The Kingpin's Weakness - Jessa Kane Page 0,18

out? Did he even look back or second-guess himself?

In this moment, I truly hate him.

He stole me out of my life, made me love him and abandoned me.

Left me floundering with a broken heart and no way to reach him. No recourse or closure. I don’t have his phone number and the way to his house is a blur, because he always made sure I was distracted in the back seat.

An alarm beeps on my phone.

Class. I have class.

Going to school seems like such a foreign idea when I’ve been locked in a fantasy for two days, but I have to go. There is an exam next week and the next few sessions will be spent reviewing. Feeling like something inside of me has died, I go through the motions, taking a shower and getting dressed, piling my hair up in a bun. Books in hand, I leave the apartment…

…and I immediately know I’m being watched.

Every hair on the back of my neck stands at attention, prickles riding up my arms.

I turn in a circle on the walkway outside the building, trying to find the source of my intuition, but I can’t see anything out of the ordinary. At least until I get on the bus.

When I take my seat, I watch over my shoulder as two nondescript cars pull away from the curb outside my residence and follow the bus at a discreet distance. But I’ve watched a lot of suspenseful movies and I’m not fooled. I know what a tail looks like. But I can’t tell who is in the driver’s seat from this distance.

Resolutely, I turn back around in my seat, crack open a textbook and fire through some review questions. If those are indeed Easton’s men tailing me, they can suck it. He doesn’t get to control me from a distance. He’s either in my life completely or he isn’t. These half measures aren’t going to work for me. I want the man or nothing at all.

And I miss him.

Terribly.

All through class that morning, I feel like there’s a hard-boiled egg stuck in my throat and there’s a hot iron pressed to the back of my eyes. I replay every moment of our two days together. Me fainting in his luxury box, Easton buying drinks in the Speckled Hen, making love in the ocean, falling asleep in each other’s arms, making a lava lamp in his kitchen. Was it really so easy for him to just offload me and go about his merry way?

Towards the end of class, another wave of electricity walks up my arm and I turn, scanning the faces of the students, trying to pick out someone I don’t recognize.

There.

Is that guy wearing an earpiece?

Wait. There are two of them.

“Class dismissed,” drones the professor and everyone stands, blocking my view of the two men with curly little wires trailing down their necks.

I crane my neck to pin them down, but one of my classmates stops in front of me, a backpack slung over one of his shoulders. “Hey, uh…Scout, right?”

“Yes,” I say absently, still scanning the milling crowd of students.

“My name is Paul. I’ve been sitting behind you all semester.” I force myself to focus on the young man and nod, as if I recognize him, but unfortunately I don’t. Everything but the subject matter tends to fade away during a lecture. Usually, anyway. “I just wanted to say, I really liked your kinematics presentation last week.”

“Oh.” I give him a genuine smile. “Thank you.”

“Sure.” He shifts on his feet. “Do you want to grab a cup of coffee?”

My immediate reaction is to say no. I’ve been asked out before, but I’ve always declined, reasoning that boys were too big of a distraction while in school. With Whitney working so hard to help pay my tuition, I owed it to my sister to be one hundred percent focused. That reasoning never occurred to me while I was with Easton. I’m pretty sure that makes me a hypocrite, doesn’t it? Maybe I should say yes to this guy.

No. I am going to say yes!

Rebellion roars to life inside of me, crackling in my fingertips.

I’ve just been dropped off like a sack of potatoes while the man I love moves on. Without so much as a goodbye kiss. Well I can move on, too. Perhaps there is nothing I really find attractive about my classmate, but the world isn’t going to end if we have a friendly cup of coffee. And maybe it’ll help me