Saint and Scholar (9 page)

She opened her mouth, then closed as she shook her head. “I…um. I mean, you’re obviously smart and…”

He raised one dark brow. “And?”

“Andyou’renicetolookat,” she said without enunciating before funneling her energy into fiddling with a loose button on her blouse.

“I don’t know about that. I have a pretty hard time getting one lady in particular to look at me.” He nudged her shin with his bare foot. She managed a smile and gave him a sideways glance.

“My friend gave me a pretty hard time last night after you left.”

“Why?”

“Well, Meg seems to think you’ve got some dirty old man vibe going on. I mean, what must it have looked like? You making out with a former student, I mean.”

“That bother
you
?”

She shook her head and met his gaze face-on. He was smiling at her, and not a teacher-to-student smile, either.

“Neither of us are attached to the university at this point, right?”

“Well, not officially.”

“Right.” He slid onto the cushion beside her and twirled a swath of her hair around his second and third fingers. “I always liked your hair. It reminds me of old paintings of angels and female saints.”

“I’m no saint,” she whispered when he started to glide along her jaw with his fingertips.

“Angel, maybe? You know, Ireland is actually called the Land of Saints and Scholars.”

“I see where
you
fit in.” When her voice came out sounding huskier than she liked, she cleared her throat. She closed her eyes as he tickled the underside of her neck with the ends of her hair.

“I think we can fit you in, too. You can be the patron saint of lonely hearts.” He dropped her hair, and slid his hands up from her knees, pausing at the tops of her thighs.

He grazed her lips with his, but didn’t linger, laying whisper-soft kisses across her cheek and at the lobe of her ear, which he took between his teeth and pulled. When a breath escaped her lips, he said, “If you kiss me and really mean it–not like last night, but because you
want
to–there’s no turning back for me. I’ve waited too long for you.”

She didn’t know whether to trust him. Sweet words from a liar had enticed her in the past, and falling victim to such cajoling again seemed folly. Her last relationship was a textbook case of a small fly getting caught in a spider’s web. But, when she pulled his head back by the hair and studied his face, there was something in that solemn expression that had never been there when Otto was cajoling her: fear. So, she kissed him. She pressed her lips to his and straddled his torso with her knees, because maybe Grant meant what he said.

Chapter 6

Carla lay back on the sofa, with Grant on top of her peppering her neck with kisses and working loose the buttons of her blouse. While she worked his shirt over his head, he asked through the fabric covering his face, “Hey, you want to go to Ireland?” He didn’t want to leave anything unsaid, unasked. If there was a chance, he’d grab it.

His shirt discarded, she sat upright to access one of his pebbly nipples and took it into her mouth while reaching into the back of his pants to grab two handfuls of his rear. Something low rumbled in his chest and he wrapped his hands around her wrists to halt her exploration. “Hey, answer me.”

She released her latch on his nipple and licked upward toward his collarbone. “I’m sorry, what?”

He pushed her shirt off her shoulders and down her arms. “I thought women were supposed to be good at multitasking.”

“Whoever originally said that didn’t factor foreplay into consideration.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” He held her still for a moment so he could admire the way her breasts mounded in her push-up bra. They were small compared to what Francesca had purchased, but he’d always thought anything more than a handful was a waste. They were perfectly proportioned to her narrow waist and feminine hips. Carla didn’t need artifice. “I asked if you wanted to go to Ireland. You could do your research in person.”

She put a bit of space between them so he could see her furrowed brow. “I haven’t given making that trip very much thought. It’s not something I considered for the near future.”

“Well, no time like the present. Come with me.” He reached around her ribs and deftly unhooked the catch of her bra. With her breasts freed, he laid her back and pressed his bare chest to hers as he resumed the work of marking her neck.

She closed her eyes and moaned, digging her nails into the skin near his waistband as he carefully clamped his teeth onto her flesh.

He propped himself up on his arms to assess his handiwork. Not bad, but she wouldn’t likely agree once she saw it. “Well?”

Her dreamy expression morphed into something darker. “You’re playing with me!” Carla pushed herself up on her elbows and put her palms on his chest to give him a small shove back.

He grasped the tops of her arms to hold her still and laid her back down on the sofa. “No I’m not. I’m not some little boy who plays word games to get a woman to take her pants off.”

Her eyes narrowed a hair, but she said nothing.

“You don’t believe me? Well, I guess, why should you? You hardly know me.”

“Precisely.”

He forced out a breath through his lips and let go of her arms.

Shit. If she were any other woman, how would I be behaving right now?

No matter how hard he pondered, there was no satisfactory answer…or at least not one that could subdue his advances. Carla wasn’t any other woman. She was
the
woman.

When he trailed a finger around the blossoming bruises on her neck, she closed her eyes and giggled.

“Hey, look at me,” he whispered.

She opened her eyes.

“I want to confess something that’ll either scare you off or make you unbelievably horny. Hard to tell with you complicated creatures.”

When she tried to sit up, he unstraddled her and got on his knees on the floor beside her. She furrowed her brow again and covered her breasts with her arms.

Best to just get on with it. “Look, Carla, I want to help you with your project, but more than that I want to have a go with you.”

