Tempting (The Tempting #1)

by Alex Lucian

  My thighs clenched in excitement. Gingerly, I stepped around the ice and made my way to campus, a smile on my face.

  * * *

  “Come in,” he answered my knock.

  Entering the office, I took in the lone light from his desk lamp. The rest of the room was washed in darkness. “Nathan,” I said softly.

  He lifted his head from his book and peered at me, eyes traveling the length of my body. “You’re quick.”

  My lips twitched. “I can be.”

  My innuendo didn’t go unnoticed. Swiftly he stood, coming around his desk and reaching behind me to lock the door. He turned me around and pulled the zipper of my coat down, pulling it off me quickly and gracefully. He tossed the coat into the chair and turned back to me.

  “How are your knees?”

  The immediate blush warmed my cheeks. “Sore.”

  He smiled, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m glad.” His eyes moved over my face. “Look at you. Flushed cheeks. Messy hair. Were you excited to see me?”

  The unexpected tenderness of his words softened the thudding of my heart. “I’m always excited to see you,” I admitted quietly.

  He brushed the hair from my eyes and cradled my face with his hands. The warmth from his fingers burned into my windblown skin and I sank into his hold. “You’re beautiful, you know that, right?”

  I’d expected a quick fuck, something fast but satisfying. But instead, he held me carefully as if I might break under the pressure of his touch. He disarmed me when he touched me like this, and surprisingly—to me—I seemed to need what he gave me, whether his movements were quick and punishing or slow and tender. I was an animal begging for scraps from him, but he always nourished me no matter how he fed the desire that burned within.

  Leaning forward, he brushed his lips over mine. He wasn’t hurried in his tasting, savoring the moment with me. His hand cupped my ass and squeezed, causing me to hiss. “Ouch.”

  He let go, his eyes searching mine. “What’s wrong?”

  Sheepishly, I smiled. “I ate it out in front of my apartment today. The fucking ice.”

  “Oh,” he pressed his lips against my forehead. “My,” he said, pressing his lips against my temple, “poor,” he pressed a kiss to my lips, “baby.” He breathed the word right into my mouth, causing my complete undoing in his hands.

  My hands found his chest, fingers digging into the softness of his sweater. “Nathan…” I murmured. “I have class.”

  “Ah.” His breath fluttered against my mouth. “So we’ll have to make this quick? Pity.”

  His fingers opened the buttons of my blouse, exposing my stomach to him first. His thumbs caressed the skin there and as delicious as it felt, I knew I couldn’t let him prolong this.

  “I’ll be late,” I said, leaning forward and planting a kiss on his lips. “Fast. I want fast.”

  He sighed, but turned me around and pushed me against his desk. My stomach pressed into the wood and I reached my hands forward to grip the other side of his desk.

  One of his hands slid up, over the back of my shirt to the nape of my neck, brushing the hair aside to get a firm grip. I breathed across the wood; ready, waiting.

  I heard the jingle of his belt buckle seconds before I heard the firm but insistent knock on his office door. “Professor Easton?” I froze at the feminine voice, as if I was stuck to his desk.

  “Fuck,” he hissed under his breath, letting go of me and backing away.

  Slowly, I straightened, but nerves made my fingers fumble on the buttons of my shirt. Fear sat like a weighted ball in my throat and I couldn’t say a single word as Nathan pushed my hands away and took over the buttoning for me. “Just a moment,” he called.

  Shit.

  Fuck.

  Shit.

  Fuck.

  The words were on repeat in my head. I’d danced too close to fire this time, taunting it with my fearlessness. I was too focused on seeing what Nathan could give me that I didn’t give a single care to what I could lose.

  I could have not only compromised Nathan’s reputation, but mine too—as well as my fucking scholarship … the only reason I could attend school.

  Nathan’s fingers were hurried and my legs felt like they’d crumble underneath me, but I kept my breathing even and soft.

