by Paula Cox
“Fuck,” he muttered, tossing the cigarette and crouching down immediately. “I’m sorry.”
He wanted to tell her to watch where she was going, but since been looking down at the time, too, they were equally at fault. Sighing, the woman brushed her hair away from her face, revealing a pair of sparkling green eyes, kissable lips, and a smallish nose that some might describe as button-like.
She was absolutely striking. Stunning as fuck. Nash licked his lips and cleared his throat, once again trying not to stare. If that security asshole was still tailing him, now there would be a reason to investigate. He needed to make this right A.S.A.P.
“It’s my fault,” she offered, her voice a melodic hymn if he’d ever heard one. “I wasn’t looking…”
Her green eyes darted to her phone, and he quickly put two and two together: she’d been texting.
“We both fucked up,” he said with a laugh, holding out a hand to help her up. “Are you okay?”
“Uh…” Her hands, small and clean, and her nails—painted with a clear polish—were scraped. While her hands weren’t bleeding, they probably stung like hell.
“Here, let me get your stuff,” he offered softly, grabbing her scattered books, as she grabbed her phone and shoved it in her purse. “Let’s get you sitting and looked at.”
Her cheeks flamed as he helped her up, a hand on her elbow. “It’s really not that big of a deal.”
Nash shook his head, scanning the area for the security guard. Nobody in sight, but there might be guys in regular clothes wandering around, too.
“I’m a big guy,” he told her, “and we hit pretty hard. Do me a favor and let me make sure I didn’t give you a concussion?”
Her lips peeled back into a gorgeous grin, as she pushed her hair over her shoulders. So thick and wavy. It’d look good wrapped around his fist while he pounded into her from behind.
Christ.
Nash shook his head to push the image away, then nodded to a nearby bench. She went without a fuss, almost docile and pliant under his direction—his cock twitched, interest piqued.
As she’d said, the damage wasn’t much. She’d skinned the bottom of her palms when she caught herself from falling, but everything else seemed fine.
“I’m Eliza, by the way,” she said, a slight tremor in her voice as she stuffed her books into her bag. Nash held the last one out to her, head cocked to the side. She had the looks of a model but the confidence of a mouse.
“Nash.” His grin widened when their eyes met fleetingly, and she hastily tucked her last book into her bag. “Was that a law textbook?”
“Yeah, what else is that huge?” She gave another tinkling laugh, as a warm breeze rustled her blonde locks. For some reason, he had the urge to push a few strays away from her face, but he refrained, his hand tightening into a fist instead.
“Business texts are pretty big,” he fired back, recalling his days of purchasing enormous business tomes for his online classes. The money he spent on that shit…
“Oh, are you studying business?”
He looked back to her sharply, noting the still present flush in her cheeks and the inquisitive raise of one eyebrow. Yeah. Yeah, I’m studying business. Why else would I be on campus?
“Fourth year,” he told her with a sigh. “Crunch time. You?”
“Law, final year,” she remarked, her sigh much heavier than his. “It’s been crunch time since the day I started.”
Nash watched her as she nibbled her plump lower lip, then let his gaze wander to the campus security officer wandering the field in the distance. He didn’t seem to be looking for Nash, or anyone in particular, but he was still an annoying presence that Nash was going to have to deal with somehow.
And maybe Eliza was the answer. As it stood, he had no friends here, no allies. He stuck out like a sore thumb even when he tried to blend in, and before long, someone was going to demand to know why he’d been skulking around and not attending any classes.
A girl was the perfect excuse. She’d be his reason for being on campus all the time. Eliza, with doe eyes and soft-looking lips and creamy skin, would be his cover story, his shield. And given her demeanor now, he had a feeling she wouldn’t be hard to manipulate.
Hell, maybe he could even have a little fun while he was here. A brief distraction from all the stress of his assignment. Something to make him forget how many friends had died this year. His jaw clenched briefly at the thought.
When he realized the silence had dragged, he forced a bright smile and asked if she wanted to grab some lunch or if she was waiting for friends.
“Nope, no friends,” she said, then hastily added, her cheeks flaming darker, “I mean, no friends that I’m waiting for.”
Her uncomfortable chuckle made him smile, and he nodded in the general direction of the building with the food court. “Well, lucky me.”
Eliza looked away, seeming to be biting back a smile.
Perfect. She was perfect for his needs on campus.
And with a mouth that looked so fuckable, he had a feeling she’d be perfect for his other needs too.
