It was a good thing they’d had so much luck hobnobbing during the cocktail hour, because it looked like at dinner they were striking out.
Stomach sinking, Serena leaned in close to Cole as they approached their assigned table, murmuring under her breath, “I don’t recognize any of those people.”
“It’s not full yet,” he said, all reassurance, and urged her on.
She smiled as she pulled out a chair. Introductions were made, names that only vaguely registered as she kept half an eye on the front of the room. The entire administration of the school was here, and nearly all of the senior faculty. All the people who would likely have a say in the admissions process—or who would at least be listened to if they happened to put in a good word. Restless, she shifted in her seat. It was too much to hope that any of them would choose to join them here. The room was practically overflowing with people who had more of a claim on their time. But they were sprinkled around, scattering themselves at different tables.
And then the sole remaining chair beside hers pulled out.
She jerked her head up, her gaze traveling the length of a navy pinstripe suit before settling on twinkling blue eyes.
She smacked her knee on the underside of the table in her scramble to rise. “Mr. Trousseau.”
He waved at her dismissively, motioning for her to sit back down. “Grayson, please. Serena, right?”
“Yes.” Why did the word have to come out so breathless?
He nodded to Cole. “And Dr. Stafford?”
“Cole.”
Reaching across the table, he introduced himself to the other couples seated beside them.
Couples. It made a spot light up in Serena’s brain. “Is someone joining you?” She stopped herself from saying wife. “We can get another chair, or—”
“No, just me.” He shot her a rueful smile, like there was a story there. But clearly not one he wanted to dwell on. He addressed the table as a whole. “So what brings you all here tonight?”
As the man on the other side of Grayson chimed in about being an alumnus, Serena took the opportunity to look to Cole, not even bothering to mask her glee. Less than surreptitiously, she nudged her elbow toward Grayson as she raised her brows in disbelief. They’d already managed to make a good impression earlier, but getting to have a whole meal with this man? It was beyond her wildest dreams.
Cole smiled in reply, but it wasn’t quite as unreserved in its approval as it could’ve been.
She let her brows lower, mouthing, “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” As if to prove it, he placed his hand over hers beneath the table, giving it a quick squeeze, and for a second, she almost forgot what she was so excited about.
Worse—or maybe better—he didn’t take his hand away. He just left it there, broad palm atop hers, the stroking of his thumb sending shivers of warmth shooting up the bare skin of her arms.
“Are you cold?” Grayson’s voice interrupted her reverie, and she twisted around, blinking in confusion as the man tugged at the lapels of his jacket. By way of explanation, he said, “They always keep it precisely the wrong temperature at these things. Two warm for us men and too cold for the ladies in their lovely dresses.”
Oh good Lord. He was offering her his jacket, wasn’t he?
If anything, she was overheated, and Cole’s hand clamping down only intensified it.
“No, I’m fine, thank you,” she choked out.
At that, Cole’s grip relaxed, and she sat there, fully waiting for him to let go the way he always did. Every time they danced too close and he made her heart soar. He always took it back, or worse, said it was a mistake.
But not this time.
Her breath went shallow. All around her, conversation resumed. She participated in it, even. But her focus just kept coming back to the impossible. The inexplicable. The hidden play of fingers against her skin.
Let. Go.
Cole kept willing his own ruddy hand to do his bidding, but it was no use.
Serena looked and smelled so good, she was sitting there beside him in that slip of a dress, and he never should’ve touched her in the first place. But her flesh was as smooth and soft as he remembered it. He wanted to laugh. One little touch, one moment of reassurance, and it had been the worst kind of mistake.
He didn’t know how to stop. Especially not when—
Grayson laughed at some inanity from one of the other women seated at the table. Cole gritted his teeth. He was playing nice tonight. For Serena’s and Max’s sake, he was on his very best behavior. Charming and dapper and not punching smug, self-important blond deans of admission in their perfect fucking teeth.
Jesus. The man didn’t have to just be powerful, at least to Serena’s gaze. He had to be attractive, too. Educated. She was hanging on his every word, and Cole’s grip on her kept incrementally tightening.
He cursed himself bitterly. Jealous, ridiculous fool. How many times had he pushed her away? And now he physically couldn’t seem to stop holding her hand, and why? Because another man was paying attention to her? Offering her his jacket, even?
Cole’s stomach shuddered and sank. He should’ve thought to do that. All that creamy skin left exposed by that dress—of course she had to be freezing. Had he been thinking, he could’ve had her wrapped up in his coat and in his scent, but that was the effect she had on him. His brain went to toffee, sticky and slow.
He forgot to think of all the reasons he needed to let go.
Finally, he was saved by servers coming around. As a salad plate was placed in front of him, his fingers unlocked. He pulled back and straightened his spine, unable to look at her for the shame of it. Every time, the loss of her touch was a near-physical pain, and he kept forcing himself to experience it. Dancing far too close to her flame. Sooner or later, he was going to burn.