  When my shirt was buttoned, Nathan thrust my coat into my hands and began brushing my hair with his fingers, as if he was trying to manage some semblance of normalcy. I pushed my arms into the sleeves of my coat but left it unzipped, my heart loud in my ears. I opened my mouth to say something but Nathan pressed his fingers over my lips and shook his head.

  “Shh. Come over after class?” he whispered.

  I nodded my head jerkily as he ran his hands through his own hair and straightened his shirt. He gestured for me to move toward the door and when he opened it, I tried to fake a smile. “Thanks, Professor Easton,” I said cheerily as I took in the female student waiting for his attention.

  I didn’t miss the way she narrowed her eyes, looking over us both before turning her attention to Nathan and clearing her throat. “I need to drop class,” she said.

  “It’s your last day to,” Nathan replied.

  I squeezed past her and moved down the hallway, my cheeks warm with the excitement of that moment, as unwelcome as it was. It wasn’t until I was outside that I looked down to zip my coat and noticed the opening in my shirt, the button we’d missed, exposing the center of my bra.

  * * *

  All through my next class, I had sweated bullets of worry. I’d glanced at my phone a dozen times, willing Nathan to message me. We could have been caught. And if the female student had missed the way my cheeks were flushed, she most certainly wouldn’t have missed the flash of my bright red bra peeking out of the unbuttoned gap in my blouse.

  I couldn’t afford to lose my scholarship and if I wanted to continue to be with Nathan—which I most definitely did—I had to figure something out. My feelings had shifted from wanting him to something more profound: wanting to keep him. It wasn’t something I was used to, but because it was new and special, I wasn’t willing to give it up yet.

  After checking my phone for the hundredth time, I clicked on Celeste’s message and read it again.

  Me: Were you serious? I can’t see Dad wanting to support me at all, after defying him.

  Her reply came at the end of class.

  Celeste: I’m serious, Adele. We’re all sick of watching Mom worry over you. You know Dad would have supported you if you’d taken a more practical choice of study.

  I waited until I’d exited the classroom to call her.

  “Adele,” she answered.

  I gnawed on my lip, feeling like I was making a deal with the devil just by talking with her. “Why are you reminding me now?”

  Celeste’s sigh caused me to roll my eyes. “Because Thanksgiving is next week and it would be really great if we could have a relaxed holiday without you and Dad ignoring one another. You know he’d be proud if you chose another vocation.”

  Was I really listening to her and considering what she was offering? I wanted to correct her: Dad was the one who did the ignoring. And how fucking hard was it for him to be proud of me anyway?

  “And we’re both sick to death hearing Mom worrying over your weight.”

  “I’ve actually gained weight.”

  “Probably your carbohydrate diet finally kicking in. Wouldn’t it be nice to spend your money on actual food instead of packaged crap?”

  “I didn’t call for a lecture, Celeste.”

  “Why did you call? Are you considering changing your major?”

  Was I? Celeste had dangled the carrot in front of my face and everything it offered me was like a seductive whisper in my ear: no more long hours at the coffee shop, no more cold thermostat settings, time with Nathan that wasn’t stolen moments here and there. Changing my major would mean a lot of things, but it would mean I could be with Nathan more publicly. If having him as my pr
ofessor wasn’t a complication to my academic credibility, I could see him without the cloak and dagger.

  “Maybe.”

  “I thought so.” The triumph soaked Celeste’s words so heavily I could practically feel their weight on my end of the line. “Let me know if you do. See you next week.”

  “Fuck.” I put my phone in my pocket and began the walk to the subway, but the vibrating of my phone halted my movements.

  Seeing my mom’s name, I knew instantly Celeste had called her.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Baby,” she said, her voice a hundred degrees warmer than the weather around me. “Are you okay?”

