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myself,” I muttered. “I guess I just wanted to say hi before . . .”
    “Before?” She tilted her head, gazing up at me, and her eyes flashed like emeralds in the morning sun. I caught myself moving closer to her, because she apparently was not only turning me into a damn poet, thinking about her jewel-like eyes, but she had actual magnetic powers.
    Looking around, I noticed that every member of the Wildcat football team seemed to be converging on us, eyes glued to Victoria, so maybe I wasn’t too far off on the magnetic powers.
    Assholes.
    “You should go,” I said, clumsy and awkward and everything I usually wasn’t, because something about this girl got to me in places she had no business reaching.
    But she didn’t leave. Instead, she started laughing. “Seriously? Is that what you do, hang around places waiting to tell people to leave?”
    I could feel my face heat up, and I turned my head to avoid her, only to catch sight of Derek staring at me with his jaw hanging down somewhere around his ankles.
    Damn.
    “Or is it only me you’re always trying to get rid of?” She tilted her head and smiled, equal parts beauty and defiance, and a fierce sense of longing swept through me. Longing that she would never find out about the real me. The monstrous me. The Rhodale who could beat two people nearly to death and—worse—not feel even a twinge of remorse.
    “Most people are afraid of me,” I blurted out like a complete moron.
    “I’m not afraid of you, Mickey, but maybe you could work on your manners,” she said lightly, but a finely controlled quiver of tension rolled across her shoulders. “This is the high school. I’m here to register. No fires or potential arrests or any other reason why I should leave this time, right?”
    “Guess not,” I returned. “So where are you headed? Need directions?”
    She bit her lip; for a second I saw a hint of vulnerability beneath the self-assured surface. “I have to go to the office because my parents are too busy to bother with mundane things like finishing the registration process for their daughter for school,” she said, and I heard a tinge of bitterness.
    “Well, allow me to lead the way,” I said. I took off, and she followed me—I felt her nearness pulling against my back. Again with the magnetic powers. If Victoria Whitfield didn’t like me, that was for the best, right? She was out of my league. I should stay away, but I knew even as I thought it that I wouldn’t.
    I stopped outside the school office.
    She paused with one hand on the door, lowered her head and took a long, deep breath, and then she turned to face me. “I’m sorry. I do appreciate you looking out for me last night, and this isn’t how I wanted my first day to go. Maybe we could start over?”
    I was too mesmerized by her green eyes to come up with any kind of coherent response. I stuck out my hand instead, and she shook it.
    “Hi, I’m Victoria Whitfield. It’s nice to meet you, Mickey Rhodale.”
    With that, she opened the door and slipped inside, leaving me speechless and staring after her like a fool.
    Suddenly, for the first time in a very long time, I was glad to be at school.

CHAPTER 5
    Victoria
    C lark High wasn’t hell. It was hell’s trashy reality TV show.
    I looked around the hallway after leaving the school office, schedule in hand, and expected to see Honey Boo Boo’s cousin show up any minute. I was having an extreme case of culture shock, or culture jet lag, or something. My knees, already shaky from the first-day-of-school factor, had wobbled a little more after talking to Mickey. He was just so unbelievably gorgeous, in a broody, moody, dangerous way I’d never run into during my very sheltered time at Ashford-Hutchinson Academy. We’d had boys over for dances, sure, but they’d been from the nearest prep school and not one of them—ever—had been even a fraction as enticing and mysterious as Mickey Rhodale.
    None of them had stood around parking