Binding 13 (Boys of Tommen, #1)

by Chloe Walsh

I did keep the envelope though, the one I had found in my locker the week I returned to school, with the hastily scrawled From my people to your people on the front. The two fifty-euro notes I had given to Mam when I got home from school, but I had tucked the envelope into my pillowcase for safekeeping. I didn’t have an explanation for why I didn’t throw it out, the same way I couldn’t explain why my body broke out in a cold sweat, my hands turning clammy, my heart fluttering rapidly, and my stomach twisting itself up in knots, whenever I laid eyes on him. Well, that wasn’t technically true. There was an obvious, perfectly logical reason for my reaction toward him. He was beautiful. Every single time I spotted him in the hallways, it was as if every delayed urge, feeling, and hormone that had been lying dormant inside of my body for the last fifteen years had erupted to life. I was achingly aware of him; my body shifting into high alert whenever our arms brushed in the crowded hallways between classes. But it wasn’t his looks or enormous muscular build that had coaxed my stubborn hormones out of hibernation. It was the way he had been that day.