My brain bounces through about five thoughts in the next five seconds.
He looks about as far from a stuffy old bespectacled librarian as humanly possible.
Judging from the family resemblance, he’s Gideon’s older brother, hence the reason he seemed familiar.
A school library is an odd place for a Delacroix to work.
As a member of said founding family, he was probably a Swan, which means he must at least suspect where I was going.
He looks young enough that he might even have been a Swan when Royal was kidnapped…
I swallow hard, my hand curling into a fist around the key. “There’s no one else in here?” I ask.
“No,” he says, watching me expectantly.
I hold up the old-fashioned key. “Do you know what this opens?”
He quirks a brow and slips his hands into his pockets. “Do you?”
It strikes me then that he doesn’t just look like Gideon. He looks like a dark-haired version of Preston. I find myself studying his face, wondering if this is what his cousin would look like without the burn scars.
“Once a Swan, always a Swan,” I say lightly.
“Where’d you get that?” he asks, reaching for the key.
I close my fingers around it. “I’m the key master.”
“You’re a girl.”
“And?”
His eyes narrow. “You’re not a Swan.”
“I’m not?”
“Prove it.”
I raise my brows and give him some side-eye. “Mr. Delacroix,” I say. “Are you asking me to show you a tattoo that’s under my clothes, while we’re alone in the library together? I really don’t think that’s going to help Willow Heights wake up from its current publicity nightmare.”
He jerks his hand back, his eyes widening. “No! That’s not—I wasn’t—”
I raise a brow and hold up the key. “I’m going downstairs. Are any classes coming in this morning?”
He shakes his head, still looking freaked out. I step past him, unlock the door, and slip behind the bookcase.
When I reach the bottom of the steps, I turn the corner with my hands up, in case Magnolia brought another one of Daddy’s guns to school. But Magnolia’s not the one sitting slumped over in the chair against the wall, the one where I tried to curl up and sleep last year when I was trapped down here with the twins.
“Duke,” I say, coming to a stop.
He jumps up from the chair and scrambles backwards, holding up a hand as if I’m the one wielding a gun. He doesn’t have a gun, either, but he’s holding a beer bottle. The light filtering through the dark glass shows it’s already half empty.
“Seriously?” I ask. “It’s eight in the morning.”
“You shouldn’t be down here,” he says, sounding as freaked as he looks.
“Is Baron down here?” I ask. “Or are you pissed and somehow blaming me for that video, too, even though I had nothing to do with it?”
“Baron’s not here,” he says, glancing over his shoulder at the open door to the other room. “But I can’t be alone with you.”