Lover (Court University 4)

She raised her hand, not finished. “Was that you,” she directed a look at Ramses, “could actually let something like this happen again.”

Again?

Ramses’s jaw pierced his skin. He shot forward in his chair. “This situation isn’t like—”

Her hands lifted once again, still not finished.

“You don’t talk,” she said before transferring her attention to me. She leveled me with a stare so hard I felt it from across the desk. Her teeth ran over her glossed lip. “I’m going to ask you a question, Brielle, and I need you to be perfectly honest with me. Your job depends on it.”

My breath escaped.

Ramses growled. “Mother, you are completely out of line here.”

“I said you don’t talk!” Her face filled with color, beet red on normally fair skin. “You won’t talk. Not until I hear from her.”

From her…

Words like that and “colleague” didn’t sit well, and if this conversation felt bad before, it really did now.

I faced Ramses, and at this point, he had his hands laced on his mom’s desk. Fingers pressed to his lips. He knew something I didn’t.

“Did you take advantage of my son, Brielle?”

I shot my gaze in her direction, completely serious with her question. My lips parted. “What?”

She nodded. “It was brought to my attention this morning by a fellow faculty member Ramses may have transferred out of your class. This faculty member saw your TMZ story and the potential circumstances in which you may have met my son worried him. He came to me. Ramses is currently a student in his class.”

I folded a hand over my face.

Guy Donahue. It had to be him.

He was the only one who knew.

He was the only one I’d told, but before I could speak, Ramses angled in. His teeth bared. “Mom—”

“And my son confirmed with me just now you were his professor.” Her manicured hand raised again. “I asked him that before you came in.”

Ramses swung a glance in my direction, his hands opening. She’d obviously bombarded him with this, or he would have warned me.

I breathed into my hands, and in those moments, Evie l

eaned forward.

“So, I ask you again,” she said. “Did you take advantage of my son?”

“That’s not how we met,” Ramses ground out. “And if you’d given me a second to speak when you asked me in here, I would have told you that.” He shook his head. “Brielle and I met at December and Royal’s wedding. She had no idea I was in her class. We both figured that out later.”

“And lied to me about it.” The breath eased from her lips. “Continued an affair as student and teacher.”

“We didn’t.”

My voice arrived meeker than I wanted it to, and its presence had Ramses’s hand moving in my direction.

He hesitated in the end, though. He didn’t dare as he shouldn’t. He nodded at me. “She’s right. We didn’t. Brielle cut everything off.” He faced his mom. “We both did once we knew.”

“Well, things obviously started up again.”

“Yeah, once I wasn’t her student.” His eyes narrowed at Evie. “There isn’t anything for you to look into here, Ma.”