Professor Love
Page 2
“Relax, Mr. Wright.”
“Dr. Wright.”
“Whatever. I just want to use you as a kind of model,” she explained. “I won’t use your name or anything, just your face and body and the way you move.”
“But why me?”
Sophy sighed. “Can I be perfectly honest here?”
Max eyed the door wishfully, but somehow she had wedged herself between him and the knob, effectively blocking his getaway.
“I’ve been suffering from a bit of what you might call writer’s block lately,” she admitted. “I need inspiration. I need a hero. You’re the closest thing to it I’ve come across lately.”
“Are you kidding me?” His nose crinkled in disbelief. Not only did she feed the delusions of other women with her books, but she was delusional as well.
The crazy woman shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest. Her very perky, rounded chest. Not that he noticed. “No, I’m not kidding. And quite frankly, Mr. Wright—”
“Dr. Wright,” he corrected. He hadn’t spent ten years in graduate school for a certifiably insane bodice-ripper writer to call him Mister.
“Sorry. Quite frankly, Dr. Wright, I’m desperate.”
“Obviously,” he murmured, then frowned. Hold on, desperate? What did she mean? She was obsessed with sex, after all, right? Weren’t all romance writers? “What exactly would this involve?”
“Not much,” she promised. “I just need to spend a little time with you—get to know the way you move, react to situations, that kind of thing. I could just observe you while I’m helping you with your study. If you still want my help, that is.”
The sad part was that he did need her help. His grant was a painfully short-lived one, and his department chair was eagerly awaiting the results of his study. He needed to get some work done, and he needed to do it pronto.
“You promise you won’t use my name?” He had a reputation to uphold in the academic community, after all.
She made a cross over her left breast.
Lucky finger, he thought.
She may be crazy, but she was pretty. Even kind of hot, in a retro pin-up kind of way. If he agreed to this insane bargain, he would have to make himself a promise that it would be a hands-off arrangement. His gaze strayed to her index finger making another fervent cross over her chest. Over her very tight pink sweater.
No, hands-off was definitely the key.
“I swear I won’t use your name in the book,” she said.
He nodded at her and stuck out his hand. “Okay, you have a deal. You’ve got one month.”
Her cool fingers wrapped around his with surprising force, and she smiled as she pumped his arm up and down. “That’s all I’ll need.”
Why did he feel like he just made a deal with a really appealing devil?
2
When Sophy arrived at the café the next afternoon her eyes were scratchy but her heart pounded in anticipation. She had spent most of the night writing, and it looked as though Clarissa was going to fall in love after all. Or at least in lust.
Sophy had shut her laptop and fell into bed at about three o’clock and slept dreamlessly for five hours. She would have slept longer, but Hercules started batting at her head and yowling for breakfast just before eight o’clock.
Now her eyes were a little tired and her muscles a little stiff thanks to another five hours in front of the computer screen.
The walk to the café where she was meeting Max wasn’t long—only about twenty minutes. It was a beautiful day and Sophy raised her face to the watery sunlight filtering through the trees. May was almost perfect—the mosquitoes weren’t out yet but it was warm enough to wear shorts, and that was good enough for her. She walked off the stiffness in her legs and back and swung her arms around to stretch out the kinks.
Sophy’s brow furrowed and she shifted in her seat by the café window. Pushing a wayward curl behind her ear with one hand, she wiggled her toes in her sandals and dove into her bloated straw bag for a notepad. A shadow fell over her and she looked up and frowned.
“You’re late.”
Max pulled out a chair and dropped into it, his eyebrow shooting up. “Excuse me?”
“You’re late,” Sophy repeated. “It’s very unheroic.”
He looked blankly at her and shrugged his shoulders under his navy blazer. Then he glanced down at his wrist and one side of his mouth curled up. “I’m not late. You’re early.” He tapped his watch.
Sophy checked her phone. Oops. She must have walked faster than she’d thought. “Didn’t your parents teach you not to point out a lady’s deficiencies?” she grumbled.
Max grinned and opened the menu. “Sorry to disappoint you. I’ll take the matter up with them when I see them next.”
“Do your parents live here?”
A burst of air wafted across the table as he shut the large menu. “No, they live in Chicago.”
She made a note on her pad. “Is that where you’re from?” Sophy smiled at him, pleased that he was going to be so easy about this.
“Yes, originally,” Max confirmed. “I went to Northwestern for my first two degrees, and then to Stanford for my doctorate.”
“Nice.” She had to take out a substantial student loan just to attend the local college for one degree, much less three. Then again, she had decided to major in English Lit, which was not very smart of her. “So that makes you...” she trailed off and looked at him expectantly.
“Educated?” he offered.
She waved a hand at him. “Around thirty?”
“Ah. Twenty-nine, to be exact.” He smiled at her, flashing perfectly white and perfectly straight teeth. He probably had an expensive orthodontist’s bill to go along with his expensive education. Life just isn’t fair, Sophy thought. “How old are you?” he asked her.
