Dark Blue: Study in Seduction, Book 1 (5 page)

“Mum. I have to go. One of the other students is knocking on the door,” Carla interrupted before she said something she’d regret.

“Oh, okay. Call me when you set out for home. You know I worry.”

She put the phone down with a deep sigh. Of course, she knew her mother worried. Who wouldn’t when their son-in-law’s Mercedes had ended up under a supermarket’s lorry? The only mercy of that tragic day was that Stephen died instantly. He didn’t have a chance; the only comfort was he didn’t suffer either.

Shit. Here she was, after four years, using the same clichés everybody else had trotted out to comfort her and themselves. Clichés were one thing Alex had warned them all about. Be original, he’d urged them.
“Let me hear your thoughts, not some other academic’s views you’ve read in a textbook or, God forbid, on Wikipedia.”

She sat down on her bed, picking at the quilt that she’d made when she’d first been married to Stephen. What was she doing with all of this? What did she care what Alex thought? The whole situation of her fantasising about him was one great big fat cliché. How many students had he observed, in his cool, clever way, screwed up with lust for him?

For all she knew, he had a girlfriend, even if he didn’t have a wife. She—Carla decided to call her Willow—was probably chopping up the lemons right now in their kitchen, ready to squeeze them on top of his sea bass and bulgur wheat couscous. He was probably sitting down to eat it with her, and they’d laugh, and Willow would say,
“Hard day at the coalface, Alex, fending off all those hormonal young women?”
And he’d laugh and say, “
They’re not all young, Willow. There’s one of them who oozed all over my beanbag. She’s far too young for a hot flush, but I did worry I was going to have to call the fire brigade at one point. Can you pass the mangetout, please?”

But, her heart whispered, what if there was no Willow, and Alex felt the same way about her that he’d shown at the fetish party? Surely she should take the chance to find out, no matter how forbidden their relationship might be. Far from wanting to forget they’d ever enjoyed that electric connection, he might even be waiting for her to make the first move.

Chapter Three

Carla got her chance sooner than she’d expected. A few days later, on her way to the library, she spotted Alex at the other end of the college cloisters. His gown trailed behind him, lifted by the breeze through the open arches, and his footsteps echoed on the flagstones. She caught her breath at the sight of him as he closed the space between them. By the sudden frown, he didn’t seem very happy to see her, but he did stop when he reached her.

“Hello, Carla, everything okay?”

“Yes. I was just on my way to the library.”

“That’s what I like to hear. How’s the Jane Austen essay going? Any progress on amazing me yet?”

Crap. No pressure, then.
“It’s getting there.” She flashed him a confident smile. She had to judge this situation carefully, keep the conversation light and then lead into their encounter at the party.

“Good to hear it.” The college clock chimed the quarter hour, and Alex glanced at his watch. “I’d better be going. I have a faculty lecture to deliver on the Cavalier poets. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ and so on.”

He made to move away from her. This couldn’t go on. He might be her tutor and any relationship might be inappropriate, yet Carla had to know where she stood with him. Where they stood together.

“Alex, wait. I need to talk to you.”

“Is about the tutorial or your essay assignments? Is there something I haven’t made clear?”

“No… It’s not strictly related to my work.”

She could see him weighing up what to say and faltered again, but she couldn’t exist in this state of continually wondering what if… What if she’d gone home with him that night? What if they could forget they were tutor and student for a moment? What if he’d been thinking about her and longed to act on his desires?

“If it’s a pastoral issue, then by all means you can talk to me about it and I’ll try to help. However, I think you might be better off speaking to Dr. Hanson,” he said patiently.

“It’s not pastoral. It’s something else. I’m sure you’ve been waiting for the right moment to bring it up too.”

His brow creased in puzzlement. “Are you worried about your course or exams?”

Cold fingers crept up Carla’s spine. It was too late to back down now, so she called his bluff. “It’s nothing to do with home or work, but you know that, don’t you?” She smiled, to show that they shared a special secret. “It was you, wasn’t it? That night in London at the party?”

There, it was out. She waited for him to throw her the smoky gaze that would prove he shared the bond too. She might as well have just asked him a question about some dry literary text for all the reaction she got.

“I’m sorry, I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“You
were
at the fetish do. You fended off Dracula, and you called me a cab. You said, ‘Mistrust any enterprise that requires new clothes’, and I got it wrong. I thought it was Dr. Johnson, and you knew it was Thoreau. It was you…” Her words tailed off. His look of total incomprehension had completely thrown her. She’d been one hundred percent sure it was him. Of course, it
was
him, but what if she had, by some terrible coincidence, been mistaken? What if he’d got an identical twin?

Lead had settled in the pit of her stomach before she came to her senses. No, that sort of thing only happened in crappy crime shows on the TV. Alex Lemaitre had been the man in the mask, and now she’d confronted him, she had to get him to admit it or be unable to face him ever again.

