On the Line

by Lincoln, Liz

  “Can I—” she managed to squeeze out, but it sounded like a mouse who’d sucked helium. She swallowed hard and tried again. “Can I help you?”

  She was talking to a Marcus James look-alike. Even that was too surreal. Maybe her entire day was a bizarre dream. At least then she wouldn’t have lost all her work. God, the tedium of going over all those data points a second time was depressing.

  “Yeah, I’m looking for Bree Novak.” The man’s voice was rich and smooth, and his dark eyes shined with good humor. That voice was familiar, since she’d watched a zillion interviews with him.

  Marcus James, her celebrity crush, was standing in her doorway. Looking for her. She needed some smelling salts so she wouldn’t faint.

  “I’m Bree.” She even managed to sound human rather than fangirlish. Score one for Bree.

  Marcus’ full lips curled into a devastating smile, showing just a hint of his white teeth. The dark brown skin around his eyes and mouth creased into deep lines. Yeah, he was definitely the real deal and not a doppelgänger. Those smile lines were part of what she found so sexy about the athlete. And since shaving off his signature dreadlocks last spring to raise money for charity, she found him even hotter. She was a sucker for his new look.

  He came toward her desk, favoring his left leg. He’d torn his right ACL a few weeks ago during the Dragons’ final pre-season game, landing him on injured reserve for the entire season. Bree had been seriously bummed when she read that news, but figured it was better if her favorite player was out, since she needed all her focus this semester to be on finalizing her doctoral dissertation. She was scheduled to graduate in December.

  Now, instead of catching passes on her TV, Marcus James was lowering himself into the ugly, battered chair facing her desk.

  “I need to take your Introduction to Physics for non-Science Majors class,” Marcus explained. “And since classes started last week, the registrar said I need your signature on this form.” He held out a piece of paper.

  Bree took it and scanned the page. Sure enough, right there at the top of the drop/add form, the student name field read “Marcus L. James.”

  Because she was a pathetic nerd of a fan, she knew the L stood for Leroy, after his father. She bit the inside of her lip to keep from blurting out that knowledge. Yeah, she’d read his Wikipedia page.

  “Yeah, I hear you were busy last week,” she said, then instantly regretted it. Way to admit she was a big fan. Which she normally wouldn’t care about, except if he was going to be her student, she needed to maintain some level of objectivity around him.

  Oh God, Marcus James was going to be her student. She shouldn’t even be teaching this semester, but the research grant she’d been paid from had run out of money, so to earn her final semester’s salary, she had to go back to it. During teaching assistant orientation two weeks ago, all the first-year grad students had looked at her like she was some kind of flunky.

  Marcus gingerly bent, then straightened his right leg a few times. “Yeah, not my best week.”

  Bree didn’t know what to say, so she picked up a pen and quickly scribbled her name on the line for professor signature. Even though she was only a grad student TA, Dr. Bryant had decided to make her essentially the professor for the class. Which meant she gave the lectures and supervised the labs. Which was swell. She didn’t have a PhD to finish or anything.

  “How’s it feeling?” She knew he’d had surgery the previous week. And she was pathetic enough to have asked her athletic trainer older brother what the timeline for ACL recovery was. Hank had of course teased her mercilessly for her crush on an NFL player.

  Who was sitting in her office. Talking to her as if they were both regular people. “It’s better.” Marcus bent and straightened it again. “Mostly working on simple mobility right now. Making sure I can do this.” He indicated his movements.

  “That’s good. Does it hurt?” He probably thought she was a weirdo, a nosy stranger who needed to mind her own business.

  “Not as much as I expected. I can’t put weight on it yet, but if I stay off it and take ibuprofen, it’s not too bad.” He gave her a half-smile that did funny things to her belly. Warm fuzzy things that made her want to squirm in her chair. “I take it you’re a Dragons fan?”

  She frowned at him. How did he know?

  His smile deepened and he tipped his head to indicate the calendar on the wall behind her. The Dragons. September’s picture was of quarterback Matt Baxter and running back Jaron Edmonds bumping fists in the end zone.

  Nervously, Bree toyed with the handle of her coffee mug. Which was emblazoned with the Dragons’ logo. She laughed nervously. “I grew up in Madison with a Division II football player dad and three athletic older brothers. It was either become a fan or get disowned.”

