PleasuringtheProfessor

Angela Claire

Liam Conner was once a literary darling, but now he’s trying
to drink himself to death in the seclusion of his mountain cabin. He’s not much
interested in sex after the personal tragedy that ended his career, but his
libido kicks into high gear when a beautiful blonde shows up in the middle of a
snowstorm.

Grad student Clarie Lewis is out to nab an interview with
the reclusive subject of her thesis. When Liam throws political correctness to
the wind and offers to give her an interview if she’ll sleep with him, she’s
not sure whether he’s trying to drive her back out into the snow or if he
really
is
just horny. Both, probably.

Clarie doesn’t need to sleep with anyone for a grade. But
she finds herself alone in a remote cabin with a man whose prose she’s been
analyzing and appreciating for as long as she can remember. The fact that he’s
gorgeous as sin doesn’t hurt either.

Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Ellora’s Cave Publishing

www.ellorascave.com

Pleasuring the Professor

ISBN 9781419939556

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Pleasuring the Professor Copyright © 2012 Angela Claire

Edited by April Chapman

Cover design by Kendra Egert

Photography from Shutterstuck.com

Electronic book publication March 2012

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Clarie threw another log on the fire and pulled up the cowl
of her heavy-duty cable sweater so it covered her jaw and mouth. God, it was
cold. And dark. The sputtering flames provided only a minimum of illumination
to light the pitch-dark cabin. No street lights out in the middle of the Smoky
Mountains to shine through the windows. She’d never seen dark like the dark
that had enveloped her when she’d turned off her car and trudged toward this
cabin.

The snowstorm had hit out of nowhere and before she knew it
she’d been driving into a wall of white. In sheer defense, she’d stopped the
car—stopped it right out there on the deserted road she apparently should not
have taken and was going to kill her friend Ally for suggesting—and it was then
that she saw it. Or rather she didn’t. The road had ended. Dead ended right
into a cabin of some sort up in the distance. She must have taken a wrong turn
somewhere along the way.

Swearing, she’d contemplated turning around, but knew she
probably wouldn’t make it far in this storm. She’d have to wait it out. Doing
so in her car, though, especially since she was running low on gas, didn’t seem
like the best alternative when there was another one perched right in front of
her. The flickering light of what turned out to be the fire going in this cabin
had beckoned. So she’d abandoned her car and headed out into the knee-high
snow.

By the time she’d gotten to the front porch, her hands felt
almost numb from the cold and she was shivering from the icy flakes bombarding
her. Pounding on the door yielded no response, but when she’d tried the latch
she found it open. There was a God.

Stumbling inside, she’d fumbled along the wooden wall for a
light switch, but hadn’t found one and had finally given up, lurching toward
the fire going in the fireplace, sputtering but still alive.

She supposed the owner of this cabin must be somewhere
around here. Fires didn’t light themselves. But she couldn’t worry about that
now.

Dropping her canvas bag on the floor, she kicked off her
boots, and shivering, curled up into a ball on the threadbare rug in front of
the fireplace, hugging her knees. Her teeth were chattering and her clothes
soaking wet. But she was grateful at least to be somewhere she could wait out
the storm.

The banging of the cabin door against the wooden wall a
minute later startled her out of the beginning of a daydream in which she was
warm and dry. She jumped up. “What the—?”

“Who are you?” someone, something, bellowed at her out of
the darkness and the gust of frigid wind that accompanied the open door. The
door slammed shut with the same force it had opened and he—she guessed it was a
he, not an it—advanced until he was within the scanty light of the fire.

“Who are you?” he asked again, not quite as loud, which,
frankly, she appreciated since the mere sight of him was terrifying enough.
Bundled up in some floor-length fur coat, a hood all but obscuring his face,
the guy looked to be about ten feet tall. She didn’t need any overwhelming
audio.

“I’m, ah, I mean my name is, ah, Clarie Lewis,” she
stammered. “I stopped here to get out of the storm. I couldn’t drive through it
anymore.”

“So you thought that gave you a right to barge onto private
property?”

“I didn’t—”

“Save me the excuses. Get out.”

The order was delivered with such finality that for a moment
she was just plain flabbergasted. But then all the frustration of the day, the
wrong turns, the trudge through the freezing snow, the ice seeping through her
new boots, came crashing down on her and she surged to her feet.