If she hadn’t had her birthday only three weeks before, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him. It wasn’t fair that a man could have such mesmerizing eyes. They were as blue as the sickeningly sweet frosting on her recent birthday cake.
“Uh, twenty-four.” She did some fast calculations in her head. “Yes, twenty-four.” I think. Her pencil and her gaze was glued to the pad. “And you’re not married.” It came out of her mouth as a statement rather than a question, and she blushed slightly. God, she prayed he wasn’t married. She would crawl under the table and die if he were married.
“No,” was all he said, and she sighed inwardly in relief. He didn’t offer any explanations, nor any stories of long lost girlfriends and failed relationships. Sophy wondered, but didn’t ask. Then something occurred to her, and her head snapped up.
“Are you gay?”
His laughter echoed through the corner of the café and his eyes crinkled at her. “No, I’m not gay,” he reassured her. His warm gaze penetrated through the cotton of her dress and her heart started thumping wildly.
Her face got hot and she took another sip from her water glass. “You ready to order?”
Max turned to the waiter that had just appeared beside the table and ordered a club sandwich and an iced tea. “Only if it’s real tea. I don’t drink that powdered stuff,” he warned. The waiter nodded as if he had heard it before.
Sophy ordered a large spinach salad topped with fresh salmon and handed her menu to the waiter with a brilliant smile. “Thank you, Paul,” she said, peering at his nametag. A spot of color burned high on Paul’s cheeks and he retreated quickly, nearly taking out a nearby chair. Sophy turned back to Max, her smile fading when she saw the faint scowl on his face.
“Problem?”
“No,” he grumbled, his scowl quickly replaced by that disarming grin that made her heart race.
No man has a right to be this attractive, she thought. Graduate school might have appealed to her more if someone like Max Wright had been on the faculty.
“Why do you write romance novels?” he asked simply.
Sophy rattled the melting ice cubes in her empty glass. “Because I believe in
romance.”
He frowned at her answer.
“Don’t you believe in romance?” she asked, but she could already tell by the suddenly grim line of his mouth that he didn’t.
“No, I don’t believe in romance.” He looked as though the word left a nasty taste in his mouth.
She tilted her head at him. Something told her these were dangerous waters she was approaching. “Why?” He shook his head to deflect the question. “Do you believe in love at least?”
“No.”
Sophy couldn’t help it—her mouth opened slightly and the air whooshed out of her chest. Feeling remarkably like a five day-old balloon, she reached up to smooth the crease from between her eyebrows.
“You don’t believe in love,” she repeated flatly.
Max squeezed some lemon into the iced tea that Paul had just delivered, and shook his head. “Sure you still want to use me in your book?”
She leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers in her lap. She hadn’t expected this. Well, maybe just a little. “Why on earth are you doing a study on romance novels if you don’t believe in romance, or love?”
He drank about half the glass then placed it back on the table. “That’s exactly why I’m doing it.”
She looked blankly at him. This was very confusing.
“I’m trying to prove that those books foster unrealistic expectations of love and romance in women,” he explained. “What they think is love is really just a chemical reaction. Call it lust, if you want. It’s pheromones and synapses firing, but not love. It doesn’t exist.”
Sophy was stunned into silence. At that moment their food arrived, but her appetite had vanished almost as quickly as her illusion that Max Wright was a model hero. He was turning out to be distinctly unheroic.
She was tempted to call the whole thing off, but physically he was perfect, and he was the only inspiration she had these days. And she had already wasted two months beating her head against the keyboard. All she had to show for it was the first ten pages of the manuscript and a nervous cat. Badly. She wanted so badly to prove she could write full-time. She couldn’t call the whole thing off, could she?
She took a deep breath and concentrated on picking the hazelnuts off the top of her salad. Talking into her plate, she asked, “Have you ever read a romance novel, at least?”
He grunted something around his club sandwich and she looked up and frowned. The muscles in his neck flexed as he swallowed and he washed the mouthful down with a swig of tea.
“I take it that means no?”
He nodded.
“Yes, you mean no, or yes, you’ve read a romance novel?”
By the time she laid out the options he had another mouthful of chicken and lettuce and he held up one finger.
Her heart sank. This was going to be tougher than she thought. “You’ve never read a romance novel, and you’re doing a study on them?”
He nodded again and poked a wayward piece of bacon back into his mouth.
“Who on earth gave you this grant?” she muttered to herself in disgust. Suddenly not going to grad school didn’t seem like such a bad decision. He started to answer her, but she held up a hand. “Forget it.”
Ignoring her salad, she reached into the overstuffed bag at her feet and plucked out a paperback book. It was the latest bestseller by one of her favorite historical authors, and she had been toting it around for nearly a week. She had finished it the day before, but had forgotten to take it out of her purse. It was easier than gifting him an ebook, since she didn’t know his email address. Thrusting it across the table at him, she met his curious gaze with a challenge.
“Read this, and I’ll help you.”
He swallowed and cleared his throat. “But you already agreed to help me.”
She squinted at him and lowered her voice menacingly. “Read this and I’ll still help you.”
