Beautiful Ruin (Nolan Brothers #1)

by Amy Olle

“I’m her teacher.” He was sputtering now. “She’s my student.” His protests ceased, and he fixed her with a narrow-eyed stare. “Don’t you dare laugh at me.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it.” She couldn’t repress a small, private smile.

  She’d worked in academia long enough to know not every professor was repulsed by the idea of sleeping with their barely legal, power-disadvantaged students.

  Thoughts of skeezy student-professor relationships scattered like college kids at a keg party with no beer when Noah’s dark gaze clamped on her face and then journeyed the length of her body, lingering at a few key destinations. A punch of heat blossomed in her belly and spread through her veins.

  How did he do it? How did he manage to make her feel so sexy? She never felt sexy. Her hips were too wide, her legs too short, but somehow, when Noah looked at her, she couldn’t seem to remember those facts. She wanted to give herself over to him, to do whatever he wanted with her.

  To hell with the eighteen-year-old.

  The window air conditioner kicked on and emitted a whiff of mildew into the stale air in the office. Mina endeavored to rein in her lust-filled thoughts and pulled the check from the dealership out of her back pocket.

  She filched a pen off Noah’s desk and scrawled her name on the back before handing the slip of paper over.

  Worry formed creases around his eyes while he read. Then his head snapped up. “You sold your car?”

  Mina waved off his concern with a flit of one hand. “Do you have any idea how much furniture is needed to fill a seven-thousand-square-foot house?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “Neither do I, but I’m guessing it’s a lot. A girl needs a truck if she’s going to do any proper shopping.”

  Easy laughter rumbled in his chest. He rounded the desk and slipped the check into a drawer. “We’ve finished surveying and are ready to start excavating a few days ahead of schedule.” He came out from behind the desk. “The well is still an issue. I need a little more time. I’m sorry.”

  Fatigue settled in puffy bags under his eyes, and a faint sunburn painted color high on his cheekbones and across the bridge of his straight nose. The image of brash headlights slashing through the darkening night sky rose to mind.

  Was it possible he’d done it for her?

  Her throat constricted. “Don’t be sorry.” She forced out the lame reply. “Please.”

  The lines smoothed from his face. “Did you have any trouble finding me?”

  “Not at all. This used to be my office.”

  He paled beneath his tanned skin. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “I wish I were.”

  He dragged a hand through his hair, causing a large swath on top of his head to stand on end. “I swear, I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, surprised to realize it was true. Her misfortunes weren’t of his making. Not by design, at least.

  The furniture was the same, but he’d added an area rug and a bookshelf, which sat mostly empty. A box sat on the floor, opened but packed to the brim with books. Several framed documents propped against the wood shelves, and she noticed one hanging on the wall behind his desk. She stepped closer and squinted at the elaborate lettering.

  She glanced back over her shoulder. “You studied at Oxford?”

  He rolled his shoulders. “I suppose it’s not every day a high school dropout gets into Oxford.”

  “It’s not every day anyone gets into Oxford.”

  His dark eyes glinted with mischief. “I had an in.”

  “You had an in? At Oxford?”

  “I was bartending at a pub outside London, and one summer, a group came to town to excavate some Roman ruins in the area. They came to the pub most every night. They talked about the excavation. I asked questions. Soon enough, I was on my knees in the dirt with nothing but a couple of garden tools and instructions not to fuck it up.”

  Their laughter met and mingled.

  “One of the professors overseeing the project took me under his wing,” Noah said. “He encouraged me to apply to the program. Lined me up with a few scholarship opportunities.”

  “So you went back to school?”

  “I came back here, took the GED, and enrolled at Oxford the following spring.”

  “You were in Thief Island? When?” And why did it hurt to know he’d returned but hadn’t come to see her?

  “A long time ago.” His tone softened with regret.

  Or was it pity?

  Warmth touched her cheeks, and she turned to the framed diplomas on the floor. She tipped through the short stack. Two bachelor’s degrees, a master’s degree, plus the PhD from Oxford.

