by Sofia Daniel
The arrogance in his words snapped the sense back into my limbs, and I stepped away, face as hot and probably as red as coals. I was right. This was the playboy of the group. The guy who knew his way around a girl’s mind and body to lure her to a humiliating downfall. I’d read about this type in hundreds of books. Women found him an irresistible challenge and fooled themselves into thinking they could tame his womanizing ways because their libidos took over.
Well, this was no fairytale, and I was no princess. As much as I wanted to snap out something to wipe that cocky grin off his handsome face and to stop those chocolate-brown eyes from twinkling with triumph, I still needed Blake to show me to my room.
“You’re not affecting me.” I straightened my blazer. “I’m just ticklish. I could have had that reaction with anyone.”
His brows rose in the kind of incredulous expression people gave when humoring a bad liar. “Alright, then. I’ll try not to tickle you while I escort you to your rooms.”
“Rooms?” I pictured a suite with a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchenette.
He waved a dismissive hand, wrapped it around my waist, and drew me close to his side. The one-two punch combination of a strong, muscled body and his incubus scent made my heart pound and my knees go weak.
“You seem a little unsteady on your feet, Emilia.” His breath tickled my skin, and his low, smoky voice tickled me much lower down. “If there’s anything you need. A helping hand, or some such, I’ll be there. Ready and able to please.”
A breath hissed through my teeth. I should push him away and tell him where to shove his offer. No one but a player ever came on that strong, but his touch, his words, even his hot breath made me feel alive in a way I’d never experienced. Every nerve ending vibrated with life, responding to his silent siren song.
“S-some such?” I asked.
We stopped at the double doors of a house in a different architectural style to the main teaching block. This one was a lot older, with smaller and fewer windows. Blake opened the door and bowed with a flourish. “Welcome to Elder House, my lady. Your home and mine for the next two years.”
The absence of his body next to mine was both a loss and a relief. I took a steadying breath, willing the pounding in my heart to calm, and hoped the reception hall and its large, roaring fire would replace his missing heat. I stepped into the warm stone room, and my gaze swung to the mantle, above which hung a painting of what looked like the same armored man as the one outside the headmaster’s office. A number of mahogany cabinets stood around the walls, each about the size of a breadbox with letter-sized slots.
“Is this some kind of mail room?” I asked.
“Yes.” His hand returned to the small of my back, and he ushered me through the reception hall and into a corridor. “Our common room is at the end of this hallway. It’s where some of the sixth formers like to relax after prep and before lights out. We’re a lot quieter than the other houses that accommodate younger students.”
“Why’s that?” I was sure someone had explained this, but I couldn’t think of anything else but that hand on my back and what it could do to the rest of my body.
“Only sixth formers are allowed in Elder and Hawthorn houses,” he replied. “If you see anyone under the age of sixteen, feel free to give them a boot in the backside.”
Blake took me to a room on the left side of the hallway and introduced me to Mr. Jenkins, the housemaster, who explained he was the keeper of the keys and in charge of the general welfare, academic or otherwise, of the people in Elder house. Mr. Jenkins was a kindly man of about five-food-eight, who was delighted that I would be sharing with Rita Yelverton. He pressed a key into my hand and wished me the best of luck.
Next, Blake ushered me up a set of stone stairs whose walls radiated the cold. Goosebumps rose on my flesh. It was no wonder they’d put the fire on despite it being a mild September day. These old buildings had no insulation.
“Female dorms are on the first and second floors. Male at the top.” He reached the first flight and held the door open to a darkened hallway of mahogany floors. A large window at the end provided the only illumination. “By the way, who was the atrocious woman with the nauseating accent?”
He was referring to Marissa, but I snapped, “Charlotte Underhill.”
His face split into a grin. “My apologies for the offense,” he said in a voice that indicated he didn’t give a shit but wanted to move the conversation past his insult. He brushed a lock of auburn hair off my face and let his gaze linger down my body. “Was the older lady your mother or another relative? I see no family resemblance.”
My mouth dried. Marissa was short, much like Charlotte, with the kind of curves that made men turn around to check out her ass. I was like Mom. Tall and willowy, all angles and no jiggle. At five ten, I didn’t exactly tower over most guys, but it was hard not to feel gangly around a group of smaller girls with perfect little figures.
My tongue darted out to lick my lips. His eyes tracked the movement. “Marissa… She’s one of my stepfather’s personal assistants.”
“And your stepfather is?” He let the question hang in the air. “I didn’t quite catch the name.”
“Rudolph Trommel.”
He tilted his head to the side. “I can’t say I’ve heard of him. What industry is he in?”
I shrugged. “He buys media companies, mostly.”
“Business must be lucrative if he’s sent you here.” He stepped into the hallway, as though the subject had bored him already.
I blinked hard. Rudolph Trommel was one of the most well-known tycoons in America. When pictures of him and Mom had appeared in the society pages, people I’d never heard from in years got in contact, asking for introductions, as though being the daughter of his current paramour granted me access to the man. I’d barely met him. Barely seen Mom during their whirlwind romance, and would likely barely hear from her until the inevitable divorce. A breath of relief slipped through my lips. It was nice to be in a place where nobody had heard of Rudolph Trommel.
