Discipline (5 page)

Daniel shook his head at me and grinned.
“That’s not fair, that’s two entirely different levels of
embarrassment. My secrets are about you. Yours are about other
people.”

“I have some about you, too,” I offered.
Christ, Nina
. My drunkenness was quite the double-edged
sword. With my lower lip bit back, I peered up at Daniel, whose
blue eyes danced as they gazed down at me.

“Huh. I guess that balances it out then,” he
said, his tone flirtatious in a way that made my heart pound so
hard it felt like each beat was lifting me off the wall. “Though
you’d have to reveal your secrets for us to be actually even.”

A wary hum escaped my lips. “Mm, yeah,
that’s not gonna happen,” I laughed quietly, looking down at my
hands as they twirled the hem of my top. My secrets weren’t so much
secrets as fantasies, but they were all sexual and about him. And
most of them had been dreamed up while sitting in his classroom
during a lesson.

My face grew hot as I ruefully recalled them
and reminded myself that the object of those fantasies was standing
before me, knowingly watching me as my cheeks flushed, my lower lip
disappearing between my teeth as I recalled one of the steamy
scenarios I’d created for us my senior year. It had been in his
classroom and though they were against our school dress code, I was
wearing a short skirt.

In my feverishness, his voice sounded far
away.

“Really not gonna tell me then, huh?” He
chuckled something low and sexy. “Yeah…” His eyes fixed on my lips
as I nodded. “That’s probably for the better.”

I looked up at him, inquisitive until I saw
the look in his eye. It was hungry but resistant and entirely
tortured. He swallowed hard when my gaze met his and only then did
I realize that I’d played too hard with the hem of my shirt and
tugged it down enough to bare a peek of lacy bra. Daniel’s eyes
bore into mine in a seeming attempt to keep from looking
downward.

“Nina, you’re killing me right now,” he
exhaled, laughing lightly at himself as he forced his eyes
elsewhere while I fixed my neckline.

As I did, I watched as his sleepy gaze shift
around the room, seeming to awaken at the sight of others, like
he’d forgotten for the past ten minutes that anyone else was
around. That anyone else existed. He blinked and straightened his
posture, as if suddenly remembering to be good in case these people
might somehow know others from Woodhill. My eyes darted about his
face as I felt him coming back to Earth though I wasn’t ready to
just yet.

“Daniel.”

Without a thought, my fingers grabbed tight
handfuls of his shirt. Immediately, his focus returned and upon
catching my expression, evaporated back into that lusty haze.
Good
. Whatever zone we were in, I needed more time. I was
still hot, dizzy and wanting desperately for him to touch me. I
watched as Daniel’s eyelids grew heavy again, his breath ragged as
I released his shirt to flatten my palms on his hard chest.

“What are you doing?” he murmured, gazing
down at my hands so that his forehead touched mine. He exhaled hard
when my fingers curled against his skin, scratching through his
shirt.

And with a grunt, his hands were suddenly on
my hips, grasping with a tight intensity, as if he’d been waiting
forever to put them there. Suddenly, he had me pushed against the
wall. Immediately, I was breathless, in need for more of his touch.
I closed my eyes, rolling my head to the side and willing him to
put his lips on my exposed neck. A thrill coursed down to my thighs
when he did. Breathing hard, I slid his palms from my hips to my
backside, eliciting a deep groan from the bottom of his throat.

“What are you doing to me?” he repeated,
drawing away just enough to look at me. My eyelashes batted as I
shrugged. I didn’t mean to play coy – I just couldn’t speak. His
chest was pressed against mine and I had his hands not too far from
where I wanted to be touched. If I opened my mouth, a moan would
come out. And so I stayed silent, watching his eyes close as I
pressed his hands harder against me, which he gladly let me do.
“Christ, Nina.” His fingers curled when he said my name, grabbing
handfuls of my backside and easily drawing that suppressed moan out
of me. He rumbled something deep and full of lust when the sound
escaped my lips. It made him tighten his grip on my ass and jerk my
body hard into his, as if trying to shake the sound out again. He
succeeded. I moaned right into his ear this time, my need for his
touch now panging hard between my legs. My eyes were closed again
but I was sure that I felt the flicker of his tongue on my
neck.

But suddenly, with a bump from a passing
stranger, I was let go.

My eyes flew open, flitting with panic when
I saw Daniel looking awake again, running a hand through his hair
while slowly backing away from me.

