by Maria Geraci
Although it appeared as if they had nothing in common, and that Kate was rushing a sorority while Jenna spent the week before classes holed up in their room reviewing her AP math and science notes, they developed a lasting friendship, one that extended to Jenna’s family. Kate was practically a second daughter to Marsha and Bill Pantini, to the point that sometimes Jenna thought Kate talked more to Mom than she did her own mother.
This phone call from Kate was no coincidence.
She clicked on the answer button. “Hey, Kate.”
“So I was thinking,” her best friend began, “It’s been way too long since you came down to visit me. Plus, I have a new guy to fix you up with. Or, wait…is there something you should have called to tell me?”
Marsha. Marsha. Marsha. Jenna bit back a moan. “I take it you’ve been talking to my mother again?”
“Yes, but that’s neither here nor there. Marsha says you ran into an old college boyfriend and that his name was Ben, but I think she must have gotten the name wrong because—”
“Ben Harrison is here in town.”
There was a dramatic pause. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Ben Harrison is in Whispering Bay?”
“Yep.”
“Wow. Talk about karma.”
“We’re getting together for a drink tomorrow night.”
Jenna would bet her last dollar that right about now her friend was picking her jaw up off the floor. Kate, being Kate however, quickly recovered to ask the all-important question.
“What are you wearing?”
“Exactly what I plan to wear for work,” Jenna said, glancing at the outfit she’d hung on her closet door. “A black skirt and a blue shirt with—”
“No, no, no,” Kate said firmly. “You’re going home before you meet him and changing into the sexiest thing you own. Then you’re sending me a picture of the outfit ahead of time so I can approve it. Wear your white jeans. Your ass looks amazing in those. And you have to wear heels. Any pair in your closet will do.”
“Believe it or not, I know how to dress myself.”
“Hello? I taught you, remember?”
“This is strictly a business drink.” She went on to tell Kate the events of the past few days.
“He has a daughter? Are you sure about that?”
“I saw her with my own two eyes.”
“I follow Ben on Twitter and he’s never mentioned a daughter.”
“You what? Why would you do that?”
“Only because of the Tiffany McAdams thing,” Kate rushed. “You have to admit it’s all kind of fascinating. Oh! Is he still dating her? Because—”
“I have absolutely no interest in who Ben is or isn’t dating. As for the daughter, he’s probably been hiding her. Or maybe he’s just found out about her. The poor thing looked confused when I saw her. And you should see the nanny. She’s Heidi Klum minus about twenty years. He’s probably doing her behind Tiffany’s back.” Jenna shuddered. “I can’t imagine a worse father than Ben Harrison.”
“You have to call me the second this date is over and tell me all about it. And as for no interest in Ben, of course you’re not interested in him! But, you have to admit, it would be sweet revenge to see the look on his face when you go walking into that bar looking all gorgeous.”
“Don’t you have your own life to worry about? How’s Tim?” she asked referring to Kate’s husband.
Kate and Tim met five years ago, and it was a match made in heaven. He was a trust fund baby, too, but he wasn’t the kind of guy to sit around and live on other people’s money. He’d started his own company nearly a decade ago and was one of Florida’s most successful entrepreneurs. They lived in a beautiful, upscale home in ritzy West Palm Beach and had the perfect life.
“Tim is fine. Don’t change the subject.”
“Okay, but for the record, which means you have my permission to relay this back to my mother, this meeting is completely work-related, nothing more.”
“But—”
“End of story, Kate. Gotta go. Love you!”
Knowing she was defeated, Kate sighed. “Love you, too.”
Chapter Six
Now that Kate had riled her all up, there was no way she could get to sleep. Jenna turned to her side and punched her pillow into submission.
Ben Harrison.
She’d never forget the moment she first saw him…
It was day one of their freshman year, and the first class on her schedule was calculus. Jenna was anxious to get a good seat so she’d been the first one to show up. She sat at the table in the front of the room going over her syllabus, occasionally glancing up to watch the rest of the students as they filed through the door, some of them barely dragging themselves in, already hungover before the new school year had even started.
Jenna had never been that girl who stayed out late partying. Not in high school and certainly not now. The University of Miami was a private college, and although she’d earned a good amount of scholarship money, her parents were still partially footing a substantial bill. Her father was a civil engineer and her mother a school teacher. They made a comfortable living, but they were far from rich. She had no intention of either losing her scholarship or disappointing her family.
She was still studying her syllabus when the buzz in the quickly crowding classroom came to a still. Looking up from her paper, she expected to see the teacher walk into the room, but it wasn’t the instructor in the doorway.
Tall and broad-shouldered with dark hair and dark eyes, no doubt this guy was gorgeous, but it wasn’t his looks that silenced the class. There were a lot of good-looking boys at the school. The thing was, this wasn’t a boy. This was a man. He was still young, probably early twenties, but the slightly bored look of confidence on his face had every girl in the room sitting straight up in her chair, and every boy annoyed that every girl had noticed it.
