Unleashed (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance) (7 page)

“Great speech.”

I look up and am too slow to stop the gasp from leaving my lips.

It’s Chance Hudson. Prized school athlete, jock, extremely good looking, and from what I hear, total manslut.

First I catch him staring at me, now he’s
following
me?

What the hell does he want?

His gorgeous hazel eyes bore straight into mine, and I find it hard to maintain eye-contact. He’s been teasing and tormenting me for
a whole year
.

He used to be two years above me. Back then, I never used to have to deal with him. All the girls talked about him, but I didn’t care. I had other things to focus on.

One year, he disappeared, just vanished. He didn’t come to school a single day. It’s not like I was keeping track, that’s what people told me.

We all assumed he’d gotten some kind of early sports scholarship to a college. That’s how it is, you know? They can’t grab the athletes fast enough.

But then he came back, to my astonishment. The gossip around school was that he had gone on an amateur MMA fight tour around Asia, and had won the grand prize, some one-hundred thousand dollars.

Big deal. So he beat up a bunch of people, whoop-dee-doo.

His coming back meant, though, that he had to make up his credits or else he couldn’t officially graduate. Why he even bothered, instead of taking one of those scholarships, I’ll never know.

Somehow, he ended up in almost
all
of my advanced classes, the ones I was taking with the grade above me.

Technically, today I graduated a year early, but it’s balanced by the fact that I started schooling a year late.

Chance shifts his weight in front of me, and I’m pulled from my thoughts back into reality.

He wipes his medium-length, chestnut-brown hair to the side. It’s a little messy, unkempt in an attractive way. His golden-tan seems to shine in the afternoon sunlight. I immediately notice the texture of his skin. His hands are scarred and rough, with knuckles that look bigger than they should be.

Of course, he’s a fighter. All that punching, all that injury, hence all that scar tissue.

His broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted body, all muscle and not an ounce of fat, towers over me. I’m quite literally sitting in his shadow.

“Oh God,” I groan, looking away. “Not you!”

It’s warm, and I’m tired, and I shook like a wet puppy on the stage. I was Valedictorian, gave a speech, and I was
terrible
at it!

There were hundreds of parents there, and the red lights of camera-phones recording me had succeeded only in making me more nervous.

My voice had hitched, my lips had trembled, and I had to put down the paper that I wrote the speech on because my shaking hands were making it crinkle into the microphone, causing a high-pitched feedback loop.

The whole audience had groaned, covered their ears, leveled accusing eyes at me.

By the time the speech was over, my dress beneath my gown was clinging to my back, and my forehead and upper lip were beading, though I didn’t know that second bit until I got off stage and went to the bathroom.

Of course, Dad wasn’t there to see me talk, to see me graduate.

It would have been better if he was, if I could see his face, glean some comfort from his presence. We had argued the week before when he told me he wouldn’t be able to attend because he was going on some company retreat with all of his partners.