In Too Hard (Freshman Roommates Trilogy, Book 3)

by Mara Jacobs

  I was in love with Billy Montrose for five years.

  And then I met him.

  I wasn’t the typical freshman at exclusive Bribury College. Getting in on a scholarship, and coming from a rough neighborhood that I’d happily left behind, I’d even been called a poser by my fellow students. But I was determined to fit in, to be just like all the other girls.

  But that wasn’t what he wanted.

  He singled me out because of the papers I’d written for his class. He offered me a job transcribing his notes for his newest novel. He never knew that he had saved my life years ago.

  I was in heaven just being a part of his process, being near him. And then I became more than just his assistant. I knew it could never work between us.

  I wanted to walk away, but I was… In Too Hard.

  Published by Copper Country Press, LLC

  Copyright 2015 Mara Jacobs

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author at mara@marajacobs.com. This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For more information on the author and Mara’s works, please see www.marajacobs.com

  ISBN: 978-1-940993-89-8

  For every great

  Forbidden

  romance

  Chapter One

  I was in love with Billy Montrose for five years.

  And then I met him.

  “Ms. O’Brien and Ms. Winters, would you both please stay after for a moment?” Professor Montrose said to my suitemate Jane and me as our class was dismissing. For the final time. We were a day away from semester break.

  He wasn’t really a professor. He was a guest instructor for this year only—the year I was a freshman at Bribury College. The elite, Ivy League Lite college that I’d busted my ass to get into with a scholarship.

  I didn’t belong here, but I tried like hell not to let it show.

  The rest of the class filed out, some looking back with curiosity, some just happy to begin their winter break.

  Lily Spaulding, our third suitemate, gave us both a nod as she left, but she didn’t wait. Probably off to meet her boyfriend Lucas. They’d recently been reunited and Lily had basically been walking on a cloud ever since.

  Besides the nod in both our directions, Lily’d given Jane a stern, warning look. I guessed she feared Jane would make a pass at Montrose while given the opportunity of a private audience.

  I was afraid of that too, and not just because I’d be in the room to witness it.

  I had basically held my breath all semester long hoping that Montrose wouldn’t succumb to Jane’s blatant innuendoes and outrageous flirting.

  He hadn’t. But now, as of today actually, Jane was no longer his student. And if that had been the ethical barrier holding him back, it was now lifted.

  “Ms. Winters, you first, please,” Montrose said, half-leaning, half-sitting against the side of his desk.

  A perturbed look crossed Jane’s face. She knew what I’d just figured out—Montrose wouldn’t ask to speak with her first if he was going to relent to her pursuit. Not with me in the room.

  Trying to give them some privacy, I stepped away from the seats we’d all vacated before he’d asked for Jane and me to stay. I walked to the other side of the room so I wouldn’t hear what they said, though I desperately wanted to. I moved to where I could see Jane’s face and Montrose’s back.

  Even his back was gorgeous.

  He wasn’t handsome in the traditional way, and certainly not pretty, like so many of the privileged Bribury boys. But there was just something about him that screamed sexy. His hair was dark brown and worn a little long, but not nearly as long as Lily’s Lucas wore his. Not down to his shoulders, but more like he’d missed his last two haircut appointments.

  He always looked tired, and was almost always late for class even though it wasn’t a crack o’ dawn start time.

  He wore jeans most of the time, occasionally khaki cargo pants. Even though he usually paired it with a sports coat and tie, he always looked a little disheveled and sometimes even disoriented.

  But when he lectured, you could see, hear and feel the intelligence he possessed.

  Though he taught Intro to Creative Writing, he almost always brought his favorite literature into each lecture. How Hemingway did this. How Wolfe did that. Or Woolf. He was keen on both.

  Being a voracious reader since I’d been fourteen, I ate it all up, taking notes on his favorite, but obscure, authors. Knowing I’d be able to finally read for pleasure once the semester was over, I added them all to my growing To Be Read author list.

  Montrose was twenty-eight, and had written Gangster’s Folly, which had been touted as the Great American Novel, when he was twenty-three.

  I don’t know if it truly was the Great American Novel.

  But it was the novel that saved my life.

  Now I watched Jane’s face and could tell he wasn’t hitting on her. Not by the look of “fuck you” that she was silently giving him. He reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder and I held my breath for a second until his hand dropped away from her.

  Jane’s look softened. I barely heard the murmur of what he said next, not able to make out any of the words. He gestured to the paper she held in her hand. The paper we’d gotten back from Montrose today. Our final paper, weighted at half our grade. We were supposed to start with “The person I am today is…” then write.

  I held my own in my hand—I’d been about to put it in my backpack when Montrose had asked us to stay.

  I’d scored a ninety-seven on it and saw a bunch of comments, which I would read the second I was alone.

  Jane looked at Montrose for a long while after he’d finished speaking, and then she gave a tiny nod of her head and just a hint of a smile.

