Coming In Hot (Jupiter Point Book 6)

by Jennifer Bernard

  He lowered himself into the metal folding chair, his powerful frame dwarfing the poor thing. "Well, let's start with the student body. What's your take on the caliber of students here? What sort of student does best at Evergreen?"

  She picked up a pen and tapped it against her palm. She needed something to occupy her hands. It irritated her that she found this man so attractive. Was it thanks to some kind of residual childhood attachment to strong aggressive men willing to fight?

  "I've only been teaching here one semester, but my take so far is that it's a pretty harmonious campus. The kids seem to take their studies pretty seriously, although there's certainly some partying. Underage drinking is highly discouraged. The administration is very hard on date rape, that sort of thing. Is the student in question male or female?"

  "Male."

  He could have been summing up himself in one impactful word. Male. Amen. One thousand percent male.

  "Well, to tell you the truth, I deal more with female students. Art history seems to draw the ladies more than the gentlemen. That's probably because the boys don't know how badass Renaissance artists actually were. Did you know that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel while standing on a wooden scaffold, working over his head, living on onions and stale bread? It took him years. Maybe I should tell the boys he did it on a skateboard."

  Tobias smiled, his firm lips curving in a devastatingly sensual manner. "So is skateboarding a big thing here, based on the male students you know personally?"

  Puzzled, she frowned at him. Clearly, this guy had some kind of hidden agenda behind his questions. She had no idea what. "I don't really know any of the students personally, unless you count problems in their lives that interfere with turning their papers in on time. I know a lot about those."

  "Really? None of them? No apples for the teacher?"

  Suddenly a horrified thought struck her. Was it possible this was the man who'd been sending her the anonymous threatening messages? She'd assumed they came from a student, but maybe she had it wrong. Had the Light Keepers sent this man? He looked like the paramilitary type. "What are you after, Tobias?"

  "Excuse me?" But from the way his expression shut down, she knew she was onto something.

  "You're here for a reason, and it's not to talk about skateboarding or ask me to dinner."

  "You're wrong about that part," he murmured.

  The idea that the person sending her nasty letters might ask her to dinner made her ill. She opened her desk drawer and pulled out the manila folder with the letters. Grabbing one at random, she brandished it in the air. "Why don't you just cut the crap and tell me what this is all about?"

  He narrowed his eyes at the letters. "You saved them all."

  "So it was you!" Her stomach dropped in a sickening plunge. All her little fantasies about the Man in Black seemed stupid now. "I thought these were bad coming from a student, but from an adult? That's a whole different story. If you don't want me to call security, you'd better tell me right now why you're doing this."

  He opened his mouth, then closed it again. She couldn't read his expression, but the predominant emotion seemed to be confusion. "Is it really such a mystery?" he finally asked.

  "Of course it is. I left over ten years ago and that ought to be the end of it."

  She held his gaze, refusing to back down no matter how intimidating he was. This was her turf. Her office. His dark eyebrows drew together. The air between them pulsed with tension.

  "Can I see those?" he finally asked.

  "Need to refresh your memory about what you wrote? These are copies, by the way."

  She thrust the folder at him. He leafed through the letters quickly, then looked at her sharply. "What the hell is this?"

  For the first time, her certainty faltered. Maybe Tobias wasn't the letter writer, in which case she'd just handed over a little window into her past life. "That was my question, too."

  "Who sent you these letters?" he demanded.

  "If it wasn't you, then I have no idea."

  "Me?" His face turned into one big, astonished scowl. "Why would I send you these? I've never even seen you before today. I have nothing to do with this."

  "Then what are you here for? You knew about the letters. You weren't surprised when I pulled them out."

  "I thought they were…" He rubbed the heel of his hand into his forehead, then rose restlessly to his feet. Not wanting to be at a disadvantage, she did the same, though she kept the desk between them. He paced back and forth around her small borrowed office. "You should give those letters to the police. You could be at risk."

