Stage Two Read online

  Stage Two

  By Ariel Tachna

  Lexington Lovers

  Assistant high school principal Blake Barnes has everything he wants—a chance to help troubled students and an outlet for his passion for theater. Well, almost everything—he still goes home to an empty apartment. Then his high school crush explodes back into his life, the unexpected guardian of two boys in Blake’s care.

  Thane Dalton has always been a bad boy through and through. Not much has changed, including his mistrust of authority figures, and no amount of institutional bureaucracy will keep him from protecting his nephews from the bullies terrorizing them. If that means butting heads with Blake, so be it.

  Blake and Thane have lessons to learn: that they both have the boys’ best interests at heart, that the tension between them isn’t just confrontational, and that sparks can fly when opposites come together.

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Sneak Peek

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  About the Author | By Ariel Tachna

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  Copyright

  “I found my senior yearbook, you know,” Thane said in that deep, rumbly voice that did unspeakable things to Blake’s libido. “It’s probably a good thing I didn’t notice you back then. I wouldn’t have known what to do with you.”

  Blake choked back a laugh at the memory of Thane’s casual announcement to the school cafeteria and the effect it had had on him. “I think you would have.”

  Thane turned Blake around to face him, his heavy hands hot on Blake’s shoulders even through the layers of cloth that separated their skin. “I’m sure I would have managed to fuck you,” Thane agreed, and the thought alone was enough to make Blake weak in the knees, “but I wouldn’t have known how to treat you the way you deserve.” He stroked Blake’s cheek with one thick finger. Blake’s eyes fluttered shut despite himself. “I wouldn’t have known how to keep you.”

  Blake’s eyes shot open. Thane hadn’t just said that. But Thane met his gaze steadily, not backing away from the statement in the slightest.

  “Is that what you want?” Blake asked hoarsely.

  Thane smiled and took a step back. “I’d be a fool to want anything less.”

  To my mother and sister, who answered all my questions about Lexington, and to Nicki, who indulges my obsessions even when she doesn’t share them.

  Chapter One

  BLAKE Barnes stared across his desk at the two sullen boys huddled together on small plastic chairs. “You want to tell me what happened? Because if you don’t, I’m going to have nothing to go on but the fact that this is the third time you’ve ended up in my office in less than a month. Three times in a month isn’t a record, but if you consider that you only started school here four weeks ago, it might be.”

  Phillip—the older of the two brothers, for all that they were both in tenth grade and thus Blake’s responsibility until they moved on to eleventh grade—snickered, a good sign as far as Blake was concerned, but neither of them spoke.

  “Phillip, Christopher, you’ve got to give me something here. I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “Kit,” the other brother muttered. “Nobody calls me Christopher.”

  Blake sighed. “Come on, boys. I’m not the bad guy here. I don’t want to have to drag your parents into this if we can resolve it at school.” He’d managed to deal with the issues in-house the first two times the boys had gotten in trouble because the shouting matches had been relatively minor incidents, but he couldn’t continue, given the trend, especially not now that it had escalated to physical contact.

  “Our parents are dead,” Phillip spat.

  Blake blinked a couple of times. He hadn’t known that. Well, crap. So much for building rapport with the troubled teens, although that explained a number of things. He frowned and pulled up their records to see who they were living with. It took a moment for the computer to catch up with his request—he’d insisted on taking one of the old computers when the school had gotten some new ones. The teachers needed the newer technology more than he did. Finally the database loaded and gave him what he was looking for. Phillip and Christopher Parkins, currently living with….

  Crap on a cracker. Thane Dalton, listed as their guardian. He rubbed his temples and prayed the boys would talk to him. He hadn’t seen Thane Dalton—assuming it was the same Thane Dalton, but in a town the size of Lexington and with a name like that, he wasn’t counting on it being anyone else—since Thane graduated from high school, but he doubted seeing him again almost twenty years later would be any easier. “Do I need to call your guardian or can we work this out ourselves?”

  “Please don’t call Uncle Thane.” Kit finally met Blake’s eyes, a look of such hopelessness on his face that Blake’s heart broke for the boy.

  “Kit, I keep telling you Uncle Thane won’t kick us out.”

  “Look, tell me what happened—the truth, mind you—and I’ll see if I can keep your uncle out of it,” Blake offered. “The whole truth.”

  “Those boys, the ones I shoved—” Phillip began.

  “Don’t,” Kit said. “It’ll only make it worse.”

  Blake’s stomach sank. “Kit, I know how it feels to be the new kid at school. We moved to Lexington when I was about your age, and I didn’t have an older brother to look out for me, but I also know that keeping silent about whatever the problem is won’t make it go away.”

  Phillip looked at Kit again, then back at Blake. “They think because they’re star athletes and we’re nobody that they can push us around. They think they can make Kit do things for them. They….”

