Page 44 of Twisting Beauty

Deargán stood at the colonnade’s edge with his hands in the pockets of his dark double-breasted coat hanging open over a charcoal turtleneck, still in a way that made the moving crowd look frantic. He wasn’t watching the quad.

He was watching me.

God help me.

I’d almost forgotten how criminally good-looking he was. Leaning against the old Ravenwood stone in the gray afternoon light with his hair pushed loose across his forehead by the wind, he looked like he’d stepped out of a Bronte novel. He looked like something a more foolish version of myself might have invented.

My stomach flipped despite myself.

What in the actual hell was he thinking, showing up here in the middle of the Ravenwood quad in broad daylight? Did he think he was the kind of man who could move through life invisible?

He hadn’t gone unnoticed. A cluster of girls near the fountain had been watching him for several minutes, two of them with their heads together, one with her hand pressed over her mouth, another craning openly. Something one of them said sent the whole group into fresh whispers. Someone else said “TILF” loud enough to carry on the wind. Teacher I’d like to fuck.

Deargán wasn’t paying any of them the slightest attention.

He was looking at me.

“No,” I lied to Nuala. “I don’t know him.”

“You sure? He’s been low-key staring at you for like five, ten minutes.” Nuala’s voice had shifted into something more careful. She tilted her head. “He’s a total ride, though. Nothing low-key about that.”

“Just some weirdo,” I said.

But my body had already betrayed me. My shoulders angled toward him, my weight following, the rest of me beginning to orient to him. My jaw tightened at that instinctive pull, the part of me drawn to Deargán because he’d conditioned me that way.

“I’ll tell him to scram,” I said, too quick, already moving.

I hadn’t taken two steps toward him when something sharp and cold landed between my shoulder blades.

Across the quad, near the arched entrance to the east building, Lorcan sat among the wood picnic tables with Rafe and Breezy on either side and a loose orbit of others around them, the usual mix of actual friends and people who’d positioned themselves close enough to bask. A man who’d never asked for a court and had acquired one anyway.

He wasn’t paying attention to any of them.

His pale eyes moved from my face to Deargán and back to my face. His expression hadn’t changed. Something hardened behind his eyes.

Shit. He’d followed my gaze. He’d seen who I’d been walking toward.

My feet stopped.

Deargán stood at the far pillar, expectation bleeding out of his tightened posture. Lorcan stood at the east archway, very still now, making a decision I couldn’t read. The wind scraped another shower of leaves across the flagstones between us all.

I had nowhere good to put my next step.

“Forget it,” I said, turning back to Nuala. “Let’s just go.”

Nuala’s eyes moved from me to the colonnade and back. “That’s not just some weirdo.”

She was too observant by half, and one of these days I was going to have to actually answer one of her questions. Not today.

“Coffee before the bell. My treat.” I grabbed her arm and steered her toward the kiosk, keeping my voice light and my smile in place. Twenty years of Michael Byrne’s fundraising circuit had to be worth something.

She let herself be steered, but the look she shot me said she wasn’t buying it, only shelving it for later.

Don’t look back.

My head turned anyway.

Deargán hadn’t moved. He remained by the pillar, patient and composed, as if he knew I would come to him in the end.