Never, not in a million years, had I expected to look up and see her. Maybe she’d always been hiding in the rows of blank faces that pretended to pay attention to me. Oh, the female students paid attention to me, they always had. Even when I’d had the bright gold ring wrapped around the third finger on my left hand. That had never mattered to them. But I took it off about a year ago, and the attention hadn’t wavered in the slightest, like they hadn’t noticed it in the first place. And at no point had any of them tempted me.

Not when Ashley McInerney, the nitwit who could never manage to turn off her phone, had offered to blow me under my desk in order to get a passing grade; or when Bridgett whatever-her-name-was leaned over and shoved her admittedly excellent cleavage in my face under the guise of handing me her essay. It hadn’t been the cleavage that clued me in her to offer. It had been the handwritten note slipped between the second and third pages with her phone number and the days her daddy would be out of town on it.

None of them, not even the other four who’d practically laid themselves out on my desk, had given me even the slightest hesitation in kicking them out into the empty hallway. None of them had been worth losing my job over, or worse, desecrating the memory of Diana.

But she, Add, if that was even her real name, stared back at me in a room full of people who had no clue that I knew exactly how her pussy tasted and how it clamped down like a vice when she came. That she liked a touch of pain with her pleasure, just like I did. And the worst part was that I couldn’t break her stare, like she’d shackled my eyes to hers so that they couldn’t stay away from hers for more than a few moments.

The rest of class, I don’t even know what the hell I talked about, but nobody was giving me strange looks, so it must have made sense to them. When I told them to read a chapter from the King book and paraphrase it in a way that made sense with whatever work they had in progress, I went to my desk and sat, making sure my eyes stayed far, far away from that middle seat. But without lifting my gaze, I could see her foot swinging at an even tempo.

Her shoes looked like torture devices, starkly incongruous from the sedate clothing she wore, the bright red spiked heel making a slow arc in the air as she kicked her foot back and forth, never breaking rhythm. I opened the flap of my messenger and pulled out the folder for this class, Creative Writing 201—Fall Semester 2015, and flipped to the student roster, following my pointer finger down the large list.

What a fucking idiot, like she told you her real name.

I ignored that sly, mocking voice in my own head and filtered through the names. Only a few were close, Adriane Whitfield, Adele Morello and Addison Brooks, though I’d met Addison once before, so I could rule her out. Filtering out the sounds of pages turning, pens scratching on paper and the occasional cough or whisper, I ran my finger over both names like it would somehow answer the question for me. Like the black ink on the white paper gave any clues as to which one had the same clawing hands and silk-soft skin and perfect tits, the way the right one had a ruby barbell piercing on it that I flicked with my tongue until she was keening beneath me.

Damn it, damn it, damn it. I rubbed my forehead, banishing those memories to the far recesses of my mind.

She didn’t seem like an Adriane Whitfield; that sounded too preppy, like a girl who was highly unlikely to sleep with her teacher. Giving the paper one last glance, I snapped my eyes up and she was looking straight at me, those moss green eyes lasered onto me in a way that tightened the skin on my scalp and damn it all to hell, made my cock twitch. Breaking her stare, I looked around to make sure nobody else was looking, and they weren’t, thank God.

“Okay, class. Anyone want to tell me what they can apply to their work in progress from the chapter you just read?”

A few hands shot up, the same four that always did when I asked for volunteers, and I nodded my chin at the guy to my left, nodding when he mentioned something fairly insightful. With my mind only half paying attention to what a couple other people said, I looked down at my watch. Only five minutes left, and with her eyes burning through the skin on the side of my face, I dismissed the class.

In my peripheral vision, I saw her slowly stand, making precisely drawn out movements to put her notebook back into a black leather messenger bag.

“Miss Morello?” I said, holding my breath while I waited to see if I’d guessed correctly. She turned toward me, all polite expression on her face, but her eyes glowed with visible triumph. Then she pulled my glasses from where they hung on her shirt, biting one end so that the brown arm disappeared between her bee-stung lips, and walked toward me.

When she approached my desk, I leaned back in my chair, and gave a pointed look at the glasses. Slowly pulling the tip from her mouth, Adele smirked when she tossed them onto a stack of papers. “Yes, Professor Easton?”

Her voice. It was different today than it had been last weekend when she moaned and gasped into my ear.

“Do you have a few moments after this to speak with me in my office?”

“Why? Have I been a bad girl?” she whispered, then slicked her tongue over her bottom lip.

“Knock it off,” I said just loud enough for her to hear me, keeping my face perfectly pleasant in case anyone was looking in my direction. It didn’t really matter, the room had all but emptied out. Nobody stayed late unless they needed to talk to me.

Adele leaned a hip against the corner of my desk and rolled her eyes at me. “I’m just kidding, Nathan. And yes, I have time after this. I have a free hour after your class before my next one.”

“You call me that again in this classroom, and I will kick your ass out without a second thought. Is that something I’m going to need to do?”

Surprisingly she straightened, shaking her head. “No. That won’t be necessary.”

“Good. Meet me in my office in ten minutes. Do you know where it is?”

The smile that curved her lips made something sink in my stomach.

“Of course I do.”

Of course she did. I stood, all but dismissing her with the completely unamused look I gave her. It just made her smile grow.

“Ten minutes, Miss Morello.”

“Yes, Professor Easton,” she whispered and gave me a mock salute with two black polish-covered fingers. Adele sauntered away from my desk. Such a cliché word, such a trite description for the way she moved, loose-limbed and long-legged, her hips pivoting to the side with each movement.

Well shit. Now what the fuck was I going to do?

Chapter Five

The walk from the classroom building to my office was short, but the fact that I was keeping my eyes peeled for Adele the entire time made it feel eight times longer. September was the busiest time on campus, all the students still high on the social aspect of starting a new semester, none of the pressures of midterms or finals having started yet. I dodged someone on a scooter, and glared at him when he just shrugged his shoulder at me.

Occasionally, there were days when I wondered why I put up with the bullshit at a state university when we were close enough to many of the Ivy League schools on the east coast. The true intellectuals went there, for looming, greenery-covered brick buildings and history so deeply embedded that you could fairly smell it just walking on the grounds.

But Eastons were just as embedded in Northern University, my father still serving on the board after retiring as a professor in the business program, so it wasn’t as if I really had a choice. He already thought I was a fuck-up, majoring and teaching in the arts, rather than something that garnered respect. And then Diana, well … that had only served as more ammunition.