by Amy Andrews
Cassie tried to fathom the celebrity paradigm, but even that was too much with her brain gone walkabout. ‘Wait,’ she said as he went to dial. ‘I’ll ring Gina.’
Tuck frowned. ‘Why not the concierge?’
‘Because Gina already knows we’re doing it.’
And the fewer people who knew she’d lost her mind the better.
SIX
Cassie and Tuck stayed another two nights. Just to be sure her libido was well and truly serviced. They rose late on the third morning, had a dirty shower and, unable to avoid the phone calls and text messages from her gal pals any longer, Cassie joined them in the dining room for a late breakfast.
‘Well, well, well,’ Gina drawled as Cassie sat down. ‘Never thought I’d see the day. Cassiopeia Barclay all loved up.’
Cassie snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Love is a romantic construct—’
‘Perpetrated by romance novels and Hollywood with no sound scientific basis,’ Gina finished.
Cassie shot her a sheepish look. ‘Exactly.’ She fiddled with her cutlery. ‘Tuck and I are just—’
‘Copulating?’ Reese said, winking at Gina.
Cassie nodded, even though she knew they’d moved far beyond copulation. Beyond scratching a biological itch. Her libido had been well and truly satisfied after the first twenty-four hours—it was just being plain greedy now. ‘Yes.’
‘And has Tuck copulated his way through my box of condoms yet?’ Gina asked.
Cassie almost said he’d copulated her brains out as she thought about how many of those condoms they had used. Their wet, slippery shower sex this morning stirred her olfactory centre and she blushed under the scrutiny of three sets of eyes. She’d blushed more in the last three days than she had her entire life.
Three things she didn’t do was blush, swoon or cry, and she was two out of three at the moment. It was just as well she was leaving today and could get back to being someone she recognised.
‘Not quite,’ she said.
‘I can’t believe you and Tuck…’ Reese shook her head. ‘I thought for sure he was bound to date blonde airheads for the rest of his life.’
‘April wasn’t blonde,’ Marnie said. ‘Or an airhead. She was a nurse, wasn’t she?’
Reese nodded. ‘They met while he was having his knee reconstruction. She was nice…sweet. But they were married for less than two years. And now he’s back to dating surgically enhanced pneumatic blondes again.’
‘Except for Cassie,’ Gina mused, and all three women looked at her again, sitting at the dining table in a baggy T-shirt proclaiming ‘Geek is the new sexy’, her long straight dark brown hair scraped back in a low ponytail and Alice band, her messy eyebrows knitted together.
‘We’re not dating,’ Cassie reiterated. ‘We’re—’
‘Copulating,’ her friends said in unison, then laughed.
Cassie smiled at their infectious happiness. ‘Well, we’re not even doing that any more. I’m leaving today, and nothing is more important to me now than finishing my PhD and being on that plane to Antarctica next year.’
‘Good for you,’ Marnie said.
‘Make sure you talk to me before you go. A designer friend of mine is making a huge splash in sexy thermalwear,’ Gina said, raising her coffee cup.
Cassie blinked. ‘I think they issue us with thermals.’
Gina shuddered. ‘I can just imagine what they’d be like.’
Reese laughed at the blank look on Cassie’s face. ‘How are you getting to Cornell?’
‘Tuck’s giving me a lift to New York and I’ll get a bus to Ithica from there.’
Reese raised an eyebrow. Mr Love-’em-and-Leave-’em, who’d told her a few days ago he was staying on at the Hamptons at a friend’s place for a week, was dropping his plans and heading back to New York?
Interesting. Very interesting…
In the end Tuck insisted on driving her all the way to Cornell in his big black BMW. She’d protested about the distance, but he’d just shrugged and said he enjoyed a road trip. It took five hours from the Hamptons, and there wasn’t one minute of it when Cassie wasn’t aware of the length and breadth of him, of his heat, of his scent.
The aroma she’d come to recognise as pure Tuck—to respond to like Pavlov’s dog—filled the inside of the cab, completely obliterating the luxury car smell and enveloping her in a hormonal fugue all the way to Ithica. She vaguely remembered them talking about her study and about his app, but the details were fuzzy.
It was late afternoon when they arrived—not that the long summer day gave any indication of the hour. The campus was surprisingly bustling for the mid-year break. Young people were laughing and smiling in groups, carrying books and laptops, or sitting on the grass under shady trees, engrossed in their phones or other electronic gadgets.
It took them an hour to locate her accommodation block and check in. Tuck helped her up with her bags. The corridors were buzzing with what Tuck soon found out to be high school students when he was recognised. He stopped for a chat and posed for pictures while he signed autographs for some very excited kids.
Cassie watched on, bemused, as Tuck high-fived and talked about football and retirement and his knee. The students—from Wisconsin—were doing Summer College, studying entomology, and he talked to them about the importance of getting an education. They buzzed around him like the insects they were studying, and she began to wonder if everything with a pulse was attracted to his seriously addictive pheromones.
