by Audra North
Guess that hadn’t changed in the past three years. He was already having a hard time controlling his thoughts just from standing so close to her. Dancing with her would be an exceptionally bad idea.
Besides, you’re only planning to be here for one week. It wouldn’t be fair to leave her without a partner for the rest of the class.
At least, that’s what he told himself. He looked around, hoping that there might be an unpaired guy, but no luck. No doubt the class had been specifically arranged to have an equal number of men and women, and the realization made him feel even more guilty about not planning to come back after this class. But damn it, he needed every precious hour of the next few months to build his career. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—rest until he was more secure. Now that Dad was gone, his sisters and mom needed him more than ever.
Julie tipped her head up to look him in the eye. “You okay?” Her voice was low and soft, and the seductive pull of it practically reached out and caressed him, sending a shiver down his spine. He had to move away from her.
“Now that we know who our partners are, let’s start with some walking. Ladies, on that side of the room. Gentlemen, the other.”
Thank God.
They divided up on opposite sides, and Ivana demonstrated how to move during the dance. Her feet slid across the floor, ankles locking together at the completion of every step. It was fluid and graceful, and Adam was pretty sure it would be impossible for him. A guy who grew up on a North Dakota wheat farm, where the work was literally backbreaking, didn’t do things like ballroom dance. When he wasn’t working the fields or tending to the livestock, he’d been reading his way through the Bismarck Public Library. Apart from the rare barn dance that his parents forced him to attend in the hopes that he would make some friends and, later, meet a girl, there had been no dancing in his life.
“When we move, we must lead—and follow—with the center of our body,” Ivana told the class, pointing to a place just beneath her breasts and gliding backward. “If your center does not come first, you will find it difficult to dance tango. That means straight backs, don’t let your arms flop all about, and don’t tiptoe around and lose your balance. Now, all of you, face your partner, and walk toward each other with your center leading. When you reach each other, walk backward to your starting place. With intention!”
Christ. First he was paired with the sexiest woman he’d ever known, and now he had to walk toward her with intention. If he intended anything more toward her, he’d be thrusting into her by the end of the class. Couldn’t he walk toward her with a vague interest instead?
Ivana moved to the side of the room and pressed the play button on a stereo. The strains of a violin filled the air, and Adam was surprised to find that his body was responding, starting to move to the beat of the music.
“Go!” Ivana yelled, clapping her hands again. “Walk!”
Before he could process what was happening, his body was moving, responding to Ivana’s order without hesitation. Julie started walking toward him, too—no, slinking, more like it. Adam could feel himself speeding up, wanting to reach her as fast as possible.
Ivana walked by and tapped him on the shoulder. “Relax. Dancing should not be such a trial. Drop your shoulders. Relax.”
Adam frowned, frustrated. Why was everyone so hell-bent on getting him to relax? He glanced up at Julie, who was barely two feet away from him now. She was still doing that swishing thing with her hips, sliding her feet along the floor as she came forward. It made his fingers twitch with the desire to reach out and touch her.
This class had been a terrible, wonderful idea. But mostly terrible.
She was right next to him now. “Do we have to tag in, or high-five or whatever, before we walk backward?”
“Walk!” Ivana’s voice filled the room, and Julie grinned. “Guess not.” She shrugged and started moving away, and he forced himself to move then, too, feeling like a complete dumbass. He must have looked like an idiot, standing there while she spoke, not saying a word in reply.
Ivana walked by again. “Relax,” she murmured, then moved to the next student. He suppressed a growl of annoyance. At least this class would be over in fifty more minutes. And then he wouldn’t have to embarrass himself in front of Julie Stanton again. Ever.
…
After they’d practiced walking, Ivana started teaching them how to hold each other when they were dancing in pairs. The frame, she called it. When Adam’s hand had landed on Julie’s back, just above the place where her spine began curving toward her bottom, she tensed, trying to resist the urge to melt into him.
He’d tensed in response, and Julie blurted out the first thing she could think of to keep him from taking his hand away from her body.
“So should I call you Professor Hotness now?” Except instead of Professor Harkness, like she’d meant to ask, she’d said Professor Hotness. Just as she’d always feared doing.
Humiliation complete.
He gave her a strange look. “I don’t follow.”
Before she could correct herself, Ivana walked by, catching Adam’s words, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Of course you don’t follow. You lead. Now go! Walk! Walk!”
Julie felt him moving forward, and she had no choice but to step backward, to avoid him stumbling over her. Slowly, they walked the way that they’d learned earlier in class, moving in a circle around the room.
After a minute, she cleared her throat. “What I meant to say was, I heard you’d been hired on at Columbia as a professor.”
The quick glance he gave her was skeptical, but thankfully he didn’t study her for too long.
“Yes.”
That was it. That was all he said. God, why had she been such an idiot and called him Professor Hotness, like she was living some kind of student-teacher fantasy? Things were already awkward enough with the memory of that not-quite kiss between them.
