Jamaica’s wild curls overpowered the wide flower-patterned band she’d tied over them. When she slid her backpack onto her lap as she sat beside her friend Axel in the middle row of the auditorium, she blew at them. With a rough jerk, she tugged the zipper down on her backpack, pulled out her notebook, and dropped her pack on the floor beside her. Like magic, she pulled a pen from her curls.
For a second, her gaze strayed to where I sat a few rows down on the edge of the aisle. I grinned and pointed to an imaginary watch on my wrist. She wrinkled her cute little nose in my direction, and I winked, snorting a laugh when she bared her teeth at me. It tickled the shit out of me how easy it was to set her off.
Dr. Dair interrupted my fun. “Nice of you to make it, Miss Winslow. Now class can begin.” The tone of his voice could have sucked all the water from every water bottle in the room.
Instead of slouching down in her seat as I expected, Jamaica sat up straighter and narrowed her eyes at the prof. No doubt from the way he was always riding her, the guy had a hard-on for my partner. It was one more thing I wanted to know about Jamaica Winslow.
Dr. Dair launched into a lecture on the excesses of the Regency, which he said were alternately lauded in the poetry of the Romantics and called out in the rise of the novel as a literary construct. He paid special attention to Austen’s Emma. The side of my face closest to the aisle heated up, and I glanced in Jamaica’s direction. Sure enough, she was glaring fire at me. It didn’t take a mind reader to know what that was about. Once I’d talked her into using Austen rather than Hardy for our project, I’d had to win a second argument over which Austen books to use, putting Emma on the list. Didn’t take a genius to know that glare heating up the side of my face was a not-so-subtle screw-you.
Even though Dair never seemed to let her up, she acted almost desperate to impress the man. I couldn’t give two shits what he thought of me personally as long as he considered my work to be A quality—which it would be because that’s the way I roll. From her incisive questions in class, my partner could keep up.
As I ignored Jamaica’s heated stare, Dr. Dair droned on, “Following the popularity of Pride and Prejudice, the Prince Regent hinted strongly—demanded, actually—that Austen dedicate her next book to him. Though she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, she understood her precarious situation as an unmarried woman living off her brother’s goodwill. With great reluctance, she dedicated Emma to the prince, which in all reality was a bold move considering the caricature of nobility Austen portrays in the titular character.”
The professor tipped his head down to peer owlishly over the top of his glasses. “What is it this time, Miss Winslow?”
That long-suffering stare combined with the undisguised irritation in his tone should have put her off raising her hand in class—ever. The combination had certainly done its job with most of the rest of the class, and we were only a week in.
Not Jamaica.
I kind of admired her for it.
“In my research I discovered multiple scholars believe the Prince Regent didn’t actually read any of Austen’s books. Could she have been testing if that was true?”
“Ahh, if only she were here to ask.”
I suddenly wanted to punch the prof’s sarcasm right out of his tone. Her question had merit. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn some Austen scholar somewhere had even pursued it. If Dair hadn’t assigned a larger overarching theme for our project, I might have suggested to my partner that we switch our focus to chasing down the Prince Regent’s response to Emma. As I watched Dair relax his stance, a satisfied smirk on his face at his humiliating response to Jamaica’s question, an idea formed in my head. In the margins on my iPad I jotted an addition to our project focus on manners.
When class ended, I glanced up from sliding my iPad into my pack to see Jamaica angrily stuffing her notebook into hers. The hard set of her jaw as she glared at Dr. Dair’s back when he exited through a door behind the lectern explained her actions. After four class sessions with her asking pertinent questions that irritated the teacher but helped the rest of us, I began to see that questioning the lecturer was her way. Even when he tried to preempt her with the derogatory way he called on her, she never backed down. Every time I’d had a conversation with her, something in it would set fire to her cheeks, but she never showed embarrassment with our professor. Her expressions consisted of genuine interest or determination. Though she didn’t flare up at the public set-down today, her actions left no doubt she was hot about it.
“What’s the deal with you and Dair?” I asked as I fell into step beside her and Axel on the way out of class.
“Besides that he picks someone in every grade to hate, and I’m the junior class choice?” she gritted through clenched teeth.