“Now, wait a minute. You can’t kick me out of here. There’s
a friggin’ avalanche out there.”

“It’s some snow,” he said derisively.

On her feet, she saw he wasn’t quite the giant she had first
thought. Six three or four, tops. But a lot bigger, of course, than her own
five feet six. Hard to tell with the parka still on, but she bet he outweighed
her by a hundred pounds as well.

“And you can spare me your indignation. Please. It’s my
cabin. Or does private property mean nothing to your type?”

She didn’t venture a guess at his categorization of her
type. Maybe he thought she was a hippie backpacking through the mountains. She
didn’t have a clue.

“I
own
this space. The warmth of that fire.”
Gesturing to the howling clatter beyond the cabin window, he then pointed a
gloved hand toward his chest. “The protection from that wind.
Mine
.”

She shivered as he pulled his gloves off and threw them on a
nearby chair.

“If you want to share any of it, you’ll have to make it
worth my while. What do you have to bargain with?” he asked nonchalantly.

“Bargain with? Of all the insulting—”

Mid-indignant exclamation, it dawned on her that she was
alone with this…this mountain man, in the middle of a monumental snow storm.
Forget about no protection from the elements. She had no protection from him.

And he’d suddenly started talking about what she had to
bargain with? Every Lifetime movie she’d ever seen flashed through her brain.

What the hell had she been thinking wandering into a strange
cabin like this?

She eyed the poker for the fire, trying to calculate whether
she could reach it before he reached her. Since actual odds had never really
stopped Clarie from doing anything, she lunged toward the fireplace, intent on
the poker, and did not even register at first as to why she didn’t reach her
goal. The mountain man had moved so quickly that the poker was out of reach—flung
across the room, in fact—before she could even think of grasping it, and his
fingers were wrapped, tightly, around her wrists, which he held apart as he
stared down at her.

Although most of his face was covered by the sides of the
parka hood, she could see from the apparently proprietary fire light that his
eyes were a deep green. And they bore down on her with an expression that she
had never had any trouble recognizing quite easily from the time she had been
sixteen or thereabouts.

Okay, now she was really scared.

He stared down at her, a smile forming. She noticed
irrelevantly that he had very straight, very white teeth. Dental care
apparently had made its way up to the Smokies.

“Believe me, I’m not that hard up.” He dropped her wrists
and turned away.

Of course, he’d lied. He was that hard up, technically
speaking, if you took into account the amount of time since he’d last touched a
woman. Just the feel of this one’s slender wrists in his own cold hands had
given him a boner, which was why he’d dropped them. A hell of a time for his
libido to kick back into gear after he’d all but given it up for dead.

Even putting aside his own state, however, he had to admit
that this unexpected refugee from the storm looked darned good—despite the
sodden, three-times-too-big sweater and the red nose and the damp reams of
hair. She looked beautiful in fact, with the firelight glinting off her high
cheekbones and lush lips. He knew from long experience that some things
couldn’t be ruined. This was the kind of girl who would probably look beautiful
in a hurricane. A mere snow storm didn’t stand a chance of marring her allure.

So of course he’d ordered her out. He was done with
beautiful things, even ones unexpectedly dropped on his doorstep.

“I’m not talking about your delectable little self as
payment.” He said the words so derisively that it became obvious from the
tightening of her lips and the crossing of her arms over her chest that she
felt a touch of embarrassment, which had been his intent. “I’m talking about a
currency I can use. How much cash do you have on you?”

“You’re going to charge me?”

“Why not? If this was a hotel, you’d expect to pay a hundred
bucks.”

“Not even close. Sixty-five at most.”

“Well, you’re welcome to go find other more affordable
accommodations, then.”

“I don’t have any cash.”

“Okay. Bye bye.”

Shrugging out of his parka, he kicked his boots off and
reached for the remote control that controlled the lights, switching them on.
Rubbing his hands, he made his way to the thermostat as well, cranking up the
heat.

Turning to his little visitor, he saw the harsh light seemed
to have stunned her.

Or something.

“I can’t believe this,” she finally said. “It’s you!”

They stared at each other for a minute and he recognized the
rapt expression on her pretty face, though he hadn’t seen it for quite a while.
Admiration. Great. This was so not happening.

“Liam Conner!” She fumbled for a dog-eared paperback in her
bag and held the back up to him, as if proving the fact of his identity with
the photo thereon.

