Tempting the Knight - Heidi Rice Page 0,1

told her ‘not to worry, we’ll figure this out,’ Seb had shot Zelda his what-the-hell-have-you-done-this-time look, and then blanked her. He sat next to her now, as they waited their turn with Mercy and her parents and Faith and Mr. High and Mighty to get a roasting from the Mother Superior, still ignoring her. His booted foot tapped on the polished wood floor, the patient thud, thud, thud echoing in Zel’s skull like a death knell in time with the loud ticks of the grandfather clock.

With his hair shorn off in a brutal buzz cut, his skin darkly tanned from his latest tour in the French Foreign Legion, the blank expression on his face neither angry nor consoling, Seb seemed like even more of a stranger than the last time she’d seen him. Four months ago, when he’d dropped her at St. J’s after she and Mercy had spent the Christmas break at the Madison townhouse in Manhattan. Before Seb had headed off to his latest posting with the Legion. Or rather, before he’d run away from her. Again.

“It was only a few glasses,” Zel whispered, attempting to get him to at least acknowledge her existence. “Iggy totally overreacted,” she added, using the nickname she and her friends had coined for their least favorite sister.

Seb turned and blinked, as if surprised to see her there. Then shrugged. “Whatever, Zelda.”

She slumped back against the uncomfortable bench seat, her panic increasing. He was wearing that weary scowl again, the one he’d worn when he’d sent her off to boarding school three years ago, despite all her pleas and protests and angry tears, and the two times she’d been expelled since and she’d been sent off somewhere new.

But this time was different she wanted to yell at him. This time she didn’t want to leave. And she didn’t want to return to the Madison Mausoleum. There was nothing left for her in their huge family home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side anymore, the shadowy hallways and empty rooms as moody and miserable as her brother, and she’d finally figured it out.

She glanced across at Mercy, whose cheeks glowed pink under her olive toned skin before her friend’s gaze darted away. Mercy’s mother whispered something in hissed Spanish while her father sat on her other side, stony faced.

I wish Mum and Dad were here to be mad at me.

Zelda swallowed down the choking feeling in her throat. The cramping pain in her stomach a cruel echo of the agony she’d been in three years ago.

It can’t be happening again. I can’t lose my friends now, too.

The four of them couldn’t get chucked out of St. J’s. She couldn’t bear it. Faith, Dawn, and Mercedes were her only friends. They were all she had now. The other school misfits. Ever since she’d arrived at St. J’s a year ago and been assigned to their dorm room, she’d bonded with them. Maybe not at first, because she’d been so hurt and angry and still determined to cause as much trouble as possible so Seb would notice her and let her come home. But gradually she’d come around, and figured out that all the things that made her friends strange to everyone else, made them fascinating and fun and perfect to her.

Mercedes’ thick Argentinian accent, which they had all dedicated themselves to helping her lose. Her stalwart loyalty and passionate temperament, so unlike the demure expression she wore now for her parents’ benefit. Faith’s quiet grief, and dogged determination, the incredible pictures she drew and the funny stories, which Zelda would beg her to tell them all late at night, about growing up over her family’s Irish pub in Brooklyn. Dawn, the scholarship girl, who the other girls teased because she was tall and gawky and who Sister Bridget had said they should all respect with a sneery tone in her voice that really meant the opposite. But who Zelda and Mercy and Faith knew was really super smart and super witty. All those things made them the closest thing Zel had now to family. Zel, the bad girl, who spoke with a British accent the rest of the school accused her of faking because she’d been born in New York, who’d been expelled from two boarding schools in the UK already and who had only got to go back to her family’s townhouse in Manhattan for Christmas with Mercy in tow after begging her brother for months.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time she’d lost herself