“What are you talking about?”
“Everyone in the English department knows Dr. Dair chooses someone from each cohort to give a hard time.” Axel shot Jamaica a side-eye. “In the junior class, that would be Jamaica. She asks too many questions.” Over her head he grinned at me.
“Are we or are we not in school to learn?” she demanded as she stomped up the aisle between us. “How does he expect people to learn if they never ask questions?”
“You kinda do it on purpose, yeah?” I said.
“Do what? Ask questions?” Those gorgeous green eyes rolled in her head like marbles, the “duh” in her voice loud and clear.
“No. Irritate him.”
A long sigh flowed out of her. “I irritate him by majoring in English. If I had a different major—say, sports marketing”—she slid me a glance—“he’d give me a pass on the questions. Like that premed major who sits on the opposite side of the auditorium from you. That guy asks loads of questions too, but Dair is never an ass to him.”
Axel shot me a “she’s right” look, and I shrugged.
Stepping out into the crisp autumn air, she squared her shoulders and stopped on the steps. I’d taken the next step down, so she stood eye-to-eye with me.
“I thought we could finish up on our outline tomorrow night.”
I grinned. “Sounds like a plan.”
“I’ll meet you in the study carrels on the second floor of the library if you don’t mind.” Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe we can finish our work before your girlfriend and her posse discover us.”
My brow went up at the snark in her tone. “My girlfriend?”
“Tory Miller.”
“Tory Miller?” I echoed.
“Sophomore? Blonde? The one who staked her claim on you at the library last week?”
The side of my mouth crooked up. “You’re jealous.”
Jamaica’s eyes shot daggers. “You wish.”
“She’s a jersey chaser.” I shrugged. “Not girlfriend material.”
Axel puffed his cheeks and whistled out a long breath, drawing my attention to him. He made a “cut it” gesture beneath his chin, but it was too late.
“Nothing sexist about that opinion,” Jamaica began.
I cut her off. “Nothing at all. It’s a statement of fact.”
“Yep, Dair hates me,” she muttered under her breath in Axel’s direction.
He shot me a smirk, and I grinned back.
“See you tomorrow night at the library. Second floor. More private.” I leaned in closer to her. “I like it.”
Her knuckles turned white where she gripped the straps of her backpack. “Bring some ideas, will you?” She stomped down the steps past me.
Giving me a thumbs-up, Axel trailed in her wake.
That girl was pure fire. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew better than to play with her, that playing with her would lead to getting burned. But as I watched her hips sway in those tight jeans as she tromped down the sidewalk, all I could think about was how hot those hips would feel in my hands when I pulled her in close.
Nothing about Jamaica Winslow was my usual type, yet everything about her intrigued me. For whatever reason, I usually went for blondes who didn’t challenge me much, girls who were in it for a good time as much as I was. Nothing about Jamaica, from that mass of chocolate-brown curls to her take-no-prisoners approach to school, said casual. Her sword was always out, ready to challenge ideas—and people. For reasons I decided not to study too closely, I liked it when she challenged me. Whistling the tune to Balefire’s “Hotter Than Hell” as I headed in the opposite direction, I couldn’t remember when I’d looked forward to a study session as much as I looked forward to tomorrow night.
When I arrived at the library, I found Jamaica seated at a tiny table in the back corner opposite the stairs and the elevator. Her eyes tracked me from where she sat with her back to the wall, which meant my back would be to whoever might wander by us. The table was littered with books and notebooks, but what caught my attention was a pen on top of one of those notebooks. I scanned her curls for another but couldn’t see one. Didn’t mean she didn’t have one—or a handful of them—stashed in all that hair. The thought made me smile.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m smiling, not laughing.” I slung my backpack off my shoulder and onto the table and pulled my iPad from it. “Hello, partner. How was your day?”
She wouldn’t let it go. “Your eyes are laughing. What’s so funny?”
“Your strategy. You think putting my back to the rest of the room will deter a determined jersey chaser from finding me?” I slid into the chair opposite her and set my pack on the floor at my feet.
“Worth a shot. Maybe it will buy us enough time to finish our outline at least.” The eye roll in her tone dared me to play with her.