Flinching slightly, a queasy look came across his face, and he glanced around the busy restaurant. “And if I don’t?”
Sophy shrugged with a confidence she didn’t feel. “I’ll find another hero.” God knows where, she thought.
He eyed the book as if it were a bomb ticking on the table, and sighed. “Okay.”
Sophy let out the breath she had been holding in, and picked up her fork. Maybe this could work. Just maybe.
* * *
“What have you got there, Wright?”
Max’s head jerked up at the voice, but the owner of it was blurred by the vague mist on his glasses. He pushed them down his nose and peered over the wire rims.
“Oh, hello sir.”
Max dog-eared the page he was on and tried to hide the book in his desk. Dr. Chapaty, the chairman of the department, stood in the doorway to Max’s office, a large grin on his round face and fluorescent light from above bouncing off his polished head.
“Since when do you have time to read… uh…?” His eyebrows lifted as he checked out the book stuck hanging halfway out of the drawer. “…fiction?”
Max groaned inwardly. “It’s research for the study I’m doing.”
The grin on Chapaty’s face grew and Max wanted to crawl under his desk. “Ah, that romance novel thing, eh?”
Max nodded.
“Where do you plan to submit that study?” Chapaty asked, then offered a few suggestions from the doorway, which Max mentally filed.
“Thanks for the suggestions.” Max nodded, smiling tightly.
As he moved into the room and sat down heavily on the chair on the opposite side of the desk, Max’s smile turned into a grimace.
“Let’s see it,” Chapaty demanded.
“Uh, I haven’t finished writing the paper yet.” Barely started was more like it.
“No, the book.”
Max flushed and yanked open the desk drawer. He pushed the book across the desk at his boss, who picked it up and flipped open the front cover.
“My wife just read this,” he announced. “It’s been sitting on her bedside table for weeks.” He glanced up at Max. “Have you gotten to the stable scene yet?”
Max could feel his face glowing hotter and hotter and his glasses were starting to fog up again. He plucked them off his nose and wiped them nonchalantly. “I believe I just finished reading that scene,” he mumbled.
Chapaty leaned across the desk and chuckled. “Hot stuff, eh?”
“Yes, sir.” Max squirmed slightly. Go away! Go away!
He flipped through the book absently and then tossed it on the desk. Standing up, he remarked, “Isn’t your grant up soon?” He acted casual, but Max guessed that he knew exactly how much his grant was, to the dollar, and the day it expired.
“Yes, sir.”
Chapaty smiled solicitously. “I know you’re new here, Wright, so you might not know that we have a certain standard for publication in this department.”
Max nodded in understanding. It was the reason he had finally gone to Violet Honeypot—no, Sophy Hadden. He needed all the help he could get.
“We were happy to hire someone who had some experience outside of academe, but I’m sure you realize that your merit increases are contingent on your successful publication of this study. We don’t waste grant money in this department,” Chapaty warned.
Feeling like a puppet on a string, Max’s head jerked up and down automatically. “Yes, sir.”
Chapaty beamed at him and headed for the open door. “I look forward to reading your paper, Dr. Wright. Are you planning to present it at the conference in September?”
Max opened his mouth but no words came out.
“Good.” Before he vanished, he tossed a reminder over his shoulder. “Don’t forget the wine and cheese on Friday.”
Damn, he had forgotten. Probably on purpose, Max realized. Stuffy department affairs weren’t exactly his idea of a good time. But he was the new kid on the block, so to speak, so there was a requisite amount of sucking up and pointless schmoozing that he had to go through. Wine and cheese. They still did those things?
He shifted in his chair again. Would Sophy’s book be like this?
A misty vision swam behind his eyes, of him pouring red wine down Sophy’s open dress. It would trickle over her breasts, and gather in the creases around her distended, and surely, rosy nipples. He would lower his head to them, and lick the wine off her salty skin...
Max slammed the book shut. Damn, this was going to be harder than he thought.
* * *
He was still disturbed by the vision when he met Sophy a few days later at the local library. He finished the book the night before and was plagued all night by hazy dreams re-enacting the more sordid scenes.
It was only too easy for him to imagine her legs wrapped around his hips and her head flung back in ecstasy. He wondered if her hazel eyes would darken to chocolate brown or green with passion, or if she...
He shook his head and shoved the image aside. She was helping him with his study, that’s all. He dragged a hand through his hair and dropped his fist a little too hard on the table in front of him.
The librarian shot a warning glance at him. He pushed the legal pad away from him and looked around. The library was fairly full this afternoon; about forty people were milling around. A few sat in the overstuffed easy chairs in the corner by an enormous antique grandfather clock. Others browsed the stacks and sat at the long tables poring over their books and newspapers.
The library was a historical site, and one of the town’s oldest buildings. It evoked a forgotten era of dignified stateliness when rhetoric and learning was held in high regard. Now they had to hire a security guard to ensure that delinquent teenagers didn’t spray paint their own rhetoric on the side of the brick building at night.