Chapter 3
“Can everybody please make sure they have their answers to the discussion questions completed for next time? I’d like to actually have a discussion where everyone can contribute…”
A mass of students packing up their bags, throwing on sweaters, and slowly starting to chatter again all but drowned out Professor Lincoln at the front of the room. Eliza Truman, however, was one of the few who actually waited until her professors were done speaking entirely to pack up her things. The young professor’s eyes scanned the room, the final slide of his lecture still up on the board. When those beautiful bright blues met Eliza’s, she nodded enthusiastically, wanting him to know at least one person was paying attention. His gaze moved on, and finally he drifted forward to shut off the projector.
Even though she looked enthusiastic about tackling discussion questions, Eliza was far from it. To say she was wholly and utterly burned out in her last year of law school would be an understatement—and they weren’t even through the first month yet. October loomed in the very distant future, and she still a full year before her final final exam so she could earn that law degree her father was so keen on her getting.
Hooray.
She sighed heavily, shifting in the uncomfortably hard lecture hall seat so that she could stretch. Something in her back cracked noisily, and she settled back down with a wince, knowing she’d have to wait until the row of students on either side of her left before she could get out anyway. Eliza always chose to sit in the middle of the lecture halls, especially the ones with an amphitheater-style setup. It was where the acoustics sounded best in pretty much every building—and it gave her the opportunity to just blend in with the sea of faces until the class was over.
Many of her law professors simply loved calling on random students to answer questions that none of them knew the answer to. If Eliza could hide, she’d do it.
Truth be told, she was tired. She wanted nothing more than to hurry back to her dorm and crash for a late afternoon nap—but something kept her going.
Well, not something. Someone.
She’d run into ridiculously handsome Nash last week on her way out of a morning lecture. Head down, she’d been in the middle of texting her dad about their dinner plans that night—she’d needed to cancel to get some prep time in for a quiz the following morning—and she’d crashed headlong into the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen in her life. And made a total fool of herself in the process, dropping all her books and skinning her hands as she caught herself in the fall. It was better than landing on her face, but it had certainly been one of the more humiliating episodes of her year thus far.
Since then, she and Nash had been seeing a lot of each other—more than she’d expected when he took her to lunch after her fall. She thought, at the time, that he was smoothing things over, hoping the dean’s daughter wouldn’t go after him for hurting her. Accident
or not, a lot of people treated her as if she was made of glass at Blackwoods University, and she’d assumed Nash was no different.
But then he’d invited her on study dates. They’d enjoyed more lunch outings. Usually their time together was spent in silence, both of them studying—he was in the prestigious business school, and his work ethic and focus on his assignments was commendable. Still, the silence didn’t bother her. An introvert at heart, Eliza was a people-watcher before anything else, and she couldn’t count the number of times she’d caught herself studying her new study partner, admiring the muscular bulge of his biceps and the swell of his broad chest with each breath.
He’d caught her staring, too, and as she turned away, pretending it had only been a fleeting glance, she swore she noticed him grinning.
At this point, she had no idea what their situation was, but he asked her to hang out with him at least once a day almost every day—excluding the weekend—and Eliza wasn’t about to question it. She usually didn’t “do” study partners unless assigned to a group by a professor. Her father’s expectations weighed heavily on her shoulders, and ever since leaving high school, she’d had her nose buried in the books. No late-night parties, only late night cram sessions. No boyfriends. No spring break trips. Nothing. Her father was paying for her education, and she wasn’t going to waste his generous donation to her future by getting distracted.
But somehow it had happened. Just as she was about to stand, her phone vibrated softly in her pocket, and sure enough, there was a text from Nash waiting for her when she fished it out. He’d snagged a good table on the quiet floor in the library.
See you soon ;) was the second text that arrived seconds after she finished reading the first. Unable to stop the enormous smile from blooming across her cheeks, Eliza grabbed her things as fast as she could and made a beeline for the door, pushing by other students in the process.
She was in her final year and her grades were great.
A little distraction wasn’t going to hurt her GPA. Besides, she only saw Nash when they were either studying or eating, both of which were an absolute necessity for her survival at Blackwoods. What harm could it do?
But for now, she was keeping Nash a secret from her dad. What he didn’t know couldn’t give him a heart attack and earn her a huge condescending lecture, right? As far as she was concerned, Nash “The Hunk” was her dirty little secret. Everyone was entitled to at least one dirty little secret in his or her life, and seeing as up until this point Eliza had had a grand total of zero, Nash was perfect for her first.
Shouldering her way through the crowd of fellow law students, Eliza picked up the pace and hurried to the library, eager to settle in next to him for the next two hours between her classes. Eager to catch a whiff of his masculine scent. Eager to see the corners of his mouth twitch up in a grin dripping with sarcasm. Eager to feel his arm resting on back of her chair.
Eager for him like she’d never been for a guy before, which was kind of frightening.
But also incredibly exciting.
