Pleasuring the Professor
Angela Claire
Liam Conner was once a literary darling, but now he’s trying to drink himself to death in the seclusion of his mountain cabin. He’s not much interested in sex after the personal tragedy that ended his career, but his libido kicks into high gear when a beautiful blonde shows up in the middle of a snowstorm.
Grad student Clarie Lewis is out to nab an interview with the reclusive subject of her thesis. When Liam throws political correctness to the wind and offers to give her an interview if she’ll sleep with him, she’s not sure whether he’s trying to drive her back out into the snow or if he really is just horny. Both, probably.
Clarie doesn’t need to sleep with anyone for a grade. But she finds herself alone in a remote cabin with a man whose prose she’s been analyzing and appreciating for as long as she can remember. The fact that he’s gorgeous as sin doesn’t hurt either.
Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Ellora’s Cave Publishing
www.ellorascave.com
Pleasuring the Professor
ISBN 9781419939556
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Pleasuring the Professor Copyright © 2012 Angela Claire
Edited by April Chapman
Cover design by Kendra Egert
Photography from Shutterstuck.com
Electronic book publication March 2012
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Pleasuring the Professor
Angela Claire
Chapter One
Clarie threw another log on the fire and pulled up the cowl of her heavy-duty cable sweater so it covered her jaw and mouth. God, it was cold. And dark. The sputtering flames provided only a minimum of illumination to light the pitch-dark cabin. No street lights out in the middle of the Smoky Mountains to shine through the windows. She’d never seen dark like the dark that had enveloped her when she’d turned off her car and trudged toward this cabin.
The snowstorm had hit out of nowhere and before she knew it she’d been driving into a wall of white. In sheer defense, she’d stopped the car—stopped it right out there on the deserted road she apparently should not have taken and was going to kill her friend Ally for suggesting—and it was then that she saw it. Or rather she didn’t. The road had ended. Dead ended right into a cabin of some sort up in the distance. She must have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way.
Swearing, she’d contemplated turning around, but knew she probably wouldn’t make it far in this storm. She’d have to wait it out. Doing so in her car, though, especially since she was running low on gas, didn’t seem like the best alternative when there was another one perched right in front of her. The flickering light of what turned out to be the fire going in this cabin had beckoned. So she’d abandoned her car and headed out into the knee-high snow.
By the time she’d gotten to the front porch, her hands felt almost numb from the cold and she was shivering from the icy flakes bombarding her. Pounding on the door yielded no response, but when she’d tried the latch she found it open. There was a God.
Stumbling inside, she’d fumbled along the wooden wall for a light switch, but hadn’t found one and had finally given up, lurching toward the fire going in the fireplace, sputtering but still alive.
She supposed the owner of this cabin must be somewhere around here. Fires didn’t light themselves. But she couldn’t worry about that now.
Dropping her canvas bag on the floor, she kicked off her boots, and shivering, curled up into a ball on the threadbare rug in front of the fireplace, hugging her knees. Her teeth were chattering and her clothes soaking wet. But she was grateful at least to be somewhere she could wait out the storm.
The banging of the cabin door against the wooden wall a minute later startled her out of the beginning of a daydream in which she was warm and dry. She jumped up. “What the—?”
“Who are you?” someone, something, bellowed at her out of the darkness and the gust of frigid wind that accompanied the open door. The door slammed shut with the same force it had opened and he—she guessed it was a he, not an it—advanced until he was within the scanty light of the fire.
“Who are you?” he asked again, not quite as loud, which, frankly, she appreciated since the mere sight of him was terrifying enough. Bundled up in some floor-length fur coat, a hood all but obscuring his face, the guy looked to be about ten feet tall. She didn’t need any overwhelming audio.
“I’m, ah, I mean my name is, ah, Clarie Lewis,” she stammered. “I stopped here to get out of the storm. I couldn’t drive through it anymore.”
“So you thought that gave you a right to barge onto private property?”
“I didn’t—”
“Save me the excuses. Get out.”
The order was delivered with such finality that for a moment she was just plain flabbergasted. But then all the frustration of the day, the wrong turns, the trudge through the freezing snow, the ice seeping through her new boots, came crashing down on her and she surged to her feet.
“Now, wait a minute. You can’t kick me out of here. There’s a friggin’ avalanche out there.”
“It’s some snow,” he said derisively.
On her feet, she saw he wasn’t quite the giant she had first thought. Six three or four, tops. But a lot bigger, of course, than her own five feet six. Hard to tell with the parka still on, but she bet he outweighed her by a hundred pounds as well.