When I caught up, Blake rested his hand on my hip and guided me through the hallway as though he was escorting me home from a date and expected to be invited in for coffee. His reaction to Edward’s comment about fleas no longer stung. It hadn’t been personal, and he seemed the type who would laugh at anything.
“So,” he said, all business-like. “This is one of the female hallways. They house two-person dorms for the lower-sixth years.”
“Are you in the upper-sixth?”
He grinned. “Thank you for the compliment, but I only turned seventeen a few days ago. If you’d like to give me a belated birthday kiss, I’ll accept it with humble thanks.”
My hand shot up to my mouth to hide a giggle. Blake was charming and funny, along with ridiculously handsome. A girl could fall for a rogue like him and probably not even regret it when he moved onto the next conquest. There was only one way to deal with such a flirt, and that was to never give him what he wanted until he swore off other women and meant it.
A smile curved my lips. All my knowledge of men was theoretical. During the times between divorces, Mom and I could get really close, and she would dish out nuggets of advice that I never thought I’d need… until now.
“Right.” Blake furrowed his brows. “You’ll be rooming with Rita Yelverton.”
“Why did you say her name like that?”
He blinked. “I don’t follow.”
“You said her name as though there was a nasty smell under your nose.”
“She’s a scholarship student.” He raised a shoulder. “Music and academics.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing at all,” he said too quickly to be true.
I narrowed my eyes. Either Rita was an innocent girl whose studious habits and scholarship offended him, or she was an unholy bitch who made Charlotte seem as cheerful and loving as Mary Poppins.
I placed my key in the lock and turned it, revealing a
huge room, larger than my previous dorm in Park Prep. On the far left, four narrow windows streamed their light on two single beds arranged in a pair of alcoves. A fire burned in a stone fireplace, whose contents crackled and popped and spread dry warmth throughout the room. The side of the room farthest from the wall had posters of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, two of my favorite jazz musicians, and smaller pictures of Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Ella Fitzgerald.
I stepped into the room and exhaled a sigh of relief. No one who liked such great music could be a bad person. When Noelle got dumped, she and I had spent hours singing along with Billie Holiday’s songs of heartache. A person who really understood those words couldn’t ever inflict pain on others.
“There’s something you’re not telling me about my roommate.” I turned and narrowed my eyes at Blake, who lounged against the doorjamb like he was a jazz singer. “What is it?”
He raised his palms. “There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s just… unpopular.”
“Why?”
Blake stepped back into the hallway. “It’s nothing I can place my finger on. Rita isn’t just not very sociable.”
I shrugged. “Antisocial I can deal with.”
He clicked his heels in the parody of a devoted soldier and bowed with a flourish. “Then I will leave you to acquaint yourself with your new home.”
Blake strode down the hallway, leaving me to study my side of the room. The white wall and white comforter on the wooden bed made for extremely dull accommodation. I’d have to buy a quilt or ask Mom to send something over from our storage unit.
With Rudolph’s help, she had sold the Parkside apartment from the settlement she received from my previous stepfather, a man I’d barely met because I’d been sent away to school. Very few had bothered to ask why I didn’t just walk the twenty minutes it would have taken each morning. But then I supposed a lot of us at Park Prep were in similar situations with parents too preoccupied or apathetic to care for their own kids.
My monogrammed, Louis Vuitton cases lay at the foot of the bed. They were Mom’s way of apologizing for letting Rudolph send me halfway across the world. I shook my head. Did she think meaningless luggage could replace a mother?
I pulled out my smartphone and texted Mom, then Dad, then Noelle, to tell them I’d made it to my new school. Dad lived all the way in La Jolla, California, with his wife and young family, and couldn’t afford to take care of a teen who would need college tuition and other equally as significant expenses.
After tying back my hair with one of the bands I kept around my wrist, I shut the door of my room and picked up the first case. I’d missed two weeks from the start of term. That was an eternity for someone who needed to take exams in a foreign country with foreign spelling and foreign study methods.
A knock sounded on the door, and the knob turned. Before I could straighten, Charlotte stepped in with a pair of girls wearing headbands the same shade of burgundy as their blazers. Each stood with their chests thrust out, looking like they were in the middle of a boob-enhancement exercise. I imagined they were trying to appear as well-endowed as Charlotte, but they just looked pathetic. If I called them clones, it would suggest that Charlotte had a sense of style worth copying. The girls were more ghastly apparitions of Charlotte, or better still, doppelgängers.
“The British public school system is far more advanced than anything you’ve experienced,” said Charlotte. “Go back to America.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “I thought this was a private school.”
Charlotte rolled her eyes, glanced back to her pair of doppelgängers for reassurance, before turning back to me. “In Great Britain, public schools are the most elite.”
“Much like the British cabinet,” I said with a smirk.
Charlotte turned to an unseen spot in the hallway. “Edward, tell the others what you found out.”
