Visions of her career imploding in scandal warped through Rosemary’s neocortex at light speed, but Wes radiated calm. Unless you happened to be standing right behind him and staring at the rigid lines of his shoulders and back, as Rosemary was. She could see he was holding himself too carefully, none of his loose-limbed, easy sprawl evident now—but she couldn’t hear it in his voice.
“As a matter of fact,” Wes said, his voice firm, “she’s not my professor. Final grades for Food Chem 101 are in. I passed, so that’s that. Nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Cornell moaned. “This academy prides itself not only on its culinary reputation, but on the professionalism with which we imbue our graduates—a professionalism which you, Dr. Wilkins, have clearly violated by getting involved with a student. I dropped by to tell you I’m having lunch tomorrow with one of the academy’s wealthiest donors, an influential man who will undoubtedly want a tour of the lab his donations helped pay for. I wanted to make sure the lab was presentable—oh, God. What if he’d walked in on this scene with me?”
Cornell’s hysteria was contagious. Rosemary started to hyperventilate. Only a little. But the laboratory air was so thin and cold all of a sudden!
As if he could hear her short, sharp breaths, Wes casually moved back until he was close enough to touch. Ashamed of her weakness but unable to resist the comfort, Rosemary latched onto the back of his shirt with one hand and immediately pulled in a big, cleansing breath that carried his scent: the tang of apples and the salt of warm, healthy male.
Fortified, Rosemary managed to push through the rising tide of neuroses to say around Wes’s shoulder, “I apologize. I don’t know what to say. This is … it shouldn’t have happened.”
The strong, lean back beneath her clutching fingers stiffened even further. “Don’t apologize,” Wes said, half turning and forcing her to let go of him. His eyes were bright with frustration and something else, something fierce. “We didn’t do anything wrong. This”—he swept a hand between them—“isn’t wrong.”
Cornell sputtered. “It was made abundantly clear to Dr. Wilkins when she was hired that the academy has a strict policy against faculty dating students. So yes, Mr. Murphy, this little affair is indeed wrong. Think how it would look to the donors!”
Her insides wibbled. The loathsome little man was right. No one would ever believe she hadn’t been toying with one of her students, playing favorites and massaging his grades—frak, maybe they’d even think she slipped him the answers to the final exam!
Panicked, she stole a glance at Wes, who was watching her with an expression she couldn’t decipher.
Great, of all the times for her to lose her special Wes Expression Decoder Ring. But it wasn’t a happy look, she got that much. And when he angled his gaze over to Cornell, the cold roughness of his voice confirmed it.
“Deep breath in, Prez. How do you want to play this? Because you can kick us both out of school, but it sounds to me like you did your damnedest to woo Dr. Wilkins here into moving her research over to your fancy lab.” He shot her a wink. “And why not? She’s very wooable.”
Rosemary jerked as if he’d zapped her with a fully charged ventricular fibrillator.
“Oh, my God. The donors. All the people I talked to about the emerging field of food science and how we’d be leaders, making discoveries, breaking new ground.” Cornell rubbed his hands over his shiny, bald head. “What will I tell them all?”
“Why do you have to tell them anything?”
Cornell’s hands dropped, along with his jaw. “Are you suggesting I cover this up?”
Wes shrugged. “The way I see it, you have two options. You can blow your new, potentially lucrative research department to pieces by firing your star scientist—or you can walk out of here right now, and none of this ever happened.”
Whiplash was most commonly described as an injury resulting from a sudden wrenching distortion of the spine, as from a car accident, or falling off a bicycle—or from being forced to jump from one all-consumingly horrifying topic to another without any apparent bridge between them. Rosemary’s neck actually ached.
“I can’t do that … if it comes out later that I knew, and looked the other way …”
“What’s the likelihood of that happening? We’re not going to tell. And no one knows you’re here, do they? Even if our relationship were to become public, you’d have plausible deniability. You were never here; you saw nothing. You’re completely innocent.”
