The Viper (Untamed Hearts #1)(7)
Katie had even taken to posting on craigslist, short messages sent out to Miami with the vain hope of Marcos seeing them and contacting her. All the effort got her was an inbox full of messages from weirdos, but she still posted at least once a week. At the moment, it was the only way she had to reach out to him.
She didn’t like that Chuito.
Not at all.
The two of them had been glaring at each other every time they crossed paths over the past several months. His contempt for her was every bit as potent as hers for him, with all his secrets and dark looks. She was strangely fearless of the light-heavyweight UFC champion. She knew he recognized Marcos’s jacket that she wore whenever it was cold. Which had been always since January. She didn’t care. Let him think what he wanted.
Chuito wouldn’t even give her a damn cell phone number. Jules certainly didn’t have Marcos’s contact information, and had largely discouraged Katie from seeking him out.
“Turn that one loose,” Jules said when Katie sat in the chair behind Jules’s desk and complained about Chuito’s silence on the subject. “He’s probably doing you a favor. We wouldn’t have sponsored him at the Cellar even if he hadn’t taken you out two hours after New Years. Checkered past is an understatement.” Jules glanced at a file on her desk and mumbled to herself. “Dunno why Chuito recommended him in the first place.”
Katie snorted in disbelief. Jules’s own husband had been in prison. Everyone knew it, and she would have called the pretty lawyer on it if the phone hadn’t rung. Jules held up her hand and answered it, which led to a long conversation about taxes and accounting that made Katie’s eyes glaze over. Numbers reminded her of her ex-husband. She quietly excused herself and left.
But she was due back at Jules’s desk, to glare a little at Chuito, who was always underfoot there considering he lived in an apartment above Jules’s law office, and argue some more with Jules. The last time she was there, she’d noticed Chuito had the same snake tattoo on the inside of his forearm that Marcos had. That was very curious. They had to be close friends. She was going to ask him about it the next time she saw him.
This accident had made history geek Katie Foster downright bold, and she liked the change in herself. Life had taught her nothing if not that time was fleeting and a wasted chance was nothing but a potential regret. Screw that. She had enough regrets for a lifetime.
The AP students crowded around her desk to discuss their end-of-the-year projects.
She answered their questions as she pulled on Marcos’s jacket and retrieved her purse from her bottom drawer. She’d already told Principal Jenkins she was leaving early once school let out. Jules Wellings owed her a conversation that she had been avoiding with impressive skill for almost four months. Now it was time to hit her when she least expected it.
The last of the students cleared out. Katie gathered her papers to grade, taking the time to neatly organize them in the soft-sided leather briefcase her mother had bought her the day she had gotten the job at the high school. Her mother died three months later of a rapidly spreading cancer.
Katie took very good care of her briefcase.
Which was why she didn’t appreciate it when she slammed into Grayson before she even had the chance to close the classroom door. Katie’s ex-husband frowned down at her. “Heard you’re blowing off the staff meeting.”
“Physical therapy appointment,” she lied as she dropped down to pick up the briefcase he had knocked out of her hand, and then spent the time to reorganize the papers. Fuming.
He had the good grace to bend down and help her pick up the papers from her earlier classes, but she noticed he didn’t apologize about the briefcase as she sat there brushing it off. She rubbed at a scuffmark on the corner, trying to decide if it had been there or if Grayson had caused it.
“This boy is hopeless,” Grayson mumbled, reading one of the papers in his hand. “Look at that grammar. You’d think after failing algebra three times he’d at least know how to spell.”
She jerked the paper out of his hand. “That’s mine.”
“Dumb jocks. Why the hell did we decide to stay in Garnet to teach?” He shook his head, obviously expecting understanding. “They still plague us, Katie girl.”
“Don’t call me that.” She put the paper back into her briefcase along with the rest. “I like Jason Clover. He tries hard, and Ned said he does amazing things in auto body. We can’t all rule the world through calculus.”
“Oh, a math jab.” He grinned rather than rise to the bait. “You’ve been spunky since the accident. I like it.”
“Gross.” Katie shuddered as she stood, unable to fathom that once upon a time she’d thought the sun and the moon rose over this man’s shoulders. He’d been so different from the other boys in their town. Grayson understood her love of academics, even if their interests were vastly different, and she’d gotten married without a second thought as a sophomore in college. How utterly stupid. “I have to go now.”
She’d take a jock any day over a math geek. Grayson had burned her for her own breed—likely forever.
She walked out of the room without looking back.
Ashley, the cheerleading coach, who was in the hallway instead of on the field, bumped into her before the door had even clicked closed, but this time Katie had a firm grip on the handle of her briefcase out of anger.