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)
“A trap?”
“He’s charming as hell and will flirt with you until your pants are on the floor. And that’s all he wants.”
Paling, Ren shook her head. “I don’t think—”
“Do you hear me?” Miriam cut in, pointing a cautionary finger. “Be smart. Because his ego is bigger than Alaska.” The much-taller woman bent at the knee so that the two were eye-to-eye. “Are you from Alaska?”
“Idaho.”
“Well, I take it you know how big Alaska is.”
Ren nodded, mentally fortifying herself at the prospect of meeting an attractive man with an ego that was nearly seven hundred thousand square miles.
“Good. So don’t let him seduce you.”
A flush crawled up Ren’s neck. “Oh my gosh, would you stop suggesting that?”
“I mean it. He’ll only break your heart.”
Flustered, Ren turned to open the door to flee. But when she was only a few steps away, Miriam leaned out of the doorway. “Ren!”
She turned. “Yeah?”
Her roommate’s voice reverberated up and down the packed hallway: “Do not let that man into your pants!”
Ren felt every pair of eyes land squarely on her back as she walked the straight path to the stairwell. She’d studied in every moment of her free time—studied hardest these last few months in preparation for college. But a new truth was very quickly becoming apparent: Some things in life were impossible to prepare for.
CHAPTER THREE
REN
Ren took one step outside of Bigelow Hall and rain seemingly poured from an immense overturned bucket in the sky. On this final day of January, the wind was nothing compared to what it could be out in the middle of the fields, but here it was rain that flew sideways, the buildings pressing it all together and then shoving it forward like a colossal mouth blowing a million icy darts. She wrapped her scarf up around her face, leaving only her eyes visible beneath her beanie, zipped up her coat, and covered the whole of her head and neck with her giant hood.
One step, and then two. In the hazy light of midday, the world seemed at once too big and too small; wet sidewalk stretched out in every direction, and yet even a block in the distance was obscured from her view. Ren felt like a blind mouse at the center of a maze. Her heartbeat was a deafening gallop in her ears.
“You can do this, Rennie,” she whispered, pulling out the folded campus map she’d printed at the Deary library last week when her new student orientation packet arrived, shielding it from the rain with her body. She’d circled all of the important places she had to be: Bigelow Hall, the Registrar’s Office, dining services, and each of the buildings where her six courses were held. The Registrar’s Office, where she was meeting this Alaskan-egoed Fitz, was located inside Carson Hall, which looked on the map to only be a couple buildings over. Even so, it was hard to get her bearings. There weren’t her usual landmarks here—the hills to the east or the tall stretch of aspen to the west. The sun wasn’t visible at all, and the river was obscured by buildings. Here, it was only structures and sidewalks and asphalt in a seemingly uniform stretch of wet concrete no matter which way she looked.
But her direction, the map indicated, was to the right. Past Willow Lawn, past the Stills Center, to the building just bordering the main quad. Ren hauled the door to Carson Hall open with all her weight and stepped inside, where she was immediately sealed up in the dark, quiet atrium.
Shaking the raindrops from her coat and stomping the water off her boots, she looked up into the shadows of the interior of the building. For the day before the start of spring term, it was surprisingly quiet, echoing in its emptiness. Just as the outer door sealed shut, another opened somewhere on the floor above her, and the sound was followed by the jogging squeak of sneakers on stone. From the second story of the building and down the wide set of central steps, a figure descended—a man—with soft dark hair and shoulders so broad Ren immediately had the impression he’d be able to carry a newborn calf with ease.
Diffuse light from the tall window behind her caught his face as he approached, and if this person walking toward her was Fitz, she should have listened more closely to Miriam, should have asked questions: what he studied, where he came from, what exactly his tricks might be. The key to surviving, Steve always told her, was to know everything she could about every possible threat she might encounter. And the way her heartbeat reacted to this man, with that face and those shoulders, screamed THREAT PROXIMITY ALERT.
He came to a jogging stop a couple feet away and pulled a white headphone from one ear. “Ryan?”