“You’re right,” Cornell gasped, hope breaking over his shiny face. “No one could prove I knew anything about this.”
He backed toward the door, still looking shaky, but all Rosemary cared about was that he was leaving.
“Very true,” Wes agreed. “You’re completely safe, your lucrative research department stays intact, and no one gets fired or suspended. Everybody wins!” He glanced over his shoulder at Rosemary, who found it difficult to keep her smile from taking over her entire face. “Besides,” Wes continued, “the doc and I aren’t through with our research for my final project yet. Something tells me we’re getting close to a breakthrough.”
“Yes,” she said, surprised and pleased by the even smoothness of her own voice. “We have a few more tests to run, experiments to conduct, before we can be sure of what we’re dealing with here. But I, for one, look forward to analyzing the results.”
Wes gave the smile back to her, the slow, honest smile that lit up his entire body from within. They stood there, grinning like demented idiots at one another while Cornell threw his hands in the air and said, “I don’t want to hear about it! Oh, my God, I need to get out of here.”
He rushed out, slamming the lab door behind him hard enough to make the strawberries jump in their stainless steel bowl.
“That was amazing,” she told him. “I was there for the whole thing, and I still don’t know how you got him to leave.”
Wes shrugged. “Pretty simple—I just looked at the situation from his perspective and showed him the shortest, straightest path to getting what he wants: a crapload of happy donors with their wallets open, shelling out the green for your big, pretty brain.”
He sauntered over and scooped up a strawberry, his eyes never leaving hers. He tipped his head back and held the stem as he swirled the berry in the chocolate fondue. Rosemary’s breath caught in her chest when he bit into the treat.
“So what do you say, Doc?” Wes licked a trickle of juice from his lower lip. “Wanna do a little experimenting with me?”
He could actually see the shiver race over her skin. He tracked her body’s reaction to his words—first the tremor that made the fine hairs on her arms stand up, then the tightening of the buds of her nipples, their sweet contour barely visible against the line of her lab coat. Her pupils expanded as if he’d dimmed the lights, and her tongue came out to wet her lush, pink bottom lip, mirroring his own.
It seemed a waste for her to be licking her lips when he could be doing that for her.
Wes pounced. She shrieked a little, startled at his sudden movement and how quickly he was there, surrounding her with his arms and pinning her against the lab table with his body, but it was a happy sound. Almost a laugh, pitched high with nerves and anticipation.
Since the same blend of are-we-really-gonna? and hell-yeah! was moshing around in Wes’s midsection, he didn’t pause. Just searched her clear blue eyes for a hot second, then lowered his mouth to close them with a kiss.
The thin, fragile skin of her eyelids trembled under his lips, her lashes tickling him mercilessly. Wes kissed his way down her nose, lavishing extra attention on the bump of cartilage at the bridge that gave her face the edge that made it endlessly fascinating to him.
Her hands wavered in the air beside him like birds unsure of where to perch until Wes finally reached her mouth and pressed his tongue between her lips, searching out the hot, yielding sweetness he’d found there before. Then she clutched at his biceps spasmodically, her fingers digging into muscle and
forcing a groan out of him.
He loved the way she responded to him, all unconscious sexiness and unrehearsed pleasure. Wes panted into her mouth and watched her eyelids flutter, the two of them like kids ditching curfew to snatch a few more stolen moments together.
They scrabbled at each other’s clothes, gasping and laughing at how stupidly hard it was to deal with buttons and zippers. It was fumbling and awkward and real, and nothing had ever felt so good to Wes.
He tugged the lab coat off her shoulders but it tangled around her elbows, making her twist and struggle a little, while Wes stopped, his attention captured by her T-shirt. It was black, covered in brightly colored boxes in a familiar pattern.
“It’s the periodic table of elements,” Rosemary said, apparently miffed at the silence. She shrugged, wiggling her torso to try and dislodge her trapped arms from the sleeves of her lab coat, a hot red flush rising in her cheeks.
