"Overprotected Child Syndrome?"
"Excuse me?"
"You're an overprotected child too, aren't you?"
He scratched the back of his neck. "How'd you know?"
"Trust me, you have the classic symptoms. I used to have them too, but after years of intensive therapy, I learned to hide them and can almost function normally now."
He laughed at that. "Got the name of that therapist handy?"
She smiled. "Sure." Cassandra inclined her head toward the coffee shop. "You got time to join us for a cup of coffee?"
He looked as if she had just handed him the keys to Fort Knox. "Yeah, thanks."
She and Kat led the way into Starbucks with Chris right behind them like a happy puppy whose owner had just come home. After they had their drinks, they sat down in the back, away from the windows where the light couldn't burn her.
"So why are you taking Old English?" Chris asked after Kat had excused herself to go to the restroom. "You don't seem like the type who volunteers for that kind of punishment."
"I'm always trying to research old… things," she said for lack of a better term. It was hard to explain to a stranger that she researched ancient curses and spells in hopes of elongating her life. "What about you? You seem like you'd be more at home in a computer class."
He shrugged. "I was after the easy A’s this semester. I wanted something I could coast through."
"Yeah, but Old English? What kind of home do you have?"
"One where they actually speak it."
"Get out!" she said in disbelief. "Who in the world actually speaks that?"
"We do. Really." Then he said something to her that she couldn't understand.
"Did you just insult me?"
"No," he said earnestly. "I would never do anything like that."
She smiled as she glanced down to his backpack where she did a double take. There was a distressed brown day planner exposed by an unzipped pouch. The planner held a burgundy ribbon hanging out with an interesting badge attached to it. The badge had the picture of a round shield with two swords crossed and over the swords were the initials D. H.
How strange to see that today when she had her mind on a whole other kind of D. H.
Maybe it was an omen…
"D. H.?" she asked, touching the emblem. She turned it over and her heart stopped as she saw the words "Dark-Hunter. Com" engraved into it.
"Huh?" Chris looked to her hand. "Oh… Oh!" he said, getting instantly nervous again. He took it from her and tucked it back into his backpack, then zipped it closed. "That's just something I play with sometimes."
Why did it make him so tense? So obviously uncomfortable? "You sure you're not doing anything illegal, Chris?"
"Yeah, trust me. If I even had an illegal thought, I'd get busted and get my tail kicked."
Cassandra wasn’t so sure about that as Kat rejoined them. Dark-Hunter.Com…
She hadn't tried to search them out with a hyphen between the words. And now she had a Web address to try. They chatted a few more minutes about class and school, then parted ways so Chris could finish his errands before their late-afternoon Old English class and she could get back to campus before her next one. She might blow off one class a day, but two classes…Nah. Cassandra was nothing if not dedicated.
Before long, she was safely ensconced at her desk and waiting for her Classics professor to show while other students talked around her. Kat was just down the hall in a small waiting area where she was reading a Kinley MacGregor novel.
While Cassandra waited for the professor, she opened up her Palm Pilot and decided to do a little Web surfing. She typed in Dark-Hunter.Com. She waited as the page loaded. The minute it did, she gasped. Oh, this was getting good…
Chapter 4
Chris sighed as he neared his Old English classroom. It was a typical day of suckage and blowage. His life should be great. He had all the money in the world. Every luxury known. There was nothing on the planet he could dream of that couldn't be his for the asking.
For that matter, Wulf had even flown Britney Spears in to sing at Chris's twenty-first-birthday party last spring. The only problem was that the attendees had consisted of him, his bodyguards, and Wulf, who ran around the whole time trying to make sure Chris didn't get a head wound or racked.
Not to mention the three million times Wulf had urged him to make a pass at Britney. Or at the very least propose to her—which she had rejected with a great deal of laughter that still rang in his ears.