Chapter 5 #3
“Oh, that must be hard.” I couldn’t help but think of how much I already missed my mom. It had only been a day, and she was still in the same country. I couldn’t imagine her being on another continent—even if I was currently angry with her.
“Not really, they’re always traveling.” Cress shrugged again. “Plus, I had our townhouse all to myself this summer. It was great.”
I matched her smile, but I didn’t envy her one bit.
I might have spent most of the summer working at the café, but I couldn’t imagine being left home alone for the whole break.
Especially if I’d already spent the entire school year away at boarding school like Cress had.
If anything, I felt a little sorry for her.
Just as we reached the front door to Lauder, it opened and a boy stepped through the entrance. He was frowning with his head tilted down and his eyes focused on the ground. He must have sensed us standing there waiting for him to pass because he lifted his head, and our gazes collided.
As our eyes met, I felt a flare of recognition, but I knew I’d never seen him before in my life. The strangest mix of emotions ran through me. I felt both a sense of comfort and like I was helplessly exposed all at once.
His bright green eyes pulled me in so intensely that I struggled to look away. I was stunned by the way he had affected me. Who was this guy?
“Hey, Noah,” Cress said. Her words felt distant, like I was hearing an echo of them from underwater.
The boy slowly turned to Cress, and when his eyes moved to my roommate, the connection between us snapped. I could finally breathe again, and I immediately felt like an idiot. I must have been staring at him like a total fool.
“Cress,” Noah replied. “I was just inside looking for you.” His voice was deep and pleasant, and now that I wasn’t so distracted by his gorgeous eyes, I realized they weren’t the only attractive thing about him.
He was so stunning he didn’t quite seem real.
His deep-brown hair was unkempt and fell down across his forehead.
His lips were full and soft compared to the sharp line of his jaw.
He was tall—far taller than I was—and his tight shirt did little to cover the strong muscles corded beneath.
This boy was the kind of guy who gave fathers nightmares and made grown women swoon. He was overwhelming in every sense of the word, and I got the feeling he could destroy a girl’s heart with just one look. He was trouble in both the best and worst sense of the word.
“Well, here I am,” she replied. “This is my new roommate, Isobel. She’s just started at Weybridge, and I’m showing her around.”
My mouth went dry as his all-encompassing green eyes returned to mine.
The intensity with which he’d stared at me just seconds before had completely disappeared though.
He now seemed so bored as he took me in that I wondered if I’d imagined it.
He looked me over just once before returning his attention to Cress.
It wasn’t at all surprising that a guy like him would have no interest in me.
“Are you coming to Luther’s tonight?” he asked Cress.
“Yeah, we’ll be there,” she replied, her smile widening.
“We can catch up then. I’ll leave you to your babysitting duties.” The corner of his lip twitched, but he continued walking past us before I could see his expression properly. With each step he took from us, I felt myself breathing easier.
Cress started giggling, jolting me back to reality. I quickly looked away from him and found her smiling at me. “I see you’ve already experienced the Noah Hastings effect.”
“The what?” As the words left my lips, the name finally seemed to register in my mind.
Noah Hastings. This was the guy my father had been warning me about?
I glanced over my shoulder and watched him walk away from us.
Matthew had called Noah a boy, but I really didn’t think that was an accurate description of a guy with that many muscles.
“Noah has a way of making girls lose their words,” Cress explained.
“You didn’t seem to lose your words,” I said, dragging my eyes away from Noah.
“Because Noah happens to be my cousin. And yuck!” She emphasized her point with an exaggerated shudder. “Anyway, half the girls at school imagine themselves in love with him.”
“Why only imagine?”
“Because you can’t love someone you don’t really know,” she said. “He’s left a trail of broken hearts a mile long.”
Perhaps that was the reason for Matthew’s warning, though my father really didn’t need to worry.
There was nothing I hated more than guys who didn’t treat girls well and bulldozed through their emotions.
I’d been that girl. I kind of still was that girl.
And if there was one positive thing to come out of Levi cheating on me, it was the determination I felt never to let something like that happen to me again.
If Noah was half as bad as Cress suggested, I’d be steering well clear of him this year even without Matthew’s advice.
“But, enough about my dreary cousin,” Cress continued. “Let’s get inside and show you our room already.”
She pulled the door open and entered the building.
I glanced over my shoulder one last time, catching sight of Noah as he was flocked by a group of girls.
One girl in particular seemed to stake her claim over him as she linked her arm with his.
She was gorgeous with long red hair and legs that went for days.
But, despite her obvious possessiveness of Noah, the other girls in the group weren’t discouraged, and they continued giving him flirtatious smiles and fluttering their lashes at him.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of Levi, who’d always been fending off advances from other girls—even when I’d been standing at his side. I scrunched up my lips with distaste. It appeared every school had their king, and I’d just met Weybridge Academy’s.