  An odd expression flashed across his face. “Yeah, hard to swim upstream in your own family.”

  “So you just decided you’d add to the joy of physical therapy with some light physics reading?” she asked. It was another nosy question, but hell, she had Marcus James sitting three feet away from her. She had nothing else to look forward to for the day except hours of spreadsheets. She was keeping him in that chair as long as she could.

  She leaned across the desk to hand him back the form. As he took it, his fingers brushed over hers, and a sizzle ran up her arm. Momentarily frozen, she couldn’t seem to pull her hand back. Nor did he.

  Her gaze snapped to his to find him looking at her with a faint half smile. His smile deepened, bringing out his sexy dimple and the creases around his dark eyes. Heart thudding against her ribs, Bree couldn’t look away as the moment stretched out between them. She’d never felt such a visceral reaction to a man before and she didn’t want it to end. She loved the way a simple touch made her skin feel alive.

  Dammit, it wasn’t fair. She finally got to meet her long-time celebrity crush and they had clear chemistry, so of course he was her student.

  Too soon, Marcus blinked away their connection, pulling his hand away and clearing his throat. “Been working on finishing my degree. I declared for the draft after my junior year, so I didn’t graduate.”

  It took her attraction-fogged brain a moment to catch up to the conversation. “That’s great.” She knew he’d been a business major at USC, which she’d always found impressive. But she wasn’t saying all that out loud. A business degree would do a lot for him when his football career ended. She knew he’d already invested in a handful of local businesses—God, she really was pathetically nosy. His return to school was also great in that it landed him in her class.

  Where she would spend the semester drooling over one of her students.

  Dammit. Not good.

  Why did her original dissertation advisor and mentor, Dr. Anna Steinman, have to take that position at CERN in France, leaving Bree to get assigned to Dr. Lewis Bryant, one of the most old-school-boys-club physicists Bree had ever met? And the sciences were filled with them. If Anna were still there, she’d have found additional funding to pay Bree so she wouldn’t have to teach.

  Maybe.

  It didn’t matter. Anna was in France doing fantastic research and dating a sexy French engineer, Dr. Bryant hated Bree, Bree was teaching again, and Marcus James was in her class.

  “Fair warning,” Marcus said. “Science is not my strong suit. Which is why the two classes I have left are science. So I’m pretty much going to occupy this chair whenever I’m not working on my knee or bugging my geology TA.”

  Bree’s stomach tried to squeeze up into her throat. “No problem,” she choked out. Their gazes connected again, but before it could turn into another sizzling Moment, she forced herself to look away. She was barely making it through this conversation. How was she going to endure an entire semester of him, a man she’d had a celebrity crush on since he was drafted by the Dragons? He was twenty-nine, which meant she’
d been crushing on him for eight years.

  She was going to be a cliché, the teacher with the hots for her sexy student. At least he wasn’t some nineteen-year-old frat boy.

  Get back on track, Bree. She grabbed a Post-it and a pen. “What’s your email address? I’ll send you the syllabus, which has my office hours. And you’ll have my email in case you need to set up a time outside office hours. But I’m usually here.”

  He recited his email and she wrote it down. “I’ll send that today. My computer’s being a jerk, so it’ll be when I get home and can use my laptop.” She turned the monitor so he could see her blank spreadsheet. “I spent all day filling this in and making charts. Went to refill my coffee and…sorry, you don’t care.”

  “No, that sucks. I’m sorry.”

  She looked at the sincerity in his expression, like he actually gave a shit about her lost data. But she had to be imagining it. She read once that NFL rookies got PR training; he was probably falling back on those skills.

  “Thanks. It’s not like I had plans tonight anyway. My roommate and I will binge Stranger Things and I can redo it.”

  They lapsed into silence that was oddly comfortable. Which immediately made her feel awkward. She didn’t have comfortable silences with anyone except the youngest of her older brothers, Drew, and her roommate, Raina.

  “So what’s all your data for?”

  Wait, was Marcus James actually asking her about physics? This couldn’t be happening. Her day had gone from boring to shitty to surreal in the span of fifteen minutes and she couldn’t keep up.

  “I’m finishing my dissertation, and the data was for the charts and graphs I need to put in.”

