Playing With Trouble

by Chanel Cleeton

  And just like that, the underworld swallowed me up with a savage gulp.

  Chapter Three

  There’s a new man on the D.C. social scene, fresh from the Windy City. What attorney and recent bachelor will be in attendance at tonight’s fundraiser? A newly minted professor, and if the rumors about his looks are true, he can teach us any day . . .

  —Capital Confessions blog

  Gray

  I’d either been really good or really bad to deserve this. I wasn’t sure which one, and right now, I didn’t care.

  My announcement had caught her by surprise, and I took the opportunity to study her just as she’d done to me, trying to decipher the enigma that was Blair Reynolds.

  She wasn’t sexy. Not conventionally, at least. She was slim, her tits smaller than I normally liked, her hips less curvy, her body less obvious. She wasn’t the type of girl you’d expect to see in a calendar in an auto shop. Everything about her was understated. She was pale, her skin flawless, the only pops of color her cherry-red lips, dark eyebrows and lashes.

  And the flush on her cheeks . . .

  She looked like one of those old paintings at the museum benefits my ex-wife used to drag me to in Chicago. Like she belonged in another place, another time.

  My grandmother had loved poetry. When she got older, her eyesight started to go, and she would ask me to read her poems in her room at the nursing home. I’d thought I’d forgotten most of it after she passed, but lines flitted through my brain.

  All that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes . . .

  She was a Byron poem. And I was fucked.

  When she’d first walked into my office, I’d been convinced that I was now hallucinating in addition to her haunting my dreams. And then she’d stared, her gaze running over me as though she stripped the clothes from my body layer by layer, and I’d gotten hard imagining all the things I wanted to do to her on my desk.

  This was either going to be an unexpected pleasure or an unmitigated disaster, and given the way my life had been going lately, the trend skewed toward the latter.

  I waited for her to crack under my scrutiny, for her composure to waver.

  It didn’t.

  That was one of the things that impressed me most. She had an unflappable grace that never failed her. In the beginning, I’d looked because I couldn’t help it, because she was like the fucking sun, shining bright in your face when you were hungover and just wanted a pair of sunglasses and a burger. And then, little by little, with each day that had passed, each time she looked at me, she got under my skin, until now I wanted the light. Craved it. Even when it blinded the shit out of me.

  I wanted to know more about her, wanted to understand what it was about this girl that had me completely gone. And apparently I’d just been given the perfect opportunity.

  Fucking serendipity.

  I nodded toward one of the empty chairs. “You can sit, you know. I don’t bite.”

  I lobbed the innuendo at her, waiting to see if she’d ignore it, if I was playing this game alone, or if she’d volley it back to me.

  She didn’t disappoint.

  “Now, why don’t I believe that for a second?” she muttered, not quite under her breath.

  I grinned. Smart girl.

  Blair

  “You don’t like me, do you?”

  I sank down into the chair, his question hitting me mid-motion, my body jerking in surprise. His tone was casual with a hint of silk, as though he could seduce the answer out of me.

  I’d never been prone to fits of temper, but god, he pushed all of my buttons. It wasn’t an etiquette thing—a social faux pas he’d somehow made because he didn’t know better—he knew he was being rude and he just didn’t care.

  And perversely, I was equally determined to deny him.

  The truth?

  Of course, I didn’t like him.

  It was debatable if I would throw water on him if he were on fire. While my body apparently didn’t need me to like him to want to lick him all over, at least my mind had better judgment.

  An uninvited guest, twenty-three years of etiquette, reared its untimely head.

  “Why would you think that? Your class is . . .” I commanded my voice to say something nonthreatening like, “interesting,” or “nice,” but instead, “hell on earth,” “my least favorite place,” and “motherfucking torture” pushed to get out.

  Screw it.

  He sat there with that same smug smile—he knew—and suddenly, I stopped caring about being polite. If he was going to be inappropriate with me, then I was more than happy to return the favor.

  “No, I don’t.”

  His smile deepened like it was a fucking reward, like I was his prized student, and I’d just given him the answer he wanted.

  My scalp tingled, a pull gathering low in my belly. I was so screwed, and not in a good way.

  “I call on you too often,” he continued, his stare unblinking, dark humor dancing in his eyes.

  He did not just say that.

  His eyebrow arched as if to say, I’m rewarding your honesty with mine, not needing to give me the words, weeks of this fucked-up silent war we had going on creating an undeniable intimacy.

  He read me like a book.

  My breath hitched. The air pulsed. And just like that, my nipples decided to join the party.

  I wanted to ask why he called on me so often, why he liked flustering me, yet as much as curiosity poked and prodded its way through my composure, I couldn’t make myself form the words. It was one thing to engage him with the safety of a classroom between us, another entirely to wave a cape before a bull without a buffer. I was heading into deep and treacherous waters, and he looked only too happy to pull me under.

  My eyes narrowed. “Are you going to stop?” I snapped.

  “Probably not.”

  God, he grinned at me. The man’s ego was unbelievable.

