“No way it’s the same person.” Steve picked up his pencil and started reading, making notes in the margin of his text. Somehow, through the maze of mols and reagents, his mind kept returning to the image Beau had described of a half-dressed instructor pacing from one side of the room to the next as she lectured, displaying her body in a flagrant manner. She must be driving the male students crazy. The Leah Morris he’d known never would have acted like that.
“But you’ve changed in those years. Why not her?”
“Who’re you talking to?” Beau asked. Barefoot and wearing faded jeans, his hair glistening with droplets of water, he picked up an apple from a bowl on the counter and bit into it.
“Myself. I was just wondering if it was possible your sexy teacher could be a woman I dated once back at Eastern Ohio.”
“You’re kidding. You knew Leah Morris?”
Steve said, “I knew a Leah Morris.”
“No shit. Well, you’ve seen this one. About five nine, blonde, shape like an hourglass.”
As much as he tried, Steve couldn’t bring Leah’s face into his mind’s focus. He vaguely pictured a slight girl with thin brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and glasses. She was smart but no looker. “Don’t think it’s the same person.”
Beau grinned. “Good for me. Too bad for you.”
Chapter Three
When Leah walked into class on Friday, fewer than half the students she’d faced a week and a half ago remained. They stared with bored expressions now, used to seeing her in her regular garb—very conservative, classic but bland. As had become her habit, she sought out Beau with her gaze and ticked off a satisfaction box on an internal list of things that made her day right when she saw him. He nodded and smiled. A man sitting beside him studied her with an intense look. He seemed awfully familiar, but she couldn’t place him. On campus, she saw so many people, a single face in a sea of people didn’t always register. Dismissing them both, she began her lecture.
As usual, she paced back and forth in front of the desk. The one concession she made to sexiness was spike heels. Men seemed to appreciate a woman in high heels, and though she no longer wanted to lure men to her book project—she had her subjects in mind—she liked admiring looks as much as the next woman. Feminists weren’t supposed to think in those terms, but like a good many associations, she half agreed with their philosophies and half didn’t. Yes, she wanted equal pay, and yes, she even would take advantage of minority perks like fast-track tenure. But she still wanted to be seen as a woman.
After twenty-five minutes of lecture, she stopped and gazed across the lecture hall. “No test today.” Sighs of relief and even a softly muttered cheer reached her ears.
“However.” All movement stopped. All eyes were focused like light through a prism on her. “For the remainder of the class, please write a two-page paper on how the current movement toward the cities will affect interaction in both the urban and rural areas. I will be looking for at least three references from my lecture and two from the reading in the text. Pick up Wednesday’s test on your way out.” She ignored the groans as she took her seat.
As Beau turned his attention to his work, the man next to him whispered something and then came forward.
“Thank you for letting me sit in on your lecture. I found it very interesting.”
She smiled. “Thank you.” If she had seen this man on the other side of campus, she still would have pegged him for a friend of Beau’s. They had similar builds and the same confident bearing. Where Beau’s eyes were gray and the hair that tipped his ears was golden, this man had dark brown hair and equally dark eyes. No dimples for him. His face was tanned and honed to sharp angles. His eyes held darkness as well as light. When he laughed, he would mean it, just like when he loved. Who was he? Something about him made her uncomfortable.
“Can I assume you’re planning to join the class?”
“No. I just came with Beau. To see you, actually.”
“That’s flattering.”
“Are you the Leah Morris who used to attend EOU? About ten years ago?”
Leah crinkled her brows, thinking. “Yesss. Do I know you?”
When he smiled, it was as though someone flipped a light switch. The room came alive. And Leah knew immediately who he was.
She pointed her finger. “You are not welcome. Please leave.”
“Leah, wait a minute.”
Jumping from her chair, she leaned on the desk, palms down. She wished she still had long hair and a bun and that she still wore glasses. He seemed to get the picture, however. The entire class stopped work to focus on the scene taking place in the front of the room.
He took a step back and held up his hand. “I didn’t believe it could be you when Beau told me about his teacher. I mean, I even saw you on the quad and didn’t make the connection.”
Using every ounce of energy she had to control herself, she gave a frozen smile. “Well, thank you so much. Now get the hell out.”
Steve Hardin. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized him. “I said—” Her voice had risen without her realizing it.
“Are you all right?” Beau magically appeared beside Steve, concern marking his expression.
She nodded, too emotional to speak.
He nudged Steve toward the door. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Leah.
“Without him,” she said pointedly.
“Without him,” he agreed. Steve walked out ahead of Beau. “You have only a few minutes to finish up,” she said sternly to the class. Gazes dropped back to their papers. Beau returned and went to work. Within fifteen minutes, everyone had turned in their work and left without lingering.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” he asked when he dropped off his paper.
“Yes, thank you. I need to go now.” She waited for him to leave, then donned her coat, jammed her papers into her briefcase, and hightailed it for her office.
When she reached her sanctum and closed the door, however, she simply sat behind her desk and thought of the last time she had seen Steve Hardin.
