Rohan had thanked her profusely for setting a good example and helping his little brother achieve during his first years in America, and he’d been walking Lena to her father’s convenience store ever since she started at Boston Glenn.
Usually she took him up on his offer in the colder months, when the sun set early, but it was still bright out. So she waved up and said, “No, that’s okay. See you tomorrow.”
Lena kept her voice light, but as soon as Rohan disappeared back through the window, she returned her worried attention to Vihaan. “Maybe you should tell your brother. He might have some ideas about how to help you.”
Vihaan started shaking his head before Lena was even finished with her suggestion. “He is very stressed about his sophomore year in university. All he does is go to class and study. He does not need this additional stressor.”
Her heart sank a little. “But—”
“Let it go, Lena.” Vihaan said. Then he turned to walk away before she could protest any further.
Lena plodded the rest of the way to her dad’s convenience store, still fretting over what had happened with the new school bully.
“Were you given much homework then?” Dad asked when she walked into the EasyStop.
Lena couldn’t figure out how he’d managed to clock her glum expression. He was sitting behind the bulletproof counter, just like he’d been since 12am, his suspicious eyes glued to the four-camera security monitor he’d mounted next to the counter.
She glanced at the security camera. There were only a few customers in the store. Two teenage girls in the candy aisle and a large black man in a Dickies workman jacket, studying the beer, like his choice would determine whether the Boston Revolutions won or lost their basketball game tonight.
The man’s relaxed shoulders told Lena he wasn’t any threat. But the girls…they were whispering and pointing.
“Hold on,” she said and went over to stand at the end of the aisle.
Sure enough, the girls abruptly stopped whispering. Lena lingered, pretending to have a hard time choosing between the old-fashion Hubba Bubba and one of the new-fangled, way more expensive Big E-Paks of Eclipse gum they’d recently started carrying. And a few minutes into their can’t decide standoff, the girls made a hasty beeline for the door.
When she went back up to the front of the store, her father gave her a quick, tired smile before returning his suspicious eyes back to the security monitor. “You are good at spotting these criminals. I think this skill will help you very much when you become a doctor. You will know when someone is truly in need of medicine or trying to scam the system. There are so many of those these days. I saw it on an episode of Boston Hope.”
Lena rarely received compliments from her father, and they usually lit her up. However, the way her stomach knotted every time she thought of spending the rest of her life in a hospital, like the doctors on Boston Hope, made it hard to enjoy this bit of praise.
But her father had dropped out of medical school to raise her alone after her mother had died in childbirth, she reminded herself. The least she could do after all he’d sacrificed for her was make the dream he’d had to give up for himself finally come true.
“Where is Rohan?” he asked, drawing her away from her guilty thoughts. Usually he stopped in and exchanged a few words with her Dad in Punjabi.
“It’s still light out, so I told him I could walk here alone.”
Dad finally tore his eyes away from the security monitor. “You should let him escort you, even when it’s light out. His walking you here is a good way to show he is needed. Indian men are not like Americans. We appreciate smart females. But we don’t like too much independence. Also this is a way for you two to spend time together—and before you go saying something like, ‘Eww, Abba, he is four years older than me!’ Let me remind you these few years will not matter at all when you reach university age. Also, you must start your campaign to earn a proposal from him early, as his mother will be a hard sell. It will take time to work your way into her good graces.”
Lena could have pointed out that Vihaan’s and Rohan’s mother held down two jobs and was never home anyway. And even if she worked a nine-to-five, she was probably hoping for a nice Indian girl for both of her boys. A nice full-Indian girl like the ones Rohan was probably currently meeting at college, not a half-black one like her.
But she already knew what her father would say. He had a long-range plan. This was why he favored Rohan over Vihaan for her. Vihaan was bright and bubbly when he wasn’t getting picked on by bullies—it would be easy for him to net a nice girl her dad had declared. But Rohan was too studious and conscientious to attract the attentions of a normal Indian girl. He had every faith that his mother would become increasingly desperate and eventually decide to accept a half-Indian daughter into her home.
Lena loved her dad and couldn’t be more grateful for him. Just the fact that they were standing in a convenience store he was way too overqualified to run showed how much he loved her, how much he had sacrificed. But he had a plan for everything, and sometimes it felt like she’d never be able to execute all of them. Never be able to make him happy the way a full Indian daughter would have. And deep inside that knowledge hurt.
“I don’t have too much homework today,” she said, changing the subject. “You should go upstairs and take a nap.”
Even when she had a lot of homework, Lena never admitted that she did. What she’d referred to as a nap was technically the only sleep her father got on weekday school nights, since he refused to hire an assistant clerk with money that would be better invested in her college fund.
He must have been tired, because he didn’t give any protest. Instead he tapped a finger on a thick envelope and said, “The Irish will be by tonight. This is for them.”
Lena simply nodded, though the sight of the envelope filled her with disgust. This was another reason she didn’t love Southies. Her father had been paying bogus protection money to them since he saved up enough to buy the original owner out of the store.