Did he even remember that?
She wasn’t sure which would be worse—if he remembered, and was making an effort to pretend it had never happened, or if he didn’t remember at all. But then he spoke again, surprising her.
“I almost didn’t apply for the position, to be honest.”
She waited for him to say more, but nothing came. They just kept dance-walking in a slow rhythm.
“Why not?”
Another long pause went by. What was up with him? He wasn’t a slow thinker. How come he kept drawing out his responses like this?
He huffed in what sounded like amusement. “Sorry, I—navigating us so that we don’t run into anyone else is taking too much concentration. Told you this wasn’t my cup of tea.” His forehead was furrowed, and his eyes were focused on the space behind her.
So he hadn’t been ignoring her. Well, on purpose, at least. She should have realized he would put the same intensity behind learning how to dance as he did into his work, even if this wasn’t really his thing. Wasn’t that part of what she’d found so sexy about him in the first place? Not that it mattered, really—he hadn’t acted at all interested in her, either back then or in the past half hour of tango class. But still, it made her feel marginally better. This was supposed to be a fun night out, after all, and having him ignore her would have made it hard to even pretend that she’d had a good time.
Her shoulders relaxed, a change that he must have felt in his own body, because he stopped for a second to look at her questioningly.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” She nodded and gently squeezed his hand. “I’m fine.”
But instead of picking up the dance again, he studied her for a long moment. “When the position opened up, I’d still been expecting to work as a postdoc for a couple of years and then start looking for professorships. I thought it would diverge too much from my plan and saw it as a risk, rather than an opportunity.”
I saw it as a risk, rather than an opportunity. For the first time, she wondered whether she’d misinterpreted that afternoon in his office. She’d know
n plenty of other undergrads who had hooked up with their TAs, but Adam had never been that kind of guy. Had he wanted her, but hadn’t been willing to take the risk?
The possibility buoyed her spirits and gave her confidence enough to curl her lips upward in a seductive smile. “Congratulations. I’ve always thought there was something extra special about the times when opportunity just lays itself out right in front of you.”
She was talking about herself, of course, throwing a suggestive note into her voice, and he didn’t miss it. His eyes snapped to hers, his color came up, and he made a rough sound deep in his throat. She stroked his shoulder, almost imperceptibly, where her left hand rested, and quirked a brow at him.
“I’m ready whenever you are,” she purred.
She felt him suck in a sharp breath, and in the next instant, they were dancing again.
Chapter Three
Only ten minutes left.
What the hell had happened earlier? Adam was still running his mind over that exchange with Julie. He could have sworn it all started with her calling him Professor Hotness, but he hadn’t been listening closely enough to be sure. And then he’d had a moment of…well, something. Almost like a realization, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He’d been talking about risk and opportunity and when he’d said the words, they’d come out sounding like he actually thought that diverging from his plan was a good thing.
But that wasn’t right. He’d done it once, and it happened to have worked out, but that meant nothing. He of all people knew that the higher the risk factor, the less chance one has of success.
And then Julie had said something about opportunity laying itself out in front of him, in a way that made him think of her, lying naked on his bed, legs spread and arms beckoning and—
Dancing while trying to suppress an erection was about as fun as it sounded.
They were still walking together, all the couples moving in a big circle. He had one hand just along Julie’s rib cage, and the other was pressed against her palm. His mind would not let go of that image of her open and ready—for him, and the contact was killing him. This close, he could see how perfect her skin was, and she smelled so good—
“Oops!” Another couple bumped into him from behind. He tripped forward into Julie. For a brief moment, they were pressed full-body against each other, breasts to chest, hip to hip, and…his cock almost jumped with relief at the feel of being pushed against her sweet, soft heat.
“Oh!” Her eyes flew wide and he jumped away, bringing them both to a full stop while the offending couple danced around them, completely unaware of the awkwardness that they’d left behind.
Just act like nothing happened.
He nearly laughed out loud. Julie Stanton had just felt his erection and his advice to himself was to feign ignorance? Moments like these made him question how he’d ever won that Fulbright Scholarship.
His muscles drew tight, and he realized with a jolt of surprise that somehow over the past almost-hour, he’d managed to do as Ivana had instructed and relax. At least a little. But he shook off the thought, focusing instead on the matter at hand. “Julie. I’m sorry about that. It was—”
Lovely, deep pink lips curved upward. “I didn’t mind at all.”
He gaped at her.
She shrugged. “These things happen. Why don’t we just keep dancing?”
He nodded, but her response threw him off. She didn’t mind? Did that mean it was no big deal, or that she liked it? And how often did these things happen to her, for God’s sake, that she would be so sanguine about it?
Somewhere inside of him, jealousy was blooming, fueling the desire he felt for her. He hadn’t felt this unsure of himself since he was the scholarship kid at Harvard, plodding to his part-time job every weekend while his fellow students went to parties and slept in. But the same argument he used back then still applied, he supposed. Doing frivolous things might be rewarding in the moment, but they didn’t do anything for you in the long run. Doing frivolous things was a risk, not an opportunity.
