**Author's Note: Because I don't feel I do it nearly often enough, I say a big thank you to all of my reviewers and faithful readers. I've had wonderful feedback and wonderful compliments here. But since you don't care about that as much as you care about the story… get to reading!**
CHAPTER NINETEEN- Causing Harm
**Suggested listening: "Tangled" by Maroon 5
The first bell had rung, and she was already nearly late to class, walking down the hallway at a clip faster than normal, hair spread over her shoulder as she turned to look behind her, turned to see if he'd walk late into the big front doors of the school.
But as the bell sounded to signal the start of class, he had not yet arrived.
It shouldn't have shocked her; it was, after all, Drake Mallory's style to skive off classes and do whatever he damned well chose. But he hadn't done it since they'd started their sessions, and she hadn't heard from him all weekend.
After the first hour, she'd managed to convince herself it was something silly; he'd gotten sick or stayed out too late, or just plain felt like asserting his independence.
After the second hour, she'd told herself it didn't matter why he was gone, and that it gave her a little bit of freedom, a little room for movement without that assessing hoary stare.
And from the third hour on, she had sheer, petrifying panic. She'd frightened him, she'd sent him home angry, she'd made him think she was more serious about things than she really was. He'd figured out how stupid they were being and decided to call an end to it. His father had finally killed his mother.
There were so many things that could have happened, and as she bit her nails ragged, Genevieve Wesley couldn't land on a single one that made her feel any better.
She looked around the student lounge all those hours later, trying to find him, to get the smallest glance of that bright hair, a glimpse of those smoke-gray eyes, even in sullenness.
"Feeling all right, Gen, darling?" Lucia ran a hand down Gen's hair, a small, sisterly smile playing about her lips.
Gen jerked as though guilty, casting her eyes first down to the table then up to the willowy blonde. "Lovey, do you believe in love?" The question-the non sequitur, Gen insisted to herself-was out before she could stop it, her worried eyes flicking to Lucia's deceptively mild ones.
Lucia sat down, tucking away the secretive smile that wanted to rise. Of course she believed in love; it was all over the place. "What's to believe in?" she asked. Seeing the stricken look on her friend's face, she pressed on. "Genevieve, that's like asking if I believe in the floor. A bit of a silly question, don't you think?"
Her chest felt constricted, weighted, and anger, indignation buzzed in the back of her mind. Love? What made her think of it? What right had he to interfere with her life that way?
"I don't know," she answered hollowly, but she was unknowingly scanning her surroundings once more for Drake. There were his friends, his ever-present companions, but no Master Mallory.
"You'll find him," Lucia said, accurately pinpointing the target of Gen's scrutiny. "If you want to, that is."
And much to her chagrin, no matter what her internal struggle, the horror she felt at her own split mind, Gen found she did want to.
She wanted to very much.
~~~
She'd have cursed herself for an idiot if she'd been able to find breath. Her nerves were strangling her, making spots swim in front of her eyes.
Gen paused at the gate in front of the large house, placing one hand on the cold black iron to steady herself and buttress her weak knees. It was ten strides, fifteen at most, to reach the door, but it seemed an insurmountable distance.
She had never sought him out.
She had never been here unbidden. She'd felt unwelcome even when with Drake, and now, in front of the Mallory mansion, her stomach twisted and the freckled expanse of her forehead beaded with cold sweat. If she'd managed to eat at all that day, she'd have been sick everywhere, but as it was, her empty stomach was twanging unpleasantly.
She closed her eyes to collect herself, and the frowning bow of her lips lifted into a small smile as she remembered, saw, felt his arms around her, his bare chest pressed to her back as he whispered outrageously awful things in her ear, just to see what she'd do.
It would be okay, she insisted to herself, keeping her eyes closed even as she swung open the gate. Fourteen strides on her long legs took her to the front door, and though she'd gathered as much courage as she had, when she picked up the intertwined brass snakes that made up the Mallory doorknocker, she did not have to try to knock it against the door.
Rat-a-ta-ta-tat, her trembling hand sent brass against brass in a strange, flurried call, and a shiver passed through her.
Sounds like chattering teeth, she thought with a grimace.
Gen flinched, physically recoiled, when the massive door swung open, but instead of flaxen hair and eerie eyes, she was met by a short, olive-skinned woman with extraordinary eyes so dark they were nearly black.
"May I be helping the miss?" the maid asked in halting, stilted English, her eyes shifting back and forth like careful sentries.
Gen opened her mouth, heard nothing but a dry rasp, then swallowed and geared up for another attempt.
Girl, you're an absolute horror of an embarrassment to the Wesley family. Acting like this, and for what? Drake Mallory! Appalling.
The self-deprecation was just enough to lift her chin, just enough to shove her voice into her throat and out. "I'm here to see Drake," she said forthrightly, her voice now clear and a bit too loud for polite company.
What did it matter? Naught was polite about this house, and naught polite about their relationship.
Relationship.
She bit back a tiny sigh and watched the maid shuffle her weight from foot to foot.
"Miss, the young Master Mallory is not being here."
Poor English or not, Gen could hear the lie in the maid's voice. "He's not here, you say?" she repeated, and even though she knew it to be false, knew it in her heart-
Can't you feel him here?
- she felt the disappointment.
"Is not being here," the maid insisted, nodding her head with a slight "hmph" exhalation.
"That's a bit odd," Gen said, taking a big risk, "As his auto's still here on the premises." The maid's eyes widened and Gen smirked, completely unaware of Drake's expression on her face.
"Young Master Mallory is not seeing visitors," the maid reiterated. "Is there anything for me to be telling him?"
Oh, yes, tell him he's a cowardly bugger who can't show up to classes and can't face me, and tell him I never wanted this, never asked for this, never signed on to turn into some bloody stupid bint over some sex. Just simple… stupid… sex.
