Today's Reading
CHAPTER ONE
Tallulah Aydin had never seen blood droplets sail through the air quite so gracefully.
She turned the phone sideways and enlarged the hockey highlight to full-screen mode, tapping the volume button in order to hear the commentator's voice.
Abraham with the vicious elbow to O'Hanlon's nose. Oh mama. Somebody call the trainer. O'Hanlon just learned the hard way what we've known for years. Players risk bones and cartilage when they enter Sir Savage's house as he's just proven once again tonight...
Tallulah exited the video and set her phone down, queasiness rolling in her stomach.
This afternoon, she was scheduled to begin shacking up with the homicidal hockey player from that very SportsCenter highlight. Sir Savage. If the algorithm gods hadn't creepily recognized her location as Boston and placed that nose-crunching clip from last night's preseason game in her path, she would already have left the smoothie shop and entered the landmark doorman building across the street to begin her employment as an au pair for his tween daughter.
She'd agreed to the arrangement months ago. Back when the whole idea hadn't seemed so unnerving. Now, however, the white plastic seat in which she'd been parked for over an hour was rapidly making lattice patterns on the backs of her legs. Blenders whirred in her ears. She'd been rendered unable to stand up and cross the road. Which was galling, considering she'd just spent a year in Antarctica studying the migration habits of the Adélie penguin.
A nanny job should be a cakewalk, right?
Thanks to a twist of fate, she'd landed a swanky place to live in Beacon Hill while she earned her master's in marine biology at Boston University. In return, all she had to do was nanny for an already self-sufficient twelve-year-old girl while her daddy apparently went out and flattened perfectly good noses on the ice.
It was the latter that kept her glued to the uncomfortable chair.
Tallulah reached for the paper cup holding her peanut butterespresso blast and noticed her hand was trembling oh-so-slightly. She gave herself an impatient eye roll and snatched up the cup, swigging what remained of her smoothie. The guy behind the counter obviously heard the empty vacuum sound coming from her paper straw and gave her the Boston eyebrow. Head cocked, impatient, one brow raised. Like, are you done here or would you like to lick the napkin dispenser, too?
She'd clearly overstayed her welcome at the Joyful Juicer.
Message received, Tallulah stood up, crossed to the trash can, and tossed her cup before returning to the table and gripping the handle of her suitcase. Staring through the picture window of the shop at the ten-story brick building on the other side of the road, her stomach sagged somewhere in the vicinity of her knees. On paper, she didn't have any reason for the alarm weaving through her ribs.
After all, her best friends, Wells and Josephine, had vouched for the Boston Bearcats team captain, Burgess Abraham, also known as Sir Savage. He didn't have any criminal history that she could find on the internet. In fact, he was known for being a terror on the ice, but stoic and reasonable once he entered the locker room. As evidenced by the time Tallulah had spent watching postgame interviews with his sweaty black hair plastered to his forehead, his denim-blue eyes intense as he considered every question like the answer was deeply important.
And no, she hadn't purposefully searched for shirtless interviews, thank you very much.
They'd come up as a suggested Google search. She couldn't simply ignore that kind of search engine divine providence. It would be irresponsible. Nor could she ignore shoulders thick enough with muscle to seat a couple of baby walruses—and those suckers had heft.
But right now, when she was an hour late to arrive at Burgess's penthouse to view her new living space and go over the particulars of their arrangement, all she could see was that brutal elbow slicing through the air, the accompanying expression of malice.
Like a peek inside some hidden part of the man?
Accepting this job had seemed like a great idea when she'd met Burgess at that golf tournament in California last summer. But she shouldn't have been so impulsive when it came to something so huge, like living with a man who she barely knew. One who could have all manner of lurking issues. In her experience, men could be mild mannered, charming even, on the surface. Easygoing, friendly.
...
