Acrobat (26 page)

“What are you thinking?”

I smiled before I lifted my head to look into the deep, dark brown eyes. “That you’re just gorgeous all over.”

His grin was wicked as he reached over and slid his knuckles up the column of my throat. It was so nice to be petted; I let my eyes flutter shut to savor the feeling of his skin stroking over mine.

“Here’s the thing, I want us to do this for real. I wanna be here, and I want you all in, 100 percent. Mel says I have to demand it if I really want you.”

My eyes drifted open. “Is that what she said?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I can suddenly see my life with you in it, Mr. Fiore, so all the tricks I’ve done in the past to impress people, I’m going to give that up and concentrate my efforts on making this work.”

He leaned close, kissing me softly, tenderly, sucking at my bottom lip just enough to send a throb of heat through my body. “Don’t stop doing all your tricks…
tesoro
… I have many positions I plan to put you in.”

I chuckled, my eyes drifting closed again as I parted my lips for his kiss.

“You submit to me so beautifully,” he whispered before he claimed my mouth.

The kiss was drugging, and he tasted and explored, licking, nibbling, biting, making sure he missed nothing as he pressed me back down onto the bed.

“Nate,” he gasped, panting for breath as he lifted off me, his mouth still hovering over mine. “You have to tell me if you want my ass.”

I chuckled. “Crudely put, Fiore.”

“But you got my point.” He smiled back.

I licked my lips and saw the ripple in the corded muscles in his neck, heard the low sound in his chest, and watched his eyes narrow. The thrill of being desired was almost too much to bear. “If you want that, I’ll do it for you. But if not, then submitting to you… that’s so good.”

He looked like he was in pain. “Is it?”

“It’s—we all have what we like best.”

“Yes, we do,” he agreed, his lips hovering over mine. “I’m gonna kiss you before we go back out there.”

“Please,” I whispered.

And he bent and took me in his arms.

Chapter 12

I
WAS
surprised when I showed up at the Four Seasons hotel the following day that Sanderson was actually stunned to see me.

“You actually thought I wasn’t going to show.” I rolled my eyes.

“Yes. To make me look bad. I see no end to your machinations.”

Who had that kind of time? “Where are we going?” I asked, the irritation filling my voice.

“We’re supposed to go to the front desk and have the hotel catering manager paged. She will be with Greg Butler’s event coordinator.”

I lifted my hand like I would follow him. Halfway there, I heard my name called. Turning, I saw Gregory Butler and at least twelve other people walking toward me.

He looked the same as he had five years ago, when he was in my class.

“What’re you, like, all of twenty-five?” I called over to him.

“Twenty-six, actually.” He smiled, stopping close, extending his hand. “It’s really good to see you, Dr. Qells.”

Same brown hair, same blue eyes, same ordinary, handsome, all-American goodness face. Even the freckles across the bridge of his nose added to the apple pie image. I took the hand and squinted. “Tell Professor Vaughn here that I didn’t put you up to this.”

He squeezed my hand tight, not letting go as he turned to Sanderson. “I took over from my father just this year, Professor, and when I did, I got control of all the charitable dollars at my company’s disposal. I’m building a homeless shelter downtown in March of next year, and we made a lot of other donations, but on top of my list was my alma mater, even though I barely made it out.”

I grunted as he finally released my hand.

His smile was huge. “Dr. Qells took me in his office one day and told me that if I didn’t do some work damn soon he was going to flunk my lazy ass.”

Listening to everyone gasp at once was fun. I scoffed; Gregory’s smile lit his eyes.

“I reported him to the dean,” he told the entourage and Sanderson while he kept his gaze locked with mine. “And the dean told me that I must have misheard, because that kind of behavior was completely foreign to Dr. Qells.”

I waggled my eyebrows for him.

He nodded, tipping his head to the side. “When I went back to class the next day, I asked Dr. Qells if he knew who my father was, and he told me that the only use he had for my father was if he knew anything more about Milton than I did so maybe he could tutor me.”

I laughed softly at the memory.

“God, I hated you.” He shook his head.

“You weren’t my favorite either.” I snickered. “If we’re keeping score.”

His sigh was heavy. “First time anyone ever stood up to me, told me where to go, and gave me an ultimatum. I had no idea I could be treated like everybody else.”

I grinned.

“I never worked so hard in my life.”

“It was strong C at the end,” I told him.

“It was a bitch to get,” he told me.

“But it was earned,” I assured him. “If you hadn’t screwed around at the beginning, you probably would have gotten an A. You had quite the grasp of Chaucer especially.”

He reached out and took hold of my shoulder. “Walk with me.”

The hotel was beautiful, the atrium, the chandeliers, the marble floors, the staircases—and the grand ballroom where the feast would be held was breathtaking. There, waiting for us, was Katherine Abrams, Greg’s fiancée.

“Oh, Dr. Qells.” Her smile was dazzling, as was she. “Such a pleasure to meet the man who made such a difference in Greg’s life.”

“I had no idea I had.” I smiled back.

She took my arm after we shook hands, holding on. “You did. He always tells me it was you. His father will be here the night of the party, and he’d like a word as well.”

“Of course.” I patted her hand in the crook of my arm.

“You see”—Greg was smiling—“I was going to be a trust fund baby or what I am now. Everybody likes the after, Dr. Qells. Before you, I guess I was kind of a malcontent.”

“You were a slacker.”

“I am better now for having known you.”

I chuckled. “Who knew I was a saint?”

“You’re an ass,” Greg assured me.

“Greg!”

“Oh, he is.” He made a face at Kate. “And he knows it.”

“I am,” I agreed with him, grinning at her. “I know it. Ask Sanderson.”

“Who?”

