Page 10 of Wild Elite

She waved her hand, cutting me off. “I’m just messing with you. But seriously, if you meet any snobby bitches here, just ignore them. Roden is teeming with them.”

I grinned. “So I’ve heard.”

“Don’t worry. Some of us are cool.” She winked, then headed for the door. “I’ll show you all the different lecture halls now.”

We headed out into the brisk cold. Mellie waved her hand across Bamford’s courtyard to a gargantuan sandstone building. “That’s another residential college—Marwick. It’s for grad school students only, so if you’re into older men, that’s where you’re most likely to run into them.” She winked.

We headed past Marwick on our way to the first lecture hall she wanted to show me, and she suddenly stopped short a few seconds later. “Hey, there’s your parents,” she said, pointing to the left.

I turned and looked. She was right. Mom and Dad hadn’t left campus to meet their client as I assumed they would. They were standing by a large marble fountain about fifty feet away, deep in conversation with a tall, well-dressed man. He had thick brown hair and a strong jawline. For some reason, he looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen him before.

I waved, and that caught my mother’s attention. She glanced over in our direction and briefly waved back, not meeting my eyes. My father did the same a few seconds later. Weird.

The stranger suddenly looked over at me as well. His lips were pursed, and he stared right at me for several seconds before returning to the conversation with my parents. I hadn’t noticed this before now, but they looked nervous, their shoulders taut and their hands fidgety.

“Hm. Looks like they’re busy,” I said, wondering why my mom and dad wouldn’t meet my eyes. It didn’t bother me too much, though. They were probably just trying their best to focus on this potential client, whoever he was.

“That’s okay. I have a ton of stuff to show you, and it’ll take a while,” Mellie said cheerfully. We started walking again, heading onto a stone path that led around the other side of Marwick College’s courtyard. “Anyway, are you starting in the fall?” she asked.

“Earlier,” I replied. Because Roden was so heavy on academics, they offered three study periods instead of two—a summer, fall, and spring trimester schedule rather than the usual fall and spring semesters that other colleges offered. “I’m gonna come straight here after I finish school and start with the summer trimester.”

“Me too!” Mellie said. “It makes sense. That way we can spread our courses out further, instead of cramming them all into two study periods. Less stressful.”

“Yeah, exactly. And if we do cram a lot of courses into each trimester, we can get enough credits to finish in under four years if we want to.”

“True. Sounds like you already can’t wait to get out of here,” Mellie said with a playful nudge.

I blushed again and smiled. “It’s not that. It’s more that I can’t wait to have a degree and get a decent job.”

“Well, don’t worry, you won’t be staying here that long, anyway,” she replied.

I stiffened. “What do you mean?” I asked, my forehead wrinkling.

“Just that the four years will fly by,” she said. “Everyone in my family who’s been through college said the same thing: it goes faster than you think it will.”

“Oh, right.”

Mellie suddenly frowned and stopped short. “Hey, how do you know Elias King?”

“Sorry?”

She gestured to our right, back at the courtyard of Marwick College. “He’s staring right at you. I assumed you knew him.”

I turned to look and immediately swallowed hard. She was right. Elias was here at Roden. He was standing by a statue on the outer edge of the courtyard, a cell phone in one hand and his gaze fixed right on me. There was a hint of a smirk on his handsome face. Against my better judgment, I instantly wanted to run my hands through his perfect hair, touch his perfect skin, gaze into his perfect eyes.

Since Willa’s party, I’d thought of him several times—well, thought of the strange effect he had on me, really—but I hadn’t wondered if I’d see him again. I figured I wouldn’t, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to, either, given how rude he was. I guess I was in two minds, though. On the one hand, he made me melt like candlewax and also saved me from a potentially deadly situation. On the other hand, he said he hadn’t done it for me, and he’d spent the better part of the evening glaring at me like I’d kicked someone’s beloved dog.

I shrugged and turned my attention back to Mellie. “I don’t know him. Not really,” I said. “I mean, I met him for about five seconds at a party last week, but I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t even know his last name until you said it, and I still don’t know who he is.”

Her blue eyes widened. “Really? You haven’t heard of the Kings?” she said in a tone which suggested I might’ve lived under a rock for the last eighteen years.

A penny slowly rolled in from deep in the back of my mind. Then it finally dropped. “Wait, he’s one of those Kings?” I asked. I’d heard of them, all right. Who hadn’t?

“Yes, and that was his father your parents were talking to when we saw them near the fountain. Tobias King. I figured maybe you were family friends or something.”

“Nope.”

There was no way they were family friends of ours. The Kings were icons here; the closest thing our country had to royalty, and their family name was a constant reminder of that. Sometimes I wondered if they’d changed it from something else hundreds of years ago just to remind everyone how filthy rich and powerful they were.

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