“They know when we finish practice.” Sliding a finger over the surface of my machine, I woke it up and scrolled to our project notes. “That and I don’t exactly blend into this environment.” I smirked.
“That man hates me so much,” she said to herself.
“I don’t hate you at all.” Waggling my brows, I added, “I think you’re hot in a studious sort of way.”
“Studious?” She glanced down at her oversize Mountain State T-shirt. “Are you serious?”
Gesturing to the books scattered over the table, I said, “It’s how you present. I don’t usually go for studious—”
“Why am I not surprised?” Crossing her arms over her chest only drew my attention to her rack, which her oversize sweatshirts didn’t disguise nearly as well as she probably thought.
“—but maybe that’s because I haven’t met the right kind of studious.”
One skeptical brow lifted. “The right kind of studious?” she drawled.
“Yeah. Smart, driven”—I let my eyes take a tour of what was in front of me, then, for good measure, leaned back to glance beneath the table at her pretty legs in her yoga pants and back up to her narrowed green eyes—“and hot.”
With no little amount of satisfaction, I enjoyed the pink tinging her cheekbones. She grabbed her pen and pulled a notebook toward her. “Don’t bother flirting with me. I’m not interested in athletes.” She glanced up from her notes. “And I’m not carrying all the weight on this project, or Dair will fail both of us. Trust me.”
Making a show of reading and marking her notes, she did her best to send me “back off” vibes. But the squirming on her chair told a different story. Good to know I wasn’t the only one in this pairing with a not-so-scholarly interest in my partner.
“About that. Something Dair said in class yesterday had me thinking about an angle for our presentation.”
As though she couldn’t believe I had an original idea, she blinked up at me.
“Rather, it was the way he dismissed your question about the Prince Regent. Made me think we have an opportunity to remind him of his manners.”
Blowing at a curl that slipped past the flower-patterned band on her forehead, she said, “It’s not worth the chance of him lowering our grade.”
“I don’t know.” I smirked. “It’s not like everyone in the class isn’t aware of his SDE problem.”
“Wow. That didn’t take long.”
“What? That I caught onto Dair’s small dick energy? He practically shouts it every time you challenge him.” I leaned in. “Out of curiosity, are all his ‘cohort’ targets smart women?” I asked, air-quoting her friend Axel.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. We’re not giving him any reason to score us below the A we are going to earn.” Her stern schoolteacher tone cracked me up, and she glared at me. “I mean it, Hotshot. Your scholarship rests on what you do bashing around on a football field. Mine rests on what happens in the classroom.” Pausing, she tucked her plump lips between her teeth. “I can’t afford to take any chances with mine.” Those last words came out so softly I had to lean forward to catch them.
Flicking my eyes down to the notes on my iPad and back up to hers, I said, “Austen is subtle in her delivery of scathing truths.” Stretching my leg, I lightly ran the toe of my running shoe up the side of her calf and back down. “We’ll be subtle too. That way if he dings us, we have plausible deniability when we confront him over it.”
The tiny hitch in her breath at the contact going on beneath the table gratified me. Mostly because when I touched her, the contact tingled up my calf as well. Knowing Jamaica wasn’t as immune to me as she pretended to be left a warm spot in the middle of my chest.
She turned on her chair, crossing one knee over the other and distancing herself from my wayward foot. I shot her a grin, and she rewarded me with narrowed eyes. “Since Dair brought up Emma today”—she glanced up from beneath her brows, her sardonic tone making her point for her—“maybe we should start with it. I reread it over the weekend, this time with our focus in mind, and marked some relevant passages. I was thinking we could use the scenes where Emma is instructing Harriet on the finer points of proper behavior for landing a gentleman.”
“Or we could focus on her lack of manners where one of her peers is concerned. The way she treats Jane Fairfax always pisses me off.”
Her mouth gaping open and closed like a guppy was so damn funny it took some of the sting out of her obvious opinion of my academic prowess.
Leaning back in my chair, I said, “I read the book over the weekend too.”
“Oh. Well, great. Um—”
The way she stammered over her stereotypical athlete prejudices demanded I play with her. “You did say you expected me to pull my weight, yeah?”