Jenna half expected him to sit in the back of the class but instead he quickly zoned in on the empty seat next to her. Hot Guy sat down, laid his backpack on the table and pulled out a notebook. A pretty girl with long, dark hair sitting behind them tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hi! I’m Melissa. Do you have a pencil I can borrow?” She leaned forward giving him (and three other guys sitting in their row) a spectacular view of her cleavage. “I can’t believe what a ditz I am this morning! Long night, you know?”
Oh, brother. Sometimes her sex could be soooo obvious. What kind of student didn’t bring a pencil to a calculus class?
Hot Guy briefly caught Jenna’s eye then pulled a pencil out of his backpack and handed it to the girl.
“Thanks! I’ll be sure to return it after class.”
“No problem.” His voice was deep and husky and sent little shivers dancing up Jenna’s spine.
“So, my name’s Melissa.”
Jenna wanted to scream, yes, we already know!
“I’m Ben,” he said to the cute brunette.
Jenna ping-ponged his name around in her brain. Ben. It was a good name. Masculine and solid. Melissa continued flirting with him. He didn’t engage but he didn’t discourage her either. Jenna tried not to eavesdrop but she’d have to be in a coma to have not heard their exchange.
Yes, he was a freshman like her.
No, he hadn’t pledged a fraternity.
He lived off campus.
He was twenty-two and had just gotten out of the army.
The army. No wonder he seemed so…otherworldly.
Jenna had to give Melissa credit. The girl was good. Despite the fact Ben wasn’t a big talker, she’d gotten all that information in the span of just five minutes.
Then the professor walked into the classroom and introduced himself as Dr. Parrish. Jenna anticipated that calculus would be her hardest class. She was good at math, but she had to work at it, so all thoughts of Hot Guy, or anything else that wasn’t calculus related, flew out of her mind for the next fifty minutes.
Dr. Parrish finished the class by going over his gra
ding system. “This class isn’t going to be easy, so I suggest you all pair up with a study buddy.” He clicked off the overhead projector. “That’s it for today. See you all on Wednesday.”
The buzz in the room immediately went into overdrive.
“Ben!” Melissa said, not even trying to be discreet. “You have to be my partner!”
He turned around and shrugged. “Sorry, but I’ve already got a partner.” He looked at Jenna. “Right?” His dark eyes bored into hers with a mixture of humor and desperation.
Jenna squelched the urge to turn around and see if he was talking to someone else. “Um, yeah, sorry,” she said to Melissa.
The girl frowned at her, then gave Ben an overly bright smile. “My loss.” She handed him back his pencil, along with a slip of paper that he automatically tossed into his backpack. Every pair of male eyes were on her as she sashayed her way out the front door.
“Did that girl just give you her number?” Jenna asked incredulously.
“I didn’t look,” he said in a tone that suggested girls threw their numbers at him every day. “So how about it? Want to be study partners?”
“You were serious about that?”
“Says the girl who spent the last hour taking more notes than anyone else in class.”
“I need to make a good grade in this class to keep my scholarship.”
“Then we’re in the same boat.” He pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down his name and phone number, then handed it to her. “I have a full schedule and I also work part-time, but that’s at night. My best days to meet up are probably Sunday and Monday.”
“I never said yes to being your partner. It’s nothing personal. But I need to get an A in this class, and…sorry, but I really don’t have time to tutor anyone.”
He looked more amused than annoyed. Taking back the paper he’d given her with his name and number, he flipped it around to the side that was blank. “Open up the calculus book to the first review problem.”
“Why? What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to audition to be your study partner.”
“Seriously?”
He scribbled on the sheet for a few seconds, then handed it to her. “Is this how you’d set it up?”
“There’s a mistake. Right here,” she said pointing to the second line. “You used a sine when you should have used a cosine.”
“Check again.”
He seemed so sure of himself. Not cocky. But…
So she checked again.
Rats. He was right.
“Okay, so my bad.”
He handed her back the paper. “This Sunday at six?”
She was big enough to admit when she was wrong, and she did need a study partner. “Sure. Sunday works for me.” She wrote down her information.
“Jenna Pantini?” he said, reading her name off the paper. “Sounds Italian.”
“One hundred percent, both sides.”
“With that red hair and those blue eyes, I would have pegged you for Irish.”
She sniffed. “That’s a stereotype. There are plenty of redheaded, blue-eyed Italians out in the world.” Wait. He’d noticed the color of her eyes?
“Stereotype, huh?” he said mildly.
She flushed. “Point taken. I didn’t think you’d be any good at calculus because in my experience good-looking guys usually aren’t.”
He blinked. “Are you always this direct?”
She blew out a breath. “Unfortunately. Yes.”
“Then you and I are going to get along just fine, Red.” Then he grinned, as if his smile was the answer to world peace.
She should have been annoyed by all that confidence. But there was something in the way he looked at her that made her think… No, that was crazy. He’d hardly paid any attention to Melissa, and by college guy standards, the brunette had been a slam dunk ten. He was probably just being friendly.
