The Lonesome Young (5 page)

A Whitfield. One of
them
. Horse folk. The family was the richest around. They employed a lot of people in town, and they were the people the whole damned
county
was named after. I might as well go after a
real
princess for all the chance I’d have at Victoria Whitfield.

She glanced around again, and when her gaze tangled with mine, she stumbled and then caught herself. Her cheeks blazed hot pink, and I grinned, unable to help myself. I didn’t know many girls over the age of twelve who still blushed, especially on my side of the county.

Before I could stop myself, I was crossing the parking lot and heading straight for her.

She planted her feet, raised her chin, and stood her ground, unafraid of me, unlike every other person in the entire school except for Derek.
That
wouldn’t last. By lunchtime, the gossips would have filled her in on the Rhodale myth—fact and fiction all jumbled together and presented as truth—and Victoria would stay far, far away from me.

My stomach twisted in a hard, angry knot at the realization. “Why are you here?”

She met my eyes coolly. “I’m registering for school. Why are
you
here?”

“I’m wondering that myself,” I muttered. “I guess I just wanted to say hi before . . .”

“Before?” She tilted her head, gazing up at me, and her eyes flashed like emeralds in the morning sun. I caught myself moving closer to her, because she apparently was not only turning me into a damn poet, thinking about her jewel-like eyes, but she had actual magnetic powers.

Looking around, I noticed that every member of the Wildcat football team seemed to be converging on us, eyes glued to Victoria, so maybe I wasn’t too far off on the magnetic powers.

Assholes.

“You should go,” I said, clumsy and awkward and everything I usually wasn’t, because something about this girl got to me in places she had no business reaching.

But she didn’t leave. Instead, she started laughing. “Seriously? Is that what you do, hang around places waiting to tell people to leave?”

I could feel my face heat up, and I turned my head to avoid her, only to catch sight of Derek staring at me with his jaw hanging down somewhere around his ankles.

Damn.

“Or is it only me you’re always trying to get rid of?” She tilted her head and smiled, equal parts beauty and defiance, and a fierce sense of longing swept through me. Longing that she would never find out about the real me. The monstrous me. The Rhodale who could beat two people nearly to death and—worse—not feel even a twinge of remorse.

“Most people are afraid of me,” I blurted out like a complete moron.

“I’m not afraid of you, Mickey, but maybe you could work on your manners,” she said lightly, but a finely controlled quiver of tension rolled across her shoulders. “This is the high school. I’m here to register. No fires or potential arrests or any other reason why I should leave this time, right?”

“Guess not,” I returned. “So where are you headed? Need directions?”

She bit her lip; for a second I saw a hint of vulnerability beneath the self-assured surface. “I have to go to the office because my parents are too
busy
to bother with mundane things like finishing the registration process for their daughter for school,” she said, and I heard a tinge of bitterness.

“Well, allow me to lead the way,” I said. I took off, and she followed me—I felt her nearness pulling against my back. Again with the magnetic powers. If Victoria Whitfield didn’t like me, that was for the best, right? She was out of my league. I should stay away, but I knew even as I thought it that I wouldn’t.

I stopped outside the school office.

She paused with one hand on the door, lowered her head and took a long, deep breath, and then she turned to face me. “I’m sorry. I do appreciate you looking out for me last night, and this isn’t how I wanted my first day to go. Maybe we could start over?”

I was too mesmerized by her green eyes to come up with any kind of coherent response. I stuck out my hand instead, and she shook it.

“Hi, I’m Victoria Whitfield. It’s nice to meet you, Mickey Rhodale.”

With that, she opened the door and slipped inside, leaving me speechless and staring after her like a fool.

Suddenly, for the first time in a very long time, I was glad to be at school.

CHAPTER 5

Victoria

C
lark High wasn’t hell. It was hell’s trashy reality TV show.