  Blake could already tell where this was going, but he had to hear it from the boys. He folded his hands in his lap and squeezed hard to hide the tension that had its claws in him.

  “Go on,” he said as gently as he knew how.

  “They had him on his knees, holding him down. If I hadn’t gotten there when I did… one of them was reaching for his belt,” Phillip said in a rush. “Yeah, I shoved him. Yeah, I would have done worse if security hadn’t shown up, but they were going to hurt Kit. I couldn’t let them do that.”

  Blake’s eyes closed against the desperation in Phillip’s voice. “No, you couldn’t. As a principal, I can’t condone violence, but I understand why you did it. Unfortunately, by the time security got there, Kit was off the ground and the security cameras don’t reach the corner where you were at the time, so it’s your word against theirs.”

  Phillip spluttered a protest.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. As a matter of fact, I do believe you, but dealing with it isn’t going to be as simple as it would be if we had witnesses beyond the people involved. Kit, did they say anything about what they were going to do
with the belt once they took it off?” Blake could imagine two scenarios off the top of his head—a beating or a gang rape—but he’d long since learned that his students were far more creative than he was. The other boys could have had some other motive entirely.

  Kit shook his head.

  “Kit,” Blake cajoled. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me the truth.”

  Kit shook his head again.

  “Call Uncle Thane,” Phillip said suddenly. “Maybe Kit will talk to him.”

  Blake nodded and reached for the phone to dial the number still on his computer screen. He ignored the way Kit flinched, hoping he was making the right call. Thane Dalton had always been rough around the edges—“I may have flunked biology, but even I know you can’t get a girl pregnant from fucking her in the ass”—but Blake had never known him to be cruel. He hoped time hadn’t changed that about him, even if it had changed other things.

  The phone rang three times before someone answered.

  “Dalton.”

  “Mr. Dalton, this is Mr. Barnes at Henry Clay High School. I have your nephews here in my office. There’s been a bit of an altercation. We need you to come up to the school, please.”

  “Let me talk to them,” Dalton demanded.

  It went against protocol, but Blake hadn’t gotten where he was by following the rules. He might not look like a risk-taker, but the kids always came first for him. “One moment.” He looked at the boys. “Which of you wants to talk to him?”

  Kit flinched and Phillip squared his shoulders. “I’ll talk to him.”

  Blake offered him the receiver. The cord wouldn’t stretch to where he sat, so Phillip had to approach the desk to take it.

  “Uncle Thane?”

  Blake couldn’t hear what Dalton said over the phone, but he could hear the angry tone clear as day. He sighed. This was going to get messy, he could tell already. Either the boys had confided in Dalton enough that he knew what was going on, or he had turned into a total authoritarian and was yelling at them purely for being in the principal’s office. Phillip listened to whatever Dalton was shouting without comment. After a few minutes, he handed the phone back to Blake and sat back down.

  “Mr. Dalton?”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Don’t let my nephews out of your sight. If those thugs get another chance at my boys, I’ll be taking it out of your ass.”

  Blake didn’t shiver at the words. He was an adult, long past his adolescent crush on the bad-boy senior. Never mind that he’d figured out he was gay because of Thane Dalton and his outlandish disregard for anything like propriety.

  “I will keep your nephews in my office until you get here,” Blake replied as civilly as he could. In his four years as assistant principal, he’d dealt with enough irate parents to know how to handle this. Losing his own temper wouldn’t help anyone, least of all the boys across from him.

  The click of the phone call ending was Dalton’s only reply. Blake stifled a sigh. Some things never changed.

  “Your uncle will be here in twenty minutes,” Blake told the boys. “Is there anything else you want to tell me while we’re waiting?”

  Both boys shook their heads, so Blake left them to their silence. He had more than enough work to do if they didn’t want to talk to him, but his thoughts kept circling back around to their situation. They needed a peer group of their own, a circle of friends to insulate them from the bullies who were picking on them, to give them the same security working in the theater had given him when he’d first moved to Lexington. Being the new kid was always a challenge until they could fit in, and from what little he’d just learned of their situation, they had enough challenges facing them already.

  If he could get them to talk to him and tell him the full truth about what was going on, he could help them, probably, but if they wouldn’t talk to him, his options were limited. Security had broken the argument up this time before it could get bad enough to really be considered a fight, but the next time they might not be so lucky, and Fayette County had a strict zero tolerance policy where fighting was concerned. If an actual fight broke out, he’d have no choice but to send them to the alternative school, no matter how convinced he was that they didn’t belong there. And he’d be sending them with the same boys who’d harassed them to the point of fighting back. There had to be a way to avoid that. He just had to find it, preferably before Thane Dalton got here, because Blake had no doubt what would ensue then—all hell would break loose.

