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Blonde waves float ethereally around her heart-shaped face as she lifts her head, confused because her new fucking headmaster hasn’t said a goddamn word yet.
Her eyes go wide, her lips part, and she fumbles for the chair beside her. “Sebastian?”
The way she breathes my name makes my cock hard. Instantly.
But there’s another reaction, a wilder, more dangerous one, right in the center of my chest. I need to make this okay for her. I circle around my desk and close the door behind her, then pull her into my arms.
This will be the last time I can hold her like this, so I fucking cherish it. I breathe in her scent and memorize the shape of her body against mine. I wrap her tightly against me and cradle her to my chest until she stops shaking.
Then I hold her a little longer because I fucking need her, and I don’t want to let go.
It hurts when I step back and shove my hands in the pockets of my suit pants. “This doesn’t need to be a problem.”
She manages a watery laugh. “I don’t see how it can’t be. Fuck, I’m such a—”
“You did nothing wrong. You were—” Perfect. Sweet and sexy and fierce. She’d wanted an escape, she said. Before three months of hell at my school. I’m the hell-master in her nightmares. “You had to let off some steam before you focused on your schoolwork. Why don’t we sit and talk about that?”
She glances at the hard wooden chair in front of my desk. “What we did?”
I groan. “No. Your schoolwork.”
She’s still staring at the chair. Where my students sit when I’m discussing their future.
She’s my fucking student.
Shame tears the next statement out of my mouth. “I didn’t know you were eighteen.”
Her gaze jerks back to my face. And her shock is slowly replaced with something else. Suspicion for a second, then wariness. “Why didn’t you ask?”
To anyone else, I’d lie. To Lily, I give her the whole damn truth. “In hindsight, I think it’s pretty clear I didn’t want to know.”
Her cheeks burn as she absorbs that information. “Are you in the habit of not wanting to know how old your truck stop pickups are?”
“I told you last night.” I exhale, and it sounds a lot like a growl. “That was the first time I’d ever done that. I didn’t want to know how old you were because I wantedyou,no matter what. But I wasn’t really… thinking. I just needed you.”
She shrugs. “I didn’t know you were….” The tip of her tongue pokes into the corner of her mouth, and I want to laugh as she tries to speak more diplomatically. “Old enough to be a headmaster?”
She could have just said old. Because yeah, I fucking am. “I promise, yesterday was an exception to my usual life.”
Her gaze drifts down to my suit, then back up again. “I should hope so.”
I raise my eyebrows at the tone. The reaction is instinctive but completely ineffective against a girl—woman—who has bared everything for me and my ravenous mouth.
She shrugs. “What? You want me to pretend I’m something other than what you already know I am?”
“I don’t know anything about you,” I point out. “And vice versa.”
A pink tinge spreads across her cheeks, even as her eyes flash. “We know a few things. Maybe just enough to make terrible decisions.”
Yeah. “There’s that critical thinking ability I’ve read so much about,” I say dryly. I move back around my desk and tap on her file. “I would like to know more about how you ended up here. You’re obviously academically gifted. But you have a problem with authority.”
Her eyes flare brightly. Stubborn Lily, I immediately nickname this version of her in my mind. We all have different versions of our true selves. I try not to assume that any one version I see of a student is their whole being.
I wait for her protest, but it doesn’t come. So I lean back in my chair. “Isn’t that true? You were expelled from two other schools. You had to finish last year, what should have been your last year, at a public school, and you weren’t able to get enough credits to graduate with your class.”
“I was sabotaged,” she bites out.
“By who?”