He took up their dancing position again, but avoided Julie’s eyes. Walk, Adam! Walk!
He walked like his life depended on it, moving way too fast, he was sure. But she didn’t stumble or stutter, just adjusted so fluidly that every step they took together felt as natural as when he walked alone. She moved with him so perfectly, he couldn’t help but think that sex with her would be practically transcendental.
And…thoughts like this were a perfect example of why he shouldn’t be here. This was risky.
“You’ll have to find another partner.” He didn’t look at her when he said it.
He felt her side tense up under his fingers. “What? Why? You mean because of what just happened? Look, I’m not offended. It was obviously an accident and—”
His cheeks flamed, but he shook his head, cutting her off. “That’s not it. I never planned to take more than one lesson to begin with.”
She blinked at him. “Why did you bother signing up in the first place?”
He slowed down a bit to avoid running into the couple of front of them. “Because these lessons were a gift and I didn’t want to be completely churlish about it.” He flicked his eyes to her, then back to the space behind her shoulder, leading her in the circle. “Why are you here?”
Julie shrugged. “I imagine for the same reason as most of the other people in this class, Professor. You know, fun?”
He tried not to feel aroused by the way she called him by his title. But it was the other part that stopped him from focusing too much on the idea of sex with Julie. Like she said, this class was supposed to be fun, and that was exactly the problem. He might have become a professor sooner than he’d expected to, but if anything, that brought even more pressure into his life. Pressure to publish, to excel, to get tenure. Security is what he needed, not risk. Fun was a risk.
Meanwhile, he should stop looking at her. Standing—no, moving—this close together was hard enough. Turning his head to look at her face brought his lips dangerously close to hers every time—and brought back every naughty fantasy he’d ever had about her when she’d been in his class.
“I can’t afford to have fun,” he said, too sharply.
“Okayyyy.” Now she was looking at him like he was crazy.
But damn it. Now it was even worse. Now he was actively thinking about intense, sweating, grinding fantasies that ended in her screaming his name in pleasure.
Stop it. She’s a distraction. Not to mention vibrant, and beautiful, and fun. Everything he wasn’t.
She blew out a breath. “Goodness, are you truly that stiff?”
Come a couple inches closer and have a better feel this time, he wanted to tell her.
But then the question sank in, and he scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
At least Julie had the courtesy to blush. “Reserved, I mean. I always thought you were reserved, but only because you had to maintain some kind of authority as a TA. I never thought it extended to life outside of school. But then, you’re here, which tells me that you’re open to some stuff, at least.”
“I’m not reserved. Or stiff.” More like at half mast, now.
“Then why don’t you stay in the class?”
He guided her around another couple that had stopped and were arguing over the steps. He looked over at the guy he’d seen chatting up Julie earlier, who was now dancing across the circle with a woman around Adam’s age. He looked like he had been tangoing since he was in the cradle.
Adam sighed.
“I’m not like that guy.”
“Which guy?”
“The one you were talking to before class.”
“Trent? Do you know him?”
“No, but I know his type. Easygoing, good-looking. Good at everything. Gets any girl he wants and is probably taking this class just to pick up women.”
She frowned. “You divined all of this from seeing him in this class for a few minutes? You’re a professor at a top un
iversity. Practically famous already. How could you stereotype like that?”
She thought he was famous? Had she been following his work that closely? His ego swelled. “You have no idea how many students have come through my course and shared every detail of their lives with me. I probably know more about what people are like from a single glance than any psych major.”
“Oh, really?”
Her tone was mild. Indifferent, even. But somehow, he got the feeling that she’d been insulted. For a while, she was silent, but with every step she grew more rigid, to the point where he was practically having to carry her just to get her to move. Finally, she sighed, and he felt some of that graceful fluidity return to her body.
“If you can really decide all of those things about people from a single glance, what must you think of me?”
What did he think of her? She was the kind of woman who could relax with just a sigh. She was a woman who was captivating and bright and lovely, and she took dance lessons for fun, not because she felt guilted into it. She didn’t have a publication deadline looming over her, nor a mother and siblings to support.
She was the most lovely, engaging woman he’d ever known, and he wanted to take her home and climb on top of her and stay there all night.
But he couldn’t tell her any of that. Even if she had been flirting with him earlier, if she got a glimpse into what he was thinking now, she would run out of the class and not return. Instead, he made sure there wouldn’t be anyone in their path for a few seconds, then turned his head to look right into those gorgeous, fantasy-fueling eyes.
“You don’t want to know.”
He hadn’t wanted to scare her with his perverted thoughts. But neither had he intended the effect his words did seem to have. If he hadn’t been watching her at that exact second, he would have missed it. Hurt. Disbelief. Anger. All over her face.