By the time the entrees arrived, he’d more or less recovered his composure, though he still gripped his silverware hard enough to bend the metal. Grayson presided over the table, coaxing people’s entire life stories from them as if it were his job. Maybe it was.
Cole’s knife skidded across his plate with an indecorous screech as the man turned to Serena.
“And what about you, my dear?” He darted a glance at Cole. “Your companion here said you were a teacher?”
“Yes.” She set her utensils down and brushed a lock of golden hair behind her ear, trailing her fingertips down the column of her throat to fiddle with her necklace. “Seventh grade. Public school, though.” She said it half apologetically, as though that were something to be ashamed about.
Cole frowned. If anything, she should be proud of what she did. He opened his mouth, about to say as much.
But Grayson spoke first, neatly sidestepping the issue altogether. “And is that something you’ve always wanted to do?”
“Since I was in middle school myself.” She glanced away, eyes taking on that particular gleam they got when she was getting worked up about her profession. “I had an amazing teacher. One of those who really inspires you, you know?”
Heads around the table nodded, and Cole leaned forward. This wasn’t a story he’d heard before. Probably because he’d never asked.
“My sister, Penny.” Her voice cracked by half a fraction, but she hid it well. “She was an honors student. Always the best at everything. She had her flaws, sure, but at school at least...” A ruefulness colored her smile. “Let’s say she wasn’t an easy act to follow. Teachers expected me to pick things up as quickly as she did, and when I didn’t, they always seemed so disappointed. But not this teacher. She made me realize—” She cut herself off, throat bobbing. “Teaching isn’t about the kids who could’ve done it on their own. It’s about the ones who need you. Who need to be noticed or encouraged.” She shrugged. “I want to be that person, and teaching where I do, working with the kids I do, I get to change people’s lives.”
The room was loud, practically rattling with all the clinking and chatter. But the silence that descended over their table seemed to wash it away. Cole swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry.
This woman. He wanted to take her hand all over again, consequences and temptations be damned. He wanted to worship her.
He wanted to give to her what she was apparently so prepared to give to everyone else.
Self-consciousness seemed to steal over her, and she dropped her gaze, picking up her fork and poking at her potatoes with the tines.
Grayson recovered first. “Noble,” he said, though there was something strained to his voice.
Cole shook his head. His throat was still parched, and he grasped for words. The only ones he could find were “You’re amazing.”
Whirling around, she turned the full power of her vivid green eyes on him, making him feel pinned. He curled his fingers hard into a fist. It had come out too reverent, too awed by half, and yet it didn’t begin to encapsulate a fraction of what she did to him.
She inspired him. She drew him out of himself—made him want to teach and love and be part of the world again. Part of her world.
For a moment, the room around them receded, their gazes locked. And he could do it. He could touch her. He could let himself.
But before his hands could begin to uncurl, Grayson cleared his throat. “And, Cole, you said you were a doctor?”
Cole’s mind was a haze, all his thoughts turned to this slip of a woman who brought him to his knees, who threatened to change his life. The moment, crystalline and perfect, shattered around him.
He tore his gaze away. “I...” He tucked his hand beneath the table, jabbing into the meat of his thigh as if that could clear his thoughts. He shook his head. “No. A professor. I was a professor.”
In another life.
“Oh? And now?”
Nothing. The same, stale anger of the last few years nipped at his heels. He did nothing.
But then it came to him.
Strangled, his very lungs threatening to close, he said, “I do some tutoring.”
And it was the most satisfying thing he’d done in years.
Grayson’s brow furrowed, and Serena laughed, a high, clear sound that soothed something inside of Cole.
After that, the rest of the dinner hour passed in a blur. Small talk about careers gave way to theater and the new show at the Art Institute and the mayor’s latest scandal. Finally, someone stepped up to a podium at the front of the room. With gratitude, Cole tuned the parade of speakers and presenters out, the meaningless self-congratulation washing over him until—
“And now,” a voice boomed over the microphone, “we invite you to relax and enjoy the musical stylings of the Tony Stephens Band.”
Out of nowhere, the room erupted in music. Cole started, dessert fork clattering to his plate as he whipped around.
In his distraction, an entire band had set up. He recognized the tune, an old jazz standard Helen would have loved, would have forced him to dance to, and he would have gone. For her he would have.
She wasn’t the only one.
He turned back to Serena, and his heart was an impassable terrain of barbed wire and mud, littered with tire tracks and blood. But her eyes were beautiful. They were hopeful.
Right until the moment they fell.
Her mouth struggled to keep from curling down into a frown. Looking just to the side of him, she said, “You probably need a few more therapy appointments before you can dance, huh?”
Bollocks. He’d been so enraptured, so consumed, he’d nearly forgotten. His hand went instinctively for the crutches resting against the corner of his chair, the throbbing ache in his knee resurging.
Whatever had been rising in him fell, too.
