Deep South (Naive Mistakes #4)

by Dunning, Rachel

  Tears wet my cheeks. I felt like such a failure. But it was true that I couldn’t continue in this way. It just wasn’t working. I didn’t know what was going to work, but this sure wasn’t it.

  “What about all the money?” I asked.

  “It ain’t worth it, honey. And we always had money. Money ain’t no problem if it’s invested in da right place, know what I’m sayin? Let’s talk later. Call me as soon as you have some privacy.”

  “OK.” The word barely came out.

  “I love you, baby.”

  “Love you, dad. Sorry for waking you.”

  He made a raspberry sound. “You can call me any damn time you want!” Then he clicked off.

  When I looked up at Whithers, he looked a little green.

  -2-

  “As for you, Mizz Mitchell”—Whithers looked at Kayla—“I’ve tried calling your mother several times but, alas, as usual, I cannot get a hold of her!” Right, because Kayla’s mom’s busiest hours were the early morning. Escorts, like vampires, don’t make a lot when the sun shines, and Priscilla Mitchell was the head Dracula.

  Kayla said nothing, but was clearly hiding a smirk.

  “Oh, you think this is funny, young girl?”

  “I’m not ‘young girl’ to you, bud.”

  He started to rise. “Oh, you certainly are! You—”

  Kayla started to rise.

  “—Americans think you can barge into this establishment with your pink hair”—he waved a miffed hand at her hair—“your abominable piercings”—waved it at her ears—“your shocking attire”—her torn leggings—“and expect to get an education in one of the finest”—Kayla’s ass was off the seat now—“educational facilities in the world—”

  She flipped. “FUCK your damn facility!” She gave him the middle finger. “It’s infested with children!”

  “GET OUT! GET OUT, MS. MITCHELL! YOU ARE EXPELLED!”

  Kayla eased back behind the chair. She turned to me. She was...smiling? It was a relieved smile.

  I was a dithering mess. Expelled? Oh, God.

  I started to get up.

  “Not you, Ms. Caivano! Sit!” I felt like a dog.

  I sat.

  Kayla ran a gloved hand over my shoulder, squeezed it once. Then walked out, her boots clacking on the wooden floor like some deathly tapping in a burial chamber.

  The door slammed shut with a clang.

  Whithers flicked his chin back, breathed in, got himself under control. We had a staredown for a little bit. Then he spoke, more easily, more gently. “Ms. Caivano...” He steepled his fingers, leaned back in his high-backed seat. “The Williams family and this establishment go back a long way, as I’m sure you know.” I didn’t. “It was indeed with great sadness that Master Williams opted to study at Oxford. Our Computer Science program is far superior to the one there, and Oxford has no such relationship with the Williams family as we do—so his decision was indeed...odd. But he has turned out a fine young gentleman so I’m sure it all worked out, despite his decision.” Despite. “Now, as far as Fashion Design goes—I consider our program to be stellar, the finest in the country I would venture to say.”

  I had my doubts about that. It had been over a month and I hadn’t so much as touched a pencil to paper. All we’d done is study the geometry of fashion, starting with Egypt. Huh!? Last I heard, the Sphinx never made it to the latest Fashion Week.

  The next book I had to read as part of my syllabus was called “The Psychology of Mauve.” Somehow I had a feeling that, by the end of four years, I would have read the psychology of every color under the sun. Judging from my mom’s experience in fashion, the only “psychology” of a color is determined by Vogue’s latest cover. And if your dress isn’t on it, the psychology of the designer is pure depression.

  Shouldn’t people be “designing” stuff when they’re studying, well, “design”!?

  “—suspended.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “It’s not ‘what,’ dear. It’s ‘I beg your pardon.’”

  I felt like slapping him. But I bit my tongue and played along. “OK, I...ahem...beg...your...pardon?”

  He waited, as if I’d said something wrong. I realized I’d missed the “sir” at the end of it. Screw that. There was only so much I was willing to play along with.

