by Amy Love
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. Beth 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 Beth 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 Gryff 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 Gryff 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 Gryff 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, Beth 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 Beth 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 Gryff 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, Beth 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 Gryff 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 Gryff 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, Gryff “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 Beth had had a grand total of zero, Gryff was perfect for her first.
Shouldering her way through the crowd of fellow law students, Beth 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, Beth 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, Beth 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, Beth 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 Beth frowned, suddenly realizing why that giant of a man looked familiar.
“Gryff!” 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 y
ou 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, Beth thought she was comfortable with Gryff—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 Gryff had made her fumble, and while Beth 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?” Beth asked as they fell in line beside one another, walking at their usual easy pace. The first few times they hung out, Gryff’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 air 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? Beth 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.
“History of law,” she said dully. It might have been her most boring class, but at least there was no one to shred her ideas into itty-bitty pieces. “Want to walk me there?”
The question had come out of nowhere. She hadn’t even thought about it before she said it, and her cheeks flamed with a dark blush when Gryff looked her way, brows up. Usually they just went their separate ways, meeting up in the library or food court to spend time together. If she’d been paying any sort of attention, she wouldn’t have asked him to walk her anywhere.
In her eyes, what she’d just said was one step below asking him on a date. Her stomach turned as she braced for an uncomfortable rejection. He probably had his own things to do. Why would he have time to walk her to class? So much for eschewing the little girl persona—
“Yeah, sure,” Gryff said after a beat. “I was just going to go to the registrar’s office to change some stuff with my schedule, but I can walk you first.”
Beth brightened, suddenly feeling the need to stand a little taller, hold her head a little higher. “Great!”
Then, without thinking again, she took a sharp turn to the left, nearly plowing into Gryff, only to realize she was going the wrong way in seconds.
“I mean, it’s…it’s this way,” she muttered sheepishly, her newfound confidence taking a bit of a hit as Gryff laughed. She mentally slammed her palm against her forehead, her blush returning.
Smooth, Beth. Real smooth.
Chapter 5
Two months. Gryff had been pretending to be a fucking business student at Blackwoods University for two months, and only today had his latest lead run dry. Although not necessarily the biggest power players on campus, he’d opted to keep track of the fraternity houses and their drug dealers. A lot of rich kids were doing coke these days, and if they weren’t buying from the Steel Phoenixes, they were getting their shit from someone else.
He’d tracked those assholes through the frat drug rings, only to find they were low-level guys who had a reputation for not dealing pure stuff. Beginners. Young guys wanting to break into the drug dealing market and make it big like the Phoenixes had years ago. While they were mouthy fucks, they weren’t nearly organized, coordinated, or, honestly, intelligent enough to pull off a hit on the Phoenixes. Just to be sure, he’d dragged one of them by his ear and hung him off the side of a building on the south side of town. It was a good shakeup that got him names and numbers, but he’d learned today from Micky that they were names and numbers the higher-ups at the club already knew about.
“Good lead, and we can use ‘em later, but these aren’t our guys,” his pal had said over the phone. Gryff had taken the call during a “study session” with Beth in the library, standing by the bathrooms on the ground floor where conversation and low-level noise was tolerated.
So two months of chasing assholes in the frat drug ring had been for nothing. Sure, now he knew what these guys looked like—and if there ever were serious problems, he’d know whom to go after.
Sticking nails in his tires wasn’t exactly a serious problem, but he stored it in his memory for later. The footage of the vandals had been blurry, but Gryff had a sinking suspicion as to who the culprits were, and he’d make them pay at a later date. For now, he had a perp to find, and as he’d stalked back to the table he and Beth were sharing, it was hard not to feel a little deflated.
“Everything okay?” Beth asked, still clacking away at her laptop when he settled across from her. When he didn’t respond right away, she looked up with those big doe eyes, so wide and imploring, and he found himself answering despite not being in the mood to talk.
“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine,” he said, some stiffness to his tone, and then he opened his laptop again. “Just my landlord.”
“Oh.” She nibbled her plump lower lip, the one he’d imagined between his teeth more times than he could count, then went back to her work. “Okay.”
Beth Truman. Elizabeth Truman, daughter of Darryl Truman, Dean of Blackwoods University. Yeah, Gryff had done a little digging. He had to be sure the woman he was using as his cover story was clean—but he hadn’t expected her to be so squeaky clean. No records to be found, expect in the academic sense. Smart, she had an exceptional GPA and got into Blackwoods University on her own merit. Her social media presence was limited, even after she accepted his friend request. No pictures of her partying. She was part of an online knitting club.
And her body was killer. His cock always twitched a little when they met up, eager to bury deep inside what he was guessing was a tight little pussy. But he didn’t push her. Messy wasn’t something Gryff needed while he was investigating, because there was the chance he could be gone in a heartbeat should the need arise. Instead, he flirted shamelessly, always keeping his cover story on the hook, but he hadn’t muddied the waters yet.
She was a sweet girl, anyway. She probably couldn’t handle him even if he did try to muddy said waters—and muddy them he would. Sometimes, when they were supposed to be studying, he’d find himself studying her, drifting into daydreams where he had her arms behind her back, tied preferably, and her pert little body bent over a table. Then he’d snap back to reality, reminding himself that she blushed at just about everything, and got back to his work.
Given the lateness of the hour, Gryff was surprised how many people were still in the library. Midterms seemed to be the talk of the town around campus, and it was actually kind of fun to sit in the middle of things, watching kids freak out over nothing, while he was long out of that stage of
his life. Sure, he had more pressing things to concern himself with, but he was fucking thrilled that he wasn’t one of those panicky brats complaining to anyone who would listen about how difficult life was.
Because, really, they had no idea.
He should have gone home hours ago. Now that his frat lead had gone belly up, a cold beer and some mindless TV were in order to give his brain a chance to cool down. It had been on overdrive lately, trying to solve this mystery, and what he wouldn’t give for a night of quiet. But the weather was shit, the parking lot was a good twenty-minute walk away, and he had no beer in the fridge. So there he sat, staring at his laptop screen, knowing he should leave but not moving an inch.
“How’s it going over there?” he asked when he noticed Beth seemed to have the same glazed over look in her eye as she stared at her laptop. She snapped out of it with a slight shake of her head, then sighed.
“I think I’ve read the same sentence three times and I still don’t know what it means.”
“Yeah, I hear that,” Gryff said, chuckling. He’d been listening to and reading about the same intel over and over again, but he hadn’t solved a thing yet. Sometimes he felt like he was going in circles, like a dog chasing its own tail, and it was starting to make his head hurt.