  He smiled at the thought. Phillip and Kit needed someone like their uncle in their corner. He almost pitied the parents of the other boys if this turned into a mediation situation. Then he remembered what Phillip had told him and changed his mind. The other boys deserved whatever Dalton chose to dish out.

  He’d started shuffling some papers on his desk, looking for the report he was supposed to fill out at some point today, when his gaze landed on the announcement of the theater department’s latest project. He eyed it speculatively for a moment. A little physical labor in the guise of a bit of community service with a group of kids who prided themselves on being “different” might be exactly what Phillip and Kit needed to start fitting in. It had worked for him all those years ago.

  THANE Dalton stared down at the phone in his hand and cursed until the air around him turned blue. When he’d promised Lily he’d take care of her boys if anything happened to her, he hadn’t expected it to ever come to pass. Unlike her soldier of a late husband, she had a perfectly safe nine-to-five job at a bank. No reason to think he’d suddenly end up with custody of his nephews because she’d gotten sick and didn’t recover. No reason to imagine that he’d suddenly find himself with two grieving teenagers living under his roof.

  He tucked his phone in his pocket and whistled sharply to get the attention of his site manager. “Derek, I have to go check up on my nephews. I’ll be back when I can.”

  Derek Jackson, his foreman, best friend since forever, and the only other person he trusted with Dalton Construction, waved to show he’d heard him, leaving Thane free to head toward his truck. He knocked the mud off his boots as best he could before climbing into the cab.

  He had managed to avoid schools since he graduated from Tates Creek almost twenty years ago. He’d been planning on keeping it that way, but Kit and Phillip were all he had left of his beloved twin sister. He wasn’t about to let them down by not being there when they needed him. They hadn’t told him much—they didn’t say much of anything to anyone but each other, as far as he could tell—but they’d said enough for him to fill in the blanks. He might be pushing forty, but he still remembered how high school worked. He’d played the game with the best of them back then, but his nephews, his precious boys, hadn’t learned those lessons yet. Thane was trying to teach them, but they were still too raw to hear what he had to say.

  It had been hard enough to lose his parents at thirty. He couldn’t imagine being an orphan at fifteen and sixteen. He’d be damned if he let anyone else make their lives more difficult now, and fuck anyone who tried to stand in his way. They had no idea what he was capable of.

  Chapter Two

  “EXCUSE me, Mr. Barnes. Mr. Dalton is here to see you.”

  Blake nodded to his secretary. “Thank you, Natalie. Please show him in.”

  Blake watched the boys across from him reach for each other as Natalie went back to the main office. He braced himself mentally for whatever the next minutes would bring. He would defend them from their uncle just as he would from the school bullies if it came to that, but he could only do so much once they left his office.

  The door slammed open, startling all three occupants of the room, and Thane Dalton stormed in. He hadn’t changed a bit, except maybe to get better. He still wore his black hair pulled back into a tail at his nape. The black leather jacket Blake remembered had been replaced with a nicer one, but the jeans and work boots could have been the same ones Thane wore in high school. He still took up way more space in the room than hi
s physical size accounted for, sucking all the air out of it with his sheer presence. Blake took a breath and reminded himself he wasn’t a nerdy freshman anymore. “Mr. Dalton. Thank you for coming so quickly. I’m Mr. Barnes.”

  “I know who you are. I want to know what you’re going to do to stop these fucking thugs from terrorizing my boys.”

  “I’d be happy to discuss a mediation plan with you,” Blake began.

  Thane’s glare should have left Blake a pile of ashes on the floor. “Mediation?” he ground out. “I don’t see anything to mediate. From the day they enrolled here, they’ve been picked on by the same gang of jocks. You will not tell them not to defend themselves.”

  “Fayette County has a zero tolerance policy where fighting is concerned. It doesn’t matter who started it,” Blake said, feeling like the worst kind of hypocrite. “If they are being bullied, they need to report it to an adult rather than taking matters into their own hands.”

  “Like who?” Thane demanded. “You? You really expect me to believe you’d take their side over your star athletes?”

  “There are procedures in place—”

  “Fuck procedure.” Blake didn’t flush at the sound of Thane saying fuck. He didn’t. He wouldn’t.

  “Please, Mr. Dalton. If you would keep a civil tongue, it would help matters immensely.”

  Thane snorted. “You’re all the same. All full of polite words and pretty manners and all afraid to do anything that might get you fired or sued. Well, fuck that, Mr. Barnes. Someone is threatening my boys, and it’s going to stop now.”

  “And how do you propose to stop it?” Blake asked.

  “How do you propose to stop it?”

  “Bullies have a tendency to pick on those without an established peer group,” Blake explained. “They look for those who are alone with no one to defend them or to bear witness to what’s going on.” Thane opened his mouth to interrupt. “Please let me finish. I do have a point, if you will hear me out.”