“Yes. So, uh…” She cleared her throat. “Did you happen to mark any relevant passages concerning Jane?”
“No, but it won’t be difficult to find them.”
Seeming to recover herself, she asked, “How many times have you read Emma?”
I smirked at her accusatory tone. “Just the one time this past weekend on the bus ride home from the game.”
Her brows shot up.
“What?” Deliberately, I widened my eyes. “It was a six-hour ride. The guys made it clear I’ve won a few too many poker pots recently, so I needed to occupy myself in a different way.”
Her cute upturned nose wrinkled in disgust. “You gamble?”
“Only on the bus.”
Narrowed green eyes stared into mine, and I shrugged.
“Some of our rides are long. It passes the time.”
With a shake of her head, she doodled something in the margin of her notes. “So, about Jane Fairfax. It’s going to take a bit of time to find relevant passages.” She nodded in the direction of my iPad where I’d cued up a copy of the book.
I kept my eyes on her. “We can start in chapter 34 where Emma invites Jane to the dinner party.”
“Do you have a photographic memory or something?”
“Pretty close.” I leaned my forearms on the table. “On the first day of class, you were wearing a tight pair of jeans—great choice, by the way—and a light red shirt with a low neck that hinted at your cleavage—which is fine. I enjoy a little mystery.”
She glared.
“Your boots added about two inches to your height—another plus. I like taller women.”
Her indignation came out on a gasp.
“And you had on the same headband you’re wearing tonight. What I haven’t been able to keep track of is exactly how many pens you keep stashed in those glorious curls of yours.”
Self-consciously, she lifted a hand to the side of her head before dropping it back to her lap. “I was asking about your ability to remember passages from a book you’ve only read once—with the added distraction of a busload of rowdy football players, no less—not about what I wore when.”
“I know.”
When I treated her to my best grin, I thought steam might escape her ears. My grin morphed into a full smile, and I watched in fascination as her entire body softened.
As usual, Finn’s timing sucked.
“There you are, buddy. One of the girls swore she saw you walk into the library a couple of hours ago, and we’ve spent the past fifteen minutes looking for you.”
“Been right here studying.”
“Well, the library’s closing in a few, and this lot think we should hit Stromboli’s for snacks.” Finn McCabe, my roommate, best friend, and probably the best defensive end in the league when he wasn’t jumping offsides, gestured to the posse of jersey chasers gathered around him.
Tory Miller stepped away from the pack. “Why are you up here instead of downstairs with the rest of the team?” The accusation in her tone pissed me off, but I knew better than to show any emotion with this one.
“Too many distractions.”
She tossed her hair and shot me a coy smile.
One drunken slipup. One. We didn’t even round first base, but she thought we were an item.
I glanced across the table to see Jamaica gathering up her things, a determinedly neutral expression on her face. But the tense set of her shoulders and the jerkiness of her hands as she stacked books and notebooks gave her away. Clearly, she thought I had something going with Tory too.
Fuck.
As if by magic, a second later, Jamaica’s side of the table was bare, her backpack heavy as she lifted it in one motion and stood. “I think we have a viable start.”
Guess our study time together was over, along with any strides I’d made toward cracking her tough shell.
“Are we meeting again this week?”
I powered down my iPad, stacked it on a notebook, and stuffed the whole works in my backpack. “Can’t. We have another away game. But I’ll catch up with you in class tomorrow.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
As Jamaica stepped around the table, I heard Tory’s not-so-subtle “Bitch” directed at her from somewhere directly behind me. Jamaica’s brow lifted, but her acknowledgment of the jersey chaser stopped there.
Classy.
Tory not so much. She slipped her claw around the crook of my elbow and said, “I’m in the mood for cheesy fries. They’re your favorite too, right, Callahan?” The simpering tone of her voice set my teeth on edge.
I shrugged my arm away from her and shot a glare in my roommate’s direction. But his eyes were on Jamaica’s retreat. More specifically, with the speculative grin on his face, he was enjoying the sexy sway of her sweet round ass in her form-fitting yoga pants as she wasted no time walking away from me.
Now I had another problem.