I patted her arm. “I’m afraid you lost your date to our demonstrative roommate, bunny.”
She rolled her eyes again. “It would seem so.”
“Anabel knows no shame when it comes to nabbing a man. What possessed you to give a male of any species our home number instead of your cell?”
Julia bit her lip. By far, she was the prettiest co-ed in a five-mile radius. Tommy, or any guy, was hers for the taking. But she didn’t compete for dates.
“It’s your own fault,” I continued. “You should learn to play dirty. Next time the house phone rings, use your elbows. That’s why God created them.”
“I’ll remember that,” Julia said. “Now sit here and don’t move your feet.” She drifted to the mirror, continuing with her own primping routine. “Do you ever miss this?” she asked as she pulled a brush through her hair.
“Never,” I said. “My way is low maintenance.”
“I just wondered, ’cause when it’s not braided, your hair looks like a movie star’s.”
I tugged at one braid. “Which movie star?”
“No, I mean, you’ve got that whole blue-eyed, all-American, long, blond Gossip Girl hair thing happening.”
“Who’s Gossip Girl?” I asked. “Was she on Grey’s Anatomy?”
Julia tossed a hand towel at me. “Never mind. I forgot you claim to only watch CNN.”
I bent forward to blow on my toes. My fingernails were the same dark shade. I usually wouldn’t take such pains as to match the color on my fingers and toes, but I promised my friends I would join them tonight at the first big party of the school year. I also promised that I would check my cynical attitude at the door.
There was a slight chance one of those things might happen.
I really shouldn’t have been going out at all. Professor Masen was expecting an update on my new project Monday morning, and so far, I didn’t have even a glimmer of a plan.
“As I recall,” I said, going back to a less traumatic subject, “you didn’t even like Tommy. Wasn’t he the one who made you go Dutch when he took you to dinner?”
“That’s him.” Julia tsked. “A gentleman should treat a lady like a lady. That’s what my grandmother always says.”
Julia was as old-fashioned as they came. In that respect, she and I were about as opposite as you could get. Even so, I loved her—from her perfectly blown-out hair to the delicate Celtic knot pinkie ring she wore every day.
“Hello? Anybody home? Springer?”
“Up here!” I called out to my best friend, Melanie, as she slammed the front door below.
She’d texted an hour ago. Already pissed off at her dorm-mate for parking in her spot, Mel was walking over to tonight’s street party with us. By the time she made it up the stairs, she was wheezing, face flushed, brown eyes wild. I thought she might be sick, but she was all smiles. Her curlicues of coffee-colored hair were bouncier than usual.
“So, tell me everything.” Mel beamed, catching her breath. She was dressed in a black lacy top, black lowrise pants, and black sling-back open-toed heels, Stanford crimson red splashed across her nails. While hanging on to the door jam with one hand, she bent back like a contortionist and reached behind her to adjust the strap of one shoe.
“About what?” I asked, hobbling to my feet, careful not to smudge my shiny polish.
Mel’s smile practically split her face. “About the new guys across the street.”
Oh. I said nothing, but continued to gaze at her blankly. She didn’t need to know I’d already been caught semi-spying on one of them.
“New guys?” Julia froze, her eyeliner hovering in front of her face. She was going for the whole nonchalance thing, even though she knew—as we all did—that Mel was the eyes, ears, nose, and throat of “Cardinal Society” at Stanford. She’d worked in the admin’s office freshman year and still had major internal connections. Nothing went on at our university that she didn’t catch wind of first.
A grin of satisfaction spread across Mel’s face. “They’re moving in as we speak. Today. Right now.” She paused, taking in my blank expression. “Seriously, where have you been?”
“I’ve got a research project I’m trying to wrap my brain around, so I’ve been…” I trailed off, noticing that Mel was gazing at me while pointing in the direction of Julia’s bedroom window across the hall, the one facing the street.
Following the point, Julia made her way to the window, Mel right behind her. I stayed put in the bathroom.
“Know anything about them?” I heard Julia say.
As if she had to ask.
