His Naughty Lessons-Chapter 214: Good Girl, Bad Boy

** Tyler **

"Care to elaborate?" Tyler asked with no small amount of indignant doubt. "What’s so good that could possibly happen between a fling person and a relationship person?"

"That would depend on whether this is a fling or a relationship, of course." The blonde sipped her drink casually. "You’d have to tell me more. Did you see the two of them together? Did they look like a dating couple or nightclub hookups who barely talk to each other?"

Tyler wasn’t sure how he felt about this woman exuding an "I am the expert on this matter" air while most of what she said didn’t seem to make any sense. And it wasn’t like she had any business to dig into all the details of his sister’s love life anyway. But he was out for rants tonight, so he went with it and actually gave the question some serious thought.

Starting from the dinner on Wednesday, up until the camping trip over the weekend, he turned the past four days carefully in his head ... and realized that the answer was not at all what he had expected.

"It didn’t look like either a fling or a relationship." He frowned slightly. "I mean, the two of them had known each other for a long time. And they looked ... normal. Like how they would’ve been if they were still just friends. Heck, I didn’t even realize for days that something had changed."

"Interesting." The pretend expert looked thoughtful. "Maybe they were trying to hide it from you, knowing you’d judge and make a big deal out of nothing."

"I’m not making a big deal out of nothing," Tyler argued. "I’ve seen messages he sent my sister! You have no idea how dirty the things he said are."

"Oh, even more interesting." His companion cocked her head. "If that playboy really is as experienced as you claim he is, I might just be jealous of your sister. She must be having the time of her life with someone who’s got both skills and the heart to show it."

Tyler didn’t like that comment. "Don’t talk about my sister like that," he warned. "She’s not that type of person."

The blonde woman rolled her eyes. "Terribly sorry to break it to you, but as much as you’d like to believe otherwise, your sister is no longer an innocent little kid. It’s not unusual for good girls to have a thing for bad boys, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it either."

"She’s not—"

"But since you look so offended by any suggestions that tarnish your sister’s pure image, fine, let’s talk about that playboy instead. Did he acknowledge her as his girlfriend in public? Because that’s not something playboys do with every hookup. Especially not in front of a serious group like his family or coworkers."

That question gave Tyler pause.

Eli had indeed mentioned that he had a girlfriend. Back at the time though, Tyler had naturally assumed that it was a new girl he hadn’t met before, so when he saw the email in Harper’s inbox, the rage had only been doubled by the thought that the asshole dared to flirt with her while going out with a different woman at the same time. But now that he had heard Harper call him her boyfriend ...

Maybe the situation wasn’t as nasty as he thought at the very beginning? Maybe this blonde woman wasn’t completely wrong, and Harper was actually the girlfriend all along, the one that Eli admitted to be different and important to him?

"I suppose he might have ... very indirectly," Tyler admitted. "At least to me. Not sure what things are like in front of other people though, they haven’t told me much about whatever this is that they’re having right now."

"Wait. So they didn’t tell you about this relationship, and they didn’t look out of the ordinary either when they were with each other." His new acquaintance gave him a sideways glance. "How did you know they hooked up then? A flirty message sounds like too far of a stretch to me for that type of evidence."

"Ironically, the asshole admitted it to me himself." This time, Tyler was glad that no one could say he was making statements that he didn’t know were true. "He even had the balls to say he was freaking in love!"

"Hmm ... A notorious playboy, who went through the effort to hide this ’thing’ with your sister in front of you because he knew you’d be absolutely mad once you found out, actually came clean on his own and even said he was in love?" The blonde woman looked suspicious. "Are you sure you got everything right there? Because it doesn’t seem to add up for me." freёweɓnovel.com

... Did it not?

Tyler’s thought process hit another pause.

He had indeed been surprised when Eli brought up this "thing" to him. At first glance, it was easy to assume that the guy was simply making up excuses and lies to worm himself out of this tricky situation, but thinking back, why would he even bother? He didn’t know that the email bomb was about to detonate yet, and there was no reason why he needed to admit something that would obviously earn himself a good beating.

Besides, the way he had said he was in love with Harper ...

The words had slipped out so fast and unprepared that Tyler could see the shock on Eli’s own face. As much as he didn’t want to believe it, the words felt raw, uttered with an expression that he had never seen on Eli before. It felt ... unguarded. In a subconscious and instinctive way.

Could it have been real? Could there have truly been more to the story like this blonde woman suggested?

"... Maybe you’ve got a good point there," Tyler mumbled.

"I’ve always got a good point." The woman huffed. "Glad the tequila has knocked some sense into you to figure that much."

"..."

Tyler raised his snifter to a somewhat reluctant toast, and as he downed his drink, he wondered if he actually preferred this new thought to his original assumptions ... because it surely meant that a long, serious conversation was in store.