AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I bite the inside of my cheek. “I told them that you stalk me.”
He laughs.
I glance over at Skylar and Lucy and Theo. Liam’s here now, too, and he glances my way. I let my attention skip away from them and sip my coffee while Jacob laughs in my ear.
“Let me up,” he repeats. “Our flight home isn’t until tomorrow. We have all day… and all night.”
“Wild Oak Art,” I say suddenly.
He goes quiet.
“Your snooping through my phone didn’t tell you I wentthere, did it?” I close my eyes. “You bought my paintings. Alotof them, Jacob. You can’t—”
“They didn’t belong anywhere else.”
“If I was doing it to be famous, then—”
“Is that what you want?”
I don’t know. I don’t know what past-Melody wanted. What her goals were when she painted those things or what she was thinking. Or dreaming. There are so manythingsI just don’t know about myself. And now I have this memory of teaching, of talking about old, classic works of literature, and having eyes on me. And having Jacob’s eyes on me.
When it was forbidden, it felt… dangerous.Good.
That scares me, too.
What kind of person was I, to be attracted to my student? To allow him to come into my house and push me up against a wall, to intimidate and proposition me and not immediately report him?
“You still there, songbird?”
I pull the phone from my ear.
The sudden clarity of not being agoodperson—it hurts.
So I hang up on him.
45
JACOB
Knox drags the chair out across from me and drops into it.
He looks like absolute shit. Bruises on his cheekbone and around his eye, a split lip. His dark-blond hair is mostly hidden by a backward black ball cap.
The waitress brings over a mug and fills it with coffee for him, but I wave her off before she can say anything. She already clocked exactly who he is the moment he walked in. Half the waitstaff did.
Doesn’t mean they need to say it to his face when he’s likethis.
“You’re not going to ask?”
I roll my eyes. “Nope.”
“You don’t want to know?”
“Of course I want to know,” I counter. “But I’m not going to ask because you’re going to tell me either way.”
He pouts.
“You’re acting like someone kicked your puppy,” I point out.
