Otherworldly Bad Boys: Three Complete Novels (45 page)

I started for him.

As I got closer, I realized he was only half dressed. His chest was bare. He wore a pair of plaid pajama pants that hung low on his hips. He was chiseled and perfect, just like in my dream.

“Miss Moss?” he whispered.

I climbed three steps onto his porch. I took a step toward him.

He took a step toward me.

Lightning flashed.

I backed up, suddenly unsure of myself. What was I doing? Why was I here?

I collided with the stone pillar that held up his wraparound porch. I leaned against it, grateful for its support. It would keep me upright.

He swallowed. He was all shadows and angles in the darkness, the swell of his shoulder, the line of his jaw.

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, he was closer to me.

I could smell him again. The cologne wasn’t quite as strong anymore. There was a hint of something beneath it, his real smell, sweat and spice and desire.

Thunder crashed all around us. The world reverberated with it.

He was close enough that I felt his breath on my cheek.

I looked up at him, my pulse beginning to thrum.

He put his hand on my neck, and for a second I thought he meant to strangle me. My heart sped up at the thought of it, my body tensed to fight him.

But it was a caress, his fingers splayed over my skin, stroking my sensitive skin.

And he pinned me against the pillar as his lips came for mine.

I slammed my eyes shut again.

He kissed me.

The rain poured out of the sky.

I felt the air change as the humidity released itself, fat droplets of water pattering against the ground around us, against the roof of the porch over us, scattered and pounding, echoing my heartbeat.

His tongue was in my mouth. It felt like bliss, like release, like ecstasy. I moaned.

His voice was a tattered whisper. “What are you doing here, Miss Moss?”

I licked my lips.

His hand slid away from me, fingers trailing over the tops of my breasts.

And then I ran.

I stumbled down the steps, into his yard. Rain soaked into my nightgown, pelted my skin. I yanked up the sopping white skirts of it and kept running. I didn’t look back.

CHAPTER FOUR

Carter

I went after her. I didn’t think about it. I just did it, running into the summer rainstorm. She was ahead of me, her white nightgown brilliant in the darkness.

“Teagan!” I yelled.

She didn’t hear me. Or she didn’t respond if she did.

And when I got to the sidewalk, I couldn’t see her anymore.

I stood there, turning in a circle, my hands in my wet hair. Where could she have gone? Had she run away that quickly?

I wanted her back.

No.

I shouldn’t want that.

Rain pelted me, running down my bare chest, drenching my pajama pants.

She was a student, for fuck’s sake. She couldn’t come wandering to my house in the middle of the night and kiss me on my porch.

Maybe I’d kissed her.

Whatever.

The point was, someone might have seen us. One of my neighbors, pushing aside the curtains, peering out into the night, could have spied me pressed up against her on my porch, her soft, warm body trapped between mine and the pillar.

I dropped my hands. Dammit. What was happening to me?

I wasn’t even sure why I’d gone onto the porch in the first place.

Something had woken me up. I’d thought it was wanting a glass of water, so I’d gone to the kitchen.

But once down there, I’d walked right past the sink. I hadn’t even bothered to get a glass.

I’d gone to the door, opened it, and stepped outside.

And when I’d seen her...

This wasn’t like me. I was generally fairly in control of myself. I didn’t usually jump women who appeared on my porch in the middle of the night in their nightgowns.

Oh God, the nightgown. The wind had blown it back against her body. I’d seen all the lines and curves of her. I shuddered. I shouldn’t be thinking about that. I should never have kissed her. Why had I done it?

I wasn’t sure. It was obvious that she’d wanted me too, though.

Wasn’t it?

Why had I been so sure that her arrival had been an offering of herself, an initiation of intimacy? She hadn’t said anything. She hadn’t touched me.

But I knew it, just the same. Something in the way she looked at me, the way she leaned against the pillar, her breasts jutting out, her lips parted. She wanted me. I wanted her.

Dammit.

“Carter?”

I brushed rain out of my face. A woman with an umbrella was walking down the sidewalk. “Adelaide?”

She stopped next to me, holding her umbrella over my head.

Adelaide Surber, the dean of students, had abruptly stopped sleeping with me in the late spring of last semester. Since then, things had been a little strained between us, but we were generally still civil to each other. I hadn’t been alone with her in months.

She looked the same, her face regal and aristocratic, if a bit weathered. She had a firm body, sturdy and sculpted because she ran four miles every day. There was nothing soft about her. She was a tall woman, and she stood eye-to-eye with me.

“What are you doing out in the rain?”

I struggled to think of a good excuse.

“It wouldn’t have anything to do with that girl I saw running up the street in her nightgown, would it?”

“You saw her?”

She pressed her lips together in a firm line. “What are you doing, Carter? You must realize how important the ritual is to all of us.”

“I do,” I said, feeling defensive. There was no way I would jeopardize the ritual.

“She didn’t look happy,” said Adelaide. “The girl is to remain satisfied, or she’ll try to escape from us.”

I swallowed. “She just...” I found I couldn’t quite find the words to explain to my former lover that I’d been lip locked with a student on my porch. “I don’t know what happened.”

“You leave her alone,” she said. “I’ve already heard talk about the way you embarrassed her in front of her entire class.”

“What?” I said. “I do that at the beginning of every semester. It’s a very powerful illustration of the method.”

