“What are your plans for the weekend?” I’d asked Axel as I slid in beside him. For once, I’d managed to be first in line at the coffee hut in the Union, which meant I’d made it to class with time to spare.
My friend’s surprised eyes spoke volumes about how unusual it was that I hadn’t skidded in at the last possible second before our professor started his lecture. “Drake and I are probably going to hang out. Maybe catch the new John Krasinski thriller.”
“I’m not on call this weekend for once. Maybe you won’t mind a third wheel on your date? I’ll buy the popcorn.” I gave him my cutest puppy-dog eyes.
He shot me a look from beneath his brows. “Won’t you have, like, six books to reread for classes?”
“It’s come to my attention that perhaps I should try to read with more purpose the first time through—or, in the case of this class, the second or third time through since I read most of these classics in high school.” Taking a sip of my coffee, I worked to keep from picturing Callahan’s smirk when I’d stupidly commented on his photographic memory. The guy may be a jock, but he didn’t fit the old “dumb jock” stereotype.
But when Axel, Drake, and I arrived at Stromboli’s after the movie Saturday night, there sat Callahan with a bunch of other football players—and Tory Miller, staking her claim on him. I amended my earlier thought. He fit one jock stereotype: dating girls who clung to him purely because he played a popular sport.
Fine, maybe Tory wasn’t staking a claim specifically on Callahan since she was as close to sitting in his friend’s lap as possible in the confines of the booth. But the daggers she shot at me made it clear she didn’t want my friends and me sitting so close to her posse and the football players they couldn’t stay away from. From the looks of things, a party had started in that booth. One I didn’t care to listen to.
Callahan’s intense stare sealed it.
Fortunately, I noticed a table opening on the opposite side of the bar from the team and their groupies, which meant I didn’t have to suggest we order takeout pizza and go back to Axel and Drake’s apartment. Putting up with the inevitable teasing from my best friend wouldn’t have been fun, but it would have been better than putting up with hearing those sorority girls fawning and simpering over the football team.
A dark expression marred Axel’s good looks when he sat beside me.
“What?” I asked. “That one girl had already grabbed one of the chairs at that table. From the looks of things, they needed it.”
“Not the problem,” he said.
I lifted a brow.
“The girl Chessly had so much trouble with on her floor last year is a first class be-otch.” His expression cleared as he clocked how close we were to the bar. “Good call with finding a different table.” Raising his hand, he signaled a waiter rolling by us with a tray of empty mugs. “Can we get a pitcher of stout, please?”
Without slowing down, the guy nodded.
A few minutes later we were enjoying our beers and dissecting the finer points of the movie as we waited for our extra-large meat-lover’s and jalapeno pizza to arrive. A shadow fell over me, and I didn’t need to flick my eyes up to the mirror behind the bar to know who stood at my back. I shivered as his breath ghosted over my ear, and I wanted to kick myself. Instead, I remained rigid.
“I need the notes from yesterday’s class. Can I get ’em from you tomorrow?”
Angling myself so I could pull away from the annoyingly enticing scent of clean skin and musky sandalwood, I shot him a side-eye. “We don’t have a study session scheduled. You do football on the weekends, remember?”
“Come on, Jamaica. We have a quiz on Monday. I imagine something from Friday’s class will be on it.” With one hand on the back of my chair and the other on the table in front of me, he caged me in. “You don’t want me to have more riding on our project than you have, do you?” A mischievous smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth, but the banked fires in his eyes sent a different message.
I huffed out a sigh. “Fine. I’ll scan them into my laptop and send them to you.” Careful not to touch him in my confined space, I tugged my phone from the back pocket of my jeans and pulled up my contacts. “What’s your email?”
“That’s the thing. I’m probably going to need you to walk me through them.” He flicked a glance up at my friends whose eyes I could feel boring into me. “I get out of film at two. We could meet up then”—he dropped his voice a notch—“or over dinner if that works better for you.”
Clenching my jaw, I held back what I truly wanted to say. About then, the posse of giggling girls sidled up behind him. Something about the narrow-eyed glare Tory shot me made me change my mind. “I work at the sweet shop until three. I can meet in the Union after that.”
“Thanks. I’ll drop by and pick you up when you get off work.” He ghosted his hand across my shoulders as he joined the other guys waiting for him near the door.
The gang of overly made-up freshmen all vying for his attention followed in his wake except for Tory who hustled ahead to link her arm through his. Whatever game he was playing, I had no intention of joining in. Yet my shoulders tingled with his touch long after the door to Stromboli’s closed behind him.
Damn it.
Drake launched in first. “Oooh, you and Callahan O’Reilly, huh? You’ve been holding out on us, J.” He nudged Axel with his shoulder and laughed. “Good thing for you the guy is straight.”
“That’s what Axel said about you after Dair saddled me with O’Reilly for our project.” Lifting my beer to my lips, I took a deliberate sip, licked the foam from my upper lip, and sipped again.