He looked at it blankly. “Yeah. So what?”

“You’re the reason why I’m here! I came out here to see
you.”

That was troubling. “How the hell did you know I was here?
How did you find me?”

“Well, I didn’t. I mean I was on my way to the university in
town. Since that’s the last place you, ah…”

“Got fired from,” he muttered.

“I thought they might have an address for you. But I decided
to drive through the mountains because there was construction on the freeway
and before I could make it through, I got caught in this snow storm and
wandered into the only shelter I could find. And it turns out you live here!
That’s incredible!”

“Yeah. It’s kismet. So what do you want?”

His curtness, now that she knew who he was, seemed to
unsettle her. She looked around as if something could help her out and then cut
to the chase. “I’m a graduate student at NYU. I’m writing my thesis on you.”

Now that was funny. NYU even. “Really? So what are you, like,
some literary groupie or something?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Too bad.” Leaning back against the counter in the small
kitchen adjoining the main room of the cabin, he eyed her in the same way he
had initially, but she didn’t seem to mind it now. She shook her head, smiling
widely. With the lights on, he could get a really good look at her now. Big
blue eyes, pink rosebud mouth, with the high-cut cheekbones he could make out
even in the firelight. Her hair trailed down to her waist and since it was wet
it was hard to tell the color. It looked blonde though.

And her skin. Dewy white. Soft. How sweet it would be to
touch that skin, to run his fingers along the underside of her sharp little
chin and along that long neck. To soak up all that youth and promise. Just for
a little while.

The fact that he was even thinking about it meant he
obviously hadn’t had enough to drink today. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he’d
had anything. He was falling down on the job.

“God, I absolutely love your work,” she gushed on. “So I
thought I could interview you, maybe, if you wouldn’t mind. Add it as a
postscript to my paper. You’d be doing me a huge favor. It would really help me
clinch an A.”

“Why would I care about that?”

“You, ah, well you…I thought you’d want to help a student in
your field.”

He had been considered a brilliant teacher at one time,
until the accident, that is. But that was a long time ago. Apparently, she
hadn’t gotten the memo.

“I don’t have any students these days.”

She stared back at him for a minute and his eyes dropped,
checking out her long legs and the hint of a really nice rack, which didn’t
help with the boner he still had.

“And if I did, you know the only thing I’d want if somebody
looking like you came to me and asked for my help in getting an A?”

When she didn’t answer, he prompted, “Go on. Guess.”

“I’ve probably come at a bad time,” she offered instead.

“As good a time as any. But come on, Miss Grad Student, drop
all the political correctness bullshit I’m sure you’ve got hammered into you
and take a guess at what a guy like me might really want when a hot little
piece of ass—”

“That’s enough.”

He opened a cupboard and extracted a half-full bottle of
whiskey. Slamming the cupboard door shut with vigor, he took a swig of the
bottle, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

“What? You object to me commenting that you look like a hot
piece of ass? It’s the God’s truth. You think because a man’s in academia—not
that I am anymore, of course—he wouldn’t think that? What are you, like
twenty-two, twenty-three? Grow up. If a prof could ask you to sleep with him
for an A these days, he would. But deans frown on that kind of thing now. So
many rules.”

Like not showing up to class dead drunk. Like not lecturing
a room full of spellbound students on the futility of human endeavors and how
it would probably be better to all go out and drink the Kool-Aid.

“Fortunately, I’m not tenured anywhere anymore, so it’s not
like they can kick me out or anything. So what do you say? You want me to spell
it out?” He took another drink of the whiskey. “I’ll give you an interview if
you give me a go at that sweet little body you got hiding under that sweater.”

Her rosebud mouth dropped open. It looked as if he’d finally
gotten Miss Starry Eyes to shut up from babbling about her thesis and holding
up that trashy book of his as though it really meant something.

Now that he knew she was a graduate student, he did know her
type. Ambitious, smart, sure the world was made for them and that every man,
woman and child would step aside and make way whenever they decided to make
their debut. This kind of girl didn’t stoop to sleeping with anybody for an A,
even if he had been serious. Not now, not ever.

So maybe he was just trying to drive her back out into the
snow so that he could get rid of this boner and get back to some serious
drinking.

Or maybe he really wanted to fuck her.

Both, probably.

It was hard to really evaluate her body properly in all
those wet clothes, though. “Go on. Take off your sweater.”