Thoroughly Kissed

by Kristine Grayson

  Michael had once told Mort that it felt as if he were a Christian in the Roman coliseum, waiting to face the lions. Mort had laughed and said that it was his job to capture the students, not to let them capture him.

  Michael had never quite found the trick to that. He was better at research and scholarship than actual lectures. He actually liked the organization his administrative duties required of him, and if he never taught another class, he doubted anyone—including him—would miss it.

  Obviously Emma Lost’s students didn’t feel that way.

  Michael had never seen a two hundred–level Middle Ages class so full. And more surprisingly, most of the students were male—and, if he didn’t miss his guess, several of them were the school’s top athletes. He’d never heard of nonmajors taking a medieval history course as an elective—the nonmajors flocked to American history, and then to famous events, like the Civil War or World War II. And the jocks avoided the history department ever since Mort had canceled all of the History for Dummies classes (as they were affectionately called) ten years ago.

  So what were the jocks doing here?

  Michael gazed down at the stage and didn’t see a professor at all. The teaching assistant had her back to him. She was gathering a pile of papers and placing them on the table that doubled for a desk.

  Then she turned around, and his breath caught in his throat.

  She was slender yet curvy in all the right places. She wore her long black hair loose, and it flowed past her knees. It caught the light, shiny and reflective like hair in a shampoo commercial. But her hair wasn’t her most stunning feature.

  Her face was. She had a true peaches-and-cream complexion, the kind he hadn’t seen outside of Ireland, and never on a brunette before. Her eyes were almond shaped, her cheekbones high, and her mouth a perfect bow.

  He sank into one of the ugly orange plastic chairs, his legs no longer able to hold him, and it took him a long time to remember to close his mouth.

  No wonder this lecture hall was filled with men. No wonder they all stared like—well, like he was. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

  She walked over to the podium and grabbed the cordless microphone. It thumped once, making him start.

  “Sorry about that,” she said. “I just had to make sure you all had the revised assignments list.”

  She had a throaty alto with a bit of an accent, an accent he couldn’t quite place. It was almost Scandinavian, but not in the broad comical tones he usually heard all over the upper Midwest, the accent that had been so aptly lampooned in the movie Fargo. No, this was more like a hint of an accent, as if English were not her native language. She clipped the ends of words the way a German would who had long been acclimatized to the United States.

  “All right,” she said, leaning against the podium but not stepping behind it. “Since you all seem to be having so much trouble believing that the people who lived a thousand years ago were the same as the rest of us, with the same problems, similar cares and worries, and similar feelings, let’s try to bring their world a little closer, shall we?”

  Even though she was chastising the group, she didn’t seem at all angry. In fact, Michael felt himself being drawn closer to her.

  “We still practice a lot of rituals that began in the Middle Ages,” she said and then she smiled. It seemed as if the entire room had been lit by its own sun. “And frankly, the rituals made a lot more sense back then than they do now.”

  Michael’s hands were shaking. He had never been drawn to a woman by her beauty before, but he couldn’t help himself. She was absolutely, positively mesmerizing.

  “For example,” she said, that smile still playing around her lips, “one of the Suebic tribes worshipped the Mother of the Gods. They wore an emblem to honor that rite—it was the image of wild boars.”

  Half the class tittered nervously. The sound brought Michael back to himself for just a moment. He caught his breath, but couldn’t make himself look away from her.

  She didn’t even seem to notice their reaction. “To them, the boar guaranteed that the worshipper of that goddess would be without fear even if he was surrounded by his enemies. At Yuletide, the warriors made their vows for the coming year on a sacrificial boar. You all continue that practice. You make New Year’s resolutions.”

  A young man in the front of the room said, “You don’t know that the events are tied. You can’t just say—”

  “Justin,” she said in a weary tone. “What did I tell you about comments in class?”

  “Geez, Professor Lost, I…”

  Michael stiffened. He frowned at the woman, still engaged in conversation with the young man in the front of the room. She looked as young as her students. There was no way that this could be Emma Lost.

  He had expected a middle-aged woman with a narrow mouth that never smiled, and small beady eyes that constantly moved back and forth searching for people who saw through her terrible scholarship. He should have realized that she was tiny and telegenic. After all, he’d been hearing that she made the lecture rounds before she came to the UW, and she was still being called by interviewers as an expert on all things historical.

  “My favorite senseless thing that’s still practiced in this century,” she was saying, “occurs in the spring. Now remember, that medieval people understood the world based only on what they could see.”

  Michael gripped the plastic top of the chair in front of him. She looked so relaxed down there, one ankle crossed behind the other, the microphone held easily in one hand. He was always behind the podium, struggling with notes.

  “There is a bird in England called a lapwing which, for those of you who don’t know, is a plover—”

  The hand of the boy in the front row rose again.