Drake gifted Axel an affectionate grin. “I forgive you.”
“Me too,” Axel said and focused his attention on me. “Told you.” He turned to his boyfriend, ran the tip of his nose along Drake’s jaw, and gave him a little kiss.
I loved how my best friend since forever had found his person during orientation freshman year. They were so good for each other. Yet there were times, like right this minute, when I envied their relationship. Beneath the table, I kicked myself.
Drake eyed me over his glass. “Never took you for someone who went for football players.”
Wrinkling my nose at him, I clarified, “I don’t go for jocks. Football players especially.”
His lifted brow said he didn’t believe me. Now I wanted to kick someone else under the table.
“Have you ever known me to date a jock?” The tone of my voice dared him to contradict me.
“Nope.” He leaned his arms on the table, a smirk on his lips. “But I saw how you reacted to that one.” He waggled his brows. “There’s a sizzle there, and it’s not all one-sided.” With a nod in Axel’s direction, he added, “I’m not the only one who noticed, am I?”
Axel, the traitor, chuckled as he patted my hand in a patronizing way that made me want to smack him. Why had I begged to join them this weekend? I could be home rereading Persuasion and eating my own pizza right now instead of putting up with my friends’ nonsense. I threw up my hands. “Men have stereotyped women as gossips, but you two prove that men are the real talkers.”
Mercifully, our giant, delicious pie arrived in time to shut up the Callahan O’Reilly speculation. But I blame all the jalapenos stacked on it for the restless night I spent dreaming of Captain Wentworth, who for some weird reason, resembled a certain irritating football player.
When I stepped out of the sweet shop after work on Sunday afternoon, I almost ran over Callahan who was waiting with one shoulder leaning on the wall as he scrolled through his phone. The smile that broke over his face when he saw me stopped me dead in my tracks.
“Hello, Island Girl. How was work?”
I resumed walking, and he fell into step beside me as we headed down the hall. By a strange silent agreement, we walked in the direction of the study tables on the lower level outside the game room.
“Why do you call me that?”
“What? Island Girl?” He chuckled. “Come on, Jamaica.”
I could feel my face heating, and I quickened my pace.
He easily kept up. “It isn’t any more obvious than why you call me Hotshot.”
“Oh, really?” I drawled as I scanned the tables outside the game room for an open one. To my surprise, every table was occupied. Crap. We’d have to go upstairs to the more public ones.
Callahan trailed me up the stairs to the ground floor of the Union. “If you came to one of my games, you’d see how accurate your name for me is.”
“Right.” I stretched the word out like a rubber band and let it snap back on the T as I scanned the study tables for an open one.
“There’s an open table at the back of the café,” he said. With his superior height, he could see what I couldn’t. From my vantage point, the Union was the campus hot spot on this gorgeous autumn afternoon.
Motioning me to follow, he led the way to an empty table by the windows. Anyone walking into the Union who happened to glance up would see him sitting like a display advertising sexy football players. With his ball cap spun around bill backward, a shock of dark blond hair poking out of the hole where he adjusted its size, he exuded an attractive boyishness a person would have to be blind to miss. He’d pushed up the sleeves on his gray hoodie, exposing muscular forearms that begged for a fingertip tour. His massive shoulders and back strained the fabric covering them, drawing attention to his size. His torso arrowed down to a pair of well-loved jeans that fit his ass to perfection while showing off his long legs. Axel, Drake, and Chessly were right: Callahan O’Reilly was easy to look at.
Snagging the leg of a chair with the toe of his sneaker, he tugged it away from the table and set his backpack on it, taking the seat beside it. I dropped my backpack in the other empty seat between us and pulled the chair closer so I could rummage around inside for the notebook I needed. By the time I’d gathered my materials, Callahan had his iPad booted up and was eyeing me expectantly.
“I still don’t see why we had to meet. I could have scanned these and sent them to you during my break this morning. You would have had them when you finished practice.” I puffed at a stray lock of my hair that had escaped my headband.
“Since this is the first time I’ve asked for your notes, I wanted to be sure I’d understand them. You need to walk me through them for that.” Though his tone sounded sincere, when I flicked my gaze up from my notes, I caught the mischief dancing in his eyes.
“I don’t believe you, but since we’re here—” I turned my notebook so he could see the words right side up, sorta, with the thing resting mostly sideways between us. “I’ve highlighted the parts I have confidence Dair is going to ask about in green. The ideas I think he might ask about I’ve highlighted in orange. The rest that’s plain is what he lectured on that’s interesting to me that I want to remember. From experience in Dair’s other classes, I’m pretty sure that info won’t be on the quiz.”
For a long minute, he stared down at my notes. “Do you always do this much work for class?”
