by Nina Lindsey
“Because if you’d taken the stairs, we wouldn’t have gotten trapped.” A smile tugged at his beautiful mouth. “So I’m eternally grateful to the elevator gods now.”
Callie’s mind went blank. Blank.
That never happened. She was always thinking, assessing, worrying, planning…she had hypotheses to prove, lectures to organize, her family to take care of, books to write. Her mind was a machine.
“Button fly,” she said.
What the…?
A puzzled crease appeared between his eyes. “Excuse me?”
She waved a hand at his groin.
I just waved a hand at his groin.
“Your jeans have a button fly.” Please, kill me now.
“So they do.” He looked down, as if verifying the truth of her remark. “You’re very observant.”
And contrary to what I’ve believed my whole life, I’m also apparently stupid.
She cleared her throat and straightened her shoulders. “Yes, well, one must possess keen powers of observation when one is a scholar.”
“Indeed one must.” The amusement in his eyes deepened. He slid his gaze over her body, and the potency of his attention sparked a firestorm in her blood.
“Double-breasted,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re wearing a double-breasted blazer.”
Then he glanced at her breasts, a quick graze of his blue eyes, and Callie’s nipples tightened as if he’d touched them. Or licked them. Or—
“You’re also observant.” Her voice came out high and breathy. This really had to stop.
“About you, yes.” He met her gaze with a grin so engaging that her heart did an entirely ridiculous spin and twirl. Her heart had never done that before. Not even with Brian. Not even close.
“Did you make it to your meeting okay?” he asked.
“More or less.”
The snap of a door clicking open jolted her out of her brain fog. Behind her elevator stranger, a stoop-shouldered, balding man in his late sixties approached.
“Hello, Professor Markham.” Callie struggled with a simultaneous surge of relief and disappointment over the distraction. “Did you get my message about next year’s course curriculum?”
He paused, straightening to peer at her with rheumy eyes. “I did, though I take exception to your suggestion that we excise the unit on great Roman military leaders.”
Callie gave him a tight smile. “I didn’t suggest we excise it. I suggested that we include alternative narratives instead of only focusing on the conventional geopolitical history of male politicians.”
Markham sniffed. “Overhauling a curriculum that has been in place for ten years will do you no favors in your quest for tenure, Professor Prescott.”
“I’ve no intention of overhauling anything.”
“Good. See that you keep it that way.” Pursing his lips, he shuffled toward the elevators.
Anger heated Callie’s face. The blue-eyed stranger, his jaw tight, narrowed his gaze on Markham’s retreating figure.
“Qualem blennum,” he remarked, his voice increasing in volume.
An unexpected laugh burst out of Callie. Markham turned, drawing his bushy eyebrows together in suspicion. Callie swallowed another laugh and waved. “See you at the weekly meeting, Professor Markham.”
With a huff, the senior professor stabbed the elevator button and turned his back on them. Before she started laughing again, Callie unlocked her office door and ushered the stranger inside.
“Not many people know how to say ‘what a doofus’ in Latin.” She closed the door behind him and put her keys and satchel on the desk. “I’m impressed.”
“Then I’ll have to learn more Latin insults.” Leaning his shoulder against the filing cabinet, he crossed his arms and regarded her warmly. “I’d forgotten I knew that phrase.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“I took Latin in high school, so it must have been one of the few things that stuck. Along with in vino veritas and e pluribus unum.”
Callie smiled again, even as his mention of “high school” tickled a memory at the back of her mind. Did she know him from high school?
No. Surely she’d remember this man with his crystal-blue eyes and strong Roman features, and good lord, his body that had all sorts of warm, carved muscles and that incredible abdomen that had so captivated her.
What would touching him feel like? She imagined sliding her hand underneath his navy T-shirt, stroking the hard ridges up to his bare chest and—
Stop it!
“In any case, I appreciate the support.” She sat in her office chair and briskly pressed a button on her keyboard. The screen flashed with a bucketload of new email messages. “But I need to start responding to student excuses and pleas for extensions on their papers. So what can I do for you?”
She’d have sworn his eyes darkened at the thought of what kind of response he could make. She had little doubt he could do a lot of things for her, and none of them were at all polite.
He shrugged. “I don’t have any papers that need to be turned in, and I’m sure you’re not interested in hearing any excuses about me being here coincidentally.”
“Actually, that might be the only excuse I am interested in hearing.” She slanted him a glance. He’d looked her up and deliberately found her here. But why?
“What’s the most ridiculous excuse you’ve heard today?” he asked.
“One student tried to convince me his pet turtle had somehow tipped over his tank and spilled water all over his laptop.” Callie rolled her eyes. “Of course, he hadn’t remembered to back up his assignment to any cloud software, and there’s simply no way he can rewrite the whole paper in time. Therefore, he needs a whole other week. He didn’t say what happened to the turtle.”
Her mystery guest chuckled, a deep pleasurable sound that settled somewhere inside her. She suddenly wished she was funny enough to make him laugh again. Unfortunately, she was the least funny person she knew.
“That’s better than anything I could have come up with back in school.” He shook his head, his eyes twinkling. “I can’t imagine why you didn’t give him an extension.”