“And you can spare me your indignation. Please. It’s my cabin. Or does private property mean nothing to your type?”
She didn’t venture a guess at his categorization of her type. Maybe he thought she was a hippie backpacking through the mountains. She didn’t have a clue.
“I own this space. The warmth of that fire.” Gesturing to the howling clatter beyond the cabin window, he then pointed a gloved hand toward his chest. “The protection from that wind. Mine.”
She shivered as he pulled his gloves off and threw them on a nearby chair.
“If you want to share any of it, you’ll have to make it worth my while. What do you have to bargain with?” he asked nonchalantly.
“Bargain with? Of all the insulting—”
Mid-indignant exclamation, it dawned on her that she was alone with this…this mountain man, in the middle of a monum
ental snow storm. Forget about no protection from the elements. She had no protection from him.
And he’d suddenly started talking about what she had to bargain with? Every Lifetime movie she’d ever seen flashed through her brain.
What the hell had she been thinking wandering into a strange cabin like this?
She eyed the poker for the fire, trying to calculate whether she could reach it before he reached her. Since actual odds had never really stopped Clarie from doing anything, she lunged toward the fireplace, intent on the poker, and did not even register at first as to why she didn’t reach her goal. The mountain man had moved so quickly that the poker was out of reach—flung across the room, in fact—before she could even think of grasping it, and his fingers were wrapped, tightly, around her wrists, which he held apart as he stared down at her.
Although most of his face was covered by the sides of the parka hood, she could see from the apparently proprietary fire light that his eyes were a deep green. And they bore down on her with an expression that she had never had any trouble recognizing quite easily from the time she had been sixteen or thereabouts.
Okay, now she was really scared.
He stared down at her, a smile forming. She noticed irrelevantly that he had very straight, very white teeth. Dental care apparently had made its way up to the Smokies.
“Believe me, I’m not that hard up.” He dropped her wrists and turned away.
Of course, he’d lied. He was that hard up, technically speaking, if you took into account the amount of time since he’d last touched a woman. Just the feel of this one’s slender wrists in his own cold hands had given him a boner, which was why he’d dropped them. A hell of a time for his libido to kick back into gear after he’d all but given it up for dead.
Even putting aside his own state, however, he had to admit that this unexpected refugee from the storm looked darned good—despite the sodden, three-times-too-big sweater and the red nose and the damp reams of hair. She looked beautiful in fact, with the firelight glinting off her high cheekbones and lush lips. He knew from long experience that some things couldn’t be ruined. This was the kind of girl who would probably look beautiful in a hurricane. A mere snow storm didn’t stand a chance of marring her allure.
So of course he’d ordered her out. He was done with beautiful things, even ones unexpectedly dropped on his doorstep.
“I’m not talking about your delectable little self as payment.” He said the words so derisively that it became obvious from the tightening of her lips and the crossing of her arms over her chest that she felt a touch of embarrassment, which had been his intent. “I’m talking about a currency I can use. How much cash do you have on you?”
“You’re going to charge me?”
“Why not? If this was a hotel, you’d expect to pay a hundred bucks.”
“Not even close. Sixty-five at most.”
“Well, you’re welcome to go find other more affordable accommodations, then.”
“I don’t have any cash.”
“Okay. Bye bye.”
Shrugging out of his parka, he kicked his boots off and reached for the remote control that controlled the lights, switching them on. Rubbing his hands, he made his way to the thermostat as well, cranking up the heat.
Turning to his little visitor, he saw the harsh light seemed to have stunned her.
Or something.
“I can’t believe this,” she finally said. “It’s you!”
They stared at each other for a minute and he recognized the rapt expression on her pretty face, though he hadn’t seen it for quite a while. Admiration. Great. This was so not happening.
“Liam Conner!” She fumbled for a dog-eared paperback in her bag and held the back up to him, as if proving the fact of his identity with the photo thereon.
He looked at it blankly. “Yeah. So what?”
“You’re the reason why I’m here! I came out here to see you.”
That was troubling. “How the hell did you know I was here? How did you find me?”
“Well, I didn’t. I mean I was on my way to the university in town. Since that’s the last place you, ah…”
“Got fired from,” he muttered.
“I thought they might have an address for you. But I decided to drive through the mountains because there was construction on the freeway and before I could make it through, I got caught in this snow storm and wandered into the only shelter I could find. And it turns out you live here! That’s incredible!”
“Yeah. It’s kismet. So what do you want?”
His curtness, now that she knew who he was, seemed to unsettle her. She looked around as if something could help her out and then cut to the chase. “I’m a graduate student at NYU. I’m writing my thesis on you.”