  “It’s incredible. You’re incredible.” She tried to pull the sappy words back too late. Her blush turned furious, and sweet embarrassment hung in the air between them.

  “I quit high school. Nothing incredible about that.” Beneath the derision, an ember of vulnerability flickered across his face.

  She faced him. “You were bored, not stupid.”

  The words dropped like a hammer.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you,” she said. “It’s just... You weren’t stupid.”

  In the hall, a door banged open, and voices poured into the corridor as a class let out.

  She inched toward the noise. “I should go.”

  “Can I walk you out?”

  She couldn’t suppress a wry smile. “I know the way.”

  He cringed. “Right.”

  At the door, she hesitated. “Thank you for all your work.”

  His dark eyes filled with promise when he said, softly, “You’re welcome.”

  Her heart stuttering, she pressed her way through the crowded hallway. Faces of college-aged students weaved before her, and she over-focused on each one, crowding out a certain dark-eyed gaze from her mind.

  He hadn’t arrived early and stayed late at the site for her, she told herself. He was only doing his job. She’d do well to remember that.

  A finger-fuck on the dining room table was one thing, but she’d given up the rescue fantasies long ago.

  Chapter Eleven

  Noah rocked back in his office chair and scrubbed his hands over his face. The essay on his desk joined the pile on the floor. A month into the semester, and a heap of muddled three-page opinion pieces with laughable grammatical errors lay at his feet.

  Except he wasn’t laughing. His head ached from trying to follow the aimless, convoluted workings of his students’ minds while his ego, doubled-over and gasping for air, suffered the brunt of the blows.

  He was a good teacher, or so he’d thought, but paper after paper proved otherwise.

  He’d taught some of the brightest minds in Europe, at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Students came to him driven. He didn’t have to work to motivate them.

  Here, well, apparently the students needed a little more encouragement.

  With a resigned sigh, Noah shoved to his feet. He had to step away before he crushed some poor kid’s confidence with cruel comments scratched in red ink. He snagged his backpack off a chair in the corner and left Hannah Hall behind.

  Mina’s house filled his view, its buttery yellow limestone exterior glowing in the afternoon sun, and his blood pressure started to drop. He drove up the tree-lined drive and parked off to the side, amidst the crush of trucks littering the driveway and front lawn.

  A steady whir of activity emanated from inside the house when he climbed from the cab and hauled his bag from the bed of the truck. He slung the pack over his shoulder for the long trek out to the site.

  In the two weeks since he had begun the excavation, he’d grown accustomed to the rhythms of Mina’s life. It’d be a few more hours before the crew packed up and headed home for the day. Afterwards, she’d take a walk along the beach, and things would fall quiet for the rest of the night.

  He’d seen no signs of girlfriends stopping by or family dropping in on her. No late
-night visitors, or early-morning departures, to make him suspect Mina had a lover.

  At the site, the wind blew in from the southwest with a slight, steady influence, and the sun pushed through the clouds to give him suitable light to work. He tossed his backpack to the ground and pulled the bandana from his back pocket. He tied it in a tight knot at the back of his head, a shield against the wind and dirt, while he pondered what drove a single woman to take on a restoration of this scope and size.

  Noah kneeled in the dirt before a four-square-foot section of earth, one of fifty or so such sections, and removed a trowel and brush from his bag.

  Probably the same thing that drove him to turn to the past for answers. If you couldn’t connect with the living, why not try the dead and inanimate? For the next few hours, he lost himself in the task of working the earth to convince her to give up the mysteries of the past.

  Sometime later, he pulled an arrowhead from the ground and placed it beside the shard of porcelain he’d extracted moments before. He placed a few handfuls of soil in a sifting table, and dirt fell away to reveal more porcelain fragments. He smoothed away the caked-on mud and laid the pieces along the table’s edge. The shards all contained the blue-and-white pattern, and soon Noah fitted some of the broken pieces together. Before long, he’d found and reassembled more than one-third of a dinner plate.