“Well, the blond one’s name is Dart,” Mel said. “Transferred from Duke. He’s a grad student in Kinesiology. He’s had three serious girlfriends and his father won a Nobel Prize.”
Melanie was a fountain of information.
I bit my lip and pushed off the wall, caving to curiosity, keeping up with current events, so to speak. I should know about my new neighbors, right? More than the fact that one of them drives a Viper, has the face of a movie star but is kind of a jackass.
Mel grinned when I entered the room.
“Not a word,” I warned her as I came up beside Julia, who was staring out the window. While Mel talked on about Dart, I lifted up on the balls of my feet and peered through the window. From what I could make out, there were two guys milling about their front yard. I spotted the dark-haired one first. The light-haired one I didn’t find nearly as eye-catching.
When Julia unleashed a wistful sigh, I glanced at her. One side of her mouth curled up.
“Dart.” She said the name, then repeated it twice. Methodically, her long fingers tucked a wisp of hair behind an ear. “That’s an interesting name, don’t you think? I wonder what it means. Sounds familiar, right? Like it’s short for something.” She moved her lips, muttering the name over and over like a tick.
“So, Mel,” I said. “What—”
“D’Artagnan!” Julia exclaimed, making me jump. “I’ll bet anything his real name is D’Artagnan. It’s from The Three Musketeers. He’s a royal knight.”
Her use of the present tense did not escape me. She pressed her fingertips against the glass and leaned in. “Dart. He’s very handsome, isn’t he? Almost dashing.”
“Oh,” Mel interjected in a cautionary tone. “He’s Lilah’s brother.”
Julia whipped around, mouth gaping open, frozen in silent horror.
“Lilah?” I said the word like it was the name of a poison I’d just swallowed, and then half expected to hear the “dun-dun-dun” music that accompanies a tragic twist in a movie plot. I gazed through the glass at our neighbors, a sickly familiar feeling sweeping over me. “Fantastic.” I moaned. “The alpha she-snob of this university has a brother. If this Dart dude is anything like Lilah, we’ll be lucky if he ignores us completely.”
Mel offered me one somber nod in agreement.
Dart knelt in the driveway, digging through an open box. I’ll give Julia credit, he was pretty cute, but not my type.
Our dark-haired neighbor faced us, sunglasses hanging from the collar of his shirt. He made a deliberate one-eighty turn, stared toward his front door and planted his hands on his hips. His butt—I mean his back—was to us.
Oh, my.
Directly on the heels of fascination, my pride flicked at the back of my neck, reminding me that I was not someone who reduced herself to slobbering over a man, at least not publicly. Therefore, I let exactly five seconds lapse before my questions began.
“So, um, the other one?” I rubbed my nose, forcing my voice to sound blasé. “What’s his story?”
When Mel turned to me, she displayed a toothy grin, like she’d been waiting for me to ask. “Yeah, Springer. I thought you might like him. Yummy, no?”
I rolled my eyes, not willing to join in on the drool fest just yet. “I take it the poor guy is your target of prey for the upcoming year?”
“Oh, no. I’ve decided to save that little morsel”—she tilted her head toward the
window—“for you, babe. And you’ll never believe it when I tell you about him. Go ahead, guess who he is. Ask me his name.”
Mel was not about to make this easy for me. She knew how I was about guys. If I showed the slightest interest, she wanted it to be written on the side of the Goodyear Blimp.
I turned my attention to my nails, picking at a spot of polish on a cuticle. If she wanted to share her gossip about the secret identity of our dark-haired neighbor, I wasn’t about to beg for it. Nice butt or no nice butt, the thrill was gone.
“He’s Henry Knightly!” she exclaimed, perching herself on the windowsill.
I turned to Julia for a clue, but she was staring down at their garage where Dart had disappeared a minute earlier.
“You know.” Mel twisted an earring. “Knightly?”
Still no clue.
“Knightly Hall? The new building behind Stone Plaza?” Her mouth twitched, giving me a smirky grin. “That building you and your little environmentalist group protested against being built last year. I helped you paint all those stupid picket signs. Totally wrecked my French manicure.”