Now that was funny. NYU even. “Really? So what are you, like, some literary groupie or something?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Too bad.” Leaning back against the counter in the small kitchen adjoining the main room of the cabin, he eyed her in the same way he had initially, but she didn’t seem to mind it now. She shook her head, smiling widely. With the lights on, he could get a really good look at her now. Big blue eyes, pink rosebud mouth, with the high-cut cheekbones he could make out even in the firelight. Her hair trailed down to her waist and since it was wet it was hard to tell the color. It looked blonde though.
And her skin. Dewy white. Soft. How sweet it would be to touch that skin, to run his fingers along the underside of her sharp little chin and along that long neck. To soak up all that youth and promise. Just for a little while.
The fact that he was even thinking about it meant he obviously hadn’t had enough to drink today. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he’d had anything. He was falling down on the job.
“God, I absolutely love your work,” she gushed on. “So I thought I could interview you, maybe, if you wouldn’t mind. Add it as a postscript to my paper. You’d be doing me a huge favor. It would really help me clinch an A.”
“Why would I care about that?”
“You, ah, well you…I thought you’d want to help a student in your field.”
He had been considered a brilliant teacher at one time, until the accident, that is. But that was a long time ago. Apparently, she hadn’t gotten the memo.
“I don’t have any students these days.”
She stared back at him for a minute and his eyes dropped, checking out her long legs and the hint of a really nice rack, which didn’t help with the boner he still had.
“And if I did, you know the only thing I’d want if somebody looking like you came to me and asked for my help in getting an A?”
When she didn’t answer, he prompted, “Go on. Guess.”
“I’ve probably come at a bad time,” she offered instead.
“As good a time as any. But come on, Miss Grad Student, drop all the political correctness bullshit I’m sure you’ve got hammered into you and take a guess at what a guy like me might really want when a hot little piece of ass—”
“That’s enough.”
He opened a cupboard and extracted a half-full bottle of whiskey. Slamming the cupboard door shut with vigor, he took a swig of the bottle, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.
“What? You object to me commenting that you look like a hot piece of ass? It’s the God’s truth. You think because a man’s in academia—not that I am anymore, of course—he wouldn’t think that? What are you, like twenty-two, twenty-three? Grow up. If a prof could ask you to sleep with him for an A these days, he would. But deans frown on that kind of thing now. So many rules.”
Like not showing up to class dead drunk. Like not lecturing a room full of spellbound students on the futility of human endeavors and how it would probably be better to all go out and drink the Kool-Aid.
“Fortunately, I’m not tenured anywhere anymore, so it’s not like they can kick me out or anything. So what do you say? You want me to spell it out?” He took another drink of the whiskey. �
�I’ll give you an interview if you give me a go at that sweet little body you got hiding under that sweater.”
Her rosebud mouth dropped open. It looked as if he’d finally gotten Miss Starry Eyes to shut up from babbling about her thesis and holding up that trashy book of his as though it really meant something.
Now that he knew she was a graduate student, he did know her type. Ambitious, smart, sure the world was made for them and that every man, woman and child would step aside and make way whenever they decided to make their debut. This kind of girl didn’t stoop to sleeping with anybody for an A, even if he had been serious. Not now, not ever.
So maybe he was just trying to drive her back out into the snow so that he could get rid of this boner and get back to some serious drinking.
Or maybe he really wanted to fuck her.
Both, probably.
It was hard to really evaluate her body properly in all those wet clothes, though. “Go on. Take off your sweater.”
Her stunned expression amused him. He was kind of getting into this.
“It’s freezing,” she finally said.
“Was that a no?”
She shook her head. “I’m not even entertaining the idea.”
“Sure you are. You’re writing your thesis on me. You’ve probably been idolizing me all term. Poor, tortured artist crap. Got me right up there with Lord Byron. And like every highly intelligent woman—”
“Gee, thanks,” she cut in with some bite finally.
“You just want to get your brains fucked out by Byron.”
Liam Conner’s smile was really something. Clarie had never seen a picture of that. She supposed he didn’t smile much anymore. But he was smiling now, as if this was all a big, funny joke. She knew he was embittered, but coming from him, this bald proposition really shocked her.
Of course it turned her on too. She felt it right between her legs. That must be what authors meant when they talked about a “stab of desire”. In any case, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t had about a hundred one-on-one sessions with her private parts in which the reclusive, dreamy novelist had played a starring role. She was sure she could dredge up a student-sleeping-with-the-prof scenario.
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