ARABELLA
Two and a half years later
“Blake?” a deep voice asks.
I turn to see a tall guy with blue hair and cornflower blue eyes to match, on his phone, lounging against the archway outside one of the entrances to Reynard’s Elite Boarding School for Boys. It’s my first day, and I’ve no idea where I’m going. I’ve been standing outside the building for at least five minutes, digging through my bag for the piece of paper with instructions on it.
He puts his phone away, bending down to pick something from the ground. A piece of paper, the one I must have dropped when I walked through the gates. He reads it and then smirks.
“Or should I say, Ara-bel-la?” he says my name, tasting it on his lips as he walks over, languid and graceful. When he stops in front of me, I have to look up to meet his sparkling blue eyes, full of amusement. “No wonder I couldn’t find you. You gave me a fake name.”
I gape at him.
Suddenly, it all comes flooding back. My twenty-fifth birthday.
This guy is my one-night stand.
Or should I say my one-month stand?
The day I gained my qualified teacher status, I turned twenty-five, and my mother threw a party to celebrate in the house my stepfather owned. It was dire. Full of old gits groping me every which way. I got drunk and left halfway through to go on an impromptu date with a guy I was flirting most of the night with on one of those apps. Only my date was an old man.
Then I met Romain and had a cray cray moment where I thought shacking up with a local boy would piss off my parents and solve all my problems. It didn’t. It just made them worse. I fell for him, and then I left England to escape the fallout, the shit storm that rained down on my life after I went back home.
I haven’t thought about him much since.
Liar. I think about him every time I make myself come.
And every time I remember why I’m damaged goods.
I blink, taking in his once dark hair that is now blue. I didn’t recognize him right away because he changed his hair. He offers me my papers and I take them.
“Romain?” This can’t be happening.
He gives me a bemused look. “You’re back.”
I nod at him, unable to do anything else. My mind is a whir. There was a small chance I thought I would meet him again, but not here. In Rubensfeld, maybe, where he owned the bar, which is a forty-five-minute drive away. Never in a million years would I expect to see him in a boarding school.
What is he doing here?He’s still devastatingly handsome and has those mesmerizing eyes. Once mine are locked on his, I’m unable to look away. Just the sight of him has all sorts of memories from that night, of him holding me down in the lavish bed in a hotel penthouse while he fucked me raw, assailing me out of nowhere.
He was my first, the only guy who has ever been able to make me orgasm.
Not that I would ever admit that to anyone.
“I could ask the same thing about you.” He frowns, dragging me out of my inner whirlwind of unhelpful thoughts.
“What?” I ask, blushing furiously.
“You asked me what I was doing here.” He raises a brow.
Did I? I clear my throat. “I’m…”
“I looked for you after you ditched me,” he snorts.
I shake my head. “I went traveling.” That’s partly true. After the stint in Pinehill where my parents all but forgot about me, I went slumming it around Europe with Blake, eventually ending up in LA.
He looks extremely pissed off at that.
“You changed your hair,” I say, to keep the exchange light. The last thing I want to do right now is dig into the past. It’s dead and buried. No point in hashing it all out now. I force a smile at him, ignoring the old emotional pain rearing its ugly head back up. Please don’t ask me anything more.