Lucy was still thinking about the boy an hour later when she took a rather terse phone call from someone at Cumberland Academy for Alex.
She put through the call and leaned forward to see Alex at his desk through the glass, his brows drawn together in a frown, the phone receiver pressed to his ear. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes before hanging up.
Lucy threw herself back into her chair and he came into the reception area a few minutes later.
“Lucy.”
She looked up, smiling brightly. “Yes, Mr. Kincaid?”
“You can call me Alex, you know. I have to leave school for about half an hour. If anyone rings, please take a message.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you.” She watched him head out into the school yard, saw something tired and defeated about the set of his shoulders as he walked towards the staff car park, and wondered all over again what that phone call had been about.
Half an hour later Alex returned with a very sulky preteen in tow. The girl slouching into the school behind him was beautiful, although you wouldn’t necessarily notice that first off. Her dark, silky hair was covering half her face, and her black school blazer was far too big, with the tie worn loose and the skirt quite short.
She gave Lucy a deliberately bored look, and Lucy saw that the girl’s eyes were a lovely, clear hazel. Her Cupid’s bow mouth was painted an unfortunate fire-engine red.
“In here, Bella,” Alex said tersely, and pointed to a chair in the reception area. Lucy scooted closer to her computer, as if doing so gave Alex and this girl any kind of privacy. At least it gave them some space.
With a loud, sneering sigh, the girl flung herself into the swivel chair and sat there sprawled, her tights-clad legs flung out in front of her, her bags and coat at her feet. She looked up at Alex with her eyebrows arched, a mocking smile on her face. She reminded Lucy of the mean girls she’d encountered in seventh grade, all acid sweetness and deliberate contempt.
“What, I’m going to sit in here all day?” she asked, spinning around in the chair, and Alex glared at her.
“Yes,” he bit out, “you da—you are.”
“Language, Dad,” Bella mocked, and Alex’s eyes snapped with fury, his mouth tightly compressed.
So this was the other daughter he’d mentioned at the café. Lucy would have expected Alex’s daughters to be quiet and cowed, but then since he didn’t have his dog under control, why should he have his daughter? And Bella Kincaid definitely looked like a handful.
“Just stay here, Bella,” Alex said. “Since you managed to get yourself suspended from school in only the second week of term, you can face the consequences.”
“Which is to be bored out my mind?”
“That’s the first one,” Alex snapped, and then turned to Lucy. “Lucy, I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but I trust my daughter will behave herself and not cause you any trouble this afternoon.”
That, Lucy thought as Alex stalked back to his office, was some incredibly wishful thinking on Alex’s part.
She slid a sideways glance at the girl, who was still lounging in the chair, studying her chipped black nail polish with such obvious boredom that Lucy almost wanted to advise her not to tryquiteso hard.
She turned back to her computer, the afternoon’s register blurring in front of her. She could feel Bella’s curious and contemptuous gaze burning into her back. How on earth was she supposed to concentrate with this girl staring at her all afternoon?
She might be all right to give a few five-year-olds cuddles and ice packs, but this type of child—this querulous, unpleasant, on-the-cusp-of-adulthood, malevolentforce—was something else entirely.
The exaggerated sighs, the narrowed looks, the eye rolls, the lip curls . . . she’d had it all before with Thomas’s sons. And she’d been trying with them, not that it had ever done much good. If anything, those two boys had put her off children completely.
She turned back to the register and tried to work for ten endless minutes, with Bella heaving gusty sighs and spinning in her chair, before she couldn’t take it anymore. She swung around in her chair and gave Bella a sunny smile the girl very obviously ignored.
“So, what you’d get done for?”
Lucy watched Bella hesitate, torn between keeping up her too-bored-to-live act and actually answering the question. She turned so her back was to Lucy.
“Nothing too bad.”
“Oh.” Lucy loaded the single syllable with disappointment. “I thought you might have set fire to the chemistry lab or something.” Not, she realized, that she should be giving the girl ideas. Bella certainly looked capable of a major act of arson. But she’d had quite enough of her too-cool-for-school attitude. She wassoover that.
“I just bunked off PE,” Bella said after a moment, spinning round in her chair again to face Lucy. “Teachers overreacted asusual.”
