Free Brutally Beautiful by Lynne Connolly Page B

Most men would have felt at least uncomfortable, sporting an erection in such close proximity to a blood relative, but not the O’Donnell brothers. They’d spent part of their formative years tag-teaming rich women, trying to make enough money to get ahead. Sexual favors had paid for more meals than honest work, even when they could get the honest work.
    The memory reminded him of two things: how much he missed his brother and what he’d done to survive. When poverty came in the window, morality flew out the door, at least that was what his mother had said, the dimly remembered woman who’d abandoned them without so much as looking back. She’d left only a cheap, thin gold ring as a reminder of her existence.
    All gone, he told himself as he had so often before when the pangs of memory threatened to destroy his focus. Pain like that wasn’t worth dwelling on, because he couldn’t do anything about it now. Done and gone.
    There. He’d drilled into Gen’s department and found records of her classes, making a mental note of them in case they proved useful in the future. Gen was telling the truth; she was majoring in sociology. She had credits from her previous university in Idaho and had started the course fast-tracked. She was part-time, so it would take her another two years to complete her studies. She was working somewhere, but he couldn’t discover where. She’d worn office clothes, but that could mean anything. She had a small studio apartment in a not so good part of an area that until recently had a dire reputation for poverty and gang activity. That was why he’d taken notice of the locks. Pretty sure he could get into the public parts of her building without too much trouble, but he’d been glad to see the complex locks on her private door and the alarmed windows. Fairly standard for New York, but some people still lived as if they believed it couldn’t happen to them. The trouble was, “it” often did. Their trouble, not his; although he didn’t take part in such things anymore, he knew about them.
    But now he had a lecture to deliver on the poem he’d tried to teach the girl having what he suspected were fake problems. Only because she touched him a little too often, smiled at him too warmly, came too close. He huffed a laugh. If that was his only concern, he’d be a happy man.
    As it was, he could let everything go for the next hour and immerse himself in two of his greatest pleasures: wallowing in High Victorian poetry and trying to explain it to a class of people who preferred Kanye West to Tennyson. Changing their minds challenged him, gave him intellectual and emotional release when he did so. And he’d never failed in swaying a class to his point of view. When he was a kid, a battered version of the Golden Treasury had given him peace from the grind of daily life, and ever since he’d turned to poetry for solace. Mind, if any of the types he’d tangled with in those days had found out, his cred would have disappeared in a puff of smoke. So it was nice to finally let it out. Better than nice.
    He carefully logged off and disengaged the proxy server before stuffing the laptop in his bag and setting off for his class.
    As he left, something fell to the floor with a flirtatious tinkle. He bent and picked it up, then wished he hadn’t. That fucking ring. He should have left it where he was. He still wasn’t sure why he carried it, except it reminded him of what he could have become, a place he never wanted to go. He’d carried it around all his life because he didn’t want to end up the way his mother had, and this was a constant reminder. Shoving the piece of jewelry in his pocket, he strode away.
    His mother hadn’t even been married, so fuck knew what she was doing with a wedding ring.

Chapter Seven
    Coming out of his lecture after pausing to answer the questions of a few of the students, Nick allowed himself a self-indulgent wallow in euphoria. He enjoyed teaching, much to his