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sometimes …”
    “Sure, she couldn’t get enough of it,” he bragged to the gawky junior who managed the basketbal team. “But what was I supposed to do? She was—wel , let’s just say Adam’s pretty lucky he never made it to home base.”
    He almost felt sorry for Beth. She was like a dolphin, playing at being a shark. Which was a dangerous game: You were likely to get eaten.
    The note the teacher had handed her had been short and sweet: Report to my classroom. Now .
    Okay, maybe not so sweet.
    “Jack,” Kaia said simply, stepping into his empty classroom and closing the door behind her. “Bonjour.”
    Powel was perched on the edge of his desk, fingering a red sheet of paper. Kaia recognized it immediately, with little surprise.
    “You said you’d stopped seeing him,” Powel said coldly, placing the flyer careful y down on the desk. “I thought I’d made my position perfectly clear: I don’t like to share.” Kaia strode toward him and took a seat at one of the desks in the front row, aware that his gaze was glued to her long, tan legs, barely covered by a green suede miniskirt.
    “Do you real y want to discuss this here, Jack?” It was a violation of every rule he’d set for them, and it stank of desperation.
    “There’s nothing to discuss.You told me you’d stopped. You told me you wouldn’t, with— that . And now I read …” Kaia laughed. “Are you going to believe some piece of trash you probably confiscated from one of your clueless freshmen? Just how gul ible are you?” Powel ’s skin turned slightly red, whether in anger or embarrassment, Kaia couldn’t be sure. She could put him out of his misery right now, confess to the dal iance with Reed, and suggest he find himself another student to play with—or maybe even pick on someone his own age. But Kaia wasn’t quite ready to finish things, and she certainly wasn’t going to let some loser with a printer and a grudge force her hand.
    She got up and walked slowly to the door, as if to leave, then paused with her hand on the knob. “Do I real y need to defend myself?” Kaia asked. “Or can we stop this game and play another … ?”
    Powel hopped off the desk, walked toward her, and then did something he’d never done before on school grounds. He touched her.
    Placing his hand over hers on the doorknob, he turned the lock.
    “We can table this for now,” he told her, his lips inches from the nape of her neck, his fingers digging into her skin. “You’re a smart girl, Kaia. You know better than to screw this up. Take this as a warning.”
    He pul ed her roughly toward him, and she let him, hyperaware of the people in the hal way, just on the other side of the door. Only a few inches separated them from discovery, a thought that turned her on far more than Powel ’s hands roaming across her body.
    Yes, Kaia was a smart girl, and she almost always knew better. She just never acted on it.
    Where was the fun in that?
    The whispers flew back and forth over Miranda’s head. No one thought to ask her what was true—most likely, no one thought of her at al .
    Without Harper, I’m invisible, she thought, pushing around the soggy food on her tray. She had no appetite. Not when Harper was at the center of an admiring crowd, soaking in the attention. Miranda had just given her more of what she loved the most. From across the room, Miranda couldn’t see the self-satisfied grin on Harper’s face, but knew it was there.
    And she couldn’t hear the spin Harper would put on everything to cast herself in a good light—but she knew Harper would. A spotlight. It al seemed so obvious now, that this was how their feeble plot was doomed to end.
    Teaming up with Beth, blandest of the bland, to take on Haven High’s dark queen? What had she been thinking?
    Beth wasn’t as bad as Miranda had always thought, and was probably undeserving of al the hours she and Harper had put into mocking her behind her back. (Miranda had long ago perfected her Beth