I looked around the hallway after leaving the school office, schedule in hand, and expected to see Honey Boo Boo’s cousin show up any minute. I was having an extreme case of culture shock, or culture jet lag, or something. My knees, already shaky from the first-day-of-school factor, had wobbled a little more after talking to Mickey. He was just so unbelievably gorgeous, in a broody, moody, dangerous way I’d never run into during my very sheltered time at Ashford-Hutchinson Academy. We’d had boys over for dances, sure, but they’d been from the nearest prep school and not one of them—ever—had been even a fraction as enticing and mysterious as Mickey Rhodale.

None of them had stood around parking lots trying to scare girls, either.

A perky redhead wearing jeans and a Wildcats T-shirt intercepted me in the hallway and took the schedule right out of my hand. She had a tan that was a little too dark and a little too orange to be natural, and her hair needed its own zip code, but her eyes were friendly, and I liked her on sight.

“I thought so. We have English together. Come on, you can walk with me,” she said, flashing a warm smile. “I’m Denise. You can like me even though I’m a cheerleader, or maybe because I’m a cheerleader, because this is Small Town, USA, and high school football is king.”

I blinked at this outpouring of words, which had the opposite effect of what she’d probably intended, because my shyness kicked in and my tongue got tangled up in my mouth. “Um, hi. I’m—”

“Victoria Whitfield. Yeah, I know. The whole county is kind of named after you.” She rolled her eyes, but not in a mocking way. More like
duh
. “And you were talking to Mick Rhodale, in spite of everything!”

She stopped propelling me along the hallway by sheer force of personality and sucked in a breath. “Oh, no! It wasn’t
because
of everything, was it? I’m just saying that if you have some weird kind of thing for violent guys, you need to move on, don’t you think?”

It took me a second to process this, but by then she’d dragged me to English, and the ultimate cruel teacher sport of “stand at the front of the room and tell us about yourself, New Girl” blasted everything else out of my head.

During second period, French III, while Madame Thierry showed us a PowerPoint presentation of her summer trip to Paris, complete with soundtrack (“La Vie en Rose”), Denise filled me in on who was who in class, which guys were available, and why it would be dangerous to have anything to do with Mickey or any of the Rhodale boys. She was all too clear on details. Mickey’s older brother Ethan evidently ranked somewhere between Satan and Osama bin Laden on the evil scale; Jeb, the middle boy, was stupid and horny, or maybe stupidly horny; and Mickey was a train wreck.

“He jumped five guys for no reason, I heard, and put four of them into the hospital,” she whispered. “Or was it all five? I think one of them got away.”

I turned my head to stare at her. The Mickey who’d picked me up last night was certainly strong enough to kick ass in a fight. But five guys? For no reason?

It didn’t track.

By third period, and the third “Whitfield like the
county
Whitfield?” question, I was able to stand there with a straight face and say “no relation.”

This earned me a laugh and maybe a little goodwill from the rest of the class, most of whom were now thoroughly sick of hearing me mutter a few basic facts about myself. It also earned me a slow clap from the direction of the doorway, where Mickey stood, leaning against the wall.

“Take your seat, Mr. Rhodale,” Mr. Gerard said, waving toward the only empty seat in the room.

The seat next to mine.

Naturally.

A slow, sexy grin spread across Mickey’s face as he sat down, sprawled his long legs out in the aisle, and stared up at me. “You were saying?”

My cheeks caught fire, and I stared right back at him, completely unable to remember what I’d been saying before he’d walked in.

“You were telling the
history
teacher that your family isn’t related to the Whitfields who founded the county, I think,” he drawled, and I wanted to punch him right in the middle of his perfectly straight nose.

“That’s enough from you, Mr. Rhodale,” Mr. Gerard said. “If you recall my class from last year, Miss Whitfield isn’t the only one in this classroom whose family dates back to Kentucky statehood in 1792 and even prior to that, when we were still part of the great state of Virginia.”

I glanced over at the teacher and noticed the University of Virginia flag hanging behind his desk. Ah. College loyalty was evidently as much of a cult in Virginia as it was in Kentucky. I’d seen friends almost come to blows and relationships die in shouting matches over basketball games between the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky. When I looked back out at the class, I saw that Mickey was still watching me, and I could swear his grin was mocking me.

