Ephemeral by Addison Moore

Author:Addison Moore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Addison Moore
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

30

Mr. Jones and Me

Once everyone disperses, Wesley takes me down to my uncle’s office to have a quick chat with him.

It’s lined with the same dark paneling, same rustic furniture that puts me to sleep, boring as an overeducated professor straining out a lecture—too soft to hear over the snores of the other students.

I didn’t think people like the Andersons existed. You heard about them on the news once in a while. They were privy to exotic occurrences like home invasion robberies where they had their throats slit in exchange for jewels. They had fathers that went to prison because they instigated Ponzi schemes, embezzled millions from corporations, or were found guilty of insider trading.

The only other place where the extremely wealthy resided was in the fictitious world of soaps that my mother watched religiously. They were the ones with home libraries, velvet furniture, rooms painted hunter green with oil paintings hung over the fireplace. But here, in this new reality it was all true, every last word, and then some.

“Laken,” Wes blinks when he says my name, “you know I would never hurt you.” A red flag—a flare, an entire series of blazing sirens go off in my head. No good conversation starts off that way, so, expectantly, I’m leery of his next sentence. “Last night, Jones came up and asked about the commotion.” Wes nods as if I should know where this is headed. “So I told him.”

“Oh.” I’m not exactly sure what Wes told him since he only knows half the story, and I’m not feeling too altruistic about spilling the lip lock with Cooper. It’s bad enough he saw the visual manifest in my mind earlier.

“And,” he says, making wild eyes at the carpet before looking back up at me, “I sort of filled him in about your ongoing inability to remember.”

Wow. Payback for kissing Cooper is a real bitch. He doesn’t really know that Cooper kissed me, does he? As far as Wes is concerned, he just pried into one of my warped fantasies, not some play-by-play of what actually happened.

“Thanks a lot, Wes. I’ll be in lockdown at the Flanders house of horrors before dinner. People with money always lock up their crazy relatives,” I hiss. “They’re not like the rest of society who give them free roam of the general population—the option of group therapy on the odd fucking occasion.”

Wesley’s face bleaches out at my viral expletive before his lips curve as if he suddenly found my state of panic adorable.

Jones strides in. His cologne enters the vicinity long before he swoops over to the other side of the desk. Suddenly it feels like an official visit to the counselor’s office, the Oval office, anything but a quick word with a relative about chasing prospective she-devils in the backyard.

“Laken.” His voice resonates softly. It endears me to him without even trying. “I hear you’re seeing Dr. Flanders.” He gives a heartfelt look as if this were the worst news possible, and it very well might be.

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