  Not the flirty smile I’d seen her use on him before. The smile that said she was a very naughty girl and needed teacher to discipline her.

  And not the smile that she gave to people just before she sliced them a new vein with her sharp words.

  It was a smile that perhaps only Lily and I ever saw.

  And now Montrose.

  My heart fell to my stomach. They’d reached some kind of…truce, I guessed. Would there be more?

  I knew Montrose was out of my league, that I could never make myself flirt with him, having idolized him for five years.

  But that didn’t mean I wanted Jane to be with him.

  She gave him a playful punch on the arm and turned and walked away. “See ya back at the room later, Syd,” she said, not turning around, but waving a hand to me over her shoulder as she slipped her coat on.

  “See ya,” I said to her back as I made my way over to my seat.

  I looked to Montrose who turned his attention from Jane leaving back to me. “Now, Ms. O’Brien,” he said, “your turn.”

  Chapter Two

  “Did you want to talk about this?” I said to Montrose, holding up my paper.

  “No. I mean, that’s not why I asked you to stay. But if you want to talk about it, that’s fine.”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m happy with my grade.”

  “You should be. It was the highest in the class. All sections of the class.”

  That fact made me extreme
ly happy, but I didn’t let it show. I didn’t want anyone to know how badly I wanted to do better than these rich kids.

  “So, not the paper?” I said, putting it in my backpack, then turning back to him.

  He moved around to the front of the desk and leaned against it, crossing his legs at the ankles. Putting his hands behind him on the desk he stared at me. Sort of. His focus was on me, but he had kind of a far off gaze, like he sometimes got during class, before he got rolling.

  He did an actual shake of his head, like he was trying to get rid of the cobwebs. “Sorry. Umm…”

  “Why you asked me to stay?” I said, trying to remind him.

  “Right. Right. Well, they’ve added another section of my class for next semester. Which I didn’t take very well. There are a lot of papers to read for this class.”

  “Yes, I know. It was a lot of papers to write.”

  He smiled a little. “You managed it, though, right? Even with your other classes, and working in the admin building?”

  “How did you know I worked there?”

  “You mentioned it in one of your papers.”

  “I did?” I didn’t remember that.

  “Something about how you likened working in the admin building with being an Orwellian character.”

  I barely remembered writing that, but he, who read how many student papers this semester, pulled it out of his—seemingly—far-away brain.

  “Oh, right. Yeah, I forgot.”

  He looked dead on at me, his gaze for once focused and, I have to admit, a bit disarming. “I didn’t forget. It was a great line. Very fitting, very visual.”

  “Only if you’d read Animal Farm.”

  He tilted his head a little, still staring at me with startling grey eyes. “But I have read it. And I’m guessing you knew that, right?”

  I shrugged. “I assumed.” I didn’t bring up that he’d mentioned Animal Farm being very important to him in one of the many interviews he’d done post Folly hitting it big. No need for him to think I was a book stalker or anything.

  Because I wasn’t. Well, not totally.

  He nodded. “Good assumption.” Then he shook his head again, and his look softened, almost went out of focus. “Anyway. So, you were able to keep up with classes and a job in the admin building this semester? No issues?”

  I shook my head a little bit, not really sure where this was going. “No issues. I have to have the job as part of my scholarship stipulations, and I have to maintain a 3.25 GPA.”

  “And you will?”

  “Should be a 3.7 or around there.”

  He smiled softly, and just a hint of his perfectly straight, white teeth showed. “What? No four-point-oh?”

  “I had a blip in Calculus.”

  “God, just a blip? I flunked Calc. I think twice.” The smile again, this time a little bigger.

  It was all I could do not to pull my top off and rub myself all over him. I tucked a strand of my straight hair behind an ear—a nervous habit I was trying to break. Like all my bad habits that I’d brought to Bribury. “But, anyway…yes, I was able to handle both the job and grades. It wasn’t a lot of hours at the admin building.”

  “Think you could handle more?”

  It wasn’t a loaded question in any way. No sexual innuendo in his voice at all. And yet I very much wanted to channel Jane and give him a Mae West answer about what all I could handle. “Yes,” was all I said.

  “Good. I have something I think you’d be great at. It’s not for credits—though it should be—and it isn’t part of a work/study program, so you’d still have to keep your job at the admin building.”

  He paused, and I nodded, waiting for him to go on.

  “I balked at the extra section. Loudly. Part of the reason I took this year away from the city to do this was so I could really buckle down on my next novel. I barely got a few ideas jotted down this semester, and I jot down a lot of notes. I can only imagine the extra time it will take this spring.”

  “Can’t they give you a TA or something, to help with reading all the papers?”

  I briefly wondered if that’s what he had in mind for me. But no. They wouldn’t let a freshman, who had only just had the one class on creative writing, wield that much power over her fellow freshmen’s papers.

