Charm slid onto a stool with the careful elegance of a woman who had never once in her life flopped into furniture.
“Ryan is helping me with Professor Klein’s Victorian literature paper before anyone makes this weird.”
Bliss blinked slowly. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You breathed loudly.”
“She did,” I said. “Very judgmental lungs on that one.”
Ryan looked at Charm, then at us. “I’m tutoring her.”
“Mhmm,” Bliss said.
“Were you secretly a Victorian literature major and we all missed it in the Fury newsletter?” I asked.
Bliss immediately started giggling beside me.
Ryan sighed like he regretted knowing us. “I’ll have you both know I graduated from KFU with a bachelor’s degree in English with an emphasis in rhetoric and professional writing.”
Bliss and I stared at him.
“Nope,” Bliss said. “I reject that information.”
“So do I. You don’t get to spring an English degree on us like it’s normal.”
Ryan pointed at us, looking at Charm. “This is exactly why I don’t tell people things.”
“You’re covered in tattoos and live rent-free in our bad-boy fantasies,” I informed him. “You can’t casually drop that you’re an English major.”
“Graduated with honors too.”
Bliss slapped the counter. “Holy shit.”
“See?” Ryan said to Charm. “This is why I told you they would run with this.”
“I would sooner expect you had a secret kid somewhere.”
“That’s somehow more believable than me reading books?”
“Victorian literature books,” Bliss corrected.
“Dios mío, I’m leaving,” Ryan muttered as he grabbed his shot and beer.
I pointed after him. “See? Now he’s doing it on purpose.”
“Wait. Does this mean you’ve actually read Brontë?”
“Charlotte and Emily,” he said with a wink. “Wuthering Heights was the first love of my life.”
Bliss gasped like he had confessed to murder. “Wait, so what’s the second?”
Ryan looked completely unbothered. “Hockey, obviously.”
Charm looked suspiciously pleased with herself, which definitely wasn’t helping the case she was trying to make about this being strictly academic.
“Bliss, you are recently engaged to a man who legit will kill for you. You are not allowed to look at my academic support system like that.”
“Please,” Bliss said. “I spent four years at KFU watching women throw themselves at Ryan. He’s hot. We know he’s hot. But Cade buys me peanut M&M’s without being asked and doesn’t question my Never budget. That’s elite-level follow-through.”
