Just Like a Man Read Free

father, it went without saying, was currently number two on the list of usual suspects seated across from Hannah, even though the man was anything but usual. This was his first visit to her office, even though she'd tried to see him several times before now. But Michael Sawyer seemed to go out of town a lot for his job, something that—just a shot in the dark—might be contributing to his son's incessant need to invent outlandish tales. Alex obviously craved a more stable family environment. Because he had also told his class-mates that he used to have twin sisters, who had, alas, been kidnapped and sold into bondage by an arcane band of rogue slave traders in yet another country that Hannah was pretty confident didn't exist—Outer Villainopolis. According to Alex's records, however, he was—and had always been—an only child. Besides, there was also no mention in those records of him having lived anywhere other than Indiana for the past five years, and before that, he'd been a resident of Maryland, where he was born. And the last time Hannah had checked, indentured servitude hadn't been a major source of income for Indiana
or
Maryland.
    And then there was the latest Alex fiction that had begun making the rounds of the Emerson Academy earlier in the week, that his father could hack into the computers of the Pentagon, the Kremlin, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund,
and
Toys "R" Us, and had done so on a number of occasions. But Hannah knew that Michael Sawyer was a CPA who couldn't hack his way out of a paper bag. She knew the CPA part from Alex's school registration, and about the paper bag hacking because Michael Sawyer had told her about it within moments of his arrival in her office, when presented with the news that his son had been reporting otherwise.
    In spite of his reassurances to the contrary, however, there was something about Alex's father that did sort of smack of forbidden entry. Certainly he didn't look like a CPA—or, at least, not like the stereotype of CPA. Maybe he was sort of an liber-accountant, Hannah thought. That might explain the aura of… of… überness… about him.
    Tall, dark, and handsome really wasn't a fitting description for him, maybe because that was a stereotype, too. But the man was most definitely tall, easily topping six feet. Hannah, at five-ten, wasn't accustomed to having to tilt her head back to make eye contact with anyone, but from the moment Michael Sawyer had walked into her office, she'd felt downright petite. And also strangely uneasy, because there was something about him, something smoldering and urgent and fierce, that made her think he might spontaneously combust at any moment. Or maybe she felt like that because whenever she looked at him, she felt smoldering and urgent and fierce, as if
she
might spontaneously combust at any moment.
    In any event, one of them was going to spontaneously combust if she wasn't careful. And then she'd have to completely redecorate her office. And she, for one, rather liked the British Empire feel of the place. It made her feel… imperial. And she had precious little of that in her life, despite her position as the One in Charge at the Emerson Academy. Because when one was in charge of children, one was reluctant to act like an empress. Mostly because it went right over the little tykes' heads, since so few of them had read up on their Queen Victoria.
    Michael Sawyer was dark, too—and not just outwardly, either. There was something of the cryptic and confidential, the mystique and mysterious about him. He was just dark all over, from his clearly expensive, extremely well tailored, charcoal suit—which, at the moment, was in a flagrant state of rumple, no doubt due to his position as Father of the Liar—to his bittersweet chocolate hair, to his espresso eyes that his black-rimmed glasses did nothing to diminish. .
    And handsome? Oh, yes. He was that, too. With his dusky complexion and features that appeared to have