To Professor, With Love (Forbidden Men 2)

“I don’t know.” Gazing at the rest of the homes in the trailer park, I sighed. They were all better maintained than ours.

“Where’s your mom?”

I turned to Ten. “Good question.”

He hissed out another curse and pushed away from the wall. “Well, this...this frankly sucks. No wonder you never told me about your home life. Or that your sister was fucking hot.”

“Excuse me?” When I slid him a sharp glance, he lifted his hands as if surrendering.

“What? Whenever you mentioned her, I always pictured some five-year-old in pigtails carrying around a blankie and teddy bear. And...she’s not five.”

“She’s not eighteen either,” I growled. “So back off.”

“Hey, I wasn’t disrespecting. The walls in that place are thin as shit; I heard her tell you what she just went through. I’m just saying, I’m not blind.”

“Well, you’d better turn blind around her.”

“Fine, whatever.” Ten lifted his hands once last time, telling me he was backing off. He let out a long, loud sigh and looked up at the sky. So did I. After a minute of neither of us speaking, he asked, “What’re you going to do about this whole fucked-up mess?”

Kicking at a large rock embedded in the grass, I tried to quell all the rising emotions. But the more I thought about what I should do, the more I wanted to tear the trailer house apart with my bare hands. “You know, I always wondered how bad I’d let things here get before I had to give up on Ellamore and come back home. But shit, this is worse than I imagined. How could I let things get this bad?”

“But if you leave school now—”

“I know,” I snapped, not needing the reminder. Pressing my hands to either side of my head to try to ease some of the pressure building inside, I closed my eyes. Except when I did, all I could picture were news reports with Aspen’s face splashed all over the covers of newspapers and screens of televisions with the headline Ellamore Sex Scandal Spreads from the Volleyball Team to Football.

“I can’t do that to Aspen,” I moaned, shaking my head. “I just can’t.”

“Then what’re you going to do?” Ten pressed. “Because you sure as fuck can't leave those three in there like that.”

“I know that.” I glared at him and growled, flashing my teeth. “But what can I do?”

“Well, what do you want to do?”

“I want to go into that pathetic excuse of a house, scoop up my brothers and sister, and take them back to Ellamore with me. I want to protect everyone I love.”

Ten flashed a sudden grin and dusted his hands off on his thighs. “Well, all right, then. Let’s do it.”

“What?” I blinked and gaped at him. “We can’t do that. They don’t...Their life is here. School. My mother...shit, I don’t have any kind of custody. It’d be considered kidnapping if I—”

“If you got caught.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “But I don’t see your mom anywhere. Do you really think she’d contest it?”

A seed of hope sprouted inside me. It’d be rough...but so worth it.

Shaking my head, I frowned at my roommate for even suggesting the idea. “I can’t bring three underage kids home with me.” Caroline would turn eighteen in two weeks, but still. “Where the hell would we put them in our dinky, two-bedroom apartment?”

Glancing at the dinky, two-bedroom trailer house they were staying in now, he lifted his eyebrows and shot me a look. Okay, so he had a point. Even our shithole apartment was in a hell of a lot better condition than this dump.

“Look, my bed’s bigger than yours. The boys can camp in my room, your sister can take yours, I’ll get the couch, and you can bunk of the floor until we find someplace bigger to rent.”

I just stared at him, unable to believe what I was hearing. “Are you serious?”

He made a face. “Fuck, yeah. I’m certainly not taking the floor.”

With a short laugh, I shook my head. Only Ten could make me smile at a time like this. “I mean, about the whole thing? This is a big deal, Ten. This would fucking save my life, but it’d be a huge change. For you too. Are you sure about them coming back with us?”

He shrugged as if it was nothing. “I mean, they’re going to be squished in my half backseat on the ride there, but hell, why not?”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I covered my face with my hands as the relief nearly buckled my knees. “Thank you. Oh, fuck. Thank you so much, man. I’ll never be able to repay you for this.”