Wild Swans - Jessica Spotswood Page 0,2

flashlight. “I better go.” Granddad gets a little skittish about Alex being here when I’m home alone. Alex and I have never given him any reason not to trust us, but when your only daughter goes and gets herself pregnant twice before the age of twenty, you maybe have reason to be a little overprotective.

Like I said, I pick my battles.

“You going to be okay now that the Professor’s home? No more ghosts?” Alex licks a raindrop from his upper lip and smiles. It’s his placating-Ivy smile, the one that says I let my imagination run away with me. The one he uses when I get all dreamy over a boy in a book or want to watch an old black-and-white movie or point out shapes in the clouds. The one that makes me feel like maybe I am a Milbourn girl after all—sensitive and selfish and bound for a bad end.

I grit my teeth, but the worry in his brown eyes is genuine. “Yep. I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. See you.” He jogs off through the rainy backyard.

“Ivy?” Granddad cusses as he knocks into something out in the hall.

“In here!” I pull the french doors shut.

He limps into the room, tossing his battered briefcase onto the sofa. He nods at me and the flashlight. “How long has the power been off?”

“Not long. Couple minutes.” I smile as he heads right for Dorothea’s crooked portrait and straightens it. He might be a professor, but he’s only absentminded when he wants to be.

“What’ve you been up to?” he asks.

“Nothing. Reading.” I wave my copy of Jane Eyre at him.

“Reading isn’t nothing, young lady. Not in this house.” He gives me a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes and plops down into his brown leather recliner. “Have a seat. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

That feeling slams into me again—impending doom—and I shiver. My skin feels like it’s coated in cobwebs. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing we can’t handle.” Granddad stares up at Dorothea. “You know that student of mine? The one who’s working in my office this summer?”

“Connor Clarke.” As if I could forget. He’s a rising sophomore who’s somehow made himself indispensable. He aced Granddad’s upper-level Twentieth Century American Poets course last semester.

Granddad nods. “I invited him over for lunch tomorrow. Remind me to leave a note for Luisa.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Tomorrow’s Wednesday.”

He runs a hand over his bristly gray beard. “And?”

“Wednesday is Luisa’s day off. Has been for years.”

“Ah, I forgot.” He steeples his fingers together. “You work the late shift tomorrow, don’t you? Maybe you could join us.”

Like I said—he’s only forgetful when it suits him. “And make you lunch?”

He shrugs. “You might enjoy yourself. Connor’s a good kid. Smart. Driven. He wrote an excellent paper on Dorothea. Most students are too intimidated to write a critical essay about my mother-in-law. It earned him an A on the paper and in the class.”

“So you’ve mentioned.” He hardly ever gives As in that class. Connor’s probably an insufferable suck-up. “Impressive for a freshman.”

“Would’ve been impressive for a senior.” Granddad grins. He gets a kick out of my “competitive spirit,” as he calls it. But he’s the one who raised me to be ambitious, to think I could do anything I put my mind to. “I offer that class every spring. You could take it yourself.”

We’ve had this conversation a million times. “If I stay here”—which I might, because I’d get free tuition and the college has a good swim team and a strong English program, and I worry about leaving Granddad all alone—“I’m not taking your classes. It would be too weird.”

“It wouldn’t be weird unless you made it weird,” he insists. “You’d have to earn your B like everybody else.”

“Except Connor,” I grumble, bristling that he thinks this boy is smarter than me.

“Connor’s an exceptional young man.” Granddad casts a dubious look at Jane Eyre. “Really, Ivy. You’d rather study the nineteenth-century English novel than twentieth-century American poetry?”

I stick out my tongue at him. “I am dying to take Amelia’s class on the nineteenth-century English novel, and you know it. Her Women in Shakespeare too.”

Granddad sighs. “No accounting for taste, I suppose.”

I grin, flopping back against the worn leather sofa. “You’re the one who raised me to be a feminist. And you’re perfectly capable of using the stove yourself, but I suppose I can make you and Connor some lunch. He’s not a vegetarian, is he?”

“Oh, I hope not.” Granddad shudders. “He seems so promising.”

I smile, tucking my