  "Don't change the subject," she snapped. "You thought they were what?"

  "A different kind of letter," he muttered, as though deathly embarrassed. "Love letters."

  She gaped at him in astonishment. Love letters. "Does anyone write love letters anymore? I'd like to meet that person."

  As he gave her a fierce frown, she spotted a hint of a blush under the dark scruff of his five o'clock—now seven o'clock—shadow.

  "So tell me what's really going on here, Tobias Kni—" She broke off as she recognized the name.

  Tobias Knight. Didn't she have a student with the last name Knight? For the hundredth time, she cursed her bad memory when it came to names. Roster. She needed the student rosters from all her classes. Think, Caro. Who has the last name Knight?

  There was Will Knight. Merry's new fiancé. But Tobias looked nothing like Will, who had much lighter coloring and gray eyes—

  Her eyes flew to meet Tobias’s. "Aiden. He's in my Renaissance class. The one you visited today."

  Tobias was watching her so closely it was uncomfortable.

  "Are you related to Aiden?" She called up an image of Aiden Knight from the middle row, the one with the dreamy gaze. Was he the one sending love letters to someone?

  "He's my little brother. And I'd do anything to protect him."

  Bewildered, she blinked at him. "Okay. That's nice."

  Then it clicked. "Wait. Are you here to…what…protect your brother from me?" Furious outrage made her voice shake. "Get out of my office."

  "Wait." He threw up his hand. "Can't we just talk? I have the feeling we're on the same side here."

  "We are not on the same side. You're on the side that came here to lecture me about something that's none of your business."

  His eyes narrowed dangerously. "Are you saying my brother is none of my business?"

  "I'm saying get out of my office." She marched from behind her desk, ready to push him out if need be. He took a step backwards but otherwise didn't seem very worried. Over six feet of pure muscle didn't intimidate easily. She snatched the manila folder from his hand.

  "I checked the college rules," he told her. "Fraternization between students and teachers is grounds for dismissal. And if you mess with Aiden, dismissal would be the least of your problems."

  Heat rushed into her face. How dare this man insinuate such a thing? She would never cross the line with a student. Their psyches were in her care. She considered that a sacred trust never to be violated. "Do I need to call security?"

  One corner of his mouth quirked up. "You can if you want. My point remains."

  His point! His point was apparently that she was an unethical corrupter of students.

  "You can take your point and shove it where the sun don't shine." He was still blocking her way, that slight smirk on his face. At the Light Keepers, she'd been drilled in martial arts, like everyone else. She hardly used that training anymore, but this seemed like an appropriate moment.

  In a quick surprise move, she swept his legs out from under him. He would have toppled onto the floor if he didn't have such quick reflexes. But he managed to twist and roll, then come into a crouching position.

  He was a trained fighter too, clearly. Probably military.

  Oops.

  But he made no move to fight her or defend himself. "Can I take that as a commitment that you'll stay away from Aiden?"

  "Yo
u can take that as an invitation to go to hell." She shoved the folder into her bag, along with her sweater, Tupperware lunch container and cucumber-infusion water bottle, and stepped past him, out the door. "The door locks when you pull it closed. Nice meeting you."

  4

  Of all the ways Tobias had pictured his meeting with Aiden's crush, getting knocked on his ass didn't make the top five. For the second time that day, he got an upfront view of Carolyn's suede boots—this time as they walked out the door.

  Well, apparently she wasn't too worried about leaving him alone in her office.

  Maybe because she has nothing to hide, his conscience whispered. Anything related to students was probably under lock and key, or maybe in that big bag of hers.

  Slowly he rose to his feet. Damn, he was getting out of shape. He needed to get back into the gym. No way should a delicate-looking art history teacher get the jump on him. Carolyn Moore was more than she appeared.

  What the hell had just happened?

  He hauled a long breath into his lungs and followed her out of the office, pulling the door closed behind him. As he strode down the hallway, he pulled out his phone and did a quick search for hotels near the campus.