  The million dollar question. The last few weeks of sneaking around with Nathan, working extra hours, and choosing between paying my electric bill or putting food in my fridge had really begun to wear on me and in that moment, all I could think to answer was, “No.” The word came from my lips before I’d realized I’d spoken it. I desperately wanted a wall to sink against.

  “Oh, honey. Why don’t you come home?”

  Pinching the skin between my eyebrows, I sighed. “Mom, I can’t. I have school and my job. I can’t just quit.”

  “Okay. But perhaps you can change?”

  And there it was. My hand fell and I inhaled through my nose. “I don’t know—”

  “You know I worry about you,” she interrupted. “All alone in that big city. Leo told me you didn’t even have internet hooked up.”

  I narrowed my eyes, now convinced that Leo’s true first name was ‘Fucking’ with the amount of times I referred to him as ‘Fucking Leo.’ Just like in that moment. “I was bumming off the neighbors, but I have my own now.”

  “Adele, there’s another way. You’re just like your father—stubborn.”

  Shit. The gravity of her words shifted the ground beneath me. Was I just like him? Stubborn, unwilling to be deterred. Doing what I wanted, no matter what anyone else thought. That was my father defined. And, it was me.

  “You can still write, Adele. But this way, you can study something more lucrative, more secure.”

  She was knocking me down, nick by nick. Defeat was beckoning my name. Suddenly, I didn’t want to fight anymore.

  When we ended the phone call, I stood by the stairs to the subway, fully intending to go to Nathan’s house as planned. But instead, I turned back toward campus and entered the registration office with my heart in my throat.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Truthfully, I don’t know how the hell this happened. All I’d wanted from the very first night was just a release. I wanted to feel someone next to me, even for a short amount of time. And some way, somehow, I found myself staring into my refrigerator, wondering what I could make Adele for dinner, since I knew she had to work late. She hated mushrooms, so I stopped keeping them in my fridge. And she, against all my warnings, loved eating whipped cream straight from the bottle. So that too, had found its way onto my shelves.

  Her smiles became my currency. Like the goodness or badness of my day was dependent on whether I saw her, saw that snarky narrowing of her eyes and heard that cutting tongue, read the words that she put in front of me, held me against her when I fell asleep, marveled at the mess she was able to make with such a small number of items, studied the different shades of gold in her hair when the sun hit it, hurt when I saw how moved she was by simple affection, the same way I used to be when I first started dating.

  I’d fucked my way into a relationship.

  Who the hell had I become?

  At the age of thirty-four, I was someone’s boyfriend. I looked forward, down to the minute, to that moment where she’d walk through the door and give me that secret little smile. The one that said, “These people? They don’t know you. I know you. I understand you.”

  I’d become addicted to her skin, to feeling every part of her that had been previously neglected. The freckle on the inside of her right arm and the light birthmark on the bottom of her left thigh had been discovered in the last week. I wanted to make her feel so good and so beautiful and so wanted that she couldn’t fathom having any man touch her but me.

  And every single part of that scared the ever-loving shit out of me.

  Because I hadn’t been looking for it. And I certainly didn’t think I deserved it. But nevertheless, she was there. I didn’t want that to change. We could just stay like this, keep our heads down while she was finishing her classes. I was thinking about the future again.

  The realization that Adele had embedded herself so deeply underneath my skin is what drove me to sit on my couch, staring at the wedding picture of me and Diana.

  Diana had fought her mother for that veil, the one with tiny pearls along the edge, that had sat anchored underneath all her dark hair. I remember sitting with her, railing and cursing at how her mother was a fascist tyrant who couldn’t fathom doing something new if it jammed her in the asshole. Our relationship had been so smooth and so real, we knew everything about the other person, knew when to soothe and when to push the buttons that would immediately turn a disagreement into a fight. Losing her had been like chopping off both of my arms in one fell swoop. And it had taken this long for them to grow back.

