Paranoid(57)

“Forget work.” He paused, knowing she wanted to handle things herself; it was her thing. “I’ve got time coming. I have no problem calling in.”

“No. I’ll be fine.” She flashed him one of her rare smiles and her gold eyes gleamed for a second. “Remember: I’ve got Reno.”

“Guard dog less than extraordinaire.”

“Exactly.”

He didn’t like it but saw she couldn’t be moved. “Okay. Fine. But I’ll be by to make sure the security system is online.”

“Really, Cade, you don’t need to do this.”

“Yeah, I think I do,” he said and decided to be brutally honest. “My kids live here with my ex-wife, and contrary to what she may believe, I care about her, want her safe.”

Rachel drew in a long breath. “Oh . . . I don’t think that . . .”

“I don’t care what you think, Rach, it’s the truth.” She looked about to argue again, so he started for the door. “In the meantime, keep the dog on alert and the doors and windows locked.”





CHAPTER 18


Dylan was sweating bullets.

His knee was twitching and he kept glancing at the clock, ticking off the seconds of the school day, maybe of his life.

His mom was on to him.

He saw her poking around his room this morning, finding his stash.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

Ten minutes left in class. Then he’d have to avoid that moron Schmidt and his goons, then deal with the smug assistant principal.

He felt as if the walls were closing in on him, that he had nowhere to turn, no one to confide in.

“Dylan?” Tori Suzuki’s voice brought him back to the present, at his terminal in the library media room, where he and the rest of the class were supposed to be finishing their English essays.

He looked up and caught her smiling at him from the next computer terminal. “Sorry to bother you, but . . .”

Dylan’s heart jolted. When Tori smiled at him, with her dark eyes and pretty face framed by shiny black hair, he could barely concentrate. She had a boyfriend, so he didn’t think she was actually flirting with him, but she always sat next to Dylan if they were in the media room during second period, and he was good with that.

“What?” he asked, keeping his voice low so the library monitor wouldn’t pounce on them. Exams were proctored, but since it was harder to cheat on an essay, no one watched too closely.

“I was wondering if you could show me that trick you know to make your essay look a little bit longer? Without changing the margins.”

He got it. If the essay wasn’t five pages, you couldn’t get an A. And it was easy enough to put all the punctuation in thirteen-point type for starters. He had a few other tricks as well.

“Sure.”

She leaned in, so close he could smell her perfume. He tried not to notice; he couldn’t get distracted by anything, not even Tori.

He swallowed hard.

“You think you could set it up for me?” she whispered.

“Sure,” he said again. As if it were the only word he knew. Girls like Tori made him nervous, even nice girls who already had a boyfriend. He shot a glance over his shoulder to see if anyone was paying attention. Nah. Holding his breath, he leaned over to her keyboard and opened the systems file. A few changes, probably less than sixty seconds, and he was done. “Try it that way.”

She opened her file, scrolled through it, and flashed him a bright smile. “Wow! Perfect! It’s five pages now. That’s amazing.”

Dylan nodded.

“Thank you so much! You’re so good at that.” She paused for a second, then whispered, “Hey, is it true? What they’re saying about your mom?”

“My mom?” Where was this going?

“You know, what was in the paper? That she . . . that she was arrested for murder.” Her almond eyes rounded a bit and he felt cold inside. “And it’s online.”

He knew. He’d already read it himself, but the article was pretty straightforward; just gave the facts on a homicide that was as old as dirt.

So Tori was suddenly interested in him so that he could help her do her homework and because his mother was some kind of psycho or something, possibly a killer? Suddenly he looked like some kind of bad boy? Edgy? Really?

“She didn’t kill anybody,” he said under his breath and felt heat crawling up the back of his neck.

“I know, I know, but wow. Arrested for murder. Can you imagine?”

“No.” He felt suddenly defensive.

“It’s kind of . . .”

Don’t say “cool.”

“. . . interesting.” She flashed him another smile. He’d known about the article and had wondered if it might be a big deal here at Edgewater High, but Tori was the first to bring it up to him. If anyone had read it or cared, he hadn’t heard about it.

Until now.

“If you say so.”

“At least you can say your mom’s not boring.” Tori picked up her things. “My mom’s an actuary. Ugh.” She rolled those incredible eyes, then pulled her phone from her pocket, studied the screen, and didn’t look back at him as the tone sounded, signifying the end of class and the end of the day.

He grabbed his backpack, keeping with the mob of students. It was too bad that he couldn’t even think that she might like him just a little if only for the wrong reasons.