Page 58 of Mad Boys


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Pausing, I raised my brows at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said, then took a sip of the coffee before scanning the area. There were kids flopping out on the grass, and more than one of the male students had ditched their shirts while girls had gone for shorts that didn’t meet regulations.

I could give them shit.

I wouldn’t.

“You wanted to talk to me,” she said, a reminder, and I blew out a breath.

“Yeah, walk with me?” I made it a request rather than an order. I needed to work out how to bring this up to her.

I headed for one of the walking paths that wound away from the academic buildings and into the trees. A lot of the runners favored these paths because they were quieter and they circled the campus, some farther out than others.

“You aren’t going to want to listen to me,” I intoned. “Based on past experience, I’m pretty sure you’re just going to dismiss me out of hand. But I would regret not saying anything and then something happened.”

“Okay.” The base acceptance felt like a trap, but I went with the face value for now.

“Dating RJ Wallach is a bad idea.”

She snorted.

“You don’t have to believe me. I imagine me saying anything would be like waving a red flag at a bull. You’re going to want to do it even more because I don’t like it.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re obstinate,” I said, glancing at her. “Why else?”

KC rolled her eyes then shook her head. “Not why would I not listen to you.Whydon’t you like him? Why is it a bad idea?”

“Does it matter?” RJ Wallach brought up a lot of bad memories. Worse choices.

“Yes. If you want me to think about it. You saying so is definitely not a good enough reason. So, tell me or shut up about who I do or don’t date.” The flatness beneath those words frustrated me more than the rolling of her eyes.

“You don’t really care what I think.”

“No, I really don’t,” she said, leaving the trail to walk up on a rock that looked down a tree-filled slope. “You’re a liar.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

With a kind of careless grace, she spun to face me. The wind tugged at her hair, pulling strands of it loose from the braid confining it. “You’re a liar. All three of you are. You knew who I was when I got here. You knew who my father was. You didn’t say a word. You played—whatever the hell that was last year and didn’t say a word to me.”

I frowned. “You were invited to the wedding. If you’d bothered to show up, you’d have met us then.”

Her snort was so dismissive it rankled. “I was on tour, and I didn’t even get the invitation until after the fact. It doesn’t matter. You knew and you kept it to yourself. I didn’t even know you douchebags were brothers until Jonas and Lachlan got into that fight. You know what…you could have said somethingthen. You didn’t.”

No. We hadn’t. I could try to defend it, but to be honest, at this point… the why didn’t matter. Instead, all I said was, “We’ve lived with your father for years.”

“Well, good for you.” She saluted me with the cup and guilt stabbed at me abruptly. Had that been hurt in her eyes? “And now I know, so—water under that bridge?”

I sighed. “KC…”

“Oh, no, Mr. Malone. Like I said before, Miss Crosse is fine. You treated me like dogshit, you don’t get to just decide everything is fine. We’re not friends.”

“No,” I said, agreeing with her. “We’re family.”

There was nothing amused about her laughter. It was cold, empty, and jagged enough to draw blood. “We arenotfamily. You just happen to live with my sperm donor. That makes us exactlynothing. So, if that’s all? I think I need to send RJ a message.”

The last was just a dig at me. I knew it was a dig at me. She strode down off the rock, except rather than letting her past me, I wrapped an arm around her and picked her right up. Her chest impacted against mine, and the defiance blazing in her eyes lit a match on the wood chips of my temper.

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