Brutal Blueblood

to pretend because not noticing him was impossible. But it was necessary to pretend, and I hated myself for noticing him, impossible or not.
I was smart, ambitious—I had plans. And I’d read enough self-care Instagram captions to know having a crush on the wealthier-than-God asshole never ended well. No matter how sexy his sneer could be. No matter how tempting his cool aloofness was.
I took another oh-so-casual drink.
Maybe he was already gone.
Maybe he’d gone back in to find his friends—or a beautiful girl. While Owen was less of a capital-F fuckboy than Phineas, I was still painfully aware that he rarely spent a night alone. And if the rumors were to be believed, all those cold, Mr. Darcy-like manners of his disappeared the moment the lights went off. (Or stayed on, according to certain legends about how he spent his study hours in the library.)
And there were plenty of beautiful girls here tonight. The kind of girls who effortlessly flaunted bikinis more expensive than my entire wardrobe put together. The kind of girls who wore top-tier contacts and didn’t have to worry about their glasses misting if they stood too close to the pool.
I adjusted said glasses now and decided to check and see if the coast was clear when I heard a low voice at my side.
“Not dancing?”
My stomach was nothing but flutters when I slowly turned my head to see Owen Montgomery next to me, one dark eyebrow lifted into a perfect, cool arch. It was the kind of gesture that layered curiosity with disdain, observation with judgment. Owen wasn’t the kind of person to give away his regard—or even his interest—for nothing.
It was one of the reasons I’d found him so fascinating these last few years. Nearly every other boy at Pembroke was an open book—utterly obvious, utterly transparent. But not Owen. While he was the most scrupulously dressed, even now on vacation, and possibly the best behaved of the Hellfire boys in the most technical sense of the word, he was a complete mystery.
Unknowable and impossible to thaw.
In fact, the only emotion I’ve ever seen from him was icy boredom. Which was exactly what I saw in his dark eyes as I turned to face him fully.
“I danced earlier,” I said, trying to sound like I didn’t care he was here talking to me. That he’d sought me out after three years of having class together, of having social circles that often overlapped, when he’d never done so before now.
What if all that time I thought he hadn’t noticed me, he had?
What if he’s been wanting to talk to me . . . what if he’d merely been waiting for the right moment?
No. No, I had to stop. I was better than going all flushed and giggly because a Hellfire boy had sought me out.
I forced my voice into something unaffected and indifferent. “I notice you’re not dancing, either, even though I think there are a lot of girls who would be happy if you did.”
The eyebrow stayed arched, and something pulled at the corner of his mouth. “So, you’ve been paying attention to what girls think of me, is that it?” His voice was still low, nearly intimate now, the kind of voice I had to lean in to hear over the music.
“No,” I said, finishing the last of my cocktail. “I’d simply noticed there are more girls than boys dancing here tonight. It would be polite to help even out the ratio.”
“I’m nothing if not polite,” he said dryly. “But I don’t enjoy dancing. Or . . .” He gestured to the club deck, where bodies writhed and rubbed and sweated. I could practically smell the spilled alcohol and body odor from here. “Whatever that is.”
“No, you don’t seem like you would,” I murmured. Unlike the other boys who were wearing swim trunks and glow-in-the-dark necklaces, Owen was dressed in boat shoes, cuffed trousers, and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms.
He looked chic, sharp, grown. Like someone who’d already graduated from high school games and was ready for other, bigger ones. Ones much colder and darker.
“I haven’t seen you around the van Doren yacht,” he said. His gaze raked me over from head to toe, no doubt cataloging my lack of yacht wear. I was in a T-shirt that said, “Bury Me Next to My TBR,” a pair of cutoffs, and tennis shoes that were still dusty from my earlier tour of the cathedral and nearby Punic necropolis. My ash-blond hair was in a braid that had started tidily enough but was now all messy and windswept from a day of sightseeing. I had no makeup on, and without my usual ensemble of serious black clothing, I felt like my glasses looked, well, nerdy. And not in the cool, NYC, arty way like they usually did.
I adjusted them self-consciously, my cheeks burning as I mentally compared myself to all the Instagram-ready girls on the yacht. But when I glanced back up to Owen’s face, I saw something that surprised me.
Heat.
He was looking at me like I’d personally lit him on fire.
“I’ve been around,” I managed to answer. It was the truth—I could only afford to come to Ibiza because Sera’s family owned both the plane that brought us here and the yacht we were staying on.
“No, I don’t think you have,” he said softly. “I would have remembered.”
I couldn’t breathe for the way he looked at me then. Like I was the only person he’d ever seen in his life. Like I was the only thing that had ever stirred his interest.
“I was in the town today,” I said, mesmerized by that look. God, to see him looking at me like that now when I’d spent so long hiding how I felt . . .
The eyebrow drew up again. “In the town? During the day?”
Most visitors our age only hit the town after sundown and spent their days sleeping off the mistakes of the nights before.
“I wanted to see the architecture and the history,” I explained. “Did