“I can see that,” Wes said, a surge of warmth making his throat tight. She was just so damn … what? He didn’t even know. All he knew was that he had to kiss her again, right that second.
She kept her lips in a tight line for a moment, maybe thinking he wanted to mock her for wearing the dorkiest shirt ever created. Which, to be fair, was what he should’ve been inclined to do. What should definitely not happen was that the sight of her in that ridiculous shirt made every drop of blood in his body race to his dick, swelling him painfully thick and tight against the zipper of his jeans.
He wondered at exactly what point his life stopped making any kind of sense. But when her mouth softened and she let him in, her eyes sliding closed as she melted against him, her arms still trapped so that she had to trust her weight to him—Wes decided he didn’t really care.
So the world was nuts and he’d suddenly discovered a kink for geeks. There were worse things.
Like, for instance, being walked in on twice in one night.
He grasped her shoulders and moved her gently back, grinning when she swayed a little. “Hey, I’m going to go lock the door. Just in case. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
When he turned back, lights switched off to discourage intruders, the door closed and secured against any further interruptions, his heart stopped for a second.
She was gone.
“Rosemary?” he called, feeling like an idiot. Was there a back exit? Had he spooked her or something, made her run away?
“Here,” came her voice from somewhere near the floor.
Wes quickstepped around the lab table to find Rosemary on the other side, her lab coat and his chef jacket spread on the floor and one gorgeous scientist sitting nervously erect on the makeshift blanket.
His heart pounded out a quick, primal rhythm. The relief that she was still there with him, combined with the hesitance and barely veiled apprehension in her face, made him want to lunge and cover her before she had a chance to escape.
But he wasn’t an animal. None of the things he’d seen and done in his extremely checkered past had turned him into a mindless thug, and he wouldn’t be one now, either.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked, the hoarseness of his voice giving away exactly how hard it was for him to ask that question.
She didn’t answer in words, but took a deep breath that lifted her rib cage—which Wes could suddenly see in sharp detail because she was whipping that black dork-shirt over her head.
Once it was off, she didn’t seem to know what to do next. She paused, then folded the shirt carefully, all precise edges and perfect alignment, and set it aside.
Wes followed this ritual to avoid focusing on the slender curve of her waist, the delicate lines of her ribs, the translucent quality of her pale skin, the small, round swells of her breasts covered in plain black cotton. If he noticed those things, if he let himself think about them too much, all his high-minded humanity would go up in smoke and he’d fall on her like a starving lion.
She finished folding the shirt and crossed her arms quickly, hunching her shoulders and tucking her hands high. She still hadn’t looked at him.
Wes dropped to his knees in front of her. “God, Rosemary. You look …” He’d never regretted his ditching school so much before. Maybe if he’d gotten a better education, he’d have better words to describe how she made him feel, sitting there exposed and vulnerable in the fading afternoon sunlight.
“What?” she asked, her eyes flashing to his. She was all defiant, ready to snatch that crazy shirt up and put it back on.
“Like an angel,” he said, then immediately felt like a moron. Could there be a worse, more overused line in the history of men talking their way into women’s pants? But it was all he could think of, the closest he could come to expressing how ethereally lovely she was, the line of her graceful neck caressed by tendrils of the golden hair still knotted atop her head.
She snorted, obviously as unimpressed with his wooing as he was, but there was a pleased smile flirting with the corners of her pretty, pink mouth. “Fair’s fair,” she hinted, giving him a sidelong look from under her lashes.
Wes inched closer. “What? You want me to get rid of this?” He plucked at the white sleeveless shirt he wore under his chef jacket.
She nodded, breath hitching as he scooted forward until their knees touched. Her eyes were huge avid pools of outright desire that made Wes glad to take his shirt off—it was getting hot in that lab.
He grabbed the back of the shirt and pulled it over his head, tossing it aside immediately.
Her eyes flicked after it, her fingers twitched, and he knew.
