Unconditional by Cherie M. Hudson

Author:Cherie M. Hudson [Hudson, Cherie M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Unexpected Changes

An hour later, I walked out of Dean Watkins’s office.

Wow. In the short time I’d spent sitting in the musty room full of leather-bound science tomes, the austere man’s cataract-gray stare fixed on me with unwavering focus as he read me the riot act, every plan I’d made for my time in Australia shifted.

Apparently, the university wasn’t exactly pleased with the media attention my…situation…with Raphael Jones and Brendon Osmond had caused. Apparently, they’d decided it was time I moved to the field study component of my scholarship.

Apparently—and I’m only assuming this based on the way he went bright red and stammered about for a bit when I mentioned the royal family of Delvania’s part in my accelerated timeframe—he’d pocketed a nice bribe to help get me out of Raphael’s life. When Horn had failed dealing directly with me, he’d moved onto the dean, who was now getting rid of me. I wondered if he’d get a knighthood in Delvania for a job well done.

It was hard not to be angry when he called an end to the meeting with a laborious wave of his hand at the door and a condescending, “Perhaps you will be less distracted and more focused on the reason for your studies in Australia once on the farm.”

The farm was a cattle property roughly the size of the town of Plenty, situated some four-hundred miles northwest of Sydney on the fringe of the Outback. A large koala population existed on it, left alone by the owners of the property for the sake of ongoing research into the marsupials’ survival and existence. My original pre-RaB schedule (that’s pre-Raph and Brendon, in case you didn’t figure it out) called for me to spend the last five weeks of my studies there, tagging koalas in the wild and collecting data on their movements to support my thesis. Those last five weeks weren’t meant to occur for another three weeks.

But due to the media circus—or due to a phone call from Horn, I wasn’t sure which—I was being shipped off at the end of this week. In four days. According to Dean Watkins, it would have been tomorrow if not for the fact the family I was staying with had yet to return from a holiday in Fiji.

In four days, I was leaving Sydney for good.

Four days.

For some reason, I couldn’t feel happy.

In fact, for some reason, I felt…cheated. After Mom’s incredible pep talk, after the encouragement Heather had given me on the drive to the university to “rip off Raph’s clothes and ride him silly”, I was more than just a little excited about facing the rest of my adventure here in Oz.

Okay, I didn’t have plans to confess to Raph I thought I was falling in love with him, and golly-gee wouldn’t it be wonderful if we spent the rest of our lives together in splendid bliss. That definitely wasn’t part of my plan. But I had decided, between climbing out of Brendon’s car in the student

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