She raised one brow. “A
go
?”

“I…” He stood and raked his hair back from his face as he paced in front of the picture window in the living area. “This will probably sound incredibly stalkerish, but I’ve been thinking about you for seven years, almost daily.”

“
Me
?” The look she wore was one of absolute incredulity.

“Yeah, you.” He crouched next to the sofa and folded his arms atop her lap.

She pushed his hair behind his ears.

He took her touch as a good sign. “Do you know how hard it is to want to give someone a hug make them feel better but you can’t because of how unseemly it would be? You were quiet before, but when you came back to my class after your dad’s funeral, I wanted to take you home and spoon you until you felt better. I probably would have overstepped my bounds if you had looked at me just once. Good thing you didn’t.”

She sat back agape. “I guess I…” She put her arms back over her chest and shrugged. “I suppose I didn’t think anyone beyond my friends was paying any attention to me.” She rolled her eyes and blew her hair out of her eyes. “Even my mother was offline. My advisor told me in no uncertain terms to suck it up because people die all the time.”

He pulled his arms away from her and leaned back onto his heels. He didn’t want her to think his fists had anything to do with her. He’d always gotten a bad vibe about that particular undergraduate advisor. Quite a few undergraduates had ended up taking his freshman-level courses late because the guy had steered them wrong. The man didn’t know how to read the handbooks, and that was his
job
. He steadied his breathing and tried to relax the tension in his jaw. He’d deal with it when he went to campus. “I’m sorry for that. Really, I wish I’d known.”

“It’s okay,” she said with a shrug. She was lying. Although her voice was sunny, the way her lips quivered indicated she’d just ripped open an old wound.

“No, it’s not okay. Someone should have been there. No siblings?”

“I have two brothers, but they were caught up in their own stuff. I didn’t want to bug them.”

He didn’t understand that. He hadn’t had siblings of his own, but wasn’t one of the built-in benefits of having them that they were a sort of support network? “Why not?”

“I don’t know. I guess they were so busy propping up my mom that I figured I wouldn’t pile on.” Carla curled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Of course, I didn’t intend to upset you.” He stood and placed a kiss on the top of her head. “I’m just shocked no one rallied around you.”

“Except Meg and Sharon. They did a lot to distract me, but ultimately time was what I needed.”

“Funny thing about time is it may distance you from someone, but you never really get over them. You never stop hoping there’s a chance you’ll see them again somehow.” He sat on the cushion next to her and carefully unfolded her arms from around her legs so he could hold her hands.

She exhaled and turned her face toward the open blinds. A bright red cardinal was flitting from bough to bough in a tree planted near the building’s foundation. As it danced among the leaves, one particular branch he disturbed tapped against the window, drawing her attention. “That’s why you’ve been thinking about me for all these years?”

He nodded. “I told you it would probably sound silly, but you set the bar really high for me. You changed all my expectations of what a woman could be like. You don’t even have to say a word and you still command all the attention in a room.”

Carla closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands. “Grant, it’s flattering. You have no idea how amazing it feels to hear that from you. But, I don’t think you know what you’re buying.” She put her hands down to show her flushed face. “I’m like a used car that looks awesome on the lot. You take it home and two weeks later and it starts making weird noises under the hood and you find out the rearview mirror was stuck on with masking tape.”

He chuckled and pulled her into an embrace to stroke her hair.

“Well, I’d rather you have quirks than to pretend you didn’t. Since we’re being up-front here, you should know I have the stereotypical Irish temper.”

She gave him a playful swat and he deftly caught her hand and held it in his. “Whatever. Can’t be worse than mine. I’ve been arrested a time or two.”

He laughed. “You’re kidding me.”

She shook her head and blushed.

“Well, then. You can tell me all about it on the plane on the way over, and I’ll tell you how I got my nose broken the first time.”

She held her torso back a couple of feet from his to get a good look at his face. He tried to keep it perfectly blank, but it was hard with the half-naked woman he’d been fantasizing about for years practically on his lap. “You’re serious.”

“Yes. Occupational hazard, I hear. Come on, love. Just a week, and if you hate me you can come home and I’ll just cry into my oats every day. Either way, I’ll help you with your family tree all I can.”

Carla stared at him for what seemed like an eternity and finally gave a miniscule nod.

He slumped with relief and laid his forehead in the valley between her clamped thighs. “I’ll get you a plane ticket.”

“No, don’t worry about it.” She grazed her fingernails up his naked back, ending at the top of his neck.

He looked up at her just as she brought her head down toward his and pressed her lips between his earlobe and jaw. “You going to swim the Atlantic, love?” he asked, smiling as he laid his neck to the side to receive her kisses.

“No,” she said through giggles. “I have a ticket voucher left over from when I was supposed to go to Australia with my friends last year. Meg’s husband was on tour and Sharon and I decided to meet up with her in Sydney. Well, lucky for me flu symptoms surfaced the day we were supposed to fly and an airline staffer caught me tossing my cookies in the bathroom before I boarded. Wouldn’t let me on the plane. Got a few nights of complimentary hotel accommodations, too.”

“How’d you manage that?” He shuddered as Carla licked the large pulsing vein at the side of his neck.