I pointed behind me, and the introductions began. The thing was, she didn’t care. She had absolutely no interest in Sanderson Vaughn at all, and she was one of those women who was insanely sweet and proper, but still, you knew it. She really cared about finding out if I was bringing anyone with me to the party.

“My boyfriend, Dreo,” I told her, and I couldn’t help beaming because the sound of it,
my boyfriend
, was really nice.

“Oh,” she whimpered. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

And she really couldn’t. Both she and Greg walked me over to the event coordinator. It was nice, Kate sitting beside me, Greg leaning, hand on my shoulder the whole time. Who knew he really liked me that much?

As I was leaving, after an amazing lunch with Greg and Kate and Daniel Kramer, whom I had met that day in the dean’s office, and Sophia Petrovich, Greg’s event coordinator, Greg actually wanted to hug me. Kate found it enough to tear up over, and I hugged her too. I told them all that I had no doubt that this year the Medieval Feast would be something no one at the College of the Humanities had ever dreamed it would be. They were all happy to hear it. Before I could make a clean getaway afterward, though, Sanderson called my name.

“God, what?” I grumbled, looking, I was certain, as pained as I felt.

“Must you be such a colossal prick all the time?”

“Yes, I must,” I assured him, “especially to you.”

He growled. “Are you going to e-mail Ms. Petrovich with the list or—”

“I already e-mailed Gwen, and she’ll take care of it when she gets into the office tomorrow,” I told him, turning to go.

He stepped in front of me.

I threw up my hands.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in that department with you?”

I crossed my arms and waited.

“Everybody loves you. The students think you walk on water. The faculty—I mean, those that don’t really know you—still respect your scholarly accomplishments. But what gets me the most is the women. I don’t get that at all.”

I huffed. “I have no idea where you’re going with this.”

“Oh, I know,” he said, so very annoyed. “Every woman that meets you is just smitten, and you’re gay, so what the hell.”

“You shouldn’t care about women at the university,” I told him. “You shouldn’t shit where you eat, Sanderson.”

He stared at me.

“Bye,” I said, and I left him sputtering in front of the Four Seasons.

As I walked toward the train station, I thought about what he had said. If he knew that every relationship I had with my colleagues, had been worked on and cultivated, his thinking about me would change. It looked easy to him because most of those friendships had been cemented years before he showed up. The difference was that he was a jerk. And not just to me. In his race for tenure, he came off like a brown-nosing prick, and he had alienated more than half his fellow professors with his one-upmanship. No one wanted to coauthor papers with him to help with his publishing credentials, no one wanted to go to conferences with him and present papers, and his teaching evaluations all stunk. I knew they did because the kids made sure to show them to me. Even if I said no, I still got them e-mailed to me, or stuffed under my office door, or slid between pages of my books. They knew it made me crazy, so they went out of their way to plague me with them. The affection was there in the harassment, and I was sure that Sanderson got none of that. He was so far from getting what he wanted, and he had no idea.

He overloaded the few grad students who had made the mistake of working for him, and had overpromised and underdelivered almost from day one. It was not that I was so great; he was just so universally loathed by professors and students alike that to him it appeared that way. There was a small part of me that felt bad for him, but it got squashed down a little more each day by his negativity and hubris.

Since I was thinking about Sanderson, I didn’t notice the man on my right until I turned the corner, heading for the raised platform. I had decided to take the L since I still had things to pick up for dinner. But I was stopped by a hand on my chest, and a stranger was there, in my face, so close. We could have kissed.

I couldn’t catch my breath suddenly, and I had no idea why.

“Dr. Qells,” he whispered as my knees went weak.

I looked down my body and saw his hand on the hilt of the knife that had been buried in my abdomen.

He had shoved it through my peacoat, thick cable-knit sweater, and T-shirt before it punctured my skin. I felt the heat as he twisted it and tore it free. I crumpled down hard onto the sidewalk, the sky a giant raincloud ready to burst above me.

“Tell Dreo Fiore that Joey Romelli sends his regards.”

I had no voice, and I barely heard him over my own heartbeat, suddenly so loud in my ears. I felt like I was drowning even before it started to drizzle. I was so hot, I wanted to tear off my peacoat, but everything, my whole body, was limp.

He spit on me, on my chest, and then I watched him, as I lay on my side, get into a car before it was gone.

“Jesus, Nate, what the fuck?”

And of course it was Sanderson Vaughn who was there, which was just the cherry on the cake of my day.

He pulled off his scarf, wadded it up, and pressed it to my diaphragm as he had his cell phone to his ear. I watched him, never having realized before that he had a dimple in his chin, that his nose was small and upturned, or even that his eyes were a pale China blue.

“Not,” I gasped, “going to be nice to you.”

“I know.” He nodded even as he talked on his phone, barked out the address, and yelled at whoever was on the other end to hurry the hell up.

“Charming.” I smiled up at him, noticing that it was getting harder to see him. “You have to start being nicer, gentler. Not such a prick. Sugar… not vinegar.”

“Okay,” he agreed, placating me, his phone hitting my chest as it fell from his ear, both hands now on the scarf on my abdomen.

“Stop pushing,” I ordered him. “It hurts.”

“I’m sure it does.”

“Your eyes are kind of pretty.”

“I will remind you that you said that.” He took a breath and bit his lower lip.

And I thought that for a guy who hated me, he looked sort of concerned. When he yelled my name, I wanted to tell him to stop, but nothing worked, not even my eyes.

T
HE
whispering woke me. It took a minute of focusing, but finally the room took shape, and then the lovely face looking down at me solidified so I could see who it was.

“Nate,” she gasped, and I smiled up at Melissa.

“Oh, thank God.” Her eyes welled fast, and there were tears running down her cheeks seconds later.

“Hey,” I managed to get out, my voice a gravelly whisper. “What’s going on?”