  He exhaled disappointedly. “That will have to do. I said that because of the high regard in which this school holds the Williams family—not to mention all the donations they have made to it in the last many generations—I will not expel you for this most heinous crime against one of our better students”—gag!—“but I will let you off with a mere suspension. Two weeks. You are to get your schoolwork from friends. You are to keep up all assignments. You are to ensure that you are not behind with classwork. Dismissed.”

  I didn’t get up.

  He waved a hand at me as if I were a fly. He’d turned to some papers he was now ruffling, his spectacles perched lower on his pointed nose. “Dismissed, I said.”

  “No.”

  He looked up at me, mouth slightly ajar. After a moment: “I beg your pardon!?”

  Oh, is that how you’re supposed to say it? “I said, No. I’m not leaving.”

  He was speechless.

  “Bring Kayla back in and give her the same punishment, or give me the same punishment as her. Go ahead. Expel me. But what I did was way worse than what she did and yet you expel her and suspend me?” I was standing now, my hands on his desk!

  “Ms. Mitchell has other violations against her. She’s constantly in violation of dress-code—”

  “She’s studying Fashion Design! Have you seen what people wear on the runways these days!? Kayla’s practically got a Master’s Degree the way she’s dressing already! Bring her back and give her the same punishment as me, or give me the same punishment as her!”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. He thought of what to say, and then clearly thought against it—I could tell because of the way his lips opened and then closed.

  I could almost feel his thoughts: The Williams Family. Financial donations.

  Uh-huh. Money makes the world go round. At least I was getting some sort of education in this institution.

  I’d never seen this part of Conall’s life. The money he’d had when we’d started dating a year ago had all been his, of his own making as a top-notch financial software consultant who made deals with the likes of Apple and Microsoft and who-knew-what-other major corporations. It was only later that I discovered he was worth billions, and that those billions came from his family. He’d never touched his inherited money before he and I had gotten together, but had decided to do so after we’d gotten engaged. His father, still alive, had already bequeathed some of his wealth to Conall because of some kind of tax benefit if it’s done that way, while the person is still alive.

  I’d never pondered just how many billions or, more to the point, how far back those billions stretched. Generations of wealth, stretching back to all the dirty secrets and promises and agreements and “gentleman’s codes” attendant upon that wealth.

  I had no idea, sitting there, just how powerful Edmond Williams, Conall’s father, really was. Not yet at least. But I would learn it very soon.

  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

  Dean Whithers picked up his phone. “Ms. Ruthers”—his secretary—“please would you ask Ms. Mitchell to come to my office again. ... Yes. ... I don’t care. ... Yes. ... No, she must come to my office. She did what!?” He rolled his eyes. Then looked at me. “OK, fine!” He slammed the phone down, got up, ran to the window, his black Dean’s coat flying behind him like a super hero’s cape. At the window, he cried, “Oh, no. Shocking!” He opened the window and stuck his head out. “Ms. Mitchell, desist with that at once and come up to my office! Now!”

  I got up off the chair and ran to the window.

  When I saw what Kayla had done, my stomach hurt I was laughing so much.

  Dean Whithers slammed the window shut an
d ran off out the door, mumbling as he went, “You are going to owe me for this, Ms. Caivahhrno! You are going to owe me!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  -1-

  “She did what?” Conall’s bright blue eyes glimmered above the glass of red wine he was holding, candlelight flickering in them as he looked at me from across the small table in our dining room. His black hair curled gently over his brow and ears and his perfect lips tugged up into a smile as I told him about Kayla’s escapade, during the dinner that he’d prepared for me.

  “She was spray painting people’s hair pink and orange and blue and yellow... Male, female, anyone who wanted it.”

  “That’s not so bad.” Conall’s deep voice was still able to crawl up my skin like bare hands. In over six months of living together, it still hadn’t lost that effect on me. Whereas school was making me feel like a lowly teenager, being with Conall every night and taking care of “our home” made me feel all woman.