Hmm. That did ring a bell, but the demonstrations I’d attended were starting to blend together.
“Did he build Knightly Hall?” I asked.
Mel laughed. “No, Einstein. His father donated three million to the university, and they named a building after him.”
My stomach tanked. Oh. That Knightly.
I’d researched the family last year. They owned a bunch of land all over the western United States. If they weren’t chopping down forests, they were damming up rivers, leasing their land to strip miners who bulldozed everything, or selling out to drillers for the latest earth-killing craze: fracking.
“Oh, frack,” I muttered.
My gaze left Mel and moved out the window again. Henry Knightly was buffing the side of that shiny black car with an elbow.
It’s worth more than your life… His words echoed in my ears, causing earlier thoughts of his hotness to melt like the polar ice caps.
“Precisely what this university does not need,” I said. “Another rich kid zooming around in his gas-guzzling sports car, and probably going to school tuition free because his father was a legacy.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s just…Stanford isn’t cheap, Mel. My three jobs are barely keeping me afloat, and my parents have never paid a dime of my school costs. My mom can’t afford it, and I haven’t spoken to my father in years.” I pointed toward the window. “Here comes this guy, probably studying to be a high-flying business mogul while riding Daddy’s coattails. Kind of unfair, don’t you think?”
“He’s in law school, Springer. And no financial aid.”
“Oh,” I said, frowning.
“What’s that look for?” Mel took my chin in her hand. “Are you disappointed that you don’t already have a justifiable reason to hate Henry Knightly?”
My mouth opened, ready to deny this. But as always, Mel was pretty dead-on. I didn’t know this guy, and the loathing in the pit of my stomach wasn’t exactly hard evidence against him. Even though his connection to Lilah Charleston was pretty damning on its own.
“He went to Duke too,” Mel said, fluffing the back of her hair. “That’s where he met Dart when they were freshmen. They were roommates, played ball together. They’ve been best friends for years.”
Julia suddenly unthawed. I’d almost forgotten she was there, as still as Venus de Milo. “Mel,” she said, “how the hell do you know all this?”
I snickered, always loving it when Lady Julia swore.
“I will never reveal my sources,” Mel said.
Dart reappeared in the front yard. He walked over to Henry Knightly, who was on his cell. It was evident that Dart wanted to talk to him, but his roommate held up an index finger in a curt “silence, I am already speaking” fashion.
“Is it going to absolutely kill you?” Mel asked, picking at a nail. “Living across the street from him?”
“Nope,” I answered, my eyes fixed on my dark-haired neighbor as he turned around, pressing buttons on his phone. He slid his sunglasses to the top of his head, giving me another very clear view. I couldn’t help moving a couple inches toward the glass. “His presence isn’t going to affect me in the least—”
My head jerked back when Knightly suddenly looked up at the window, zeroing in on me. When he took a step forward, I drew away from the glass and spun around.
“I…” I cleared my throat. “I’ll probably never speak to him.”
“Not even tonight at the party?” Mel asked, catching the tail end of my reaction, then peering outside. I hoped the guy wasn’t still staring up.
“Especially not tonight,” I said firmly, toying with a handful of braids.
Mel glanced from the window to me, then snickered under her breath. “You keep telling yourself that.”
I didn’t like the way she was grinning.
Chapter 2
“I don’t see him.” Julia clutched my arm so tightly that I was losing feeling from the elbow down.
Mel flanked my other side. “How’s my breath?” she asked, then exhaled in my face like only a best friend could.
“Like ponies and rainbows,” I reported.
As we approached the street known as Party Cul-de-sac, I could hear it was packed, simply by the shrieks from flirty girls. Just for tonight, I didn’t mind joining the crowd of two hundred other students ready to celebrate a fresh beginning.
Chinese lanterns lit the perimeter of the street while blinking white fairy lights wrapped around all trees, telephone poles, and street signs. Friends, classmates, and colleagues we hadn’t seen since June greeted us as our threesome, arms linked, made our way through the crowd.
