by Roni Loren
He calmly got up, retrieved her robe, and draped it over her. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “That’s it. You’re in control of it, not the other way around. Breathe it down. I’ll get you some water.”
When he returned, she was in the chair, the robe wrapped around her. And though her skin had a sheen of sweat, she was grinning. She took the bottle of water from him with a shaky hand and kept smiling. “I fucking did it.”
He nodded with pride. “You totally did.”
“Then I lost it.” She let out a laugh. “But I’ll take it. I’m not in a heap on the floor crying, so I’ll call it a win.”
He smiled and squatted down in front of her so he wasn’t looming over her. “Absolutely a win. You did awesome.”
“And…I made you cop a feel and now I feel kind of awkward. Was that okay? I mean, I know that you said touching can be part of the therapy but you probably meant with, like, discussion before or whatever and you taking the lead on that.”
“It’s not a problem at all. This is about your comfort level and what you feel you need. Bradley is going to touch you in the love scene, so I think it was a logical next step if you were comfortable with it.” He stood and helped her to her feet. “Did anything in particular trigger the panic attack or did it just hit you?”
She tied the belt on the robe and color appeared on her cheeks as she shrugged.
His internal sensors went off. “What was it?”
She wet her lips and dipped her head. “I…uh. Well, when we were acting out the scene, I noticed you…getting into it, you know, physically, which helped actually. It put me fully in the head of my character. But then when you opened your eyes, my effect on you…went away.”
Lane cringed inwardly and tried not to show his frustration at how his body had gone rogue. “Carlotta—”
She lifted a hand. “No, it’s fine. It’s just that reaction triggered those what doesn’t he like about my body? thoughts, which is dumb, I know. Because how you feel about how I look is not supposed to matter. I don’t want someone else’s opinion of my body affecting me. That’s the whole point of this. But it’s still a knee-jerk reaction.”
“Stop calling yourself dumb. You’re not. Being able to pick all that apart is insightful and self-aware. My body is going to react how it’s going to react. But my head stays in professional mode, so you can be assured of that.” Even though, in truth, he’d wandered way off the professional reservation fantasizing about Elle mid-session. “And I’m not going to spend time reassuring you or telling you what I think about your body. My opinion of it, and anyone else’s, needs to be completely irrelevant to you.”
“I know. I’m working on not caring.” She gave him a brief smirk. “So fuck you and whatever your opinion is, Lane Cannon.”
He laughed. “There you go.”
“And I’m going to take your initial reaction as a sign of my superior acting skills. I made you slip into the role, too.” She tilted her chin up in faux haughtiness, making her look even younger than her twenty-four years.
He grinned. “You’re going to nail the role.”
“God, I hope so.” She closed the distance between them and surprised him with a quick, tight hug. “Thanks so much for today.”
He gave her a pat on the back and then stepped away, forever conscious of keeping boundaries clear in a very blurry job. “It was all you.”
“No way. I think your idea about the blindfold was genius. It helped me get into character without having to think too hard. Next time, maybe I’ll be able to do it without making you close your eyes. I’m going to rock your world, Seedy Strip Club Guy.”
With that, she turned on her heel and headed toward the restrooms to change and leave. Lane shook his head. Genius. Yeah, that wasn’t a word thrown at him often.
He walked over to the stereo to shut off the music system and checked his watch. He was supposed to meet with one of his professors tonight. Dr. Arquette was his favorite teacher, but when she’d pulled him aside yesterday and asked to meet up with him to discuss his struggles in her class, his stomach had flipped over. He’d told her he couldn’t stop by during her office hours, but she’d said she’d be happy to meet him for coffee tonight.
So whatever it was, it couldn’t be good if she was going out of her way to set up a meeting with him on a Friday night. He grabbed his backpack off the floor and waited for Carlotta to leave before locking up and heading to his fate.
Chapter 7
The Pecan Street Café was busy with students and people in suits with loosened ties at this time of the evening. Dr. Arquette was already at a table sipping something steamy with foam. A half-eaten pastry filled the plate in front of her. She lifted her hand in greeting when Lane walked in, and he was jarred by how different she looked from when she was teaching class. Instead of slacks and a blouse, she was in jeans and a soft cream-colored sweater, her dark hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun. For the first time, it registered that she was probably around the same age as he was.
He put in a quick order as the waitress passed him and tried to keep a pleasant expression on his face as he walked over to the table. He nodded her way. “Professor Arquette.”
“Lane.” She smiled and motioned for him to sit. “And please, call me Allison. We’re both grown-ups and not on campus.”
He pulled out his chair and sat. “All right, Allison.”
She glanced at him in that way that let him know he made her a little nervous. He’d gotten used to that look when he’d worked as an escort. Tentative attraction. A certain brand of awareness a woman could get when she was interested in a guy but not sure how to proceed.
The waitress dropped off his black coffee, and he fought back the wariness that kind of look stirred up. This wasn’t a meet up before a “date” with a client. This was his professor. And he couldn’t imagine Professor Arquette being anything but professional. So even if she was interested, he doubted she’d go there. “I appreciate you meeting me so late.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “It’s not a problem. I usually stop here on my way home a few times a week anyway. Their chocolate croissants are a weakness of mine.”