She swore then that she would never speak to him again. So much for that vow. Now she made another. That she would be indifferent toward him. To show any emotion would only prove how much he had affected her, how much he’d hurt her. Indifference would show him and the world that to her, Steve Hardin was no more than a bug on the sidewalk of life.
But how could she? Seeing him brought all the old pain and self-doubts flooding through her again as soon as she realized whose deep brown eyes she stared into across her desk.
* * * *
“What the hell did you do to her?” Beau stormed into the house.
At the breakfast bar, his books in front of him but closed, Steve scrubbed his hand through his hair. “Jesus! I never thought I’d see her again. I mean, we were in Ohio, and now we’re in this little school in Virginia, who’d have thought?” Steve glanced at his friend. Where Beau’s eyes were normally a smoky gray, now they were hurricane-warning dark.
“Did you ever meet her at EOU?” Steve asked.
“No.” The percolator was just ending, so Beau moved to pour himself some coffee. He held up his mug, raising his brows in question.
“Yeah, I’ll take some, thanks.”
Beau pushed a full mug across the counter, poured one for himself, and sat. “So? What happened between you two?”
“She was in my English class sophomore year. She was no one anyone would notice, to tell the truth.”
“But you did.”
“We talked a few times on our way out the door. She was nice.”
“As I remember it, talking to girls wasn’t your forte back then.”
“You’re right. That’s kind of what attracted me to her. She was safe. I knew I’d never want to fuck her, so she was a girl I could actually be friends with. I thought she saw it the same way.”
“She didn’t?”
“She knew I belonged to Alpha Chi, and she heard about the spring blo
wout.”
“Jesus.” Beau raked his fingers through his hair. “You didn’t invite her to that, did you?”
Steve looked up from studying his hands wrapped around the coffee mug. “She asked me about it, and I guess I said she…could come. If she wanted to.”
“And she came.”
“And I got mind-numbingly drunk.”
“Of course.”
“I wasn’t alone.”
Beau relented. “We all drank too much that night.”
Steve nodded in acknowledgement. “I didn’t know how I’d gotten upstairs or in bed.” He ran his finger around the mug’s edge and glanced up at Beau. “I just know that when I came to my senses, a woman was naked, beside me in bed. I was sucking her tit and had a woody the length of a telephone pole. I was just ready to climb on top of her when I took a good look and realized it was Leah Morris I was about to fuck. I backed away so quickly I fell out of bed.” He could still see the look on her face. Sloe-eyed passion changing to horror and embarrassment in two-point-oh seconds.
“Serves you right.”
He looked up then. “Oh, right. Like you were a model of virtue back then.”
“I never woke up and didn’t remember how I got in bed.” Steve shot Beau a pointed look. “That I remember now,” he amended.
“I tried to explain to her. I told her that she was the last woman I would ever take to bed, that—”
“What? You damn idiot. You never say that to a girl.”
“Well, I know that now.” Steve frowned. “I knew it then, too, after I got past the hangover.” He shook his head, thinking back on how fast Leah jumped out of bed, dressed, and left his room. And until today, she hadn’t spoken a word to him. Okay, sure, he’d taken her virginity—or he assumed that sometime during the night he had—and then insulted her in the bargain, but the woman could sure hold a grudge.
“Did you apologize?”
“Hell yes. I really liked her. You know, as a friend. I even sent flowers. I found them on the porch of the house the next morning. I lost the only girl I really felt like I could talk to.”
“Knowing you and that dick of yours, she lost a whole lot more. Unless…do you think maybe you were too drunk to screw?”
Steve had wondered that himself after the event. “I have no idea, and she wasn’t speaking to me. I just know I wanted to poke her real good the next day. One could assume that I did just that when we first got into bed.”
“Which means you were too far gone to remember a rubber. You were one lucky sonovabitch.”
“A month went by without a knock on the frat house door before I took an unworried breath.”
Beau stared at him, brows puckered. “That’s when you stopped drinking.”
“Yeah. I figured I’d lucked out once. I didn’t want to take more chances.”
Beau held up his coffee mug. “Well, you followed my example into perdition, and I followed yours into sobriety.”
“And the Marines.”
Beau snorted. “I should have stuck with sobriety.”
“Who knew there was a war on?” Steve said, laughing.
“Who knew all that playing around was going to get us suspended on academic probation?”
“Two tours in ‘Nam did us good,” Steve said and meant it. “We’re mature enough now to appreciate the finer things.”
“We lived through it, that’s the best I can say.”
Steve held out his mug for an in-air toast to living through it. “Granddad always insisted that it was as important in life to know what you didn’t want to do as to find what you did want to do. We know now what we don’t want.”
“Yeah. ‘Nam did that for us, too.”
“And now we’re more settled and determined to get our degrees.”
“And jobs we enjoy,” Beau agreed.
“You said it. We’re mature and grounded. No more stupid antics.” But there was one more stupid antic Steve would like to try. Getting back to a reasonable level of civility with Leah Morris. She hadn’t married if she still carried the last name of Morris, so he wouldn’t have to fight off a husband in order to get close to her.