After that, whenever he wanted to tease her he called her Red. And the way he said it. Well, she didn’t hate it. Nope. Not one bit.
They began meeting every Sunday afternoon, first in the library, but by the third week, they changed it up to meeting at The Bean, a local coffee house next to campus where the atmosphere was more relaxed and they could eat while studying. Sunday afternoons quickly turned into Monday nights as well.
It was the fifth week of class and they’d both ordered coffee and sandwiches when he was looking over her solution to a problem. “You have your decimal in the wrong place.”
“Crap.” She frowned and erased the equation.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Red. You’re actually pretty smart for a girl, you know.”
In the beginning, she’d cringed whenever she thought back to that first day of class, but over the past month, they’d developed an easy camaraderie that lent itself to this kind of fun banter. “You’re never going to let me live it down, are you?”
Ben laughed. “Maybe. In a couple of years.”
Ben, she’d quickly discovered, was as serious a student as she was. In high school, she’d always been attracted to the smart boys. But smart seemed too tame an adjective to describe him. He was brilliant and focused, never missing a class or a study session.
After they both scored a ninety-nine on the first test of the semester, (the highest scores in the class), everything became a friendly competition between them. Ben was funny and kind. And completely respectful. To the point that she might as well have been his little sister.
It was a depressing thought.
He was only four years older, but at eighteen and twenty-two, the gap seemed wider than it would be in the future. For one thing, he could legally get into bars. Plus, he’d spent the past four years serving in the army and had done two tours in Afghanistan. Something he’d let slip out in casual conversation a couple of weeks ago.
“What was it like being in the Middle East?”
“It was great. We got milk and cookies every night before they tucked us in bed.”
She stared at him.
Ben sighed. “The weather was miserable and most of the time I was bored out of my head.”
Most of the time.
“Were you scared?”
“Yes,” he said right away. Then he paused, as if to reflect more on his answer. “But it wasn’t all bad. I learned a lot about myself over there.”
“Like what?”
“Like… You really want to know this stuff?”
“Sure.” I want to know everything about you.
“I learned that as hard as I thought my life had been to up then, a lot of people are worse off than me.”
It was a cryptic statement. One that she wanted him to expound on, but there was a far-off look in his eyes that made her lighten their conversation instead. “So what’s next? A career as a bean counter for a Fortune 500 company then retirement with a nice portfolio when you’re sixty-five?”
“I’m never going to be a bean counter. Accounting is just a back-up plan. I’m going to law school after graduation, joining a big firm and making a million bucks. How about you?”
“Grad school for sure. Maybe public administration or management, something like that.”
“So you can boss people around?”
“How did you guess?” She smiled but instead of smiling back, he just stared at her as if… No. It had to be her imagination again. Still, Jenna felt her cheeks go pink. It was the curse of the redhead.
Ben cleared his throat and looked away. “So, back to differential equations.”
It was almost midnight when she walked into her dorm room. “Where have you been?” Kate asked putting away her phone. “I was about to call campus security!”
“Sorry, I must have my ringer on mute. It’s Monday night. You know I was studying with Ben.”
“But you left at five. Do you mean to tell me you’ve been studying calculus for the past seven hours?”
Had it really been seven hours? “Sort of.” There went her cheeks, going pink aga
in, only this time with guilt. But what on earth should she feel guilty about?
“Oh my God!” Kate threw a pillow at her head. “You and Ben are like—”
“No, we’re not.” Jenna caught the pillow and sat on the edge of the bed to face her new friend. Kate waited patiently for her to continue. “We mostly studied, but we talked, too,” she admitted.
Kate’s green eyes lit up. “Do you think he’ll ask you out?”
“He doesn’t think of me that way.”
“Bullshit. He’s a guy. Trust me, he thinks of you that way. The question is, what do you think of him?” When Jenna didn’t answer, Kate got serious. “Oh, babe, you have it bad, don’t you? Not that I blame you. He’s—”
“Totally out of my league.”
“He is not! He’d be lucky to go out with you.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing, he’s a lot older than me.”
“Four years isn’t a lot older.”
“It is when…” As much as she and Kate had talked about everything under the sun, they hadn’t talked about this yet. “The thing is. I don’t have a lot of experience.”
“So you’re a virgin. No big deal.” Kate smiled shyly. “Me, too.”
Jenna flopped back on her bed. “Do you think that’s why they matched us as roommates?” She deepened her voice and pretended to look at a computer screen. “Mmm…what do we have here? Two eighteen-year-old virgins. Let’s put these weirdos together!”
Kate laughed. “Seriously, it’s not like you’re going to fall in love with the guy. Just keep an open mind if he asks you out, okay?”
Over the rest of the semester, she and Ben continued their twice-weekly study routine with Sunday and Monday evenings becoming the pinnacle of Jenna’s week. It was ridiculous, how much she looked forward to spending time with him, but other than that night when he’d seemed a little flirtatious, he kept them strictly in the friends zone.
It was mid-November, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and the weather had finally cooled off enough to be able to sit comfortably on The Bean’s massive outdoor patio.
