Playboy Princes (Royals of Arbon Academy, #2)(15)

I stood there, chewing my lip and debating what to reply. I needed to tell her now, not later. Before she heard from someone else that Alex and I had been making out in the hallway like we were... ugh... in love.

"Vi," someone said, and I startled. My gaze shifted up from my palm reader and collided with Jordan's tawny brown eyes. "Is it true?" His face was tortured. "You're back with Alex? After everything you told us... everything we told you..."

He wasn't just referring to Alex's betrayal. He was talking about how he’d confessed to liking me, kissed me, saw me naked, knew I'd fucked Rafe... and then I'd run away without having the decency to discuss it all further.

So much for being the badass, fearless Violence. I was nothing but a coward.

I shook my head, closing the gap between us by a few steps and reaching out to touch his arm. He held them tightly folded across his chest, and the muscles contracted beneath my fingers in a way that sapped my mouth of all moisture.

How the fuck had I ended up in this situation? I'd hardly spent any time with Jordan at all, but the interactions we had had... Yeah, I guess I liked him too. A hell of a lot more than I liked any of the other guys in this fucking academy, anyway.

My brain conjured up a flash memory of Rafe's head buried between my legs, my blood smeared on his strong hands as they held my thighs apart... almost like it was accusing me of lying to myself. Weird.

"It's not like that," I insisted, my voice pitched low and urgent. I couldn't let my friends think that of me. If I was going to make it through four years of schooling at Arbon Academy, I couldn't go it alone. I needed support. I needed my friends. All of them. "Can you..." I sucked in a breath, thinking as fast as my brain would go, then heaved a sigh. "Do you think you could cut classes this morning with me? I want to fill you in on shit. And I think maybe we need to talk about, you know, things."

“I can cut class; they don’t give a fuck what the royals do.”

Right. I’d forgotten that small detail. I was the only one here who had something to lose in this insanity of a situation.

Jordan relaxed minutely, reaching out and gripping my hand. He pulled me along the hall, and once again, I was going in the opposite direction to Alex and the school, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Unlike Rafe, Jordan didn’t take me to a hidden piece of paradise. Nope. Dude deposited me in his room, on his bed, slamming and locking the door behind us.

A small laugh escaped and Jordan zeroed in on that, his eyes narrowing. “What’s so funny, Cinderella?”

I shook my head. “How the fuck I keep finding myself in these situations, I’ll never know.”

Jordan stalked across the room toward me. There was literally no other way to describe his walk, filled with arrogance and long-legged grace. I had a feeling he might be almost as good a fighter as Rafe, judging on the way he moved. “Maybe you like trouble, little princess.”

I was shaking my head before he even finished. “No. that’s not it at all. Trouble finds me, I don’t go searching for it.”

Liar. Yeah, I kinda was. But for the most part I kept myself out of anything too dark. I had limits. I’d always drawn a line and I’d stayed firmly on the side closer to the light. But now. Now I kept slipping and finding myself in these murky shades of gray. Pretty soon I would be in too deep.

“Why did you bring me here?” I asked, standing. He was towering over me, staring down, and it had shifted the balance of power too much for my liking.

Jordan shrugged, but his eyes weren’t giving me the same indifference. “It’s private. Figured you didn’t want this spread around the school.”

I sobered at the thought. “It’s kind of life and death right now,” I admitted. “So private is definitely best.”

Sucking in a deep breath, I quickly blurted out my next line. “I have to pretend to date Alex otherwise he basically told me I’d end up the same as Jasmine. I’m trapped like a fucking mouse that was too stupid to see the danger until it was too late. Kissing Alex in the hall made my skin fucking crawl and if I could have killed him without repercussions, right then and there, I would have.”

Needing to do something, because the intensity of his gaze was almost as disconcerting as Rafe’s when he locked me in, I started to wander around the room, trying to find something personal about Jordan in here. There were a few photos only, mostly of him and Rafe, but also two with his parents. I recognized the king and queen of New America. Unlike their heirs, they were often in the public eye.

“I’ll head back in summer for a week,” he said from right behind me, and I would have jumped, but I’d felt him at my back a second before he spoke. “Be nice to see them and my little sister.”

I spun, blinking up at him. “You have a sister?”

He nodded. “Yeah, she’s twelve. Pain in my ass, but also the best fucking kid in the world.”

His face got all soft when he spoke about her, and I felt my heart start pounding like a drum in my chest. When he leaned in close, I started breathing embarrassingly hard. “What are we going to do about Alex?” he asked, and it took me far too long to register the question.

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “Reading between the lines of what he said, this is much deeper than any of us realized. It’s beyond just a simple arrogant fuck who thought he could force me to be his baby maker. The princess ballot was created with the sole purpose of ensuring genetically perfect royal heirs, whenever there wasn’t a match found in the royal circles. These women probably don’t even realize they are being manipulated, but it’s pretty clear that the dudes they marry are well aware of the situation.”