Eventually they let him leave and she found her room, unlocking the door and pushing it open. Tuck carried her bag through. ‘I can’t believe,’ he said as he set her suitcase on the single bed, ‘you’ve come here for three months from Australia and that’s all you brought. Most women I know take a suitcase that size away for the weekend. For their make-up.’
She shrugged as she looked round the small but functional room. ‘I don’t care much for clothes.’
Tuck looked her up and down and chuckled at the understatement. He’d always appreciated women’s packaging, but after three days in bed with Cassie he was never judging a book by its cover again.
‘I agree,’ he said as he thought about all the delight hidden beneath her voluminous shirts and how long it had been since he’d seen it. The shower seemed a very long time ago. ‘I think they’re highly overrated.’
Cassie felt the drop in his voice’s pitch undulate through the muscles deep inside her that had already received such an athletic workout back in the Hamptons. She glanced at him. He had his hands shoved in the pockets of the trendy three-quarter chinos he wore with a polo shirt sporting some kind of NFL logo, and a surge of pheromones hit her square between the eyes.
She looked away, her glance falling on the only horizontal surface in the room—the bed. She looked back at him. She’d spent practically every waking and sleeping hour of the last three days in bed with the man looking at her now as if he was calculating how quickly he could get her out of her clothes.
A shout in the corridor, followed by some heavy footsteps, yanked her back from the ledge.
Tuck dragged his eyes off Cassie, raking his hand through his hair. Unfortunately they found the bed. The narrow single bed—staple of the college dorm all over the country. He’d spent a lot of his college life on a bed just like it. Or beds just like it, anyway. And he knew from experience they weren’t made for long, lazy sessions with a woman.
They were made for haste, not finess
e, and paper-thin walls didn’t guarantee ambience or privacy. At eighteen that hadn’t been an issue, but at thirty-three, with a bad knee and various other aches and pains, he was way too old to fold himself into a bed not fit for an athlete.
No matter how tempting it was to yank her into his arms and go hunting for that body he knew was under all those layers. He looked around the tiny room and thanked God he never had to live like this again.
‘Why are you here? Doesn’t a place as esteemed as Cornell have some better digs for its PhD students?’
Cassie nodded. ‘Sure. But this is cheap—which is important when you’ve been a professional uni student for over a decade. These dorms become vacant over the summer break, so they’re keen to fill them and the price is right.’
Tuck’s gaze drifted back to the bed as he absorbed her words. It had been a long time since he’d had to give any thought to the cost of living. He had more than enough money from his decade-long career, and enough continuing endorsements never to have to worry about money again. And the app project promised to be another winner.
There was more yahooing in the corridor, and Tuck turned slightly in the direction of a thunk as someone obviously hit the wall. A burst of laughter sounded and he turned back to face her. ‘Won’t that interfere with your study?’
‘No. I’ll be spending most of my time at the Space Sciences Building or the observatory,’ she said. ‘It’s just a place to sleep.’
Tuck’s gaze was once again drawn to the bed at her mention of sleep. A vision of her on it, with him, most definitely not sleeping, filled his head. His groin tightened and he looked at her, the same time she looked at him, and the room seemed to shrink even further.
‘It’s not a very big bed,’ he murmured.
Cassie shrugged. ‘There’s just me.’
Tuck felt the sudden urge to puff his chest and say something macho like, Damn straight, there’ll just be you! But then that conjured thoughts of her on this bed by herself, maybe naked, maybe touching herself while she thought about him. Not that she probably did that. But the thought stirred the tightening in his groin to a full-blown erection.
His gaze dropped to her mouth and he took a step towards her. Noticed the flare of her nostrils, the dilation of her pupils, her chest rising and falling with the same agitated rhythm as the night of their first kiss.
Cassie shut her eyes briefly as her body swayed towards the chemical cloud she seemed programmed to obey. And she almost took a step too. But the shrill ring of a phone pierced the sound and yanked her back from his hypnotic pull.
She looked around, hindered for a moment by sluggish brain cells and the unfamiliar ring—it wasn’t her mobile and nor was it Tuck’s.
‘Your desk,’ Tuck said, stepping back.
Cassie looked at the desk, pushed into a nook not far from the foot of the bed. She identified a slimline black telephone and took the three paces required to snatch it up, grateful for a little distance from Tuck. It was Professor Judy Walsh, who would be working with her on the completion of her PhD, welcoming her to the campus and checking she was good to go in the morning. They had a brief conversation, which Cassie barely took in, conscious as she was of Tuck prowling back and forth behind her like a caged animal.
Every cell in her body, every hair covering her body vibrated with his physical presence.
When she hung up she was angry. With Tuck. But mostly with herself. Studying at Cornell, the university that had nurtured the genius of greats like Carl Sagan, had been a lifelong dream and she was letting some weird aberration derail her pursuit of her goals.