Edward Mercia stepped into view. The window at the end of the hallway lit only one side of his face, casting the other side in mostly shadow. It brought out the prominence of his cheekbones, his strong jaw and the arch of his dark eyebrows. I drew in a sharp breath through my nostrils at the sight. As soon as he locked eyes with me, all that beauty morphed into a mask of hatred so fierce, it made my heart wrench.
He strolled forward, out of the spellbinding light. With both sides of his face fully lit, the effect was no less handsome. “Hobson’s mother is a woman who slept with an ugly multi-millionaire to win her place here at the academy.”
Charlotte’s sycophants made loud gasps, acting as if they hadn’t heard this information before and as if it was the most shocking revelation since Darth Vader revealed he was Luke’s father.
My lips tightened. “She got married. It wasn’t some kind of a tawdry transaction.”
Edward held up his smartphone, showing a society picture of Mom looking stunning in a figure-hugging wedding gown standing outside on the steps of Rudolph’s hotel. And there I was standing next to her in a mini-me bridesmaid’s dress wearing the most obvious, pained smile.
His face twisted into a smirk. “Congratulations on the recent nuptials… Trollop.”
Chapter 4
I had to google the word trollop. It was a seventeenth century British word that meant I was a whore. The assholes here probably used obscure insults to make themselves feel sophisticated. It just made them look pathetic and pretentious.
The rest of the morning wasn’t great. All of my classes were with Edward and his friends or with Charlotte and her doppelgängers. I didn’t mind Blake so much. He was a harmless flirt only dangerous to anyone gullible enough to take his interest seriously. Despite the effect he had on my body, I wasn’t deluded enough to believe someone who came on so strongly to a stranger would only have interest in one woman. So far, blond Henry was an enigma, observing me like being an American was a curious puzzle he needed to solve. As long as all he did was look, I would endure his stares.
My electives, the subjects I wanted to take for my Advanced Level exams, were English Literature, Creative Writing, Media Studies, and Spanish. Because the administration of Mercia Academy wanted to keep their students too busy to cause mischief, they’d added on Latin and Classical Greek, as though someone who had never studied ancient languages had a chance to catch up with those who had been taught it since they were eleven.
After English Lit, I followed the rest of the class back to Elder House, where lunch was served in an old-fashioned banqueting hall. Triple-height windows provided most of the illumination, and ten-foot-tall mahogany panels covered the walls. On the far left, a long table stood on a dais, and behind it hung the painting of the armored knight, flanked by a painting of the knights without his armor, and another of a king. Around the rest of the room stood smaller tables, seating four or six diners.
I blew out a breath of relief, glad that they weren’t the long rows I’d seen in movies like Harry Potter.
Most of the tables were occupied, and people I approached whose tables had free seats glared at me until I went away. I found a scrawny boy with thick glasses and acne sitting at the back with a pile of newspapers next to his place setting.
“Excuse me,” I said, “Is this seat taken?”
His gaze swept up and down my body, and with an accent so thick and posh, I could barely understand him, he said, “There are no seats in this dining room for yanks.”
I folded my arms across my chest. Had Edward Mercer told him to say that, or was everyone in this room a raging xenophobe?
“You may sit with me if you like,” drawled a bleached blonde wearing a velvet headband the same color as her blazer. She sat on her own at the next table down.
“Thanks.” I offered her a smile and slid into the seat next to her.
“Wendy Radcliff.” She stuck out her hand. “How d’you do?”
“Fine, I guess. How are you?”
“Curious.” Her gray eyes gleamed. “News spread really fast about the newbie. I hear your mother married Rudolph Tromme
l.”
People from nearby tables leaned across, listening out for tidbits of gossip. Bitterness coated my tongue. She’d only invited me to sit with her to gather information. I reached for the jug of water in the middle of the table and poured myself a glass. “That’s true.”
“What’s he like, then?”
“Mom met him while I was in prep school. I barely got to see Rudolph before the wedding.”
She nodded, as though not seeing one’s parents and missing out on major life events was an average occurrence. It probably was with the boarding-school crowd. I nodded my thanks at a server who slipped a plate of grilled chicken and salad onto my setting. Wendy nibbled tiny morsels of shepherd’s pie from her fork, which she explained was a dish of mashed potato atop minced lamb. “Mikkel Jensen is your biological father, isn’t he?”
“How did you find that out?”
Wendy shrugged. “It was on the Mercia-Net.”
“The what?”
“Our online bulletin board where we share all the latest news.”
My pulse pounded in my ears, drowning out the sounds of forks and knives clinking on porcelain. “Who posted news about my dad?”
“Lots of people.” She tapped her smartphone and scrolled down. “Take a look for yourself.”
Several people, most names I didn’t even recognize, had uploaded news reports about Mom. She was a popular model in the late nineties who left the profession when she married an up-and-coming Danish photographer and had me. They’d even posted a bunch of crap about Dad’s drug problems, trips to rehab, and Mom finally leaving him when I was five. He was mostly clean now, with a small family, but people liked to focus on the negative.
I tore my gaze away. “Doesn’t anyone have better things to do around here?”
Wendy mixed the shepherd’s pie into mush and pointed the prongs of her messy fork in my face. “You’re the biggest news we’ve had since the start of term.”
“How nice for me,” I muttered.