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I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if not for that damn kiss. Maybe he thought he had to charm me a little bit after the car accident, in his own way. But I didn’t think I’d given him any reason to believe I expected that to take the form of him planting his mouth on me.
Even when it came to that detail, the more I thought about it the more I thought he hadn’t ever intended to do it. I’d gotten him mad when I refused to accept the car he’d picked for me, and things had gotten even more out of hand for him when he took me to Jillian Montgomery’s grave.
Jillian, I was certain, was the key to everything.
Tamara was sitting across the room from me in maths, but Aileen and I were next to one another. After we were all settled down and working on a page of problems, I nudged her and said, “Hey, do you know anything about a girl called Jillian Montgomery?”
“Never heard the name before,” Aileen said. “Sounds rich, though. Is she Lucas’s girlfriend?”
“She’s dead,” I said, “so I hope for his sake she isn’t.”
“Lucas doesn’t seem like the type to want them when they can’t put up a bit of a fight,” Aileen mused.
“Could you please get off the topic of Lucas Starling?” I demanded, a bit too loudly. Everyone in the seats around us was now looking.
“Well that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” Aileen said.
“It’s not all about Lucas.”
“So she has something to do with Lucas,” said Aileen, giving her cheeks a smug twitch in my direction, “and that means it’s basically all about him.”
“Aileen, Callie,” said Mrs. Patterson. “Could you please save your love lives until after my class?”
“Sorry,” I muttered, sliding under my desk as much as was possible. Aileen didn’t even bother with that much of an apology, and after that I could hear everyone talking about me and Lucas all around me, and Mrs. Patterson just rolled her eyes wearily and didn’t do anything to try to get them under control.
After school, I had to hurry to my first day back at work after a few days off, and because I didn’t have to wait around for Lucas, I was able to get out there in record time.
I was hoping it would be a quiet first day back in which I could catch up with the backlog of paperwork and sneak in a bit of personal research, but everyone saw my new car coming. My boss Dane and two of the contractors who happened to be around made straight for me and started plying me with questions.
“Become a kept woman, huh, Callie? Got a new man plying you with the good stuff for your favours?” And of course it had to be Bill who was around for it all when he was the biggest arsehole on Dane’s roster. I liked most of the contractors, even though they either treated me like a kid or a secretary—you know the behaviour—but I’d never been able to find a way to like Bill.
“She’s certainly not paying for that with the money I’m giving her,” Dane cracked. The other thing I didn’t like about Bill was that he tended to have a negative effect on the behaviour of the other guys around him.
“I told you,” I said with excessive patience, “I had this guy at my school from a rich family run into my old car. He insisted on replacing it, and… well, that’s what he gave me.”
“Rich and tasteless apparently,” remarked Mez.
“Yeah, that car is going to get itself stolen,” Dane said. “Are you at least going to put that top up?”
“I haven’t actually worked out how to put it up yet,” I admitted. I’d never seen Lucas using his sister’s car with the roof up, of course he’d gone and brought mine around to me in open-top mode, and the one thing he hadn’t brought along with the car was a manual. I hadn’t had time between school and getting to work to figure it out. Not that I’d really wanted to be fumbling around the car in front of the school with a few hundred judgemental eyes on me waiting for some evidence that I believed Lucas Starling had sabotaged my new ride.
“Right,” Dane said, “that’s easy, then. Come on.”
He marched me outside with the other two enthusiastically in tow as if they didn’t actually have any work to get done that day, and showed me how to pull out the caps on the parts of the roof that folded back into the car, and get the roof over and fixed in place. Once it had a roof like a normal car, the convertible actually looked a little less offensive. It was still over-the-top and probably more expensive than I really wanted to know, but at least I wasn’t going to look quite so much of a spoiled ditz riding around in it.
“I saw one of these in about this condition going for about thirty thousand a few months back,” Mez commented. Too bad I hadn’t been able to let him in on not wanting to know. “If you plan on riding around in that on your own, keep it secured and keep your wits about you. Honestly, if you were my girl and a boy gave you something like that I’d have his balls for chicken stew. Especially in that colour. He’s gonna make you a target.”
“Yes,” I said, “I did try to tell him that.”
“A guy who loved you would not set you up for that kind of shit,” Bill added. The fucker was trying to spin it as just more fatherly advice, but there was something just a little bit too gleeful in the way he was saying it.
“Trust me,” I said, “I don’t need you to tell me that.” I was not under any misapprehen
sion that any of what Lucas was doing was because he loved me, or because he was anywhere near loving me.
I did think, however, that maybe he had loved Jillian Montgomery… and maybe he didn’t quite know what to do with those feelings now she was gone.
I didn’t get a chance to do a bit of sneaky online research on my phone at work, obviously, and then when I got home in my car there was another tense encounter with my parents once they figured out that this one was, apparently, mine.