It was a good thing that Professor Walsh had rung when she had. Exactly what Cassie had needed to refocus. Because the way things had been heading prior to the interruption had precious little to do with astronomy.
Focus, Cassiopeia.
She turned to face Tuck, staying right where she was. The room was small, so distance wasn’t an option, but she’d take whatever space she could get. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ she said. ‘But if you don’t mind I really have to get settled in. Set up my computer, unpack. Etcetera.’
Tuck regarded her for a moment. Considering the size of her suitcase, and the fact she owned a laptop, he doubted it would take her ten minutes to do all of it. So there was only one conclusion to draw.
She was blowing him off.
He was so stunned for a moment he didn’t say anything. Then he threw back his head and laughed. First she faked it and now she was blowing him off. Two things no woman had ever done to him. She wasn’t just hell on a man’s ego—she was death to it.
He had thought of taking her out for a bite to eat, but she’d obviously scratched her itch and was ready to move on. No long drawn-out goodbye, no clinging to him and begging him to call from Little Miss Mensa.
‘So this is goodbye, huh?’
Cassie nodded. ‘Yes.’
She often felt socially awkward, but this was a whole other level. She’d never been in the position of having to bid farewell to a man who had spent a fair portion of three days camped out between her legs. What did one say in such circumstances?
‘Thank you for…’
For what? For the orgasms? For the copulation? For the pheromones? For an experiment she’d never forget as long as she lived?
‘Everything,’ she ended lamely.
Tuck grinned as he easily read every thought that flitted through her mind. ‘Don’t ever play poker, Cassiopeia,’ he murmured.
He reached into his pocket for his wallet and pulled out a card. His real card, with his real phone number—not the one he gave to hard-to-shake groupies. ‘You could always call me if your libido starts getting a little antsy again.’
He held it out and she looked at it as if it was a vial of poison. His grin broadened. Most women in this situation would have begged him for it. Hell, having his phone number in their hot little hands would probably be a story they’d tell to the end of their days.
Cassie stood her ground by the desk. ‘It won’t. My brain is firmly back in charge. And there’s no room for…that.’
Tuck raised an eyebrow at the finality in her words. He had no doubt she meant it in all those higher functioning areas, of which she had many. She didn’t strike him as a woman who let anything ruin her focus—especially now her libido was in check. But it was that little hesitation coming from somewhere deeper that gave him pause.
He strode the three paces that separated them and placed his card on her desk. ‘Goodbye, Cassiopeia. It was fun.’
He didn’t wait for a response, just turned and walked out through the door. It wasn’t until he reached his car that Tuck realised it had been fun.
Not fun in the yee-ha, laugh-out-loud, usual way. It hadn’t been gambling in Vegas with a pocketful of green and a blonde on his arm, or partying in Paris, or hearing the roar of the crowd coming out at him from under the Thursday night lights. Those had been the things that had defined fun for him until now—especially since his career slump and his marriage breakdown. But they felt kind of empty in comparison. Like an act. A façade. Something that Tuck-the-jock did to ensure he was the toast of the town, the life of the party.
But three days in bed with Cassie had made him reassess his definition. Okay, there hadn’t been a lot of talking, but neither had there been a lot of sexual gymnastics. Mostly they’d just explored each other’s bodies. Just touching and stroking and joining together, then drifting to sleep and starting all over again.
&nbs
p; But it was the first time he could remember he’d been himself in a long time. Stripped back to the man, not the quarterback, because Cassie didn’t have a clue who the footballer was nor did she give a damn. He’d been anonymous for a change.
And that had been fun.
Cassie stood very still for a long time after Tuck left, staring at the closed door. Fun. No one had ever told her she was fun. Not even as a child. The kids at school had called her brainiac and geek. Her doctor had called her a smart little cookie. Her teachers had said she was a whizz-kid. The university chancellor had called her a once-in-a-generation mind.
She’d never been anyone’s fun before.
She picked up his card, his scent enveloping her as she brushed it against her mouth. It took all her willpower to toss it in the empty rubbish bin.
Three days later Cassie realised she’d created a monster—or fed one anyway—because her libido was back at full bitch again. The first day had been good. She’d felt focused and invigorated, springing from bed, eager to live the dream. But the next morning her thoughts had returned to the carnal, and slowly things had started to slide until her concentration was shot, her ability to analyse simple data non-existent and her interest had hit an all-time low.
And everything reminded her of Tuck. Passing the students hanging out in the hallway. Pulling one of her geek logo shirts over her head. Looking at the images from deep-space telescopes and seeing a pair of starburst-blue eyes.
Her professor had asked her earlier today if everything was okay. Actually enquired if she was homesick. As if she was one of the fifteen-year-olds currently running around campus instead of an almost thirty-year-old astronomer with a Mensa-rated IQ studying auroras on Jupiter.