  He couldn’t wait to show Mina.

  The thought blindsided him.

  He kept doing that, thinking about her when he wanted to talk about work or share a clever thought or joke. He hadn’t spoken to her since the day in his office. Though he hadn’t been able to forget how she’d peered at him, her eyes bright with pride and admiration. For him.

  Not since his mom had died could Noah remember a time in his life when anyone gave a good goddamn what he did or didn’t do. Aside from the professional interest of a boss or mentor, no one cared enough. No one, that was, until Mina.

  He climbed to his feet and stretched the kinks out of his back. With the hem of his T-shirt, he wiped a layer of dust from his face. The sun waned toward the horizon and, still needing to attack those essays before the next day’s class, Noah decided to pack up before darkness settled in.

  Engrossed in the ritual of securing the site, he didn’t at first register the far-off keening cry, until the siren’s howl grew louder and the screeching wail was upon him. He glanced up as an ambulance turned into the dive and ambled up the winding path. The siren fell silent.

  He hoped for nothing as exciting as last week’s nail gun incident, which had earned one pitiable crewmember a trip to the hospital.

  Still, a prickle of unease skittered up Noah’s spine as he started across the lawn, and moments later, when a Thief Island Police vehicle rolled up the drive, his normal gait turned to long strides.

  By the time he reached the house, his lungs burned and his heart pounded in his chest. He took the stone steps two at a time and burst through the front door.

  But once inside, his resolve deserted him.

  Men milled about in somber silence, foreboding a tangible thing in the charged air. He scanned the room, skimming over all vertical bodies. Like a slow-motion heat-seeking missile, his gaze zigzagged through the foyer, to the open door of the library.

  His stomach lurched.

  A splatter of thick, red droplets sprayed down the wall and across the floor. He gripped the doorjamb and searched out the source of all that blood.

  A voice crackled over the paramedic’s radio, and a cluster of male bodies parted. At their feet, a still form lay crumpled in a heap.

  Mina.

  His insides clenched. Blood soaked her white shirt and stained her smooth skin.

  So much blood.

  Heart in his mouth, Noah moved forward on shaky legs. Over the roaring din of his own blood rushing past his temples, his scientific mind began cataloging the facts of her appearance. Her chest rose and fell with deep, even breaths, if a little rapid.

  But there was so much blood.

  He stopped.

  No, wait. Not blood. The shade of red contained a hint of russet.

  Cinnamon Stick.

  Air flooded his lungs on a near-painful gasp. Paint. It was only paint.

  Mina’s enormous blue eyes popped open and stared up at the cluster of men standing over her. Then her gaze found Noah.

  He searched her face. Alert but stunned. Annoyance held sway over the fear and pain.

  She started to sit and he moved to help her. Once she sat propped against the wall, he crouched before her.

  He peered into her face. “What happened here?” His voice sounded rusty with emotions he didn’t care to acknowledge or even name.

  “I fell off the ladder,” she said through white, trembling lips.

  The ladder now lay on its side on the floor. Near the ceiling, red paint gave way to the purple nightmare.

  “You were at the top when you fell?”

  She nodded.

  He flicked a wayward curl off her forehead. Pupils dilated but evenly sized. “You’re afraid of heights.”

  “Now you know why.”

  That she joked went a long way to calming his racing heart. “Did you get dizzy?”

  “A little. Then the paint can tipped and I tried to catch it...” Her voice was weak and held a slight tremor. “The next thing I knew, I was on my ass on the floor.”

  A smattering of laughter stirred from the men within earshot.

  “How we doin’ over here?” Luke squatted next to Noah.

  Mina’s gaze slid from Noah to Luke and back again. “I think I’m seeing double.”

  A low chuckle rumbled in Luke’s chest. “Are you light-headed?”

  She nodded. “All the male beauty is making me woozy.”