“The method.”

“Stanislavsky,” I said. “It’s a way of acting that—”

“I don’t care about your acting methods,” she said. “What I do care about are whispers from others that one of my professors is making
public
comments of a sexual nature about a freshman.”

“Sexual?” I shook my head. “There wasn’t any...” Oh. Maybe I’d kind of pointed out the size of her breasts to the class. But seriously, anyone who’d looked at her had noticed her body. It was obvious that she was an attractive woman—girl. Fuck. I cringed. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, you weren’t.” She leaned close. “In fact, it seems to me that you seem to be doing a lot of thinking with a part of your body that doesn’t have any place in education.”

“It’s not like that.” I was only kissing her on my porch and thinking about the outline of her body underneath her nightgown. That was
completely
innocent. I rubbed my face. “I’m sorry.”

“You’ll get your dick in her soon enough,” said Adelaide. “Patience is a virtue.” She looked at me in disgust.

I stepped away from her, even though it meant that I was outside the protection of the umbrella. “I would
never
—”

Her caustic laugh cut me off. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Rain pelted me, wet needles on my bare skin. My pajamas were soaked through, clinging to my thighs. “You know, Adelaide, you’re the one who broke it off between us. I don’t know if you’ve got the right to be jealous.”

She laughed again. “Not jealous, Carter. I suppose it took me too long to see you for what you actually are.”

I didn’t like her tone. “And what am I?”

“You’re a glutton.” Her eyes narrowed. “And you’re a cocky, full-of-yourself bastard. Nothing’s more important to you than getting what you want.”

Was that supposed to offend me? I shrugged. “I don’t think I hid any of that from you.”

“No.” She drew herself up. “I hid it from myself.” She began to walk past me. “Leave the girl alone until the ritual.”

I glared after her. She had no right to judge me. Here she was walking the streets after midnight—Wait. “Adelaide,” I called after her, “what are you doing up so late?”

She stopped and turned. “A meeting of the society.”

“I wasn’t invited?” That didn’t make any sense.

“It was a meeting about you,” she said. “Some doubts had been expressed about your being the right man for the job.”

A sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. “What?”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “most of the others thought you’d do just fine. You’ll perform the ritual. There’s no going back now. Don’t screw it up.”

* * *

Teagan

He hadn’t even looked at me since it happened. Not that he’d been looking at me before. But there had been one class since then. This was the second. And it seemed as if he was going out of his way to pretend I didn’t exist.

Of course, I supposed that pretending wouldn’t be
method
enough for him. He’d probably convinced himself with certainty that I was a nonentity.

We were working in groups on the stage. I was with four of my fellow acting students, and we were going around in a circle saying, “Bizarre balzac bazooka.” Seriously.

Even though the exercise was silly, it had a point. Professor Alexander said that actors often relied too much on words to express what they were feeling. He said that we should be able to convey our objectives in a scene by our body language and tone. Even with nonsense words, an audience should be able to understand what we wanted.

Professor Alexander wandered through the space, yelling out objectives to us. “To accuse,” he said. “To your left, bizarre balzac bazooka, accuse the person next to you.”

The guy in my circle turned to his left, and said, “Bizarre balzac bazooka,” in his best accusing voice.

It went around the circle.

As an activity, I had to admit it was kind of fun. It wasn’t like anything that I’d done in my high school acting classes, nor in the community theater that I used to perform in. There, things were much less about excellence and authenticity and more about getting people to show up reliably for rehearsals.

It was my turn. I took a breath, ready to accuse the person next to me.

“To seduce,” rang out Professor Alexander’s voice. It was right behind my head.

I turned to look at him.

He wasn’t looking at me, but he was standing behind me. I took a deep breath. I turned to the person next to me, who happened to be another girl. That actually made me feel a little better about the whole thing. It was less icky. I winked at her.

She grinned back.

I threw my head back, trailing my fingers over my neck and shoulder slowly. “Bizarre. Balzac. Bazooka,” I said in my most breathy voice.

I laughed, and the other people in my circle did too.

And then I caught a glance at Professor Alexander out of the corner of my eye. He was staring at me.

I raised my gaze to meet his deliberately.

He swallowed. “To apologize,” he said.

“But I didn’t get to seduce,” said the girl next to me.

“To apologize,” he repeated quietly, still staring into my eyes.

I looked away.

Professor Alexander raised his voice. “To your left. To apologize. Bizarre balzac bazooka.” He moved away from us.

The circle continued.

After we went around the circle two more times with different objectives, Professor Alexander told us to stop what we were doing. He had us come back to our seats. He said he had an announcement to make.

I settled in a seat next to the girl I’d “seduced.” I watched Professor Alexander. Had he been trying to apologize to me? Was he sorry about what had happened between us?

“All right,” he said, “as some of you know, I also teach the senior directing seminar. There are four students in that class, and they’ll each be directing a play, and you are required to be part of it. Auditions will start tomorrow evening. You will all be cast in some way or another, I will see to that. And then class meetings like this one will be over, and you’ll simply go to rehearsals for the plays from then on.”

Did I want him to apologize? Was I sorry it had happened? I’d felt like I was possessed that night. Maybe it had been the storm. Maybe it had been the dream. I wasn’t sure. But I hadn’t felt in control.