But that apology . . .
Oh, man.
And the fact that he treated the girls with respect, like they are worthy of his time and attention . . .
These girls, who were at the bottom of every possible food chain, are not used to men apologizing to them, respecting their time. Let alone a powerful, respected white man.
His apology makes them feel valuable. Important.
Gah.
It wrecks me.
It would never in a million years have occurred to Clive to do that.
Clive had never understood why I wanted to teach this class. He had called me impossibly naïve for believing I could help them. He’d even told me I was cruel to let them hope for a better life that would never be theirs.
We had fought over it. Back before we had bigger things to fight over. Even before he’d slept with someone else, I’d been so hurt by him. By the slow realization that he wasn’t the man I thought he was.
We’d first met when I was eighteen and he was twenty-five. He’d been getting his master’s. I was barely out of high school and not that different from the girls I taught now. Poor, but hard-working. No real future ahead of me.
If Clive hadn’t pushed, I might not have even finished college. My second year, between the stress of school and work, I floundered. My grades dropped. I was close to bungling it all. I was one failing grade away from dropping out and heading home to the small town in Georgia where my mom worked at the soda factory and my older brothers worked at the paper mill. If I hadn’t been so afraid of disappointing Clive, I might have taken the easy way out.
Somehow, Clive had never seen the similarities between me and the girls I taught. Because I’d been beautiful and eager to please. I’d been moldable into the kind of wife he wanted.
That had been the final nail in the coffin of our marriage. The realization that he had never seen me as a person at all. He had seen me as raw materials that he could sculpt into his idea of the perfect wife. The other half of the power couple he wanted to be.
But just now, when Max walked into this room and apologized to these girls, he’d had the opposite reaction. He had seen them. He had seen their intrinsic value.
Okay, I’m probably being overly dramatic. Imagining motivation and emotional depth that might not be there. After all, that is my fatal flaw.
Yet … And yet, Max is a completely different kind of man than Clive.
Not just on the surface either. Not just because Clive is handsome, charming, and has a closet full of tailored jackets. But because Max actually looks at people.
How could someone who appears to have so few social skills have done so much for my girls just now?
And why did I feel like he hadn’t done it for them, but for me?
Chapter 16
Max
Ispend the next twenty minutes watching Holly interact with her students through the narrow window in the door.
Not because I’m a stalker, despite the accusations of Holly’s student, Tria.
No, it’s merely an issue of wanting something to occupy my time. I check my emails on my phone. While there are several I need to respond to, the only thing I hate more than answering emails is answering emails on that tiny keyboard. I even spend a full five minutes looking over the student work displayed on the walls outside the classrooms. It’s not intellectually stimulating, so I end up watching Holly.
She is a completely different person here than she was in the lecture I watched at the university. There, she was in command of the room, a bundle of kinetic energy the students couldn’t take their eyes off.