  All woman.

  “It is for Dean Whithers. But there’s more.”

  Conall waited.

  “She, uhm,” I mumbled, “had seven people mooning the Dean’s office the moment he stuck his head out the window.”

  Conall nearly spat his wine out! “So you do have some friends there.”

  “Some, yes. Anyone who’s not friends with Bettina—which is pretty much all the geeks and outcasts—is friends with me and Kayla.”

  “Geeks and outcasts are the best friends. I find it...quite heartwarming...what she did for you, outrageous though it is.”

  I looked down at my food again. “Yeah, she’s got my back.”

  Thinking back to school during our dinner was putting me seriously out of the mood. Cutlery scraped against plates. A wind howled outside. Conall cleared his throat.

  He noticed the silence: “It’s that bad, huh?” he said.

  Hot tears prickled in my eyes again. “It’s worse, baby. I just...don’t feel like I...belong...there.” I put my fork down. “I don’t feel nineteen. Damn. Even when I say it it sounds wrong.”

  “Age has nothing to do with it. After Vivienne died”—he cleared his throat—“I felt middle aged. I felt like that for many years.”

  I smiled, still looking down. And then I met you, I remembered him telling me once.

  “Quit,” he said.

  I looked up, stunned. “What?”

  He sipped some wine. His dark eyebrows and aquatic eyes made my pulse race hard. “I said Quit.”

  “School?”

  “Yes.” He put his glass down. His chest—his manly chest—bulged from under his dress shirt. Again, he made me feel all woman. And, right now, I was feeling very womanly indeed. Hot and warm and...moist.

  But thinking of school. Well. That just killed the heat for me instantly.

  “I’m not a quitter. Besides, I need this.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “I do. I’m not gonna be a housewife!”

  He laughed, a bubbling laugh that got my blood boiling hot for him. “And I don’t want you to be. But you don’t need this to follow your dreams. You can do an apprenticeship somewhere. Learn the trade. Work with some small names and then move up to bigger ones.”

  “I need a degree to do that shit, Conall.”

  “Oh, bullshit. You need connections, and you need to know some basic things that certainly don’t take four years to learn! The rest of it is creativity. It’s art, not computer programming.”

  “You went to college!”

  “And I studied Computer Science. It’s different. But even that was far too long. I could have learned what I needed to learn in two years, maybe even one. Besides, I make my money negotiating deals these days, not programming. I’m a salesman. Nothing more.” He looked at my plate. “Your food’s getting cold.”

  Conall—the mega-million dollar deal closer for a major software house. Salesman my ass! “You’re not ‘just a salesman!’ You’re saying you could have made the money you’re making today without a degree?”

  Conall had made millions by the time he’d hit twenty-four.

  “Of course.”

  “What about that super-duper drug-cartel database of every name and contact and cross-reference known to man and God that you designed that saved Alexandra’s life and my life and got that Senator impeached for pushing drugs into the USA? What about that, huh? Could you have designed that without a degree?” I had him now!

  “I did.”

  Shit! “Huh?”

  “I started designing that before my degree—it wasn’t initially intended to track drug cartels, sure. But it was a database nonetheless. It has other uses. It’s ‘flexible.’ It can be used for any sort of forecasting or cross-referencing.

  “Facebook was designed in a college dorm as well. He didn’t have a degree either when he created it. Programming is easy to learn.”

  Bastard. I so thought I’d had him...

  I played with my food again. Now I was thinking, thinking, thinking.

  “Miuccia Prada,” he said after a while.

  “Huh?”

  “Miuccia Prada. She has a degree in Political Science. Not in Fashion Design.”

  “And did that open some doors for her?”