“I have goals, Hotshot. Goals that require another two years beyond my undergrad at least. I’m going to need scholarships for law school, which means I need to make top grades while I’m here.” With a shrug, I said, “Freshman year, I took a class on how to be a successful college student. One of the modules was notetaking and studying your notes. Rereading and highlighting class notes as soon after a lecture as possible was one of the strategies. So far, it’s worked for me.”
“Let me guess—you have a 4.0.”
“Lucky you to be paired with me, huh?” I shot him a smug grin.
A naughty smile broke over his features, and I think his voice dropped an octave. “Oh yeah, but not for your GPA.”
Beneath the table, I crossed one knee over the other and willed myself not to react to that voice. “Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”
He leaned forward on those delicious forearms. “It means I get to study with the hottest girl in class.”
With a snort, I shook my head. “Save the flirting for your ‘jersey chasers,’ O’Reilly. I don’t get involved with study partners, especially study partners who are also jocks.”
What the hell? Callahan O’Reilly thinks I’m hot?
“I prefer ‘football player.’” He winked. “And those were your rules before you met me.”
“Cocky, much?” I intended it as an insult, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate and smiled at him instead.
For a long moment, we stared into each other’s eyes.
“It’s not cocky when I can back it up.”
“Riiight,” I drawled. But the intensity of those mesmerizing sea-blue eyes had me dropping my gaze to the pages in front of me. “What Dair was on about on Friday was the sociopolitical aspects of readers’ growing access to fiction during the Regency.”
“Uh-huh.” Callahan leaned over the table to see where I pointed on my notes. “This will be a whole lot easier if we rearrange a few things.”
Before I could ask, he stood and moved my backpack into his vacated seat, pulled the empty one around beside me, and sat close enough that I could smell the musky, rain-shower-infused scent of whatever soap he used. He set up the keyboard on his iPad and started typing in notes as if sitting together this way was an everyday occurrence. The four-top was a standard card table size, so if I tried to put some space between us, I’d have to scoot around the side, and we’d be back to square one.
I had to wonder if the guy played chess.
The side of me closest to him heated from my shoulder to my knee, and I struggled to concentrate on explaining the notes to him. Nodding and adding info to the open screen on his machine, he seemed completely oblivious to my distress. When he pointed to a line on my page that I’d marked in orange and I leaned forward to see it better, he shifted in his chair. The shift, of course, caused him to slide even closer to me. It meant I couldn’t point out anything on my notes without brushing lightly along his arm. If I uncrossed my legs, my thigh would touch his from hip to knee.
Yet if I said anything about his subtle come-on, I’d play right into his game. Damn it. I did not want to be attracted to him. Such a dumbass move had heartbreak written all over it—highlighted in green, no less. If only he’d stop with the smart questions and insightful comments, ideas I had no choice but to write in the margins of my notes because I hadn’t thought of them, and they were brilliant. Why couldn’t he fit the “dumb jock” stereotype? I could ignore his sexy good looks easily then. But paired with those eyes that seemed to see inside me and that brain that could keep up with mine? Callahan O’Reilly was the whole incredible package.
Tittering giggles alerted us to the interruption seconds before it arrived.
“Hi, Callahan. We saw you in the window.”
“It’s Sunday, Callahan. Want to go out and play?”
“Hey, Callahan. Whatcha doing?”
The girls’ singsong delivery grated on my ears worse than twigs scratching at a window pane. There it was. The one thing reminding me that football wasn’t the only thing Hotshot played. The jersey chasers couldn’t have timed their appearance better.
“Those are pretty much all of Friday’s notes.” When I uncrossed my legs to scoot my chair away from him, my thigh brushed his, and a lick of fire singed the skin beneath my jeans. At the contact I might have sucked in a tiny gasp of air. Fortunately, Callahan couldn’t hear it over the cacophony of freshman fangirl noise surrounding us.
“Jamaica—”
I couldn’t decipher his tone. A warning? Distress? Didn’t matter. It was time for me to take advantage of the exit opportunity his fan club’s timely arrival offered. Accidentally bumping one of the girls who stood directly behind me, I said, “Excuse me. I was just leaving.”
She took the hint, and I stood and walked around the table to the chair where Callahan had deposited my pack. I slid my notebooks inside, shoved my pen behind my ear, and hiked the strap of my pack over my shoulder. “See you in class, Hotshot.” I glanced around at the group of girls whose eyes never strayed from him.
His chair screeched against the linoleum floor as he hastily stood up from it. “Wait up, and I’ll walk you to your dorm.”
“You know you’d rather spend the rest of your afternoon with people who know how to have fun, right, Callahan?”
Somehow I’d missed Tory Miller in the midst of the posse. What I didn’t miss was the dark expression that marred Hotshot’s face when she made herself known.
“Hey, Tory.” At last he gave the girls his attention. “Ladies.”
“Enjoy the rest of your afternoon,” I directed at Callahan. Then because I couldn’t help myself, I gave a little rolling four-fingered wave to his fan club. “Toodles,” I said to them and took off before any of them, especially Tory, could respond.