  “Wait, so you just lost all the data for your PhD?” His eyebrows shot up. “No way.”

  She laughed stiffly. “No, it’s not that bad. I have it all somewhere else. I was formatting some of it to make into graphs and charts, and tweaking how the charts look, and all that tedious stuff.”

  “Thank God.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I’ll let you get back to work in a second. But first, I want to make one thing clear.” His face turned serious.

  Dread curled in Bree’s stomach. Of course he wasn’t as affable as he’d first seemed. He was going to demand special treatment because he was a star.

  “What’s that?” she asked cautiously.

  “I want you to know I have serious reservations about a teacher who keeps Star Wars figures on her desk and not Star Trek. It’s a clear indication you have poor taste.”

  She stared at him, trying to make sense of his words, and blinked a few times. He nodded toward her monitor, so she looked to where she had Funko Pop! figures of Princess Leia and Rey. As the meaning of his words settled in, she continued her blank stare. Because he couldn’t seriously be implying that Star Trek was better than Star Wars. It was objectively false.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware there were kick-ass female characters on Star Trek that I could look up to as an impressionable young girl with three older brothers.”

  He grinned, his deep dimples sending a warm tingle through her. “What, you’ve never heard of Uhura? Not just a female, but a female of color.”

  He had her there. And she wasn’t about to admit she’d taken up her admiration for Princess Leia because it was either that or be R2D2 when her brothers started pretending they were Luke, Han, and Vader. Sometimes they even let her use a light saber and battle her oldest brother as Vader. Hank never let her win, though.

  “And since then, Star Wars has brought in all kinds of other strong, awesome women. Star Trek has given us what, a doctor and a psychotherapist? Ooh, how original.” Were there women on the newest versions? She’d only ever seen the series with Patrick Stewart, and a handful of the original episodes.

  “There’s also—”

  “Please tell me you’re not having an argument about Star Wars.” Raina, Bree’s office mate, roommate, and best friend rolled through the door. She maneuvered her wheelchair to her desk and set her lab notebook in front of her, then turned to Marcus. “On behalf of the rest of humanity, I apologize for her behavior. Her love of Star Wars isn’t quite rational.”

  Marcus turned his panty-melting grin on Raina. “Any love of Star Wars isn’t rational, as it’s clearly inferior to Star Trek. But I have a doctor’s appointment I need to get to, so we’ll have to leave her education on the many kickass women of Star Trek for another time.” He used his crutches to hoist himself onto his feet. “Thanks for the autograph.” He waved his drop/add form.

  “Make sure you pick up the textbook before class tomorrow,” she said as he made his way to the door. “And I’ll send that syllabus tonight.”

  “Sounds great.” He paused in the doorway and gave her one more smile that, yep, totally melted the panties right off her. Or singed them off. “See ya tomorrow.”

  Bree waited until she couldn’t hear the clomp-shuffle of his crutch-assisted gait, counted to thirty, then let out a dramatic sigh and sank back in her chair. “Raina.”

  “Damn, girl. He is one excessively sexy man. And he’s adding your class?”

  “Yes,” Bree squeaked.

  Holy shit, Marcus James was in her class. And he turned her on like no man had in a long time, just by touching her hand and smiling at her.

  “He looks a lot older than your typical freshman.”

  “He’s twenty-nine.”

  “And you know this already because…?”

  Bree covered her face with her hands. “He’s Marcus James.”

  “Should I know who that is?” Raina’s computer chimed as it came out of sleep mode.

  “The Dragons’ tight end that I’m borderline obsessed with.” And had to face in class twice a week, plus weekly lab.

  “The one you were whining about because he got hurt? That one? Oh, the crutches. I get it.” Raina promptly burst into laughter.

  Bree grabbed a pencil and threw it at her best friend. “Thanks, bitch.”

  Raina shifted her chair so she faced Bree. “Your football star crush shows up in your office, and you go hardcore nerd girl to him about Star Wars? We need to work on your flirting skills.”

  If she had another pencil, Bree would have thrown it. “He brought it up.”

  Raina just kept laughing. “Just remember, it’s bad form to hit on your students.”

  “I hate you.”

  “You could probably ask for tickets, though.”

  “Go to hell.”

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