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Virginia as it was in Kentucky. I’d seen friends almost come to blows and relationships die in shouting matches over basketball games between the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky. When I looked back out at the class, I saw that Mickey was still watching me, and I could swear his grin was mocking me.
    “You can return to your seat, Miss Whitfield,” Mr. Gerard said. A trace of bitterness swept through me at the thought that Gran could have easily paid my boarding school tuition, but she’d flatly refused.
    “Clark High School was good enough for me, and good enough for your father,” she’d said. “I don’t hold with this idea of shipping our kids off for other people to raise during the tumultuous teen years. God knows we don’t want you to end up like your mother.”
    That had been a low blow, but true enough. Mom had gone into Ashford-Hutchinson in her freshman year as a normal kid, and she’d come out carrying only eighty-five pounds on her five feet, four inch frame. Yet she still held it up as the best school on the planet. But even she couldn’t fight the combined power of my father, my grandmother, and the inescapable fact of her empty checkbook and maxed-out credit cards. And that, as they say, had been that. I was out of the school where I’d spent the last two years and knew who people were and how things worked, and into a school where the only boy I’d met so far had called my ass pretty and picked me up and carried me away from danger, like my own personal superhero.
    And who, according to Denise, was a very violent drug dealer. Or at least the brother of one.
    The teacher pointed at Mickey with his pen. “Mr. Rhodale, since you were so kind as to bring up Whitfield County history, you will do your midyear project on the history of your relative the Pinkerton man.”
    The pen swerved to aim its evil at me. “Miss Whitfield, you will take on the history of the Derby.”
    I relaxed. I’d been raised on the Kentucky Derby. This, at least, should be easy. I nodded, and he moved on to tell Denise that she’d be learning all about the history, good and bad, of the tobacco plant.
    “I’ve never been to the Derby,” Mickey said quietly, and his deep, husky voice caused a delicious shiver to race down my spine. Why was I reacting like this to him?
    Okay, so yes, he was the hottest guy I’d ever seen and he’d carried me away from what clearly had been an explosion waiting to happen. There was that .
    “How can you be from Kentucky and never have gone to the Derby?” I blurted it out in a whisper, mostly from a frantic need to say something .
    “Are you kidding? Or are you really such a pampered princess that you wouldn’t know the answer to that?” His voice had an edge to it, and I glanced over to see that his features had hardened. “The Derby experience isn’t exactly cheap. Some of us have to save money for college.”
    “I don’t . . . I didn’t mean . . . It’s just been part of my life forever,” I said, realizing I’d put my foot in my mouth again. “You make me nervous.”
    He smiled, and the memory of the way his muscular body had felt against mine when he picked me up flashed into my mind. I had to clench my teeth against the shiver.
    “You make me nervous too, Princess,” he said, but his smile faded as he said it as if he, like me, had realized how much he’d given away with the admission. “And I know better than this.”
    “Better than what?”
    But Gerard shot a dirty look our way, and I blushed and stared down at my desk. I’d never been on the receiving end of a teacher’s annoyance before. I had the sudden, startled realization that perhaps more than my geography had changed; Whitfield County Victoria was morphing into a very different person than the Victoria I’d been before. Had the mere proximity of the town bad boy caused a ripple effect on my personality?
    I shook off the absurd thought, but the tingle that raced down my