  “Leora. C’mon, Political Science? Please. And she even became a mime in a theater after college. The degree did nothing for her whatsoever. Not a single damn thing. What a waste of four years.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Hmpf.” I played more with my food, thinking about how I was being tortured to live a life I had left over a year ago, a life of petty games and idiotic rules, run by one Queen Bee. The School Life.

  My salmon was slowly coming to an end. I was still thinking, thinking, thinking. Why had Conall brought up Prada?

  “Phillip Lim,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Phillip Lim—was studying Home Economics when he got an internship with a designer without even so much as a portfolio.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit.”

  I looked down at my plate, then put my fork down. I looked up at Conall, grinning—God, he’s sexy!—and asked suspiciously, “How do you know all this stuff suddenly?”

  He didn’t answer, just continued giving me facts: “Giorgio Armani—started a degree in medicine, then joined the army, then started working at a men’s clothing store. Zero studies in Fashion Design.

  “Coco Chanel, basically just knew how to sew.

  “Gianni Versace studied architecture but learned dressmaking from his mother.

  “Diane von Fürstenberg studied economics but learned about fabric during an apprenticeship that had nothing to do with economics!

  “Michael Kors dropped out—”

  “OK. OK. Stop!” I put my hands up. Conall was grinning victoriously. He refilled my glass of wine with smooth Merlot. I was starting to feel mellow. “How— How do you know all this?” I asked again.

  “I saw it in your eyes from the day you started there that you weren’t happy. So I wanted to know what your opportunities were if you decided to change your mind. I know software, I don’t know fashion—at least not the business side of it. So I asked around.”

  “You don’t want me to study?”

  It was here that I saw the slightest strain of frustration on his face. “Leora.” He stretched out to cover my hand with his. “I want you to be happy. I want you to succeed. I want you to be my wife and be your own woman and do whatever it is that makes you content.” My stomach started buzzing.

  Conall squeezed my hand.

  “I’m...miserable...at this place, Conall. Miserable. I just feel...like I’ve grown so much in the last year. And now, I’m engaged, and...it just feels like a waste of time!”

  He leaned back, picked up his wine again.

  Dark, curly hairs peeked up at me from behind the undone top button of his dress shirt. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “What do you suggest I do?”


  “I suggest you do whatever it is you want to do, Leora.”

  “My mother went through life picking up man after man, marrying for money. I don’t want to be like that, Conall. Maybe that made me cynical, but I know she loved my father. I think she loved him. But they never worked out.”

  Conall’s eye twitched. “You’re worried we won’t work out?” He leaned forward, put his elbows on the table.

  “No, no.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I—”

  “Your hair looks ravishing.”

  “Wh—?” I looked at my simple brown hair. “Don’t distract me!”

  “It was you who distracted me by running your hand through your hair like that and inhaling deeply. You know that turns me on like mad. That and your brown eyes, your golden skin.” He was leaning forward now.

  “Conall, baby, this is serious.”

  “I know.” His gaze on me felt like fire.

  He reached for my hand again, pulled me toward him. My breasts fell into some sauce on my plate as my body was tugged forward. He stood and leaned forward over the table, moving the candle out the way.

  When his lips met mine...

  What was I saying?

  -2-

  I stopped talking, just licked my lips after Conall moved away. His cologne smelled incredible today, like fresh air, like oxygen on a cold mountain.

  My eyes fluttered open as my body eased back into the chair. I looked down at my dress, still dazed, saw the sauce under my breasts.

  I didn’t care.

  I was tense. So tense. The last few days I’d been feeling the pressure at college and Conall and I hadn’t made love, hadn’t touched, hadn’t even kissed for long moments in bed.

  A week before that, he’d spread my legs and licked me passionately, bringing me up to a scream, but I’d been too tired to do anything more with him.

  I’d fallen asleep with my hand around his shaft, him holding me.

  But tonight...

  Tonight, something felt different. I felt...unhindered, free, unshackled.

  I felt...in control of my life.

  I felt, goddamnit, like a freaking adult!

  Conall was standing now, his hand out to me.