Undercover Badge; Next Generation

Chapter four

CHAPTER FOUR

"What?" Ingrid half shrieked.

"Who is that; I'd have remembered that!" and it made sense that Ingrid didn't recognize Matthew Dyllan Cavalier. He'd left the town four years ago when he graduated. Since then, the topic had been sort of hush-hush. Matthew was valedictorian. Capitan of the varsity basketball and football teams, head of the student council and an A student. He also taught little league girls baseball. In short, he was sort of perfect. The fatal flaw, as there always seemed to be with these types of guys; his temper.

I'd seen it once first hand. A lowly freshman, I'd been dazzled by the glitz and glamour of the cheerleaders. They'd not yet noticed my sarcasm and intelligence at that point. Or maybe I simply hadn't become surly yet. Whatever. Point was that I was in tight with the cheerleaders. That had gained me VIP access to a senior football party. I remembered the girls dressing me up- forgive me, down. To this day I don't think I've been in public with that much skin exposed since my birth. So there was drinking, and I'd been co-hursed into a few body shots, but I was, by no means, drunk. I wasn't even tipsy. However the fashion was to giggle high pitched, prance around and hang over the jocks, and I fell in line with my new vocation.

I'd been starting to get bored, my first disenchantment with popularity, when the glass patio doors had completely shattered. I still wondered about the amount of strength it took to literally throw a two hundred pound Football player through sliding glass doors. He even bounced twice on the other side. That was when I saw Matthew. His name suited his appearance as an avenging angel. His eyes, toffee colored, looked like they were lit from behind with the rage he carried. His hair, a mahogany mess, was tousled, but bore lighter streaks from the time he spent practicing in the sun.

Where Joey was pretty - terribly full, plush, deep pink lips, with soft lines and gentle sloping angles in his face and feathered, fluffy hair - his brother was not. Joey was leanly built with fine muscle for speed, his brother was not.

Matthew was not and would never be, pretty. His brow was full and dark and prominent, often casting those liquid caramel eyes into shadow. His jaw was square and hard. Mathew's features were powerful. His nose had a strong line and had one slight dent in it from where it had been set wrong. I remembered the break. It was when the boy he threw through the doors got up and landed a lucky shot.

His lips, by God, we freshmen -and all other females in high school at the time- could wax poetic about his lips. They were on the border of full. You couldn't call them full, but not thin either. And their shape made you want to trace every dip and line. He had a little scar on his top lip on the right. Not something you could see unless you looked for it. The small line was about as long as my pinky fingernail was wide. All it was, a slightly lighter shade of the dusky color of his lips and his tanned skin. His lips were also not the cherry pink Joey supported. No. They were only dusky. Barely pink. But so, painfully attractive.

This of course led to his dimpled chin. Where Joey had one small diamond stud in his left ear, Matthew had none.

Finally, there was the body. I'd never seen it without clothes, but I knew we all wished we had. His shoulders were so wide and thickly muscled, his manhandling a football player made sense. Most tall men slumped. It was common for guys over six feet to duck their heads and slump their shoulders to avoid attention, most were embarrassed to be outstanding. Matthew walked with his head up and his shoulders straight and back. Some accused him of arrogance. I thought it was simply a part of his character. He was a powerful man. His waist tapered to narrow hips, and then the jeans he wore, that were never tight but sat just right on his ass and clung almost perfectly to those thickly muscled thighs always emphasized his physique. I remembered the girls chasing after him in school. I never had. He was out of my league and I was sort of scared of him. The way his eyes could cut like glass and his voice, always a low, low, almost quiet rumble could command more attention than the loudest shriek.