Despite the chilliness in the air after the sun went down, Julia wore a lemon-yellow spaghetti-strap sundress. Then there was the modish dark-haired, dark-eyed, black-clad Melanie on my other side. They probably would have made a more impressive entrance had I not been between them.
The white cotton peasant top I sported came from my favorite consignment shop in San Francisco. My jeans were faded to a sky-blue; their threadbare hems and holes further endeared to me. For tonight, I also chose to wear my one pair of silver dangly earrings.
It was a rarity, but my festive mood swelled, something about the start of a school year. I knocked my hip against Mel’s, and we shared an animated smile.
“Spring,” said Julia, “I still don’t see him anywhere.”
“Who?”
“Dart!”
Ahhh, right.
“He might not be coming,” I said as we passed by the DJ corner. The guy behind the barricade held a single earphone up to one ear. His other hand moved between a laptop and an equalizer, body rocking to the beat. “He looked pretty conventional, Jules. This party might be too bohemian.”
Julia’s grip on my arm went slack, my opinion apparently making her depressed. I wished I could have offered a kinder excuse, but instead sealed my lips. Better she was disappointed about Dart Charleston now than crushed later. Any acquaintance of Lilah was bad news for us.
My lab partner from last semester called out from a few feet away. I waved back. She held a red Solo cup over her head. I waved it off. No drinking for me, thanks.
“Oh, I love this song!” Mel exclaimed. Not two seconds later, she was swept away by a tall stranger in a Kappa Alpha T-shirt. I laughed, watching her disappear into the sea of people.
Then I spotted Lilah.
Dressed in the latest fashionable finery, she blew Hollywood kisses to people she passed. Her shoulder-length bleached hair was straight as a razor, perfectly framing the conspicuous year-round tan on her angular face, light eyes behind dark and heavy eye makeup, and the reddest lips this side of Taylor Swift. Surprisingly, no leather.
Dart was beside her, smiling ear-to-ear, nodding to strangers like he was actually enjoying himself. Huh. So maybe I was wrong about that. He w
as much cuter up close. His light hair was tousled yet tidy, and his pale eyes were radiant, mirroring another similar set of eyes right next to me.
I peeked at Julia, who had also spotted him. Beautiful, blushing color swept across her face as she zeroed in on him.
Oh, boy. Heaven help poor D’Artagnan Charleston.
She whispered to me in second-year French, her words tumbling from her mouth too quickly for her twisted American tongue. The only coherent message I could make out was that I must promise not to leave her side.
“Calme toi!” I replied, patting her arm. “I’m not going anywhere, bunny. Stay cool.”
The dark shadow a few steps behind the siblings, I guessed, was Henry Knightly. None of them was turned our way, but the next thing I knew, Lilah made a hard left and stood directly before us. She looked me dead in the eyes without the slightest hint of recognition, then set her gaze on Julia, giving her the crustiest up-down dismissive glare before turning to talk to whomever stood beside us.
Being this close to Lilah outside of class—in the wild!—made a ball of heat churn in my stomach.
After an appropriate amount of time passed, she looked our way again. “Oh. Hey, Spring,” she said in that low, sultry voice she’d been honing. “Didn’t see you there.”
I boldly held my stance, even though I wanted nothing more than to walk away from the scene.
“I never would have recognized you,” she continued.
“Nice to see you, Lilah,” I lied. “How has your first week been?”
“Oh, you know, I’m chairing this club and I’m president of that union…”
As she droned on, I stole a glance at Julia. She’d lowered her chin, probably not knowing where to look and not wanting to say anything, fearing Lilah would twist it in some malicious way. For that, I wanted to clock Lilah squarely across her collagen-injected mouth. It was fine for her to have it in for me, but she had no excuse to hate Julia. My sweet, guileless roommate didn’t understand girls like Lilah, girls who were mean for no reason.
I attempted a smile, hoping it would stifle my desire to thump Lilah’s skull, then I glanced at Dart. He seemed, well, pleasant—not at all like Lilah. After a subtle clearing of his throat, he elbowed his sister.
Definitely, Maybe in Love Page 2