“You can return to your seat, Miss Whitfield,” Mr. Gerard said. A trace of bitterness swept through me at the thought that Gran could have easily paid my boarding school tuition, but she’d flatly refused.

“Clark High School was good enough for me, and good enough for your father,” she’d said. “I don’t hold with this idea of shipping our kids off for other people to raise during the tumultuous teen years. God knows we don’t want you to end up like your mother.”

That had been a low blow, but true enough. Mom had gone into Ashford-Hutchinson in her freshman year as a normal kid, and she’d come out carrying only eighty-five pounds on her five feet, four inch frame. Yet she still held it up as the best school on the planet. But even she couldn’t fight the combined power of my father, my grandmother, and the inescapable fact of her empty checkbook and maxed-out credit cards. And that, as they say, had been that. I was out of the school where I’d spent the last two years and knew who people were and how things worked, and into a school where the only boy I’d met so far had called my ass pretty and picked me up and carried me away from danger, like my own personal superhero.

And who, according to Denise, was a very violent drug dealer. Or at least the brother of one.

The teacher pointed at Mickey with his pen. “Mr. Rhodale, since you were so kind as to bring up Whitfield County history, you will do your midyear project on the history of your relative the Pinkerton man.”

The pen swerved to aim its evil at me. “Miss Whitfield, you will take on the history of the Derby.”

I relaxed. I’d been raised on the Kentucky Derby. This, at least, should be easy. I nodded, and he moved on to tell Denise that she’d be learning all about the history, good and bad, of the tobacco plant.

“I’ve never been to the Derby,” Mickey said quietly, and his deep, husky voice caused a delicious shiver to race down my spine. Why was I reacting like this to him?

Okay, so yes, he was the hottest guy I’d ever seen and he’d carried me away from what clearly had been an explosion waiting to happen. There was
that
.

“How can you be from Kentucky and never have gone to the Derby?” I blurted it out in a whisper, mostly from a frantic need to say
something
.

“Are you kidding? Or are you really such a pampered princess that you wouldn’t know the answer to that?” His voice had an edge to it, and I glanced over to see that his features had hardened. “The Derby experience isn’t exactly cheap. Some of us have to save money for college.”

“I don’t . . . I didn’t mean . . . It’s just been part of my life forever,” I said, realizing I’d put my foot in my mouth again. “You make me nervous.”

He smiled, and the memory of the way his muscular body had felt against mine when he picked me up flashed into my mind. I had to clench my teeth against the shiver.

“You make me nervous too, Princess,” he said, but his smile faded as he said it as if he, like me, had realized how much he’d given away with the admission. “And I know better than this.”

“Better than what?”

But Gerard shot a dirty look our way, and I blushed and stared down at my desk. I’d never been on the receiving end of a teacher’s annoyance before. I had the sudden, startled realization that perhaps more than my geography had changed; Whitfield County Victoria was morphing into a very different person than the Victoria I’d been before. Had the mere proximity of the town bad boy caused a ripple effect on my personality?

I shook off the absurd thought, but the tingle that raced down my spine told me that some part of me might just believe it.

During the rest of the class, while Mr. Gerard handed out project assignments and droned on and on, Mickey didn’t try to talk to me again. When the bell rang, I was up out of my seat and on my way to find calculus before he could follow me.

Not that he even tried.

I couldn’t figure out if the realization made me disappointed or relieved.

CHAPTER 6

Mickey

H
ypocrisy was always a featured side dish at the United Methodist Women’s after-church potluck. The very people who gossiped with gleeful viciousness Monday through Saturday pretended that they gave a shit about their targeted victims on Sunday.

“Hypocrisy
salad
,” I muttered.

“Excuse me?” Mom said, blinking at me.

“Why is it always called salad?” I pointed at the tables that were practically collapsing under the weight of the food. “Ham salad, potato salad, macaroni salad, even Jell-O salad. None of those have anything do with lettuce, so why do they call it salad?”