  “I’ve been known to have that effect on women,” Luke said. “Anything else hurting?”

  “Only my pride.”

  Luke took her hand and placed two fingers on the inside of her wrist while Noah moved to sit beside her.

  “I think the paramedics want to take you to the hospital. Make sure you don’t have a concussion.” Luke rose. “I’ll go check on your ride.”

  Without thinking, Noah reached for her small hand lying limp in her lap. Her fingers were ice-cold, and he wrapped her hand tight in his. She dropped her head to his shoulder.

  It didn’t make any sense, but his spirits soared.

  He laid his head on top of hers. “If you wanted some attention, all you had to do was ask.”

  Her head popped up, knocking him in the chin. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.” Noah rubbed his chin and pulled her head back down to rest on his shoulder.

  Soon, two paramedics appeared and loaded Mina into the ambulance. In his truck, Noah followed.

  Once there, things progressed smoothly, albeit slowly. After a brief wait in a curtained cubicle, a nurse questioned Mina about her medical history. Nothing too interesting, until Mina mentioned something about a shattered eardrum and hearing loss. The nurse didn’t pursue the topic, and the ER doctor’s arrival thwarted Noah’s plan to do so.

  He examined Mina and ordered an MRI for her head and an X-ray for a wrist that’d grown swollen and sore. An hour later, a technician showed up to take her for the scans and, a half hour after that, returned her to her cubicle.

  Then they waited.

  A nurse appeared and checked a chirping gadget hooked to Mina’s finger. A short time later, a different nurse showed up with an ice pack and a splint.

  “The X-ray shows you have a torn ligament,” she explained. “Twenty minutes of ice and then we’ll wrap it up for you. You’re not left-handed, by any chance?”

  Mina shook her head and motioned toward the splint lying on the end of the bed. “How long will I need to wear that?”

  “A few weeks at least. Until the sprain heals up.”

  The nurse disappeared behind the curtain wall, and another chunk of time passed before the results of the MRI came back showing Mina ind
eed was suffering from a concussion. The doctor wanted to observe her.

  So again, they waited.

  Mina ate ice chips while Noah snacked on potato chips and candy bars from a vending machine. They watched a chick flick, which was actually kind of funny, and the second half of a college football game that went into double-overtime and was totally badass.

  When five hours passed with no puking and no memory lapses, Mina was set free.

  With the screech of metal grating against metal, the discharge nurse swept open the curtained wall.

  A round, middle-aged woman, the nurse peered at Mina over the rim of her eyeglasses, her mouth set in a stern line. “Ready to go?”

  “Yes.” Mina bolted upright in the hospital bed.

  The nurse pushed the glasses up her nose and referred to a clipboard she propped on the shelf of her stomach. “We’ve called in your prescription painkiller to the pharmacy on the first floor.”

  Though she addressed Mina, she handed a sheet of paper to Noah. “Here are your aftercare instructions.” Her index finger popped up. “For the next seven days, drink plenty of fluids. Take your meds and get lots of rest.” A second and third finger joined the first. Her gaze swiveled to Noah. “You’ll need to keep an eye on her overnight. We want her to sleep, but wake her up every three to four hours and talk to her. Make sure she’s lucid and not in too much pain.”

  Mina raised her hand, like a student in class. “Oh, he’s not—”

  The nurse’s rounded chin pressed into her chest, and she fixed her beady eyes on Mina over her glasses.

  Mina shrunk back under the nurse’s gaze. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “You have someone staying with you tonight?” the nurse demanded.

  “She won’t be alone,” Noah said.

  The nurse tapped the paper in his hand. “Our number is here. Call if you experience a headache the meds won’t take care of, loss of consciousness, confusion, or changes to your vision. Understood?”

  “Yes,” Noah and Mina said together.

  The nurse directed Mina to follow up with her primary care physician in the next couple of days and disappeared behind the curtain.

  With a frown, Mina scooted closer to the edge of the bed. “Why are you smiling?”