  “—which,” she continued with a grin, “for those of you who don’t know is a wading bird—”

  The boy’s hand went down.

  “—and it builds a nest, which looks remarkable similar to the scratch of a hare, which for those of you who don’t know, is a rabbit. Because of the similarity in nests, many of the early English believed that rabbits—”

  She paused, waiting for the class to come up with the answer on its own.

  “Laid eggs,” Michael whispered.

  “Laid eggs,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “And that’s why the Easter bunny lays Easter eggs.”

  Another hand went up. This one belonged to a studious girl who sat in the middle. “Our books mentioned that the word ‘Easter’ came from the pagan goddess ‘Eostre.’”

  The grin faded from Professor Lost’s face and she was watching the girl intently. Michael felt his back straighten.

  “We haven’t discussed the pagans much—”

  “We’ve discussed the Christian church’s influence and various beliefs.” Professor Lost sounded almost defensive.

  “A little. But the book mentions that it’s impossible to know what pagan beliefs really were because the early Christians did what they could to destroy any history of paganism.”

  Professor Lost’s magnificent eyes seemed to have grown larger. Michael wondered what it was about this topic that made her uncomfortable. It was well known that the Christian church did its best to convert all it contacted to Christianity. Had she run into trouble in the past by teaching pagan history? He doubted that. She didn’t look old enough to have been teaching long.

  “What’s your question?” Professor Lost asked.

  Apparently the girl heard annoyance in the professor’s tone and flushed. “Well, in, like, fiction books, they say the pagans practiced magic. Did they?”

  Professor Lost’s face shut down completely. All the personality left it. Michael leaned back wondering how she would handle this. Magic was his special area of historical expertise—and the subject of his next book. He
knew the answer. He wondered if she did.

  “We don’t discuss magic in this class,” she snapped. “Now, if there are no more questions, let’s return to our discussion of Alfred the Great. He was about twenty-three years old when he was crowned in 871…”

  Michael stood. He knew more about Alfred the Great than he wanted to. Even though medieval history hadn’t been Michael’s area before, he’d had to study it as his history of magic project grew.

  “…was an outstanding leader both in war and in peace, and is the only English king—”

  There was a small break in her voice. Michael looked over at her and found her staring directly at him. He felt her gaze as if it were a touch. Her eyes were wide, her mouth parted, and all he wanted to do was run down those stairs and kiss her. For a long, long time.

  He shook himself. That would have shocked the students. The new chairman of the history department going from class to class and kissing the professors. That would really shock old Professor Emeritus Rosenthal who was giving a lecture on British Naval History in the next room.

  The thought of kissing Professor Rosenthal broke the spell, at least for Michael. But Professor Lost was still staring at him as if he were the answer to all her prayers.

  She would soon discover that he wasn’t. He hadn’t been all that impressed with her famous lecturing skills.

  “I wouldn’t call Alfred the Great a king of England,” he said, his voice carrying in the cavernous room.

  She blinked as if catching herself, and then said into the microphone in a very cold voice, “And who might you be?”

  “I’m Michael Found.”

  “Michael Found?”

  Several students tittered. She glared at them and they all leaned back. Michael felt like he wanted to as well.

  “I don’t appreciate jokes, Michael Found, and I know your name is not on my student roster, so if you would kindly—”

  “I’m the new chairman of the history department.”

  To his surprise, she blushed. She turned a lovely shade of rose that accented her dark hair and her spectacular eyes. “Oh, well, then, I guess you can interrupt at any time.”

  They stared at each other for a moment. The students seemed to be getting tennis neck turning their heads back and forth, trying to see what was going on.

  She cleared her throat. “What would you call Alfred the Great if not a king of England.”

  “England was divided into tribal areas at that period. Alfred was king of the West Saxons in southwestern England, but he didn’t—”

  “He conquered London in 886,” she said. “All the English people who weren’t subject to the Danes recognized him as their ruler. By my book, that makes him a king of England.”

  “By your book, yes,” Michael said, “I suppose it does.”

  She frowned, obviously not understanding the comment. She would later.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt your class,” he said. “You’re the only tenured professor I haven’t met yet, and I wanted to hear you work.” He glanced at the students. “You can all go back to learning about Danelaw.”

  That blush rose again on her skin, and he felt that same attraction. He dodged it by turning and going out the door. As he did, he heard her say, “Well, you never know what’s going to happen on a pretty May morning. Let’s talk about Alfred, though. He was the youngest son of…”

  Michael hurried down the hall. His heart was pounding. He hadn’t challenged a professor in front of a class since he was a student himself. And as a professor, he hated being challenged by a colleague. He had no idea what had provoked him to do that.

  But as he reached the stairwell, he realized he did know. It had been his reaction to her beauty. He knew that her work was poor and that she had gotten fame, fortune, and an undeserved tenure for her rotten scholarship. She had looked bright enough, but she clearly didn’t understand that history was about facts, not fiction.