Leaning to grab his discarded shirt, Wes met her startled gaze and slowly, carefully, folded it into a neat square and laid it atop hers.
Between one breath and the next, she was on top of him, her hands in his hair and clutching at his neck and shoulders, her soft mouth voracious on his.
And all Wes could think, before pure, unadulterated lust dragged him under, was: Hey, which one of us was supposed to be the starving lion, again?
Chapter 9
Rosemary didn’t think she’d ever been quite so aware of her own body before. It was intensely fascinating; she couldn’t help cataloguing the physiological changes.
When Wes kissed her, for example, her heart rate sped alarmingly and she could feel herself growing warmer all over. But especially between her legs—that spot, usually nothing more than a monthly annoyance or a place to meticulously wash, throbbed with heat. Every time she shifted, she felt the liquid evidence of her desire and it made her want to be smooth, languid, silky … until Wes took off his shirt.
By the power of Grayskull, he was truly a magnificent specimen of the human male anatomy. His pectoral muscles were lean and wiry, yet sharply defined. His abdominal muscles laddered down his torso, dusted with dark hair that arrowed into his black denims. The jeans hung low enough on his narrow waist to expose the hollows on either side of his hips, and Rosemary licked her lips, wanting to … His shirt!
His shirt was wadded up on the floor, wrinkled and wrinkling, and … she had to get a grip. No one stopped in the middle of sex to harangue a man about the way he cared for his clothing. Did they? Probably not if they wanted to find themselves in a sexual situation with said man again anytime soon.
But while Rosemary was attempting to talk herself down, Wes was cocking his head and looking at her intently. He gave her the barest hint of a smile, understanding turning his eyes bright jungle green, then he reached over and folded that cursed shirt.
And Rosemary lost her composure.
Completely. Utterly. She could actually feel her brain giving up the fight, switching off, and letting her body—for the first time in her entire life—take control.
Heat. Pressure. Friction. A warm mouth, agile tongue stroking hers, fingers gripping her waist tightly enough to cause contusions, and all she could think was: This. More. Now.
There was no time to think, and she didn’t want to, anyway. It shocked her down to her bones, but all she w
anted was to feel this, to live in her body and feel every single thing Wes did to her—and he was doing a lot.
He’d worked open the buttons on her baggy cargo pants and started shimmying them down her hips. She’d fallen behind.
Dipping her fingers into the waistband of his jeans was like passing them through the blue flame of that Sterno burner—dangerous, and hot enough to sear the skin from her fingertips. Exhilarated, Rosemary worked the button loose and pulled down the zipper, gasping when the hard, tumescent length of his penis immediately sprang into her hand.
Yikes! Okay, wow.
“Laundry day?” she managed to ask. Was that breathy squeak really her voice?
“Guh,” he said.
She tore her stare from the long, smooth erection filling her hand and peeked up at his face. His head was thrown back, his chest heaving, and the look on his face was more indicative of pain than pleasure.
Rosemary snatched her fingers back, certain she’d misunderstood the technique somehow.
But he whimpered piteously and she realized, no, she couldn’t have misunderstood. Because (a) she was a genius, and (b) it just wasn’t that complicated.
And sure enough, when she sucked in a breath and put her hand tentatively back on Wes’s groin, he gasped, “Yes, please. Do that. God, your hands …”
Flush with renewed confidence, Rosemary explored the hot skin pulsing against her palm. Intellectually, she knew what she was feeling—the corpora cavernosa running the length of the organ had become engorged with blood, which she could feel throbbing against her fingers with every rapid beat of Wes’s heart. Yet somehow, for once, the clinical version of events didn’t seem to encompass the entire experience.
Wes was hard. His penis was erect and ready for intercourse because of her.
He made a small noise and she rubbed her hand up and down it soothingly, but Wes didn’t seem soothed. He shuddered, hard, and grabbed her wrist to stop her from moving her hand again.
This time, Rosemary waited, wanting more information about Wes’s reaction.
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