"Tell him his tutor stopped by," she said absently, already backing off the steps and away from the hateful hulk of a house.
And then the maid was pushed aside none too gently, and for a moment, her heart leapt in her throat, panic jackknifing through her.
Lucas-
But it wasn't Lucas. It wasn't quite Drake, either, not the way he should have been. The man she'd been looking for all day looked like someone else entirely; so drastic was the change that, as she stepped back toward the door, Gen calculated how many days it had been since she'd seen him.
A weekend and today, three days it had been since last she'd seen him, but it seemed like longer.
His hair was disheveled; not artfully so nor intentionally so, but tangled and wild as though he'd run fingers through it countless times, forward and back and forward and back. His eyes had taken on a red tint, so bloodshot were they, and the skin under his eyes had taken on a bluish-grey tone of its own. His bottom lip was chapped and torn, and as a lip-biter herself, Gen immediately recognized those marks for what they were-teethmarks, worry-marks from where he'd fidgeted unknowingly.
His clothes were a mess, also neither artful nor intentional, and the tie which dangled over one shoulder told her he'd not changed since leaving her house Friday evening. One cufflink was missing, the hole it had inhabited stretched and misshapen as though the link had been plucked or twisted until removed, and the whole of his ensemble was wrinkled and re-wrinkled.
"Drake," she breathed, shaking her head in slight, involuntary censure, and the unspoken query hung between them. What have you done?
"My tutor?" he asked, swaying a bit as though drunk. In reality, it was sleeplessness which had him weaving, sheer and utter exhaustion of every type known to man, and likely a few types unknown. He'd wandered a bit since his father's bizarre and sadistic proposition, but only when necessary. He'd stayed in the chair he'd sat in to deal, not eating, not sleeping, eyes cast sometimes to the blank television screen and sometimes to his father's study door, where a cheque for five hundred thousand pounds undoubtedly waited.
And now he stood at the door, with that freedom behind him and his captor of sorts in front of him.
And she'd called himself his bloody… damned… tutor.
"My tutor, then?" Not my girlfriend, not even my friend, not my lover, my paramour, but my tutor. If she'd said anything else, he would have stayed in his chair, brooding instead of acting, sulking instead of speaking, dying instead of deciding. But her words-or lack of words-had propelled him from his chair, a spark of anger where before there had only been hopelessness.
Tutor. Rubbish.
"I reckon I've taught you more than you've taught me," he said, his sneer a thin ghost of its former acidity. There was hurt there, though, confusion, worry about him, and it softened him more than he wished to be softened, pushed him in a decisive direction he did not wish to go.
"That's likely true," Gen said, lifting her chin once more and fighting not to ask him what in bloody hell had happened, what in the bloody hell was wrong.
In truth, she was frightened. She was scared of this man standing before her, but what was more, she was scared of what had made him this way. She wasn't certain she wanted to know.
"I was only worried," she said, attempting to hold an airy note in her voice, casual, light. "Though I suppose I shouldn't have been. Looks like you've been pissed as a lord over the week's end, and it's just catching up with you now." Gen was well on her way to one of the famous babbling lectures of the Wesley women, imitated but never duplicated by the jesting Wesley men. "Thought I'd drop by and make sure you hadn't done something stupid. You know there's a masque on Friday, don't you? You'll never be able to come if you miss all week's school."
There was the babbling, what an idiotic fact to bring up, the masque. Like he'd ever go to a masque, and they certainly weren't going to go together.
"Not that it matters," she continued, and he cut her off.
"Were you wanting to know if I'd go?" he asked, and he wanted to slap her for being there, slap her for risking herself in such a way, but she didn't k now, she didn't know, he reminded himself, didn't have a clue what had been playing on his video machine just a few days before, hadn't a clue what his father had planned for the both of them. "God, go," he said. "Go, go, go. We can't be seen together, don't you know that, aren't you supposed to be intelligent, are you absolutely daft?" He watched her lips part in shock, a gasp drawing from them, and he nodded fiercely. Yes, yes, yes, he thought, his decision tearing its way through his brain and driving a pike into his heart.
Would that I had a heart…
"What in the bloody hell has gotten into you?" she asked, her color rising, shame flooding her. Of course they couldn't be seen together. That much hadn't changed and wasn't likely to. The great, moneyed Mallory couldn't be seen with her, not even when he looked like a great heap of shite.
He was so beautiful it hurt her eyes, even like this.
I'm positively falling-down mad, she thought distantly.
He saw the money in his mind, but it was secondary, it was tertiary, it was positively incidental to everything else. Now what mattered were the video and the woman before him. "Pauper, I can harm you more than you can ever harm me."
His father would destroy her and her family without so much as a backward glance, and Drake himself would be left intact to watch the festivities, and likely she'd think he'd planned it all. But with the money, she could be free, and he could be free, and his mother could be free, and his father would be left to damn himself to hell all he liked.
And then she struck him.
The little freckled pauper actually hit him, square in the chest, in a glancing, shoving blow that sent him stumbling across the polished parquet, a surprised exclamatory grunt leaving his lips.
"Harm me more?" she asked, her voice rising. Anger was good and clean and made perfect, awful sense, so much more sense than whatever soft-headed, fuzzy, hormone-addled thoughts she'd been having only moments before. "What is it, Drake? I've become more attached than you? You can't possibly be hurt by me because you just don't give a damn? You're so much better than I? Bollocks!"
No, you're so much better than I, he thought, for you've no devil in you, no devil in your family to cause so much pain, and you never asked for this, never asked for me…
But he said nothing, only stepped back and shut the door in her face to hide himself from her, to hide his pain away from her, to hide her hurt away from him.
And Gen struggled to hold on to her righteous anger in the face of her sudden and overwhelming misery.