“Because I’m not teaching creative writing. Or the history of tall tales.”
Amusement curved his mouth again. “I remember trying to talk Mrs. Swanson into an extension. Told her our power went out and my laptop battery was dead.”
“I get a ton of dead laptop sob stories.” Callie unfastened her satchel. “Along with Wi-Fi outages, accidental deletions, crashes, hacked computers…Mrs. Swanson?”
The memory tickle in her mind intensified. Mrs. Swanson had been one of the history teachers at Bliss Cove High.
Callie swiveled, squinting at the stranger as if to sharpen her vision. “Did she buy it?”
“Not even for a second.” He sat in a chair across from her, stretching his long legs out. “She stared me down over her cat’s-eye glasses and demanded to know why I hadn’t gone to a friend’s house or the library or a coffee shop. I stood there stammering and shuffling my feet until I couldn’t take it anymore and confessed I hadn’t even started writing the paper. Mrs. Swanson was not surprised. And when I got a D minus on the assignment, I was also not surprised.”
“What was the assignment?”
He grimaced. “A final research paper discussing revolutionary texts in world history. Mine was on the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.”
“Mine was on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.” She’d turned in her paper early and gotten an A. Had he been in the graduating class before or after her? Or was it possible they’d graduated together?
“Did you get your paper finished?” she asked.
“Yes, but I had to do an extra-credit presentation on—”
“The influence of Greco-Roman ideas on the US government!” The truth struck her like one of Zeus’s lightning bolts. She sat up, a combination of sho
ck and excitement spiraling through her. “You’re Jake Ryan.”
His eyes widened for an instant before a grin spread over his face, bringing out a set of dimples that infused him with boyish charm. “You remember me because of my history presentation?”
“Of course.” Her pulse accelerated, as if she was inching up the hill of a roller coaster with the anticipation of an exhilarating swoop downward. Jake Ryan. “I remember how engaging it was, and that you brought in all these audio-visuals and the Greek honey puffs, and the color-coded chart about the constitution of the Roman Republic. Mrs. Swanson even said in front of the class how impressed she was, and that was a huge deal for her.”
“I don’t even remember all that.” A laugh rumbled from him again. “I just had to get my grade back up or the coach was going to cut me from the football team. So I recruited my sister to help me and pulled out all the stops.”
“It worked.” She sat back, twin currents of pleasure and bafflement running through her. “Wow. Jake Ryan. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you sooner. I mean, your eyes are so…anyway. What in the world are you doing here? Both here in my office and in Bliss Cove?”
A sudden cloud seemed to descend over him. He looked past her shoulder to the poster of the Acropolis on the opposite wall.
“What I’m doing in Bliss Cove is a long story for another time.” He took hold of his black-framed glasses and pulled them off. “What I’m doing in your office has a much simpler answer. To be honest, I couldn’t place you yesterday either. It wasn’t until I stopped by your mom’s bakery and saw the resemblance to your sister that it clicked.”
“You went to Sugar Joy?”
For some reason, the idea of him interacting with her mother and sister was…disconcerting. Especially since Aria and Eleanor had been on her case about dating right after her breathless encounter with Jake in the elevator.
Except she hadn’t know he was Jake Ryan then.
Now she did. And her intense pull toward him was taking on the magnitude of the earth’s gravity.
“I used to stop at Sugar Joy all the time.” He folded the glasses and tucked them into his hoodie pocket. “Your mom’s Chaos Cookies were hard to pass up. Still are, as a matter of fact. I looked you up on the department website when I was at the bakery. Not many people from our graduating class are still in town, so I decided to come find you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
She looked him over without self-consciousness this time, like anyone would study a person they hadn’t seen in fifteen years. Though in high school she’d been intensely focused on her grades and college admissions, she hadn’t been immune to boys—especially ones with killer smiles and floppy dark hair.
Wait a minute.
She squinted at his uniform yellow hair. It was the color of corn and lacked the natural highlights that had once made his hair gleam in the sun. At lunch, he’d sit with his friends in the grassy quad, and the sunlight had just poured onto his gorgeous chocolate-brown hair, intensifying the darker undertones of warm caramel, cinnamon, toffee…
Oh, yes. When she’d looked up from her books, she’d noticed Jake Ryan all right. But he hadn’t noticed her.
Her stomach rumbled again. Callie winced, battling back a flush. “Sorry.”
“No, I am.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s probably your lunch hour, and it was rude of me to show up without calling first.”
“It’s okay.” She couldn’t stop looking at his hair. “So you…uh, changed your hair.”
His expression twisted into a grimace. “Sort of.”
“More than sort of. You used to have such great hair.”
He grabbed the edge of his hair at his nape. Before Callie could figure out what the heck he was doing, he tugged the heavy mat of yellow hair over his head and dropped it onto his lap.
Callie stared at the thing like it was road kill. “A wig?”
“Yeah.” He lifted his arm, drawing her attention upward again. Then he dragged his hand through his dark hair, which was exactly as gorgeous and tempting as she remembered—thick, multiple shades of brown, and so shiny that even now she clenched her hand against the urge to touch it.