She continued to scowl at the envelope, even as she pulled out the stack of books and plays she’d borrowed from the school library after receiving her AP English syllabus. They hadn’t been assigned any homework on the first day of school, but in her experience, it always paid to get a jumpstart on all required reading, especially the Shakespeare.
She rang up a few sales and started perusing As You Like It, scanning down often to the translation notes at the bottom. But it was slow going. She kept on thinking about what had happened with Vihaan that morning. And that unexpected zap of…something she didn’t quite understand when the bully had hit her with his green gaze.
“Think that envelope belongs to me.”
She looked up to see a hulking Southie. Now this guy looked like a bully. He had a weird combination of big muscles and an even bigger beer belly. His ears stuck out and his hair was cut close to the skull. And though he was here to pick up his protection envelope, his mouth sat at a permanent downturn. Like she’d come into his store to extort him out of money he didn’t deserve, not the other way around. But the eyes were the same. Intense, like they could blink to violent any second now.
If he had come into the store as a regular customer, Lena wouldn’t have just gone to stand beside him, she probably would have picked up the landline, and kept her finger hovering over the 9-1-1 speed dial until he left.
But as it was, Lena wordlessly handed over the envelope. Hating that he snatched it from her the same way Keane had snatched that five from Vihaan.
Like it had been his money all along.
This was why she hated Southies, she reminded herself as she watched the Irish mobster swagger out of the store. And this was why she had no business feeling any kind of way about the new bully, much less obsessing over his good looks and the way his eyes had bored into hers. Southies were the worst—
But then her disgusted thoughts suddenly cut off as a new idea began to form. An idea which could solve Vi
haan’s bully problem….
When you grow up like Keane did, you put away those superhero comics pretty quick. His suitemate, Con received a whole stack of the damn things on the first day of school from a loving pa back in The Cheese State. But Keane had held up a hand, a wave of disgust rolling through his stomach, when Con offered to let him read Viking Wolf, the first spin-off comic from that Viking Shifter game he and a few of the other guys on the team liked to play after second practice.
He appreciated the offer, but those comics were full of it. Previous to his ascension into fancy muckety-muck schools that gave talented hockey players full rides, he’d learned the hard fucking way that nobody ever showed up to save you when bad shit went down in Southie. You only had two choices in life asshole or get assholed. (And if you didn’t understand asshole as a verb of life, then you had absolutely no chance of making it out of his neighborhood at all.)
Keane hadn’t read a comic since his balls dropped.
So, it was surprising to find himself reading one when Lena knocked on his suite door, loud and hard, like she knew what she wanted. “Hello, Keane,” she called on the other side of the wood. “It’s Lena. You there?”
Was he there? Hell yeah, he was. He leaped out of bed, only to freeze at the sight of her when he yanked open the door. She looked different from this morning. The tie was gone and the hip hugging uniform skirt was at least six inches shorter. She’d also unbuttoned her shirt, so low he could see the edges of her bra.
His cock instantly turned to concrete.
He’d been right about her. She had been hiding a fantastic pair of tits under that uniform. But now she stuck them out and said, “I’m here to see what I can do to make you leave my boyfriend alone.”
“That right?” Keane asked, his voice low as his dick pulsed, panting for a taste.
Normally he had a policy about messing with other guy’s girlfriends. It was a hockey thing. Don’t shit where you skate and all that. Bros before hos who could ruin your team’s chance at a championship.
But Band Nerd wasn’t on his team, Keane reminded himself. Also, he didn’t deserve a set of tits like the ones Lena was shoving in his face. Probably didn’t even know what to do with them.
Keane crooked his head to the side, pretending to take her request under serious consideration. “What if I told you to dump that chump and get with a winner.”
She grinned, like he was the coolest bro on the planet. “It depends, are you the winner I’d be getting with?”
“Hell yeah,” he answered with a smirk.
“In that case…”
She stood on her tip toes and leaned forward, pressing her incredible tits into his chest as she grabbed him around the shoulders. Then she…
Shook him hard and yelled, “Wake up, Boston. C’mon, bro, wake up already!”
Keane jerked awake. Con was standing over his bed.
Fuck! It had only been a dream.
“That for me?” Con asked, lifting both his eyebrows.
Keane followed his roommate’s gaze down to the morning wood tenting his sheet. “Fuck no,” he answered, throwing back the cover and hopping out of bed. “I gotta take a shower.” For more reasons than one.
Con just snorted as Keane shoved past him. “Yeah whatever. You don’t have time for a shower. We only got ten til practice.”
“Fuck!” Keane yelled again.
“Yeah, I was surprised to find you still sleeping.”
Keane was surprised, too. He usually got to practice fifteen minutes early. He liked to show coaches why he was always a ten times better pick than any of the entitled rich shits that riddled most hockey teams like a fucking venereal disease.
He made it on time to their morning session, but just barely, and Coach Neilson asked if he needed a reminder about the Shower Before Practice policy as he skated by—loud enough for the whole team to hear.
And a few guys snickered, which meant Keane would have to spend the rest of the week checking them into walls whenever they even thought about going for his side’s puck. As violently as possible. He’d learned early never to let a rich prick get away with laughing at him.