  He was still confused about a few things, but one fact he knew for sure. This wasn't finished. He was going to stick around Evergreen for a little while longer.

  ONCE HE'D CHECKED into the nearest Embassy Suites, he called Will. Will didn't answer—probably snuggled up with Merry at this hour—so he tried Ben.

  "Hey bro," his second youngest brother answered. In the background he heard the unmistakable sounds of a bar.

  "Where are you?"

  "Barstow's. It's Tuesday, man. Burger and beer for five bucks. Where else would I be?"

  "You sure know how to live."

  "Live until you die," Ben countered. "Are you back in town yet?"

  "No. I'm going to stay a little longer. Can you handle things there for a couple more days?"

  "For Aiden, of course I can. How is the kid?"

  "Right now he's not speaking to me. But I'm sure we'll get past that. Overall, he seems good. Defensive, but good."

  "Did you track down the evil golden goddess?"

  Tobias uncomfortably shifted his position on the queen-size bed. Now that he'd gotten to know Carolyn a little better—if getting knocked on his ass counted as getting to know her—he didn't like calling her names. "I think so. Her name's Carolyn Moore and she teaches art history. But I don't think she's involved with him. I think it's just a one-sided crush."

  "Well, that's good. I mean, not for poor Aiden. He must think he has a chance with her. I hate to break the poor kid's heart, but maybe this art history teacher could let him down easy. Can you talk to her?"

  "She's not speaking to me either."

  Ben let out an amused snort. "We sent the right guy out there, didn't we?"

  "Okay, I fucked it up right off the bat. I can fix it. That's why I need to stay a few more days. Can you cover my flights?"

  "Yeah, yeah. But maybe it would make more sense for us to switch places. I'm a lot more charming than you are and I hardly ever piss people off within the first ten minutes of meeting them."

  Tobias ground his teeth together. "I got this, Ben."

  "All right. You're the boss. I'll see you in a few days."

  "Wait. Before you hang up, how's Will doing? Any progress yet?" Will had recently left his deputy sheriff position to hunt for their father's murderer.

  "Not that I've heard. For now he's re-interviewing all the original police investigators to see if they might have missed something. When he gets back, he wants to interview you."

  "Me?"

  "You found his body."

  An uncomfortable silence followed. The topic of their father's murder had been forbidden territory for so long. They'd all coped with the trauma in their own ways, but as a group they'd completely shut it down. It wasn't just the murder, either. Afterwards, their mother had left Jupiter Point, where everything reminded her of her husband. She’d taken Cassie, their sixteen-year old sister, with her. To this day, their only communication with Cassie was through the postcards she sent. Apparently Mom was still so fragile she couldn't handle any talk about Jupiter Point or the family she'd left behind.

  "The Jupiter Point PD has all the transcripts of my interviews. It was fresh back then. I don't remember anything new."

  "Hey, tell it to Will. He's the private eye. All I know is that he thinks it's worth a try."

  "Okay, I'll talk to him when I get back to town." One more reason not to rush back, honestly. Finding his father's dead body had been the single most horrifying moment of his life, and that included everything that he'd witnessed as a pilot for the 160th Airborne, also known as a Night Stalker. It had changed him forever.

  The worst thing was that he'd had a huge fight with his father just the night before, when Dad had bailed him out of jail.

  He heaved himself off the bed and went into the bathroom, where he stripped off his clothes and stood under water so hot, it stung like needles. Once he started thinking about his father, it was hard to make himself stop. That last fight lived on, a taunting loop in his mind.

  "You're wasting your life, Tobias. Wasting your God-given abilities. I never thought I'd see the day when I had to spring my own son out of jail." His furious father had been ranting the entire drive home. Never paused to hear Tobias’s side of the story.

  "Dad—" he tried again. But when Robert Knight got on a roll, nothing could throw him off. Not even Tobias, his most hard-headed son, the one most like him.