“Yeah, I haven’t tried anything here that I haven’t liked.” He took a scalding sip of his coffee. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”
Her affable expression flickered. She smoothed the napkin in front of her, little frown lines touching her lips. “I read over your latest paper the other night.”
Lane nodded, already hearing the song “Taps” playing in his head at his failing academic career, the sad wail of the bugle. “Okay.”
“And…well…”
She seemed to be struggling to find the words, so he filled in some for her. “It’s so bad, you don’t know how to break it to me?”
She glanced up at that, surprise on her face. “No, it’s not that at all.”
His eyebrows lifted in challenge.
“It’s…smart and insightful and shows so much potential.” She reached down and pulled papers out of the messenger bag by her feet and set them on the table between them. “But it’s an absolute mess with spelling, format, and the structure of your sentences.”
He blinked, his brain hung up on the first words. “How could you say it’s smart if it’s a mess?”
She frowned fully now and tapped the pages. “Because the ideas are smart. I can see the points you were trying to make. They’re good points. Fresh perspective on the topics. But if I use the grading rubric to score this, you’re going to end up with a D, Lane. There’s no recovering from that with this being such a big percentage of the semester. And my class isn’t optional for the degree program you’re in.”
Lane’s fingers tightened around his coffee cup. “So you called me out here to tell me I’m going to fail your class?”
She sighed and folded her hands on the table, all professorial now. “Yes and no. I wanted to talk to you because there’s still time to fix it.” She met his gaze. “How d
o you think things would change if you tried to rewrite it? Took your time. Focused on following the directions and putting your thoughts into a more cogent form.”
“You told us there are no redoes.”
“I know, but I’m also not unreasonable. There can be exceptions for certain circumstances. I know you’re working a full-time job. I realize you’re having to squeeze classes in between the rest of your life. If this is simply a matter of you had to rush through this because you have all that going on, I don’t want you to fail because of that.”
Lane’s jaw flexed and he looked out the window at the people walking by on the street so that she wouldn’t see the truth on his face. What she didn’t realize was that he hadn’t rushed the assignment. He’d spent so much time on it, he’d lost sleep for a few days. He’d been painstaking with it. And that had earned him a D. If he tried to do it again, he had no idea how to even go about fixing it or doing better. He didn’t look her way. “That’s the best work I can do. I’ll just take the grade.”
“That’s a bullshit answer.”
His attention snapped to her. “Look, I don’t know what to tell you—”
“Have you ever been tested for learning disabilities? I think—”
Everything inside Lane went cold. “I don’t need to get tested. I’ll take the grade.”
Allison straightened at his harsh tone. “There’s no shame in getting tested, Lane. If they find out you have something like dyslexia, which is what I suspect, accommodations could be made for assignments and I would have options not to fail you and—”
“I don’t want special treatment. I don’t need an exception to be made. If I get this degree, I want to get it legitimately on my own.”
All he could see were the faces of his high school teachers from the fancy private school he should’ve never been in. Every time they handed him another failing grade, he got the same range of looks. Pity. Disgust. Looks that said he was hopeless, dumb, a charity case. Just the kid of the school janitor who was only there because his dad was an employee and he got free tuition. The teachers knew it. His wealthy classmates did, too. And things only got worse when they started making him go to remedial tutoring during his lunch period.
Allison gave him an exasperated look. “No one is going to give you a free pass to the degree. I’m certainly not. If you had impaired vision and I didn’t accommodate that, it would be putting an unfair roadblock in front of you. Right now, I think there are roadblocks for you. We could help with that.”
Lane didn’t say anything. His muscles felt tight, his skin hot. He feared his face was flushed.
She pulled out a page from beneath his paper and pushed it toward him. “This is a referral letter from me to the Learning Services Center. If you at least get tested, I can hold off failing you on this paper. But you’d need to get there soon. If they find something, there are ways they can help and you can have another chance on this paper. You’ve got the brains and the insight, you just might need to come at learning and assignments from a different angle.” She frowned, concern in her eyes. “Please don’t make me fail you, Lane.”
He blew out a breath and ran a hand through his hair, the earnestness in her voice getting to him. “Allison—”
“Is this degree important to you?”
“Of course.” It was everything to him.
“Why?”
His hand curled against the table. He couldn’t begin to explain how badly he wanted that piece of paper in his hand. It was more than a ticket to the job he wanted. It was a good-bye to everything that had come before it. A good-bye to that guy who couldn’t do anything but fuck up. Maybe even a way to prove to his family that he was worth something. “I have my reasons. I—” He frowned mid-thought, a flash of blond hair near the back door of the shop catching his eye. “It’s important to me.”
His gaze followed the back of the blonde.
“Then prove it and stop being such a hardheaded man.”
The tone in Allison’s voice drew his attention back for a moment. Her eyebrow was lifted, making her look less professorial and more like a bossy friend.
“A hardheaded man.”