  Silence filled the space between us, the tension lingering, the heady recklessness tempting me, goading me. Since my engagement had fallen apart, I’d been going through the motions, pretending everything was okay, pretending I was okay, and suddenly I didn’t want to fake it anymore. I didn’t know what it was, but somehow I’d felt more alive in the last few minutes of sitting in his office than I had in months. There had always been a disconnect between what I thought and what I said—a big one—but with him I didn’t care.

  There was no pretense with him. He was an asshole and he owned it. I didn’t know what exactly I was, but whatever it was, I wanted to own it, too.

  Gray

  She didn’t shy away when I called on her, took everything I gave her with an angry flash of her eyes that was my own brand of crack. So I pushed the boundaries even further, craving her reaction. I wanted more, wanted to know her.

  I’d had glimpses of her. I knew she was serious. She didn’t wear sweats to class, didn’t pretend to take notes while she was really messaging on her computer. She had friends—I’d seen her joke around with the preppy guy who sat next to her and a blonde girl—but she was quiet. She seemed older than her classmates; maybe it was the way she carried herself.

  I wanted to unravel her until she was lying at my feet.

  “How old are you?”

  Her eyes flickered with that expression I’d come to love, a cross between disdain and annoyance, her tone ice. Her only tell was the faint pink that spread across her cheeks.

  “Did you seriously just ask me how old I was?”

  I didn’t bother trying to hide my smile. “I did. And you’re avoiding the question.”

  “It’s a rude question,” she snapped.

  I shrugged, egged on by the temper she threw off. I was a twisted fuck, but I liked bantering with her. Liked the sparks that ignited between us every single time.

  By the look in her eyes, so did she.

  “Maybe I’m a rude guy,” I countered.

  “I’ve picked up on that,” she muttered and her gaze did
that fuck you look, and I shifted in my seat again.

  Behind those pretty lips I wanted wrapped around my dick, she had razor-sharp teeth she wasn’t afraid to use.

  “I’m twenty-three,” she answered with the same hauteur of a queen addressing a peasant. She gave me the words without abdicating an inch.

  Hot as fuck.

  Seven years. Not exactly dirty-old-man territory, but not small.

  “You seem older.”

  She blinked and her eyes widened. “Are you saying I look old?”

  I’d never been good with social niceties, never had much patience for dancing around things. If I felt something, I said it. Anything else seemed like a waste of time.

  “No, I’m saying you don’t act like you’re twenty-three.” I gestured toward her outfit. “Or dress like it.”

  The pink on her cheeks turned to red. “Are you saying I dress like I’m old?”

  Considering the number of Blair Reynolds–inspired hard-ons I’d had—including this one—I was definitely not saying that. But I wasn’t sure she was ready to handle hearing my feelings on the subject of how badly I wanted to get underneath her little skirts and the cardigans I fantasized about unbuttoning.

  “Most of my students come to class dressed in jeans and flip-flops. Occasionally pajamas, after, I’m guessing, a hard night at the bar. Most of my students don’t wear pearls or carry Chanel bags.”

  She made a choking noise. “So, apparently I dress like a grandmother now. Thanks.”

  She wanted the truth? My gaze settled on the hem of her skirt, trailing it down to her legs. I swept over the lines of her body, admiring the view, giving her all the answer she needed.

  I definitely didn’t think she looked like anything other than a fantasy. My fucking fantasy.

  “Trust me, the last thing I think of when I look at you is my grandmother.” My voice sounded hoarse, strained, raw. I met her gaze again, the look on her face doing funny things to my chest. “I never meant to imply that you were old, just that you seemed more mature than the rest of the class. You don’t look like you screw around when I’m lecturing like some of your seatmates.”

  I knew because I kept my eyes on her way more than I should.

  Some of the red drained away, as though my confession had mollified her a bit. I tried to lighten the tension between us, to distract the part of me that couldn’t stop thinking about her legs.

  “Speaking of, you might want to tell your friend that I can see the newspaper he tucks in front of his computer every day. I know he does the crossword puzzle in class.”

  Surprise filled her pretty brown eyes and then her lips twitched, breaking through the lingering anger. “In his defense, it’s not every day.”

  “Just most days.”

  “Just most days,” she agreed with a smirk.

  My breath caught at the playful tease and this new side of her.

  In some ways, Blair reminded me of my ex-wife, Jessica. We’d met during law school. Jessica’s father was a judge, her mother a well-known society hostess. The first time she’d taken me home to meet her parents, I’d been afraid to touch anything, never more aware of the shit hole I’d grown up in—the cramped apartment over my father’s bar on the South Side.

  I’d been dazzled by Jessica. She’d seemed like a chance at a different future, the perfect wife for my legal career. She just hadn’t been the perfect wife for me. It had turned out that as hard as it was for me to shake off my South Side background, it had been even harder for Jessica to ignore.

  So yeah, I’d done the rich-girl thing. And been bitten in the ass for it. Didn’t need to do it again. No matter how hot her mouth was.

  I tore my gaze away from Blair and looked down at my desk. I twirled a pen in my hands, a nervous habit I seemed to have developed somewhere along the way. I’d never had nervous habits in Chicago, just bad ones—the worst being my shitty self-control.