  He had always been attracted to smart, capable women. Men who were interested in women solely because of their beauty were contemptible. He had always prided himself on seeing a woman’s intelligence before he noted her physical attractiveness.

  Except this time. He had gone in knowing that she was going to be an embarrassment to the university, hoping that she would prove him wrong, and then all he had done was stare at her like a lovesick puppy—which was exactly the way all the undergraduate men, including half the football team, were staring at her.

  So he had challenged her, and she had actually answered him with something resembling an argument.

  Still, he was unimpressed with her analysis and her so-called lecturing skills. Discussing Easter eggs and boar’s heads might be fun over beers, but such things had no place in a two hundred–level history course. Those courses were difficult in the first place because the instructor had to cram as much information as possible into a very short semester. To waste time with frivolities like New Year’s Resolutions and the Easter bunny was the sign of an undisciplined mind.

  He climbed the stairs to his office two at a time, but the movement didn’t drive the feeling from his stomach. She was beautiful and he wanted to go back down there and stare at her. He half envied those kids who got to see her every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

  She was precisely the kind of woman a man could worship from afar.

  ***

  Emma’s hands were shaking as she picked up her books. The gorgeous man from her block had been in her 9:00 a.m. lecture, and she hadn’t even noticed him until he stood to leave.

  Michael Found. What a horrible, awful coincidence. She would bet that he was born with his name. In her day, very few people had last names—and usually they were descriptive, just like hers was. She had chosen the name Lost a few days after she had woken up in the Computer Age. She had felt it described her then. It didn’t describe her nearly as well now, but it was what she was known as, well known, surprisingly enough.

  She turned to see a handful of students hovering near the stairs. She suppressed a sigh. Usually she hurried out—she knew that half the boys had crushes on her—but she had forgotten this time. Michael Found—her new boss—had a lot to answer for.

  She talked to the students—that was her job after all—reminding them about the readings, refusing offers of coffee, and telling inane anecdotes, all the while walking up the stairs. She had to hurry to get to the sanctity of her office. She didn’t have office hours on Monday, and she might get some personal time.

  Heaven knew she needed it.

  She managed to escape quicker than she expected, and then took the stairs to the cubicle the university let her call home. She unlocked her office, and stepped inside. Her office was small and rectangular. She had decorated it herself with her own furniture—the book had paid for a lot of extras—which meant that she had a Danish modern desk, a thick leather chair, and a comfortable seat for students who needed help.

  On the wall behind her desk, she put a Danish modern bookshelf covered with the books she’d assigned for class, as well as extra copies of her own book. On the wall across from her was a large photograph of Portland, Oregon, the city where she had “come to herself” as Aethelstan so euphemistically put it. She used that photo to ground herself and remind her where she had come from.

  Her other decorations were her degrees—no one except her Oregon friends knew what a victory those degrees were—and literacy posters. She volunteered for two different literacy organizations and she tutored students who needed extra help. She figured it was the least she could do, considering all the tutoring and special help she had.

  She pushed the door closed, flicked on the green desk lamp, and sank into her comfortable leather chair. Then she closed her eyes. When she did, she saw Michael Found. He was even more gorgeous up close—those blue eyes so startling that they seemed to blaze across
a room. His voice was deep, rich, and musical, and he had a lovely subtle Midwestern accent.

  She wondered if he had seen her reaction to the magic question. He probably had, and he probably thought her a cross and unhelpful teacher.

  Unfortunately, that was a question she had no idea how to answer.

  Scholars had the magic issue all wrong. First, they started from the premise that magic did not exist. Then they drew their conclusions from there. They believed that all medieval people who believed in magic were pagans—and that was not true—and that all pagans were the same. Actually, it was so much more complicated than she could ever explain. If she had trouble getting her students to believe that New Year’s Resolutions were originally a medieval custom brought to the Computer Age, she had no idea how they would take the fact that half the mythical people they studied and a good eighth of the real people were mages just like Aethelstan.

  And, if she were honest, like she would be someday. She hadn’t come into her magic yet. She had twenty more years before that happened, and she wished it were longer. Men got their magic at the age of twenty-one, but women didn’t get theirs until fifty or so. All magic arrived full-blown, so a mage had to learn how to control her magic before it arrived.

  Emma had spent so much time studying that she didn’t want to apprentice herself to anyone, at least not yet. And besides, the last time she had done that, it had gone badly as well.

  Besides, there was plenty of time to deal with the magic before it came. Aethelstan would probably teach her, with Nora acting as referee. But Emma wanted to enjoy life as a normal—there was that word again! Well, as normal as she could be—American in the New Millennium.

  She deserved that much.

  Maybe the next time a student asked the magic question, she’d tell them what the other scholars believed. Who cared that it was wrong? Only she knew.