Changing the Rules (Richter Book 1)(30)

The muscles in Cooper’s throat started to constrict.

Silence hovered.

“I had to put it away, Claire.” His words came out slowly.

He felt her fingernails push into his forearm where her hand was still resting.

“What?” Her one-word question was asked with a quiver in her voice.

“You were eighteen.”

“Oh, God.”

“Eighteen and Neil stepped in as father figure.”

“Eighteen and able to make my own decisions,” she told him.

“You needed to grow up.”

Claire’s hand pulled away. “And did I? Am I grown up now?”

Even dressed like a teenager, she wasn’t one. “Yes.”

“Is that why you’re back now? I’m old enough for this conversation?” Her words were crisp and her smile was replaced with a thin line.

“I needed to stop pretending I was happy in Europe. I needed to stop getting information about you by asking coy questions to the team.”

Her eyes narrowed. “So you talked to the team about this, but not me?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

She twisted even further in her seat, hands fisted by her lap. “We were friends!”

He hated that she put that in past tense. “Of course.”

“You were crushing on me, so you left?”

Crushing wasn’t the right word. “You were eighteen.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “I was an adult.”

“You had the nickname Yearling.”

She lifted a finger in his face. “No. You don’t get to call me that anymore. My friend called me that because I could outshoot, outrun, and hold my own with him. You called me Yearling as a way to pretend I wasn’t qualified to work with this team when we all knew I was.”

No, she had that wrong. “I called you Yearling to remind myself that no matter how hot you were making a target your bitch, no matter how sexy hearing you talk to Sasha in some foreign tongue was, and no matter how much I wanted to feel you pressed against me . . . You. Were. Eighteen!”

Claire’s eyes shifted rapidly between his, her lower lip started to quiver, and her nose flared as she pulled in each staccato breath.

She scrambled to get out of the car.

Cooper didn’t think, he just made sure he got out of the car faster and caught up with her as she reached the front door.

He stopped her hand before she could twist the knob.

Only now she was standing in front of him, his body pressed close to her back.

“Let me go,” she whispered. He heard the tears in the back of her throat.

Cooper closed his eyes and briefly lowered his forehead to the back of her head. He’d ruined their friendship with his confession. And that hurt more than he thought possible. He loosened his hold on her hand, and she slammed the door between them.

With his palm resting against the house, he heard another door inside slam.

“Damn it.”





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


First thing Monday morning, Mr. Eastman stood in front of his whiteboard with several algebra equations scribbled on it.

As Claire filed into the room, and took her normal spot toward the back, she heard several students grumble.

“What’s this?” Sean flung a hand gesture at the board as he turned his chair around and straddled it.

The last of the students walked through the door when the bell rang.

“I’ve been told that several of you are having trouble in Dunnan’s class, so I thought it would be a good idea to spend our time reviewing some of the basics.”

One of the girls raised her hand. “Angie and I are taking geometry.”

Eastman smiled. “Then maybe you guys can tutor some of your classmates who are struggling.”

Claire lowered her head in her hands with an audible moan.

“Do you have a problem, Miss Porter?”

“Too much whiskey last night,” Sean muttered so quietly under his breath, only those closest to him heard what he’d said.

She snarled at the guy. He obviously had spoken to Elsie or Kyle. Good gossip spread in a high school faster than a venereal disease in a brothel.

“Mind sharing?” Eastman asked.

Claire glanced around the room. It was time to ramp up her reputation. “Yeah, I have a problem.”

He lifted both hands to the classroom. “You have all of our attention.”

“I’m hungover and I’m not going to math today.” She used math as if it were a verb.

The class erupted in laughter.

Eastman tapped the whiteboard pen against his palm.

“Hungover?” he stated.

“Hey, I’m here, aren’t I?” Truth was, the conversation with Cooper had zapped all the alcohol from her system the second his words were out. Her hangover was from crying and avoiding Jax’s questions all night. She’d managed three hours’ sleep and she felt it.

“So is that going to be your excuse when you have a job and can’t perform the next day?” he asked.

“I can do the job,” she challenged him. “I said I’m not going to.”

“Ohhh . . .”

Claire was surprised there weren’t cell phones out and filming the way the class was chattering among themselves.