  I sat there, staring at our young, smiling faces, not knowing what to feel. I wasn’t an idiot, I knew Diana wouldn’t expect me to stay single and celibate for the rest of my life. But she hadn’t had cancer, something where we’d had time to talk about what might happen in my future. One second she was there, the next, I’d blinked, and she was gone. We’d never had the opportunity to have those conversations. About kids and love and regrets.

  I knew my regrets. That wasn’t the issue. They were never far from my thoughts, especially when I was sitting in this home by myself.

  While I sat there, turning those things over in my head, there was a knock on the door. Like the universe, or God, or quite possibly Lucifer himself knew that it was the very last thing I needed. Adele was working, so I knew it wasn’t her. When I looked through the peephole, I almost lost my breath. The eyes that looked back at me were the exact same shade of deep brown, so dark that you couldn’t read much of anything, unless you really knew them.

  “Open the fucking door, Nathan. I can see you looking at me.”

  So I did. I opened the door and stared at my former brother in law for the first time in four years. Since the day we lowered my wife, his sister, into the ground.

  He was bigger than he used to be, and a beard fell inches past his chin, the same dark brown that his whole family had.

  “Elias,” I said in greeting, opening the door to let him in. He shouldered past me, pushing just hard enough that I had to step back, or get shoved. I set my jaw and faced him once the door was shut. “Where’s your car? Did you lose it again?”

  He’d plopped onto my couch, stretching his long, tree trunk legs out onto the mahogany coffee table. “I haven’t had a car in years, dickface. Cabs and trains and buses and planes take me everywhere I need to go.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  He scratched his jaw, hidden somewhere under all that fucking hair, and peered up at me. “I missed you.”

  I almost laughed. But the coldness in his eyes kept my mouth shut. I didn’t sit. I didn’t want to grant him the smallest comfort in my home.

  “I bet. Seriously, what do you want, Elias? It’s been too long for a simple social call.”

  He leaned forward, and the motion made his shoulders pop with muscles that gave me pause. There was a good chance that he’d take any opportunity to pound the hell out of me. And from the looks of it, he probably could.

  “It’s been over four years.”

  I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck. “I know. Do you honestly think I don’t remember?”

  Elias shrugged, his coal colored eyes never leaving mine. “I’m sure you do, Nathaniel. And you should. It’s your fucking fault she’s dead.”

  I sank into the chair behind me, dropping my head into my hands. “I know.” />
  “Good.”

  When I finally looked up at him, the silence in the room too heavy for me to shoulder any longer, he looked less angry and more sad. “And you needed to remind me?”

  “Yes. I’ll remind you for as long as it takes me not miss my sister so much that I feel like someone’s ripping my goddamned heart out of my chest.”

  When I stood, he did too. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m here because I’ve stayed away for too fucking long. She was my sister, Easton. I didn’t have a single memory that didn't include her, until you came along.”

  “So why now?”

  He shook his head, looking around the room, which was the exact same way as it had been the last time he’d been here, a month before Diana had died.

  “Because I needed to know that you still suffered. Still surrounded yourself with everything that she’d put here.” He pointed a shaking finger at me, and I felt it like a knife in my chest. “You were the reason she was out on the road that night. You are the reason some drunk asshole wrapped her car around a tree, because you didn’t feel safe driving home after your three pussy-ass beers. Why she was stuck in that car until she bled out. So I need to know that you still feel like shit. The same way I do.”

  Every word spat from his mouth felt like flames licking up my skin. I kept every thought of that night so far from my memory, that being thrust into it singed every part of me.

  “And you really think I wouldn’t?” I whispered, voice cracking. “I loved her. You know I loved her. And she would have been home safe if it hadn’t been for me. I don’t need you coming here, after all these years to remind me of that.”

  We stared at each other, the violence in his eyes just making me feel so incredibly tired. So bone-deep exhausted that I wanted to curl into myself and not come out for weeks.

  “I know you don’t need it,” he finally said. Then he pointed at his own chest. “But maybe I do.”