Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1) Read Free

growled.
    “What is your problem?” Keisha demanded. “It’s barely ten o’clock! And family legend has it that you were hardly an angel when you were my age.”
    “This is not some stupid frat party, and you are both obviously in high school.” He glanced at Tesla briefly, then jerked a thumb in her direction. “Jesus, Keish, she looks like she’s fifteen years old!”
    “I’ll be eighteen in October!” Tesla protested, stung by this insult, but both Finn and Keisha ignored her.
    “Well, we can’t leave yet,” Keisha said, and her voice took on that I-will-brook-no-argument tone Tesla knew all too well. “We’re supposed to meet our friend Malcolm, and it would not be cool if we left before he gets here.”
    Finn rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he snapped. And then he turned to Tesla, “But get out as soon as he arrives. You can’t be here tonight.” His bright, burnished eyes bore straight into Tesla’s and, much to her surprise, he made no comment about hers. He didn’t even seem to notice that they were, to say the least, unusual, and she was inexplicably offended by this show of disinterest. She glared back at him, her usual shyness around boys nowhere to be found. For a moment she was aware of nothing but the intensity of his stare, and in her peripheral vision his wild, unkempt hair, the grim set of his mouth. And then he turned and was gone before she could think of a single, scathing retort.
    “What the hell?” Tesla asked.
    “Finnegan thinks he’s the shit,” Keisha answered with a dismissive wave of her hand. “He figures he can tell me what to do because he’s older than me— barely older. Just ignore him.”
    Tesla certainly intended to ignore him, but she was curious. “Why is it such a big deal that we’re here? We can’t be the only ones here underage.”
    “I doubt it’s about that,” Keisha said slowly. She paused, and her frown made it clear to Tesla that it was not easy to explain Finnegan Ford. “He’s had a very cool—but very weird—life, and it’s made him kind of a pain in the ass.”
    “What do you mean? Cool and weird how?”
    Keisha pulled Tesla back into the line of people moving toward the keg, and spoke over her shoulder. “Cool in that he’s lived in a bunch of different countries, Europe mostly, but weird in that he was stuck in boarding school a lot. He’s been on his own, really, his whole life, no siblings and not much contact with his parents since he started school.”
    “Shit,” said Tesla.
    “Yeah. He’s used to being the boss. Of himself and—he thinks—of everyone else, too,” Keisha said, at the keg at last. The hot Asian guy, whose expression had been decidedly bored up till now, looked anything but as he watched the girls approach. Keisha, for her part, had lost all interest in Finn’s unusual childhood.
     
    Unnoticed by either of the girls, Finn stood in the opposite doorway, just close enough to hear the conversation as he watched his cousin flirt with his best friend. She could lay it on thick, and despite his apprehension about what this evening might bring, Finn couldn’t help but be amused. Joley might be a little older, and more experienced, but Keisha was a force to be reckoned with, and Finn wished him luck. Keisha giggled, flattered Joley, and looked away in faux confusion, but despite her amusing, over-the-top performance, Finn’s interest was drawn from his cousin to the redheaded girl who stood next to her.
    It was fanciful, of course, but it seemed that all the light in the room was pulled toward the girl in the white embroidered shirt, the pale gleam of her arms reflecting back the light and illuminating everything around her. Her thick, fiery hair curled over her shoulders and down the thin, white shirt she wore in stark contrast to the long line of her throat. His eyes traveled down her slim body, until she laughed and his eyes snapped back up to her face, animated with humor and intelligence and a soft, wide