Page 14 of Love, Academically
“Yes?” he prompted, his fingers grazing her arm.
“If I had to choose, I despise those high ropes places, you know? Where you’re all hooked up and you climb around the trees?”
Rhys’s face twisted, like he had just eaten the sharpest of lemons. “Oh God yeah, no. I am not good with heights.”
“Me neither.” She wet her lips and took a long look at him. “You know, you’re not all bad, Rhys Aubrey.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Neither are you, Miss Cartwright.”
Chapter 3
Paladin(noun)pal·a·din
A Knight renowned for heroism and chivalry
Rhys
Dan had missed kickboxing once already this week, and Rhys wasn’t holding his breath that he would turn up for class tonight either. It was great that he and Jasmeet were getting on so well, but seriously? Rhys had already had to partner someone he didn’t know earlier that week, and he didn’t really want to do it again. He pulled out his phone to text Dan.
Rhys put his phone down on his desk and lined it up next to his keyboard. He glanced at his computer screen, but the email still sat accusingly on his screen. He read the one line for the twelfth time.
The annual Dallimore family dinner and drinks was coming up, a celebration of All Things Dallimore.
It was really for the senior management of all subsidiaries of Dallimore International, but Rhys still got an invite, even though he no longer played an active part in the Dallimore businesses.Probably to ‘show him what he was missing’, or to ‘prepare him for his return’. He had avoided it for the last couple of years, but with this email from his little sister, Elin, he really didn’t have a choice. He had to go and be paraded around, pointed at, judged, and more than likely, laughed at. Forging your own way in life was what his father had expounded, but only when that forging happened through the lens of Dallimore International. You were expected to ‘do your duty’ to the family, ‘be part of the team’, and flog your guts out working your way up before starting your own business, under the umbrella of Dallimores, andheaven forbidif you wanted to do something else.
He glanced at the date, even though he knew full well that there was only another eight months left in the agreement between him and his father. Rhys had been given five years to ‘make something of himself’ in this academic field.
‘It’s long enough in business, why not in academia?’ his father had said. There was this awful looming spectre of daily suits and glass offices and stakeholder meetings and working every minute of every goddamned day in a business that was so mind-numbingly boring, plus all the endless family politics.
Some people (e.g., Elin) thrived on that. Rhys did not. He did not want any single part of it, and the prestigious Fellowship was what he had set up to his father as a measurement of ‘success’. Because his father needed somethingtangible, somethingmeasurable, something where he could say, ‘no, my son Rhys doesn’t work for the family business, but he’s the youngest member of the Royal Historical Society’ to his buddies over expensive whiskey, or when pretending to like golf.
But also, Seren would be there.
Seren, with her sleek black hair, her fitted dresses, her French-manicured nails.
Rhys simply could not turn up without screaming ‘success’ in all aspects of his life.
He tapped his top lip in thought. Lila Cartwrighthadsaid ‘anything.’ A woman on his arm would prove he was successful in his private life, if not his work life. That he didn’t need the Dallimore name to enable him to be happy and successful.
Rhys’s mother had set him up on precisely three ill-fated blind dates before he’d stamped his foot and firmly told her to butt out. This could be his way of proving that he was perfectly capable by himself.
Lila was friendly, pretty, and she would be able to glitter and dazzle with that smile of hers.
The more he thought about it, the better it seemed. There would be no sympathetic glances, there would be no veiled ‘are you okay’ comments and arm squeezes when Seren walked in.
Yes, decision made.
He would take Lila Cartwright to the Dallimore family dinner and drinks as his fake girlfriend. Well, assuming she agreed. But again, she had saidanything.
It was gone one, so Lila should be on lunch. He’d tell her now, so she could prepare. It was in a couple of weeks, so there was plenty of time.
Rhys stopped by her office, but she wasn’t there. He checked the little cafe downstairs, glancing over students’ pumpkin-spiced lattes or (if they were pretentious enough) espressos, heads buried in books and phones. Nope.
When he didn’t need her, Lila Cartwright turned up like a bad penny, but now he actually wanted to speak to her, she was missing, like John from his father’s (Henry II’s) first will. Rhys smiled at his own private joke. That was funny.