“What are you doing?” I panted, reaching for
him by his shirt. I pulled him closer and though he let me, it was
too late. His body wasn’t responding. His face had fallen solemn,
sober. He blinked at the ground.

“I’m asking myself the same question.”

“Don’t,” I protested. When he kept his
silence, I searched hard for some sort of argument, something to
convince him that it was okay. “You’re not my teacher anymore,” I
blurted.

He instantly grimaced. It was at the word
“teacher.”
Damn it, Nina
. Once again, he pulled away from my
body, his chest still heaving with ragged, heavy breathing. His
hand ran across his mouth as he watched me pant against the
wall.

He shook his head. And despite the need
burning in his eyes, there it was – that stupid teacher voice
again.

“We can’t do this, Nina,” he said before
walking away.

CHAPTER 3

“You guys suck, you know that right?” Kelsey
called over from table ten, where Em and I had sat her. It was far
enough from the bar that she wouldn’t hear our conversation, but
not far enough that she’d pout over being neglected.

She always drops by Todos Santos on Monday
nights because they’re generally dead and she can chat with us as
well as Harry, the hot Aussie who bartends alongside Em.

“Harry, go talk to her,” Em ordered as
Kelsey let out a long whine at us, only half joking. We had spent
much of the night being hush-hush, whispering over Daniel and what
had transpired last night. If I didn’t want Kelsey to know about
him before, I definitely didn’t want her to know now. Whatever it
was, we’d officially done something that Woodhill would have a
field day over. And having sensed a secret since yesterday, Kelsey
was antsy and even more prone to blabbing. She’d probably already
told her gossip-loving mother, my Aunt Erin, about me being
tight-lipped over something.

As Harry complied and dragged himself over
to her table, Em turned back to face me.

“I don’t mean to Adriana, but I’m gonna need
you to go after that man. Put that crochet dress on again and visit
him at school.”

I snorted. “That’s so wrong. I’m not
visiting the high school just to do that.”

“Fine. Then when do seniors graduate?”

“What?”

“Your brother is a senior. When is
graduation?”

Oh shit
. I’d completely forgotten
about Jake’s graduation. Maybe that was why he was calling. “Uh,
what date is it today? And shut up,” I said as a slow grin spread
Em’s face. She glanced down at her phone.

“June twenty-third. What date is
graduation?” she asked, quickly shaking her head at my utter
blankness. “Kelsey!” she called over the bar. “When’s your
brother’s graduation?”

“Huh?” She took a moment to pull her
attention off of Harry. “Oh. It’s on Friday. The
twenty-eighth.”

Whoops.

“Four days,” Em clucked. “Wouldn’t your mom
be calling nonstop lately to remind you about this?”

I cocked my head as I tried to remember. “I
think she said something about it last week. But all she really
talks about when she calls is Ben.”

“She still calls you every night?”

I nodded. “Last night, she spent twenty
minutes obsessing over the idea of Ben modeling, because her
hairstylist knows someone who knows someone at Ralph Lauren, and
wouldn’t Ben be perfect modeling Ralph Lauren?”

“Gross. You need to tell her about the
breakup so she stops bothering you about him.”

“I will. At some point.”

Em shook her head and clucked with
disapproval. “Is she really that obsessed with him that you need to
drag this out forever? You don’t even have to tell her everything –
just tell her that
he
broke up with
you
. Then she’ll
hate him with the rest of us.”

“It’s just…” I took in a deep breath, my
chest clenching with tenseness over the topic. I hadn’t told
anyone, not even Em, about my mother — or rather, my entire
family’s situation back in Woodhill, and why I’d so idiotically
stayed with Ben for all those years. “So, here’s one thing,” I
started, staring at my hands. “My mom and my aunt have been
planning for years to open a yoga studio-slash-spa in my town that
they think will be some crazy hot social scene for the moms. They
started mapping it out eight months ago and they just started
telling their friends about it.”

“Sounds bougie. Why are you telling me
this?”

“She’s under the impression that Ben will be
an investor.”

“
Why
?”

“Because he said he would be, though I doubt
that he meant it. He’s only ever invested in restaurants in the
city. But yeah, that’s a big part of my mother’s obsession. She has
too much pride to ask for money from her friends so Ben’s her dream
investor. She’s convinced that she needs him and that the spa will
earn loads and loads of money to… help us keep the house, I
guess.”

Em’s head snapped up. “Help you keep the
house?”