  “They did offer a TA. And I probably should have taken it. But…I really like reading all the papers. Giving comments. Seeing if any of the stuff we talked about in class got through. I didn’t want to give that up. Not entirely. But then, what? Half the students have their papers read and critiqued by me, and the other half by a TA? That didn’t seem right. And, well, I’m sure a lot of people just randomly got my class. But, I’d like to think a few had actually heard of me and wanted to take the class because of me. So it didn’t seem, I don’t know, right to not read the papers myself.”

  I wanted to tell him I’d taken his class because of him. That every time we had a paper returned I’d read and reread his comments on them. I just nodded and said, “Yes, I can see that. I think it’s good you want to read them yourself.”

  “Is it?” He ran his hand across his mouth. A beautiful mouth with full lips, the lower one looking particularly suck-worthy. “Yeah. Good. I thought so.

  “So instead of taking on a TA, they gave me the funds to use for an administrative assistant.”

  “But if they wouldn’t be helping with the papers, or the class, what would the assistant be doing for you?” I asked. Then I had a vision of me running around town picking up Montrose’s dry cleaning and doing his grocery shopping or something.

  I hated chores. With a passion. I’d had to do all of that back home, with two baby brothers and a mother that was, at best, neglectful, at worst, MIA.

  And a father who, at least for me, was never in the picture.

  Coming to Bribury, living in the dorms, meant I didn’t have to do those mundane chores anymore.

  Sure, I had to do my laundry, and hit the store for snacks to have in the room and stuff like that. But I wasn’t planning dinner, or making sure the boys got to bed. Or to preschool. Or, basically survived.

  So, the freedom of that kind of chore was symbolic to me, and I didn’t want to look back.

  But the idea of being in Montrose’s life, even if it was to water his plants or something, was very tempting.

  “Laundry, groceries, that type of thing?” I asked. I was about to nod my head that I’d be interested, but was stopped by his head shaking and the holding up of his hands.

  “No. No. Nothing like that. I have a cleaning person who does all that crap.”

  “Oh. What then?” Maybe my Mae West comeback wouldn’t have been far off base after all. Maybe he was looking for a different sort of “help.”

  He motioned to my vacated chair for me to sit, which I did. Then he sat in Jane’s empty seat, turning his body toward mine. “For a long time now, I’ve been writing my second novel.”

  “Okay?”

  He rubbed his chin again, a look that was so “introspective professor” but on a young, hot face.

  “Well, actually, not so much writing my next novel, as working on it. More like jotting down lots of notes on several different ideas I’m toying with.”

  “I’m assuming that’s just part of the writing process?”

  He shrugged, and looked forward, to the front of the classroom. He seemed kind of surprised by the role reversal, looking at the desk that he often leaned on as he lectured.

  “I guess,” he said. “I don’t really know what the writing process is. Or what my typical process is. Folly just poured out of me. No notes, nothing. It was just a story I had to tell. This one…has not been…effortless.”

  “Well, no. I imagine most novels aren’t. You’ll probably never have the experience you had with Folly again.”

  His shoulders slumped, and he put his elbows on the little half table part of the desk. “That is the conclusion I have come to.” He looked over at me with an embarrassed smile. “And it took m
e five years to figure that out.”

  “Better late than never?” I lamely offered.

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “I mean, it’s not like you’ve passed your prime. You’re still only…” I checked myself. “Late twenties? You haven’t even hit thirty yet, have you?”

  He’d turned twenty-eight on October third. Unfortunately a day I didn’t have his class. Not that I would have brought it up or anything, but I thought maybe somebody in the class would have seen it online or somewhere and said something.

  “Nope, not thirty. Only twenty-eight.” He looked to the ceiling. “God. Thirty in two fucking years.”

  “It’s not exactly seventy.”

  He shook his head and laughed a little, then looked at me. “You’re right. This might be a good arrangement. Don’t let me wallow, Ms. O’Brien. I tend to be a bit of a self-entitled prick at times.”

  “Then you’re in the right place,” I said, waving my arms, encompassing all things Bribury.

  An actual, full-bodied, laugh came out of him. A rich, deep sound that made my breath catch just a tiny bit, though I was very careful not to show my reaction.

  “Yeah, pretty much,” he said. “So, I need to get my notes together. I’ve been rather…lax these past five years in organizing them in any way.”

  “Are they all electronic? On your laptop or something?”

  “Hardly any of them. And there are boxes and boxes. I had them all shipped to the apartment the college provided for me for the year. I sublet my place in New York, so I wanted them all here. Plus, I thought I’d have lots of time to work with them.”

  “And you haven’t because of the class. I get it.”

  “Well, yeah. But, if I’m honest, every time I open one of the boxes to get started on it, it all feels, I don’t know, daunting or something. And I panic and shut the boxes up.

  “I even brought a few of them to my office in this building, thinking maybe that would help.”

  “And it didn’t?”