Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Unfortunately, college was another thing entirely, and if Sweden kept up her brainy-farm-girl thing on campus, she would be eaten alive.
“Whoa, whoa, Speed Racer,” Fitz called when she’d managed to skip half a block ahead of him. She turned, arms sticking straight out in that ancient arctic jacket. “Stop and take a look.” He pointed to the right. “This is where your music class is.”
She jogged back and followed his outstretched arm to the building in front of them. She had to turn her head up nearly to the sky to be able to peer out of that enormous hood. “Oh! The Blackburne Mansion! Did you know this house was built in 1898?”
“Sure did.” In fact, he’d had no idea, though the information was likely italicized and underlined somewhere in a training pamphlet Dean Zhou had handed him at some point.
She grinned, bolstered by what she seemed to read as Fitz’s enthusiasm. “And in the late 1940s the school bought it, and it became the music conservatory building. Legends say that it was once haunted.”
“Cool story.” Fitz clapped his hands, relieved that they’d reached the end of their walk around campus and he could head to work. He pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the time. “Well, you have a class here Tuesday and Thursday mornings at ten.”
“Would you go into a haunted house?” she asked.
He looked up from his iPhone. “What?”
“A haunted house.” She pointed to the mansion again. “The priest who used to teach here would sleep in his office to reassure his students that there were no ghosts.”
“And? Was he right?”
“No. He eventually had to perform an exorcism.”
Fitz laughed. “An exorcism, huh?”
“I know. I think they’re made up, too, but even so, I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to sleep in an empty house that everyone thinks is haunted.” She smiled, revealing those perfect teeth and the little dimple low on her cheek, and once again he was lost in the absolute beauty of her face.
She was, without question, the hottest woman Fitz had ever seen. She had these enormous, sparkling green eyes that seemed to take him in all at once, drinking in everything in front of her. Maybe that was what made him so uncomfortable in her presence—that feeling that she might be the first person on this campus who could see straight through him right to his rotten, unending bullshit. She was small, had zero flirtation game, and dressed like her only source of clothing was hand-me-downs from a much older aunt, but when she’d unzipped her coat earlier, he registered that she had a banging body under all those frumpy layers. And then there was the hair. It seemed alive, somehow, a kind of golden that appeared metallic in the rare glimpses of the sun they’d had so far. Even though it was wound up in a heavy braid, some of it had fallen loose, and it was unsettling how many times he’d thought about reaching out and touching it.
The problem was her. Fitz was the one doing the campus tour but felt like he was on a field trip led by a golden retriever with a PhD. She sang a song naming all the elements as they passed the science quad; she recited the entire preamble to the US Constitution when he’d pointed out her political science building. She could name every tree, flower, and leaf on the grounds—and, to his dismay, she would, unprompted. Fitz made the mistake of expressing doubt that she was truly fluent in seven languages, and she proceeded to speak only in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and then Dutch to him for the next five minutes. The only time she paused was to remind him in English that she wasn’t good yet at conversational Mandarin.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Nobody liked a know-it-all, but if she’d just been rattling off facts and information, he could’ve tuned it out. It was the unending questions he couldn’t ignore. Where did he grow up, what was his major, what was his favorite class, who was his favorite professor, did he have a roommate, where was his favorite place to eat on campus, where was his favorite place to eat off campus, what was it like being in the athletics program, did he have a car, did he go home on the weekends, did he go home for the holidays, would he have a summer job, how many of the states had he visited, had he ever been out of the country, what did he want to do when he graduated, and on and on.
She was completely irresistible as long as she wasn’t speaking, which, unfortunately, was never.
He blinked back into focus just as she was midsentence about, he thought, the exact method of the Blackburne Mansion exorcism.