I swallowed the lump of guilt in my throat.
“It looks the opposite way but we don’t… have much money. My dad’s
been laid off by two different companies in the past four
years.”

“Damn. Can your mom go back to work?”

I shook my head adamantly. “She would rather
die than let people see her go back to work or downsize her life to
something affordable.” I flicked a tortilla chip off the bar top.
“She’s obsessed with being some figure of social grace in Woodhill.
No one even knows my dad is unemployed. He still leaves and goes
into the city every day like he’s going to work, but he’s really
just visiting his brother to pass time.”

Though I wasn’t looking at her, I could feel
Em staring, unblinking. “Holy shit, Nina, I didn’t know. I’m sorry.
Can’t you just… sell things? You guys have assets right? Doesn’t
your brother drive a BMW?” She smacked her forehead. “Didn’t he
just get into freakin’
Brown
? What’s the tuition like
there?”

“His car is leased and the tuition is…
including room and board, probably around fifty thousand dollars a
year.”

“Well. Good thing you dropped out of
college.”

I cringed. “Not before wasting fifteen
thousand dollars on one semester.” Rather than let me go undeclared
for a few semesters at a community college, Mom had me enroll in a
fairly name brand art school to study Art Conservation, a major
that neither of us had heard of. It simply gained points for
sounding “classy” to Mom. “Yeah, my mom isn’t going to sell
anything. She’s convinced that we’ll be out of this hole soon and
we’ll be millionaires because of the yoga spa thing.” I winced.
“And because of Ben. When she got drunk at my cousin’s wedding last
year, she told me that she was thankful to ‘have a future
billionaire in the family.’”

“Ew,
what
? He’s not family.”

“She likes to think so. That if I get
married to him he’ll support me and them too, which he was kind of
already doing. She used to always tell him that she’d have married
him herself if she were twenty years younger, but she’s ‘glad that
there’s a reason for us to be close now.’” Em’s face of horror
spurred me to go on. “Mm-hm. And you know they talk on the phone
all the time, right? It can go on for thirty, forty minutes. She
calls him to ask what he’d like her to cook and bring over, and
he’ll be all flirtatious with her because he knows how much she
loves it. She actually calls her friends after hanging up with Ben
to tell them what Ben just said, because she’s made him into this
godly figure among the housewives in Woodhill.” I shuddered at the
memories of it all. “And now I’m going to vomit.”

Em stuck her tongue out. “Yeah, let’s go to
the bathroom. I’ll vom with you.”

“See?” I managed a laugh. “I honestly
wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve talked since the breakup. The only
reason I’m leaning towards no is because he probably would’ve told
her about proposing and if she found out that I turned down that
ring, she would’ve already found me and beat my ass into the
ground.”

Em massaged her temples. “I’m sorry I said
anything. Keep it from her for as long as you want.”

“Except Jake’s graduation is coming up and
now I have to go home.”

“It would be a dick move to bail like you
did with his lacrosse finals, right?”

“They’d murder me. My mom throws massive
parties for these kinds of occasions. Full-blown tents in the yard
and catering,” I said, a little embarrassed by Em’s astonishment.
We never talk much about my family or Woodhill, mostly because I
never want to.

“Shit. That sounds crazy expensive.”

“It is. But my mom needs an excuse to invite
the whole town over so she can dress us all up and remind everyone
that we have nice things. Nice things and tons of debt.”

A frown formed between Em’s dark brows as
she doodled on a dollar bill. “God. I didn’t know any of this about
your family, Nina. And your mom’s cool with you waitressing here
like a plebe?”

I laughed. “The waitressing thing is a
secret from everyone. Especially since I need it for the money.” I
wrinkled my nose, feeling a little pang of guilt. “My mom grew up
kind of poor and her family got made fun of a lot. Apparently she’d
always tell everyone that a hot rich guy with a six-pack would one
day sweep her off her feet. And that once she had kids, they’d have
presents for every Christmas and every birthday and that she’d
spoil the snot out of them… which she definitely did.” I couldn’t
help laughing as I thought about the pink, three-tiered cake I had
for my sixth birthday, as well as the gypsy horse Mom had rented
for the party. Though it wasn’t as lavish as my sweet sixteen,
which she had a Midtown restaurant shut down for, arranging party
buses to transport all my friends to and from the city. Even then,
I’d found it excessive, though my teenaged self certainly didn’t
complain. “My childhood memories do actually look like a picture
book.”