On top of that, he hadn’t gotten the chance to eat breakfast this morning, and there was no time to sneak in a bowl of Wheaties after practice, just a shower. He opted for the shower. Because he hated getting laughed at…he told himself. But a small, no-bullshit part of him knew the real reason.
That real reason stood around 5’5 with deep brown eyes, tits to literally dream for, and had made “More Than a Feeling” blast inside his head with just one look. And no, he didn’t want to smell when he slammed the real reason’s boyfriend into a locker this morning.
But he did take a moment to text his little brother who was still in middle school before heading off to the campus’s main classroom building.
“How’s it going.”
“Fine.”
Shit. The single word answer from his normally chatty brother meant he was anything but. Also…why wasn’t he in school?
He didn’t bother to ask, because he already knew the answer. It was six feet and liked to beat on whoever was around when it got drunk and pissed off about its shitty left behind life. This was one of the reasons he’d agreed to transfer from his boarding school in Connecticut to one in Boston. He needed to be able to go home on the weekends. Protect his brother as much as he could from their asshole father.
But apparently his father had decided to switch things up and get punchy on a week night.
So yeah, Keane’s mood was charting at Pretty Fucked by the time he got to school. He ignored all the people calling out to him as he strode down the main hallway. There were mostly girls anyway. And none of them were her.
In fact, Band Nerd and his girlfriend were suspiciously absent when he walked past their section of lockers.
More F-bombs exploded in his head as he continued down the hallway, without today’s lunch money offering. Obviously, Band Nerd & Co. had decided to avoid him, but after he stowed his books, he’d hunt them down like a Catholic priest whose collection plate had come back to the front empty.
Just like the dorm rooms on the fourth floor of the residence hall, the school kept all hockey players’ lockers together. Sin, Con and a few of his other teammates had already arrived and were shoving books into their lockers.
“Boston!” they intoned as he opened his own locker.
Unlike Con, and Sin, he hadn’t had to split up his name. Not to say Boston Glenn was elitist as fuck. But the only other Boston propers who attended the school were either brown and here on scholarship (like Lena), or descended from Founding Fathers, which he guessed made them too anemic and inbred to play hockey. Whatever, he liked having Boston all to himself. And it really didn’t matter today anyway. The main point was him needing to hunt that ass tool down to beat the five out of h—
The imaginary film of him beating Band Nerd to a pulp froze frame when he saw the envelope waiting for him at the top of his locker.
A white envelope…his heart stopped beating. If there was one thing he’d learned after two years at elite boarding schools, it was that rich kids were a bunch of mean cunts. And the guys were the worst. None of them knew how to fight for shit, so if they had a problem with you, instead of settling that beef with fists, they took the girly way out and fucked with your head.
Had one of those skinny pale-ass Founding Daddy fucks figured out his Dad collected envelopes for the Charlie Gang and decided some mocking was in order? Keane fisted a hand, wondering who he’d have to knock out first.
But then he caught sight of the words written across the top of the envelope in neat looping letters. A girl’s handwriting for sure. When he and most guys he knew bothered to write neatly, it was always in block letters, spaced out with nothing touching. No fucking loops.
Keane picked the envelope up and read:
Dear Keane (sp?),
It has come to our attention that your Boston Glenn Scholarship does not cove
r your lunch money needs. In the spirit of helping, here is the first of five dollars that will be delivered every weekday, so that you may enjoy your mid-afternoon meal without impeding the lunch time needs of others.
All our best,
Scholarship Kids Helping Other Scholarship Kids
Keane read the words on the front of the envelope, then looked inside. Sure enough, there was a five-dollar bill.
He’d noted all the “our” this and “our” that, but he knew exactly who had left this envelope for him. And a slow grin spread across his face as he went from simply wanting to bang the girl with the big tits to actually starting to like her. Sending a note like this to a guy like him required major balls, and he had to give her respect. Not just the mental kind, either.
From that day forth, he never messed with Band Nerd again. And even though he put himself on a monthly rotation of easy pussy after a week of not seeing her in the hallway, he continued thinking (and occasionally dreaming) about the girl who left an envelope with a five-dollar bill in his locker every school day.
That had been the first time she surprised him. But it wouldn’t be the last.
Chapter One
“Excuse me, could I have your autograph?”
Keane raised his head from the glass of whiskey he was about to down, already preparing to say fuck no. Politely, if he could manage it. His brother, Bono, had warned him before this year’s annual black-tie event for the Keane Hockey Academy that his habit of telling anyone who asked him for his John Hancock to go fuck themselves might not help them hit this year’s fundraising goal.
Blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Five minutes before going on stage to deliver his required speech, he had zero desire to talk to anything but a stiff drink.
But he reconsidered his no when he spied who was doing the asking. Perky blonde. Early 20s. Hopefully not younger. But rich enough to be milling around this six-figure a table black tie fundraiser. Plus, she held his Hawks Upper Deck card in her perfectly manicured hand. Not a napkin or some bullshit like that.
Keane: Her Ruthless Ex: 50 Loving States, Massachusetts Page 2