“Yes.” She took a sip of her coffee but kept her eyes on him. “Accepting that you—like everyone else in the world—may need to ask for help sometimes. And accepting that, hey, I may be right.”
“That there’s something wrong with me.”
She groaned and set down her coffee. “No. That you’re intelligent and talented, and it’s going to get wasted if you don’t get over your pride and figure out what you need to best work with your individual brain. I’ll be really pissed if you fail out of my class because you can’t get over your ego,” she said, pinning him with a look. “This is my first year teaching this class and I will consider it a personal failing. And I’m really bad with failing. It makes me eat ice cream for dinner. And watch the home shopping channels and buy stuff I don’t need.” She leaned forward on her elbows. “I could end up ordering mom jeans and bedazzled sweaters. You don’t want that guilt following you around, do you?”
He had to smile at that. “That would be tragic.”
“So tragic.” She put her hand over his. “The future of my dating life is in your hands. Save me, Lane.”
He chuckled. “If you weren’t my professor, I’d think you were flirting with me.”
She shrugged and pulled her hand back. “If you weren’t my student, maybe I would be. But you are and so I’m not. At least not until you’ve passed my class and moved on—emphasis on passed because you’re going to get evaluated and not fail out.”
The more he talked with Allison the person instead of Professor Arquette, the more he liked her. This was the kind of woman he should be pursuing. Someone who made him laugh and didn’t take herself too seriously. She was pretty. Smart. A genuinely nice person.
“You’re persistent.”
“As a pit bull. Now tell me you’re going to get tested, and I can put grading your paper on hold.”
He opened his mouth to respond, but the glimpse that had caught his eye earlier flickered in his peripheral vision again. This time, instead of just getting a flash of a familiar shade of golden hair, he got the full side view. Elle McCray had taken a seat on the other side of the restaurant. She had a glass of iced tea in front of her, was bouncing her crossed legs, and eyeballing the main door as if she were waiting for someone.
Just the sight of her sent a bolt of electric awareness through his system. She looked so damn prim and proper—forever perturbed. Like the world was constantly letting her down with its idiocy and she didn’t have time for its bullshit. The attitude should be a turn off. But he couldn’t pull his gaze away and forgot what he’d been about to say.
“Lane?”
“What?” He looked back to Allison and her expectant face. “Oh, sorry. Uh, yeah, I’ll go.”
The words were out before he could consider them, but if nothing else, at least the answer bought him time. The thought of getting evaluated made him want to punch things and he wasn’t sure he’d do it, but he wasn’t going to make that decision now. He wasn’t going to seal his fate quite yet with the failing grade.
Her face lit like a happy child’s. “Really? Excellent. That’s great news.”
“Yeah. Great,” he said without enthusiasm. His gaze drifted to the other side of the cafe, but he dragged his attention back to his professor. She’d gone out of her way to meet with him, to try to help. It would’ve been a hell of a lot easier for her to just slap a D on his paper and call it a day. “I appreciate you talking to me about everything and taking the time. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“Thanks, Lane. I’m really glad you’re going to give it a try. I’ll hold off grading your paper until you get your results.” Allison must’ve caught on that he didn’t want to linger on this conversation any longer, and she was smart enough to get out when the getting was good. She pulled a few bills from her purse and pushed her chair back. “Well,
I’ve got to get going. I’ve got more papers to grade and a Walking Dead marathon to watch.”
He peered down at the money and picked it up to hand it back to her. “I’ve got it, Professor.”
She looked down at the money. “I don’t mind buying you coffee, Lane.”
He shook his head. “I’ve got it.”
She pressed her lips together at his determined tone but nodded. “Okay, well, thanks. I’ll see you in class.”
He let her go with a polite good-bye and then zeroed his attention back on Elle. He didn’t want to think about what he’d just agreed to. And he didn’t want to ponder why he hadn’t turned on the charm to flirt with Allison when she was exactly the kind of woman he probably needed in his life. All he wanted to do right now was figure out what Elle was up to. She was checking the time on her phone and her posture was stiff, her movements unsure. She kept dipping her straw in and out of her glass as if she were fishing for her lemon, but she’d already taken that out and put it on the table.
Lane frowned. The obvious nerves looked strange on someone as poised as Elle. Was she waiting for a date? Was that why she was nervous? The thought didn’t sit well with him—her waiting for some other guy. But he’d told her no drama and they’d walked away from each other. He had no claim.
The caveman part of him grunted in indignation at that.
He grabbed his coffee again and took a gulp of the now lukewarm brew. He should leave. No good would come of this. But he didn’t get up. He sat there and drank the not-great coffee and tried not to feel like a stalker. Maybe seeing her on a date would be what he needed to get her out of his head. Make it clear to his rogue libido that she wasn’t an option. Then he could move on and stop obsessing about the night they’d had together.
That was the rationale in his head. The plan.
But a few minutes later, when a tall black man with movie star good looks, a designer suit, and a smile that had melted off more than one woman’s panties walked through the door and strolled up to Elle’s table, Lane’s best intentions disintegrated into a ball of flame.