Chapter 4
While September had been balmy and beautiful, October in Blackwoods was turning chillier and chillier by the day, hinting that this November, only a week away now, would be a dismal one. Wrapped in a thick wool jacket and a cap, Eliza hurried from her lecture hall, face burning. She’d spent the last two weeks prepping her defense argument for her criminal law class, only to have it shredded by a group of individuals who took particular glee in seeing their classmates suffer. For the most part, she’d been met by a lukewarm response after she presented her case—and then they stepped up and tore her to pieces.
Those people, five friends who excelled in every class she had with them, were on their way to the tip-top of the law ladder. They’d be making six figures within a few years of graduating, while people like her were destined for public defense or low-level corporate law. No one had said it directly to her, but as she slunk back to her seat, defeated, Eliza could see it in their eyes. Even her professor had very little to say after her defense was annihilated, and she sat for the remainder of the two-hour class, barely listening as other students presented slightly different defenses for the same case.
All she wanted to do was run back to her dorm and hide, but she still had classes she couldn’t miss to attend—two of them with those awful jerks who’d cut her down to about two inches tall. Her eyes watered as she hurried along the sidewalk, dodging other students, the cold breeze nipping at any bits of exposed skin it could find. Dead but colorful leaves scattered the once green lawns, employees out in full-force with rakes to try to minimize the spread. If she couldn’t hide in her room, she’d happily hide in one of those five-foot piles. When she stopped in front of one, a landscape employee in a green jumpsuit casually stepped in front of her, as if waiting for her to leave.
How many of their mountains of leaves had been soiled today by happy-go-lucky students eager to jump in them?
She licked her lips and quickly moved on, head down and mind awash with all the hurtful things that had been said to her only an hour before. How could she have thought that she presented a suitable defense? Why hadn’t she seen all the holes they’d stabbed through her argument on her own?
Pathetic.
Mercifully enough, Eliza wasn’t left to wallow in her thoughts for too long. As she passed one of the main parking lots by the campus gates, the roar of a motorcycle rumbled through her. She could feel the sound in her bones, reverberating in her chest in a way she almost found thrilling. Looking up sharply, she turned to the source and found a figure in a leather jacket, jeans, and a black helmet racing for one of the few empty parking spots available. He swerved in close to her, and Eliza frowned, suddenly realizing why that giant of a man looked familiar.
“Nash!” she called, waving at him once he’d pulled his helmet off. He ran a gloved hand through his hair, mussing up the thick, but flattened, locks into their usual look. When his dark eyes met hers, his mouth twisted up into that sinful smile that always made her knees feel like jelly, and then he clambered off the bike as she hurried over.
“Don’t you look cute in your little hat,” he teased with a chuckle, nodding up to the pink hat she’d knitted herself in her first year of law school.
“I didn’t know you drove a motorcycle,” she said in an effort to draw the attention away from her hat. Whenever they were together, she already felt like he was a full decade older than her, what with his worldly ideas and mysterious gaze, and she didn’t need to acknowledge anything else that made her feel like a little girl in his presence. They’d been meeting up almost daily for over a month now, and while she still knew very little about him, Eliza thought she was comfortable with Nash—comfortable in the same way that schoolgirls are comfortable with the teacher they have a crush on. She wasn’t sure how the dynamic started, but somehow it was there, and she was eager to see it change.
No man had ever been able to make her fumble over her words as much as Nash had made her fumble, and while Eliza wasn’t exactly experienced with men (at all), she nearly wished she had the same effect on him.
“My car was having some issues today, so I had to take the bike in,” he told her with a little half-shrug, helmet tucked under his arm. “I don’t like taking it out unless I really need to, but it was supposed to rain and I didn’t want to walk.”
She grinned and poked at his arm playfully. “So practical.”
“It’s basically my middle name,” he fired back in an equally flirtatious tone, dodging her poke and catching her wrist instead. He held it for a moment, then let it go, and as she brought her arm back to her side, her skin still tingled from the contact.
“So what happened to your car?” Eliza asked as they fell in line beside one another, walking at their usual easy pace. The first few times they hung out, Nash’s huge stride forced her to practically jog after him. After he saw her breathless one too many times, he finally started to slow down.
“Someone let the a
ir out of my tires,” he replied, and when he glanced at her scandalized expression, he quickly added, “with some nails.”
“Oh my god!”
He shrugged again, those muscular shoulders snagging her attention more than she would have liked. “Pretty common in my neighborhood. I shouldn’t have parked it on the street.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right.” What else was she supposed to say? Eliza didn’t have a car—why did she need one when she lived on campus, her dad worked on campus, and there was a cafeteria in her building? But if she did, she would have been horrified to discover that someone had stuck nails in her tires. Some people were so cruel.
“So where were you headed?” he asked, as they headed for the main campus area, surrounded by a herd of students.