The shrill ring of the phone sounded. “I’ll get it,” Beau said. He took off down the hall as the second ring came through.
It had felt good to tell the Leah story to someone. He didn’t think he ever had before. He’d been so ashamed, it hadn’t seemed like the kind of thing to admit. In truth, the incident with Leah was a deciding factor in his leaving school. Not that the administration hadn’t made the decision for you.
Time had gradually worn away the memory of her, but seeing her today, reliving all that had happened when they were undergrads at Eastern Ohio University, brought everything back. He’d liked Leah—really cared for her in a way guys didn’t for girls they simply wanted to fuck. The two hadn’t been friends long. That one semester and part of the next before the infamous frat party had been enough, though, to let Steve know she was special. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was smart and funny and open in a way that allowed him to share his thoughts with her. And even his fears. He’d cared for her much more than he’d realized because after she stormed out of his room and didn’t speak to him again, the hurt had been deep. Like he’d lost much more than a simple friend who was also a girl. Not that he’d let on to anyone else, but a little part of him had belonged to her and he hadn’t known it until it was too late. Based on her reaction to him today, it was still too late to make reparations.
Beau came back and took his seat. “That was Dr. Morris. She wants to meet me at the coffee shop in town this afternoon at four for a discussion. It seems I scored another hundred on today’s test.”
“That’s good, but why does it mean anything?”
“I’m not sure. She said she’d explain later.”
Steve mulled that over. Concentration on a test? Sounded more psychological than sociological. “Did she say anything else?”
Beau raised his brow and stared at Steve across the rim of his cup. “Yeah. She said not to bring you.”
* * * *
Beau approached Holy Grounds, a coffee shop made from a converted church, from the west entrance and entered after holding open the door for a couple of girls coming out. One of them looked up and smiled flirtatiously. “Thanks.”
The other nudged her in the ribs. “He’s old,” she said in a stage whisper, “and he looks military.”
The first girl’s smile disappeared in a flash. “We don’t need the likes of you to hold open the door,” she said before they walked off.
“Fine,” he muttered. Would he ever get used to being vilified for doing nothing more than joining the service and doing his duty?
Was it his fault President Kennedy stuck his finger in the Southeast Asia pie? Or that President Johnson seemed alternately not to know if he wanted to keep the pie or forget about it? Was he to blame for President Nixon taking four years to claim we won the pie while at the same time handing it under the table to the Viet Cong? All Beau and Steve, and thousands of others, had done was what their country asked of them. And for that, they were the ones hated, while men who burned their draft cards or gave up their country and ran to Canada were made heroes. More than not getting used to it, Beau would never understand it.
Inside the coffee shop, he found a mix of kids studying or chatting over food and sodas. He and Steve had been in there a few times but preferred to do their studying at home. After years of “fine dining” in the Marine Corps mess halls or in the field, they preferred their own kitchen and dining room for meals, too. And their age differences—thirties compared to late teens—meant their interests and goals generally were out of alignment with the kids they attended classes with.
He stood just inside the door and searched the room for Leah. He found her sitting on the other side, against the wall. A man sat across the table, his back to Beau. Intensity marked her face and her hands moved furiously, as though she was trying to explain something. She looked up and
saw him, but instead of the smile of welcome he’d expected to see, she frowned as she waved him over.
“Professor Morris,” he said in greeting before turning his attention to the man. He was younger than Beau with shaggy brown hair and a rough chin and jaw that couldn’t make up its mind if it was growing a beard or maintaining a five o’clock shadow. He was tall and slender and didn’t look like he could carry a buddy out of a field while under fire. Come to think of it, he didn’t look the type who would carry out a buddy rather than run to save his own ass.
“This is what you’re thinking about, Leah? This…this killer of children and raper of women?”
Before Beau could plant his fist squarely on the man’s nose, Leah said, “Give it a rest, Charles. Beau isn’t a child killer, he’s a former Marine, just like my Uncle Joshua is a policeman, not a pig. Beau, will you have a seat?”
He pulled out a chair and dropped into it, never taking his eyes off the man.
“This is Charles Little, a colleague in the sociology department. And soon, I hope, my lover.”
That sent Beau’s gaze flying to her. What the fuck? “Well, congratulations?” Like hell. “But I’m not sure why you’re telling me.”
“Because I’d like you to be my lover, too.”
Professor Little snorted. Beau couldn’t blame him.
“Come again?” His cock had started rising at her words, but he willed it down. Something strange was going on here, something beyond her actual words, but he couldn’t figure out what.
She sighed. “I’m single and in a town with hundreds of younger men.”
“I’m younger,” Little said smugly, and she shot him a sizzling look that didn’t gain its heat from desire.
“Much younger men,” she amended. “I have no interest in sleeping with children. Nor do I care to take a married man to bed. Which limits my choices. Understand?”
Teacher's Pets [Unlikely Bedfellows 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Page 3