Free My Little Runaway (Destiny Bay) by Helen Conrad Page B

same exclusive private school as Tony. She’d attended Fairfax School for Young Women and hated every moment. Somehow she’d never been able to consider herself one of the chosen few, the self-proclaimed ruling class. She hadn’t been comfortable with snobs. Every day of every year she went there, she’d pleaded with her mother to take her out and let her go to public school.
    “The faculty at Fairfax knows how to prepare you to take your place in society, Jennifer,” her mother would scold. “Besides, the things one hears happening at that public high school—I wouldn’t send a dog there.”
    Miserable at a school where she felt completely out of place, Jennifer took matters into her own hands. The faculty at Fairfax might know how to help debutantes prepare to give suitable dinner parties, but they hadn’t a clue as to how to deal with a young woman who, when asked to write a term paper on a great American, chose Al Capone, then followed that outrage, by entering the talent show and singing, to her own accompaniment on the guitar, “Love for Sale” to the startled parents assembled.
    Two months into her senior year, Jennifer got herself expelled. She was finally deemed suitable for public school.
    Public school hadn’t turned out to be quite the paradise she’d imagined. It wasn’t easy coming in during the middle of a senior year. All the cliques had already been formed, and at that age, suspicions made it difficult to make new friends. But Jennifer’s open warmth and ready smile had served her well, and it wasn’t long before she had a few pals to eat lunch with, then girls were asking her over for slumber parties and boys were asking her out on dates. All in all, she still considered the experiment a success.
    She ran her fingers over the dusty covers of the yearbooks from Dantan Prep, then found one that looked familiar. Pulling it out, she was surprised to find it was the annual for her senior year in public high school. What on earth was Reid doing with it?
    Her first thought was that her mother had given him hers, but when she flipped it open, she found the pages, which in her copy were filled with wisecracks written in by fellow students, were blank. Very strange.
    But she spent a pleasant half hour looking through it, finding her own pictures and those of friends long forgotten. Then she turned to Reid’s yearbooks, and when she opened the last of them, a piece of paper fell out. Brown around the edges, it was apparently an old letter, probably written at the time his high school yearbook came out.
    She smoothed it open, not even thinking that she might be invading a privacy. “Dear Reid,” it began in an ultra feminine scrawl, the “i” dotted with a tiny heart. “I don’t think you know me, but I watch you every day at football practice ...”
    “Jennifer?” Reid rapped on her door.
    “Come on in,” she called, forgetting she was still dressed in her flimsy nightgown. She smiled with suppressed anticipation as he entered, holding the letter to her chest and debating how best to tease him with it. “Good morning.”
    “Good morning to you.” He was dressed in steel-gray slacks and a crisp white shirt, the cuffs of which he was just buttoning. It was evident he planned to go into work, even though it was Saturday. His eyes narrowed as his gaze traveled over the revealing length of her, making her suddenly very much aware of how thin and clinging the fabric was. “Are you planning to stay in bed all day?” he asked gruffly.
    “I don’t know,” she said saucily. “That depends on what you have in mind.” She made a sexy pose, twisting a bit so that every curve was well displayed, and gave him a vampy look. She was rewarded by the whitening of his knuckles as he clutched the back of a chair.
    “Jennifer,” he said harshly, “for God’s sake . . .”
    She laughed, spoiling the lady-tramp look by turning it into the girl-next-door instead, and waved the letter at him.
    “Don’t