  "I'm ashamed of you, Tobias. You're twenty years old. You ought to be in college, not wasting your time doing manual labor. You have a brain inside that thick head, you know. But you won't if you keep brawling with those lowlifes."

  Some drunken assholes had been beating up a kid he'd known from school. A gay kid. The hell if he was going to stand by and watch that happen. "But they were—"

  "I don't want to hear it. Whatever they were doing, it wasn't worth sacrificing your future for. What college is going to take you with a police record?"

  "The charges will get dropped, those guys aren't going to—"

  "The charges will be dropped because I'm good friends with the police chief and the DA. That doesn't mean you can go around playing vigilante. Jesus, Tobias. Your mother just about had a heart attack when we got the call. It took me an hour to calm her down. I figured you could use the extra time in jail to talk some sense into yourself."

  "Should have just left me," Tobias muttered. "I don't give a shit."

  "Next time I will. And the next time after that, don't bother coming back."

  "Asshole," he muttered even lower.

  He didn't know whether Dad heard that last word or not. They reached the house, where his mother was fluttering back and forth in the driveway. Instantly both father and son switched into containment mode. No matter how much they battled, they knew better than to get Janine Knight upset. With her volatile emotional states, it could take days for her to recover.

  They got out of the car, all smiles and good cheer. Tobias played off the bruises on his face, claimed he'd had a run-in with a tree. His dad threw an arm around his shoulders, as if he hadn't been yelling at him two minutes earlier. Tobias went right to the loft he'd hammered together for himself in the barn, and that was that.

  The next time he saw his father, he was dead on the kitchen floor.

  Which meant the last word he'd spoken directly to his dad was "asshole."

  And that—he still wasn't over that. Maybe he never would be. If he'd known that would be the last night he ever saw Dad alive, he would have done everything differently. He would have thanked him instead of arguing. He would have told him he loved him. He would have promised to get his life together and stop wasting his potential. He would have told him that he'd already talked to an Army recruiter and was trying to decide if he should actually sign up.

  Instead his dad had
died never knowing that his most difficult son had followed in his footsteps.

  The guilt shadowed him wherever he went. He couldn't change that night. But he could take care of the only family he had left—his brothers.

  After a long time under the shower, Tobias wrapped a towel around his hips and went to call Aiden.

  "Let me buy you a burger, dude. Come on. We're family here. I came all the way from Jupiter Point," he cajoled.

  "Yeah, you came all the way to mess things up for me."

  "Come on, kid," Tobias said gently. "That's not why I'm here. I'm just performing my brotherly duty. Watching out for you."

  "Then you can keep your burger."

  "What about the fries? I know how you are about fries. I heard there's a great greasy spoon right around the corner. I'll even throw in a game of pool. I bet you haven't played pool since you got to college. Can you still do that triple bank shot I taught you?"

  The long pause told him this tactic was working. Aiden had been raised by Will, for the most part, but the other brothers had contributed what they could during their leaves. Tobias took special pride in the pool techniques he'd shared.

  "Okay, I'll have burgers with you and I'll whip your ass at pool if …"

  "If?"

  "If you promise not to come to any of my classes anymore."

  "Absolutely. I've had all the education I need for one trip."

  "Not even Ms. Moore's?"

  Tobias’s mouth twisted. He heard the anxious tone in his brother's voice. Maybe the boy hadn't written those letters, but he still had a crush.

  "I promise I won't do anything that will embarrass you, interfere with your life, or make you look bad to any of your teachers, including Ms. Moore. How's that?"

  Aiden chewed on that for a moment, then said, "Fine. Are you going to pick me up?"

  "Be there in ten."

  Tobias hung up and ran a hand across his scalp. He'd framed his promise very carefully. He'd stay away from Carolyn's class, but not Carolyn herself. He no longer suspected her of messing around with his brother. Now that he'd met her, he couldn't imagine her breaking the rules like that.