“Probably.” He nodded, his voice strangled.
But he hadn’t known how strained it could become.
“If I may,” Grayson said. “I know a step or two.”
Something complicated happened around Serena’s mouth. She twisted around in her seat to face the man, the pretty pink of her flush sliding down her neck toward her chest. She glanced to Cole, a question to the tilt of her chin.
It was like watching their moment fall away all over again.
“Please,” he said, the words acid, “don’t let me hold you back.”
There was reluctance in Serena’s posture as she stood. As she took the hand of another man. She glanced one last time at Cole. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
Tethered in place in so many ways, bound to where he sat, he watched them walk away.
And something inside him snapped.
Well, at least Serena knew what it was like to turn into a pillar of salt now.
The whole way out to the impromptu dance floor set up in front of the band, she kept taking backward glances. It was futile. She knew that. But the look on Cole’s face had been so miserable as he’d urged her to go. He understood how much securing Max’s place at Upton meant to her, and he hadn’t tried to hold her back. He clearly hadn’t been happy about it, though.
Her heart tugged hard at her chest as Grayson held out his arms. She stepped into them, leaving more than enough room for the Holy Spirit, her hand stiff where it rested on his shoulder. It was so wrong to be gazing past him, staring back at their table, at the twin points of those dark, brooding eyes that she could practically feel boring into her.
To go even more rigid in this mockery of a dance when she watched that figure rise and start a slow, aching walk toward the door.
Warm fingers tightened around her palm, and she sucked in a breath as she refocused.
“Let him stew,” Grayson said.
She felt like something you’d find stuck to the bottom of your shoe.
“I’m sorry, I—” She didn’t even know what kind of excuse she could hope to make.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to make one at all. “It’s fine.” Grayson’s smile was kind, his eyes clear. “You clearly have a...complicated relationship.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“I wasn’t trying to show him up or steal you away.”
The thought had scarcely entered her mind. It said more than she cared to admit that it hadn’t—Grayson was handsome and well spoken, effortlessly charming in a way Cole had to work so hard to be. He’d been courteous and quietly flirtatious, and a couple of weeks ago, she would’ve been doodling his name in the margins of her notebooks. But not now.
He squeezed her hand. “You looked like you wanted to dance, and your date couldn’t. That’s all this is.”
Her brows ascended toward her hairline. “I’m not sure if I should be offended by that or not.”
“Not at all. Under different circumstances, we would be having a very different conversation right now.” His tone flashed dark for a fraction of a moment, suffusing with a low heat, and wow. Under different circumstances, she’d be having that same conversation with him in a heartbeat. “But,” he said, voice lightening as he led her into a slow circle in time to the beat, “you have an applicant in the family, and even if you didn’t...” He glanced behind her, and she couldn’t resist now any more than she’d been able to before.
Cole had made it to the door, but not the one she’d feared—the one that would take him out. Maybe to the street and maybe to a cab. Maybe someplace she couldn’t follow. Instead, he’d headed toward a set of open French doors leading out onto a balcony.
And he stood there, silhouetted in moonlight, so alone and so beautiful she ached.
“Oh.” With a wet, shaky noise, she swallowed against the pull in her throat.
The corner of Grayson’s mouth flickered upward, drawing her gaze back to him. “That’s exactly why I’m not trying to steal you away.”
“I appreciate that.”
She appreciated his saying it, too. After all the times Cole had touched her only to pull away—after the kiss that ended before it had hardly begun—she’d started to worry this was all in her head. Cole was a lightning burst of intensity, jagged brilliance that blinded her every time it struck. He was seared into her vision now, and she wasn’t the only one who could see it.
This line they’d been toeing at the edges of for weeks now—they had to either step across it or back away for real. She knew which she’d prefer, but it was time for him to decide.
And she was going to confront him about it. Tonight.
“I should—” She lifted her hand from Grayson’s shoulder.
Only for a strong grasp to surround her wrist, returning it to where it was.
“Like I said.” His grin flickered. “You should let him stew. Come on.” The music shifted tempo, drifting into another song. “Dance with me.”
“I thought I just did.”
“That barely counted, and you know it.”
She did. She also knew that if Cole’s expression had been miserable when she’d first walked off with this man, he’d be seething by now.
Maybe Grayson was right. Maybe she should let him see her enjoying herself with someone else for a little longer.
“All right,” she said, tilting her chin up.
His smile this time was unfettered, his eyes twinkling. He flexed his fingers at her waist, taking a firmer hand in leading her around the floor. “You’re a beautiful, intelligent woman, Serena. Any man would be lucky to have you on his arm.”
They would.
She kept telling herself that as they danced—two more songs and then three. But when he cocked a brow and offered her a fourth, she shook her head. He let her go this time, and with a little bow of thanks, she took her leave.
Then with her shoulders straight, her head held high, she floated her way across the room. And toward a man whose eyes looked like the very darkest kind of storm.