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Liam was designateddriver while Charlie was point man. I sat in the back of the SUV, a new pair of mirrored sunglasses at the ready to disguise the color of my eyes in case we ran into another crowd. Kris and Charlie left with the duchess exactly five minutes after us, taking an alternate route to our destination to avoid any tails. Charlie was right, though. Traffic was very light, though the heavy rain made it a bit hard to enjoy the city’s skyline.
“So, where do you want to study law?” Charlie asked me.
I perked up a bit. “Adam told you?”
“He did.”
My cheeks warmed. I liked that the guys spoke about me in private. It made me feel oddly special, even if it was something as mundane as my professional aspirations.
“Honestly, I’ll go anywhere that’ll take me.”
Charlie chuckled. “No dreams of Harvard or Yale?”
“Only if I can get a full ride, but I doubt I will. I just want to make sure that wherever I enroll, it’s somewhere in New York so that I don’t have to move and disrupt Max’s life. Besides, those places are so…”
“Pretentious?” Liam guessed.
I laughed. “Not quite the word I was going for, but yes, kind of.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “You’re one to talk, Mr. Ivy League.”
“You went to an Ivy League school, Liam?”
“Brown,” he said gruffly.
I was thoroughly fascinated. “What did you study? Did you play college football? You look like you played college football.”
He made a sound that I was pretty sure was his version of a chuckle. “I got in on a mathematics scholarship.”
My mouth dropped open. “Math? Wow, that’s so…”
“Nerdy?” Charlie joked.
“I was going to say cool.” I leaned forward in my seat, eager to learn more. “What interested you about the subject?”
“Numbers make sense,” Liam said simply. “They’re organized. Uncomplicated.”
“Uncomplicated? Tell that to a struggling eighteen-year-old version of me sitting at the back of calculus because she was afraid her teacher would pick her to answer the questions on the board.”
“Math’s not that scary.”
“It’s a little scary,” Charlie chided.
“Can I ask you another question?” I asked him.
“You can ask me anything, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart.
Earning myself an endearment from Liam felt like winning a million bucks. I smiled wide as I asked, “Why did you enlist with the military, then? If you liked math so much.”
He was quiet for a moment, his eyes a bit distant. He was thinking. “It wasn’t fulfilling. I needed something more structured. More purposeful.”
“And you found that purpose with the SEALs?”
He nodded. “Yep.”