  The thing about having an addictive personality was that if you set a drink in front of an alcoholic, it was fucking hard to resist a taste.

  And if Blair Reynolds were alcohol, she’d be a single malt Scotch.

  Nothing about her screamed sex—it was more like a whisper. A whisper that wound its way through me, filling my ears, my head, my eyes. It was a whisper that tempted me when I’d always been drawn to the loud and obvious.

  Thank god torts came as naturally to me as breathing; I spent a ridiculous amount of class time thinking about her, wondering about her, fantasizing about her. Turned out it was so much worse when what I wanted most was sitting right across from me.

  I dropped the pen, my fingers curving into my palm as if that alone would keep me from reaching out and touching, from satisfying my curiosity about whether her skin was as soft and smooth as it looked.

  Fuck.

  “Are you ready to talk about the pro bono project?” she asked, her voice full of no small amount of censure.

  I straightened in my chair and nodded.

  She reached into her bag and pulled out a little blue notebook and a silver pen. “I thought we could volunteer with one of the local middle schools. I’ve talked to one that works with at-risk youth. The administration is interested in partnering with us to create a mentoring program.”

  My ex-wife’s idea of charity had been serving on committees and throwing lavish parties to raise money for one of her pet projects. I’d figured Blair’s proposal would be in a similar vein—something where she didn’t have to get her hands dirty.

  “Which school?”

  “Greenwood Middle.”

  “Where’s that?”

  She mentioned an area of D.C. notorious for drugs and gang activity.

  Part of what had made me a great trial attorney was my ability to read a jury.

  I couldn’t get a read on her.

  “Do you think that could work?” she asked, her voice hesitant, as if she were waiting for me to squash her plans.

  Was I really that big of an asshole? I mean, yeah, I screwed with her a bit, but I couldn’t believe she actually thought I was so heartless that I would block a plan to help underprivileged kids. Hell, I’d been a product of one of those schools in Chicago. I knew firsthand how tough it was to claw your way out of the gutter.

  “I think it’s a great idea,” I answered, surprising her, by the look on her face. “A lot of them have probably had negative run-ins with the legal system.”

  I knew all about having a juvie record.

  “This could be a chance for them to see that the deck isn’t always stacked against them. That sometimes the law is on their side. What’s the next step?”

  “I’ll arrange a meeting with the school principal,” she answered. “I’ll try to go there in the next few days. I’d like to set it up as soon as possible so the program can launch before everyone is bogged down with studying for finals.”

  “Are you going by yourself?”

  Blair nodded.

  The school she’d named was in one of the roughest parts of the city. I figured we’d team up the students to go over on the days they mentored at the school. But Blair going by herself?

  “I’ll go with you.”

  Her mouth tightened. “No.”

  “I’m not letting you go by yourself. It isn’t safe. Let me know when you get the meeting set up and I’ll clear my schedule to take you.”

  “Letting me?” Her voice was downright frosty as her anger simmered between us.

  Fire and ice.

  She was the ultimate contrast. She had a self-control about her that I envied, and at the same time, there was so much fire inside her pushing to get out. It blasted through her eyes, bubbled over in her voice. Her control slipped, inch by inch, and I wondered what it would be like when it finally fell away.

  Magnificent. She would be magnificent.

  Whoever got that side of her would be a lucky bastard. She was beautiful under normal circumstances, but when she was angry she was fucking gorgeous.

  “I’ll
take you,” I repeated.

  Her eyes narrowed. “No.”

  Blair

  I said no, when what I wanted to say was, no fucking way. In traffic that could be a forty-five minute drive. Forty-five minutes in the car alone with him?

  I’d either throttle him or jump him and neither one boded well for my legal education.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said, his tone brooking no argument. “We can meet here and drive over together. Just email me the date. I’m responsible for this project. If something happens to one of my students, it’ll be my ass on the line.”

  I hesitated, torn between not wanting to go anywhere with him, and realizing I’d picked a battle I couldn’t win. And the absolute worst part of it all? I was curious.

  I always voted the party line, never went more than five miles over the speed limit, never drank more than two glasses of wine. And I wanted to fuck my professor with an intensity that bordered on madness.

  It was a constant push and pull with him, and I wasn’t sure which way I wanted it to go.

  I caved with a grimace I didn’t bother trying to hide. “Fine. I’ll let you know.” I grabbed my bag. “I should get going. I have con law in ten minutes.”

  “With Myers?”

  I nodded, surprised he showed any interest in my schedule at all. And then he shocked me even more.

  “How’s that going?”

  Professor Myers was elderly and eccentric as hell, and half the time his lectures were a rambling mess no one could make sense of. He once actually fell asleep while one of my classmates was answering his question. And considering he was one of the country’s preeminent con law scholars, I wasn’t sure how Hannover had managed to hire him, just that they let him rule the classroom as though it was his own private kingdom. Humble wasn’t anywhere in his vocabulary. And still—

  “He doesn’t make us stand.”