His eyes flashed blue fire as he undressed me with them layer by layer as though he planned to have me right there in the aisle of Creston Hall. My heart sputtered then raced in my chest as if I’d run a marathon for days rather than merely walked into the auditorium for the start of fall classes. The heaviness low in my belly drew my attention to my suddenly damp panties, and I clamped my thighs together. Who the hell is this guy?
“Oh my, sweetheart. Looks like you’ve caught someone’s eye,” my best friend Axel Benson said into my ear.
Tearing my gaze from the mesmerizing scrutiny of the man who commanded the attention of every person in the lecture hall, I whispered out of the side of my mouth, “Who is he?”
“Callahan O’Reilly. Starting tight end on the Wildcats football team,” Axel answered, awe in his voice.
“What’s he doing in a four hundred-level lit class?”
My friend’s indulgent grin put my hackles up. “Same thing we are, probably. Picking up required upper-level credits.”
Hotshot stepped into our conversation. “Do I know you from somewhere?” Though he’d dialed down the heat, the banked fires in his sea-blue eyes smoldered in my heated core.
Damn it. Football players—any sports players for that matter—were not my type. Tightening my grip on the strap of my backpack, I said, “Doubt it.”
“Jamaica works at the sweet shop in the Union,” Axel oh-so-helpfully supplied. The “oof” that followed might have been from the elbow I threw to his ribs. I didn’t normally resort to violence, but Hotshot’s muscular, toned body combined with his intense stare overwhelmed my common sense.
Folding my arms over my chest, I said, “From the looks of you, I imagine nothing sweet has ever gone into your mouth.”
His gaze flicked down my body and back up to snag mine again, his grin positively wolfish. “Shall we test that theory?”
I blinked. “What the hell? Are you flirting with me?”
“All right, you pretenses of scholarly pursuits. Find a seat. We don’t have all day.” Dr. Dair’s curmudgeonly tones interrupted our stare-down.
Grinning like a lunatic, Axel shoulder-bumped me, his eyes darting between Hotshot and me.
“Miss Winslow, are you coming or going?” Dr. Dair’s voice was as dry as the Sahara.
My cheeks tingled with a rush of blood at being called out by the one professor I had yet to impress in front of the hottest guy I’d ever seen. The corner of Hotshot’s mouth tipped up, and his voice dropped an octave. “Yes, Miss Winslow. Are you going”—his eyes danced as if he knew exactly the effect he was having on me—“or coming?”
Gritting my teeth, I grabbed a handful of Axel’s sleeve and tugged him along the row beside me, settling somewhere near the middle. Even after I’d earned A’s in his last two classes, Dr. Dair didn’t take me seriously. If a certain football player weren’t so tall and deliciously muscular and standing in the way of me reaching my usual seat, I wouldn’t have drawn Dair’s negative attention before class even started. Hell, I hadn’t even had a chance to ask one question, let alone my usual several. Now I’d annoyed him by not finding my seat in a timely manner thanks to some jock who was too gorgeous for my own good.
Hotshot ambled down the aisle to an open seat a couple of rows down, tossed his backpack into the chair beside him, and angled his body so he could look back at me. When he caught me watching him, he winked, and I wanted to throw something at him. The smirk on his face said he knew that too.
As a junior, I desperately wanted to impress the English Department Chair at least once before graduation. Callahan O’Reilly put paid to that dream when he stopped me with his eyes in the middle of the aisle.
“English Literature: A Cultural Study will demand your concentration and no small amount of your time.” Dr. Dair ignored the little drama playing out between a certain football player and me.
Axel, the traitor, did not.
“If Callahan O’Reilly looked at me the way he looked at you, I think we’d be skipping the first day of class,” he whispered as he fanned himself beside me.
“Shhh!” I stared straight ahead at our professor. “And you have a boyfriend,” I reminded my best friend out of the corner of my mouth.
“He wouldn’t blame me if I bailed for Callahan O’Reilly.”
I shot him a censorious side-eye and concentrated on the droning of our prof.
By the time class ended, I’d annoyed our teacher with no fewer than five questions—all of them legitimate, mind you—and endured another wink and the ghost of a grin from a certain irritating football player. Before he gathered up his materials and stuffed them into his satchel, Dr. Dair announced his TA would be reading off the names of classmates he’d paired us with for our class projects. We’d need to choose an era and focus of study that fit one of the themes he’d outlined on the syllabus and read and present relevant literature to support our thesis as our culminating project, which counted for half our grade.
I glanced at Axel. “It would be a miracle if he chose us to work together, wouldn’t it?”
“With the number of times he caught us whispering in our Shakespeare class last semester, yeah. It would be a miracle.” His eyes strayed down the aisle. “I wouldn’t mind if he paired me up with O’Reilly.” He shoulder-bumped me again, and I let out a long-suffering sigh.
“If he were your partner, would you be able to stop fangirling long enough to do any work?”
“Eventually.” My friend dragged out the word with a suggestive laugh.
As usual, I couldn’t help the tug at the corner of my mouth from his antics. He’d been my best friend since we met in the cafeteria on the first day of high school, two loners who didn’t fit in with the rest of the school but couldn’t be bothered to care much. Discovering our mutual love of literature and writing drew us close, and by Christmas that year we were inseparable. It came as no surprise to our old classmates that we ended up at the same college studying the same major.
“Axel Benson and Jory Bond,” the TA called out.
A guy at the end of our row leaned forward and waved at Axel.
“Better luck next time, Ace.”
Axel grinned. “Nah. This is great. Jory and I worked on a project together freshman year.” He grabbed his pack from the floor and stood. “Move those pretty legs over, wouldja?”
I angled myself to let him pass and glanced around at the people already paired up. A sick feeling settled in the pit of my stomach as I saw Hotshot and I were among the last ones left without partners. Then the TA shot my semester straight to hell when he called out, “Callahan O’Reilly and Jamaica Winslow.”
Fuck. A. Duck.