She forced her gaze back to his. Jake Ryan, in all his chiseled, masculine beauty. Her heart constricted with both pleasure and a longing she didn’t want to acknowledge.
“What…” She swallowed to ease her dry throat. “Why were you in disguise…oh.”
Good god. He was a movie star. She’d been so caught up in “Jake Ryan from Bliss Cove High” that she’d totally forgotten he was “JAKE RYAN, international mega-star of a bunch of action movies that had made a gazillion dollars at the box office.”
“Are you filming a movie?” She twisted her hands together. “Was that your costume?”
“No.” He glanced at his watch again, which was not the Rolex she’d expect a star of his caliber to possess. Instead it was a plain analog watch with a worn leather strap.
“I thought we might go out sometime.” He adjusted the watch buckle. “To dinner or something. For old times’ sake.”
Callie crinkled her forehead. She and Jake had never exactly had any time together back in high school, but they’d spent four years in the same graduating class and had known and seen each other in passing.
She did remember all three classes they’d been in together—World History, English, and Chemistry. She’d almost held her breath when Mr. Loggins announced which students would be paired as chemistry lab partners. When he’d said, “Calista Prescott and Miles Redford,” her heart sank like a deflated balloon.
But she and Miles had been at the top of the class. So there was that.
“So what do you say, Professor Prescott?” Jake leaned forward, resting his hands on his knees and studying her with that penetrating, blue-laser gaze that had captured the hearts and imaginations of female fans worldwide. “Want to hang out?”
An excited flutter swept through her. Callie clenched her fingers on the arms of the chair. “Hang out? Like doing what?”
He shrugged. His shoulder muscles actually flexed. “Dinner, drinks, a movie, grading papers…”
“What?” Stupidity was taking over again. She couldn’t imagine having dinner and drinks with High School Jake Ryan, much less Movie Star Jake Ryan.
“Look.” He straightened and ran his palms over his thighs. “I’m just here for a few weeks, but I’ve got nothing to do. It’d be nice to hang out with an old friend.”
A hint of indignation stiffened Callie’s spine. Why did he keep using the adjective old in relation to them?
“Jake, we would have to have been friends in high school to qualify as old friends now,” she pointed out. “I don’t think we said more than a handful of words to each other all four years. And thanks for asking me to be your cure for small-town boredom, but I happen to have a multitude of things to do.”
She waved a hand to her computer and the stacks of papers on her desk.
“I didn’t mean it that way.” He dragged a hand through his hair again—a cartoon princess would kill for that hair—and sighed. “I could use a friend, okay? Even if I didn’t know you very well back then, I always thought you were a nice girl.”
Nice girl. And this man was an international heartthrob?
Still…at least he’d known who she was.
“Not to mention, you were easily the smartest, most ambitious person in our entire class,” he added. “It was no wonder you were voted the most likely to win a Nobel Prize. You used to read these huge books at lunch every day, sitting at a table under a tree in the quad. I never knew how you managed to fit so many books into that bright red book bag of yours.”
Oh. Well. He’d…noticed her?
“You remember I had a red book bag?” Her voice came out overly high and breathless again. She needed to get that under control.
“You had a whole private Catholic schoolgirl thing going on with the skirts and knee socks. Your red book bag was part of the whole pac
kage.” Heat gleamed behind his eyes. “Yeah. I remember.”
Okay, maybe she was beginning to understand the international heartthrob concept after all.
But why did he want to “hang out” with her now? Most of their classmates had left Bliss Cove for bigger and better opportunities, but there were still several people around whom Jake had been actual friends with when they were teenagers. Yet he’d looked her up and come to her office to talk to her.
Curiosity rose in her, nudging aside the mile-long to-do list constantly running through her mind.
Could he actually…maybe…just possibly…want to know what he’d missed out on in high school? To find out what kind of woman the nice, smart girl with the red book bag had turned into?
Not that she was much different.
Deflecting the thought, she shook her head. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Jake, but I’m very busy these days. Teaching, grading, research, my book…”
“You can’t spare two hours to watch a movie?” His smile brought out his dimples again. He probably used that to get whatever he wanted in Hollywood. Or life in general. “Everyone needs a break now and then. Come on. It’ll be fun.”
Callie tucked her bottom lip between her teeth, desire waging with practicality. And a bit of protective concern for the teenaged girl who’d once admired Jake Ryan from afar.
“I haven’t been to the movies in ages,” she admitted.
Frowning, he folded his arms. “Not even Fatal Glory?”
“Fatal what?” She laughed as his expression darkened. “Kidding. My mom is a huge fan, so I know about the Fatal Glory movies from her.”
“But you haven’t seen them?”
“No, sorry. But don’t take it personally. I don’t watch movies.”
“Then we need to change that.” He reached out as if he were about to touch her—even to put his hand on her knee, and Callie’s breath shortened with anticipation—but then he stopped halfway. “If you don’t keep me busy, I’ll end up at Sugar Joy stuffing myself full of cookies and cupcakes all day.”
A mental image of Jake licking frosting from a cupcake popped into Callie’s head. Warmth pooled in her belly.