Roni Loren - Need You Tonight

She gave a dramatic sigh and sank into a chair. This was not going at all how she’d planned. She hoped she could smile and sweetness her way through this. She wasn’t unaware of the effect she had on guys. God hadn’t given her much. Useless mother. Dead father. A crapton of foster homes. And not enough skills to know what the hell Hamlet was about. But he had given her a way with boys.

Unfortunately, this boy seemed immune, so she was going to have to give it to him straight.

“Listen, Kaden. Hate me all you want, but they pay you to tutor and right now, I’m the girl who needs help. But I don’t want to cause crap for either of us.”

“Meaning?” he asked, sounding bored.

“Meaning if Doug or any of my friends sees us together, he’s going to make your life hell. And I’m going to get an earful of shit.”

He lifted an eyebrow.

“What?” she asked, the simple look making her feel self-conscious.

“N-n-nothing. Just never heard you swear before.”

She winced. Truth was, she’d developed a potty mouth at her last home placement. Her foster sister, Sam, had been quite colorful in her speech. But Tessa had learned to curb it when she moved in with the Ericsons. Her foster parents were super strict and would kick her out if they had any clue how much of a delinquent she was capable of being. And there was no way she was giving them up. They’d been the closest to having a real family as she’d ever had.

“So do we need to do this here?” she asked, ignoring his comment and tightening her ponytail.

“The tutoring? No. I just have to sign off that you showed up and for how long.”

“Great. Do you have somewhere else we could go?”

“You mean, where we can hide?”

She huffed. “Come on, Kaden. I’m not trying to be a bitch, but you know how it is.”

His shoulders sagged like he’d had a sack of sand thrown across them, but he nodded and tucked his books in his bag. “It’s a small t-t-town, Tessa. Where are we gonna go?”

She chewed her thumbnail and peered over her shoulder again. They definitely couldn’t go to the coffee shop or the park, even the McDonald’s had other kids hanging there all the time. And her place was not an option. Boys couldn’t come over when her parents weren’t home, period, no matter what the purpose. “What about your house?”

He paused in loading up his backpack and looked at her like she’d suggested he get them a rocket to the moon. “You want to come to my house ? Your boyfriend would gather a lynch mob if he found out we were hanging out alone like that.”

She shrugged. “He’d be pissed. But it’s not like he’d get the wrong idea, I mean …”

The slight wince he gave was almost imperceptible but she felt like shit the minute she realized how it’d sounded. Like he was no threat. Like she was so far out of his league that there was no possible way anyone would worry about them alone together.

“Kaden, I didn’t mean that—”

He looped his backpack over his shoulder as he stretched out to his full, impressive height. The smirk was in place again but there was a sad note in his blue eyes. “Save your apology. You don’t need to play that nicey-nice, everybody-needs-to-like-me game with me. I know who we both are. And I know where we stand. Let’s go.”

The comment was like a swift slap right across her cheek, knocking off the bright face she put out in the world. In just a few brief minutes, Kaden Fowler had called bullshit on her. She hurried after him as he made his way out the side door and into the parking lot. She did a quick scan to make sure no one was around. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t need people to like me. They just do.”

He sniffed and dug his keys out of his ripped up jeans.

“Okay, so maybe you don’t.”

“And that b-b-bothers the shit out of you.”

She quickened her step, trying to keep up with his long, easy strides. “It does not.”

But it totally did. It was suddenly driving her crazy. Why didn’t he like her? She’d never personally done anything mean to him. She couldn’t be held responsible for Doug and his friends.

Kaden stopped next to a beat-up Dodge Challenger and turned to her. “I live over on Dunlop Road. You can follow me. At a reasonable distance, of course, so no one links us t-t-together.”

She gritted her teeth. “Fine.”

She turned on her heel to stalk to her car, but he called her name before she could take a step. She looked back to find him leaning against the top of his car, staring out toward the football field instead of turning in her direction.

“It’s totally bothering you, isn’t it?”

She groaned. “Shut up. Point taken.”

He smiled but there was no humor in it. He opened his door to climb into his car, but before he closed it, his eyes met hers. “Don’t worry, princess. Your record is still perfect. My problem isn’t that I don’t like you. It’s that I like you too much.”

And with that, he slammed his door and shut her out.

Tessa cupped her hand over the mouthpiece of her phone, hoping no one in the office would hear her conversation. “Doug, I better have read this email wrong.”

Her ex-husband made a dismissive grunt. “Having trouble reading now? Maybe I should’ve used smaller words.”

Fucking bastard. Tessa gripped her phone, trying to keep her seething response from slipping out. Last thing she needed was for her current boss to send a complaint to the temp agency for an unhinged receptionist yelling at her ex-husband in front of the whole office. “Look, I get that we hate each other. Whatever. But are you really so heartless that you’ll let innocent kids suffer just to get back at me?”

He sniffed. “Always so dramatic. This is merely a business decision and nothing else. That charity was your pet project, not mine, and it’s a cash sieve.”

“It’s called nonprofit for a reason, Doug.” Jackass.

“If it’s such a worthy cause, you should be able to find other donors. I’m done keeping it afloat with my church’s money. I told the congregation to pick a new charity to focus on this year.”

“Doug, please, don’t do this.” She hated the plea in her voice, but all she could think about were the kids at Bluebonnet Place who would lose services and the employees who’d lose their jobs. She’d started the project five years ago when Doug had told her she should get more involved in his church’s outreach activities to look good to the congregation. She’d had no desire to put on more of a show at church than she already did, so she’d asked for seed money to start a charity instead. Looking back over her years with Doug, it was the one thing she could be proud of. Even though it was her ex’s money that had funded it, she’d poured her guts into the project, determined to help foster kids who were aging out of the system. She was all too familiar with how it felt to be staring down eighteen with no family behind you, few job skills, and limited funds to better your education.

But now the whole thing was going to be drained dry and abandoned if the cash wasn’t there to support it. After the divorce, she’d given the lion’s share of her divorce settlement money to Bluebonnet. God knows she’d had no desire to live off Doug’s handouts for another second and wanted to put them to good use. But even with that donation, she knew the charity only had enough cash to make it to the end of the year.

“Tessa, if you had thought this through better, you wouldn’t have left me in the first place and wouldn’t have to worry about this, so don’t try to lay some guilt trip on me. This is your doing. Your decision.”