“You took me under the stairs and said you’d…”
Put me across your knee and tan my bare arse, rip my basque off, shag me senseless…
Shit on a stick. This was excruciating, but she’d gone too far to stop now. She’d taken that leap of faith, and she was falling, probably to crash and burn. She tried one last-ditch attempt to stop herself from hitting the ground at a hundred miles an hour. “I wore my leather trousers, and you had a black mask and you…” She stopped. He clutched his iPad to his chest as if he wanted protection from her.

Her throat was dry as she longed for the flagstones to open up and swallow her. “It
was
you, wasn’t it?”

His expression was as calm and icy as a glacial lake. “Carla, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here. If I was ever at a fetish party, as you call it, and trying to conceal my real identity—and I assume that’s why you say this man you met was wearing a mask—then I’d hardly be likely to admit to it, would I? Especially as I’m now your tutor, and, despite the fact we’re virtually the same age, I’m responsible for your pastoral care as well as your education.”

She tried to sift out the implication of his words. Was he saying he
was
there, yet he’d never confess to it? That he regretted meeting her…touching her…making her come? No matter how cool and unruffled he seemed, how hard he tried to blank her, she
knew
. She clenched her fingers to stop them from trembling. He was a man who wanted to be defied and challenged, and she could not stop herself from rising to it, no matter what the consequences.

“Alex, come on. Why don’t you put me out of my misery and say it. We both know Elena was hosting the party, though I have no idea what your connection with her is.”

He stepped forward, closing the space between them to a foot, his voice silky. “Put you out of your misery? Hmm, that’s a curious choice of words. Let me give you this tip. If I was at this kind of party—
if
—I think I’d be very careful to keep my attendance a secret, particularly if I’d been told by the hosts never to mention it. Rules may be boring; however, they’re usually in place for a very good reason, and you appear to have broken at least one of them.”

Broken his rules.

Those were the precise words he’d used while they waited for the cabs, and he’d left her in no doubt of what the consequences of her defiance would be if he ever got her alone. Now he’d thrown her a lifeline, and it was driving her insane with frustration.

And perhaps that was exactly what Alex Lemaitre wanted.

“I…I see,” she said quietly, submissively even, playing his game, hoping it was a game, not a genuine rejection. “Then I must have been mistaken, and I can only apologise for embarrassing you, Professor Lemaitre.”

He glanced at his watch and smiled pleasantly. “Oh, you haven’t embarrassed me, believe me. Far from it. Now, I’ll see you for your Jane Austen tute at four o’clock as planned. Please try very hard not to be late. I’m a reasonable sort of person, despite what you may have heard, but I
do
have a thing about punctuality.”

Chapter Four

Emma pointed at Carla’s plate during college dinner a few days later. “You’ve not eaten much. Is the turkey curry not to your liking, madam?”

Carla poked at the yellow mush, trying to find anything that resembled poultry.

Emma grimaced. “I thought it was a good idea to have the veggie option, and this crap claims to be tofu-and-spinach casserole. Still, the menu says we have summer pudding for afters. Oh, here it comes.”

Emma rubbed her hands with glee as the hall porters slapped bowls of dessert in front of them. Just a few metres away, Alex sat at high table with the other fellows. Carla and Emma had arrived at hall early and bagged a bench closest to the dons so Emma could check out the cut of his trousers to test her theory. Carla thought he looked so hot in his jeans and academic gown, he could ignite the dry sticks in the fireplace next to him, all on his own.

She also hated him so much she could scream.

“I’m a reasonable person,”
he’d claimed in the cloisters.

Reasonable
? After the way he’d treated her in their group tute that afternoon? Oh yes, Alex was as reasonable as Attila the Hun. Despite slaving over her Rochester essay for days, Alex had quietly and ruthlessly skewered it. His words still stung her now, sharper than any chastisement could ever be: “
Aren’t we rather ignoring the elephant in the room? The political and satirical poems of Rochester’s work are important, of course, but to relegate the sexual content of his work to two paragraphs is somewhat evading the issue, don’t you agree?”

The worst part was his implication that she was too embarrassed to deal with the swiving and fucking. It had been excruciating, and she’d hesitated whether to agree with him or not. She’d fought back because, deep down, she recognised that arguing her case was the whole point of the exercise. Even so it had been like wrestling with an intellectual Colossus.

“I think his political satires have been overlooked by the general critical community,”
she’d told him.

“Really? Hmm. You may have a point to a degree, but this is meant to be an essay on the forbidden nature of his work, so I’m going to recommend some additional reading. Now, let’s examine your assertions in more detail…”

And so he’d gone on, examining and discussing her bloody assertions until she longed to be zapped by lightning. She stabbed the last blackcurrant with her fork and swallowed it.

“I needn’t guess who you’re thinking about,” said Emma.

Carla rolled her eyes, then pasted on a smile. “I was, but I’m not anymore. I’m most definitely ready to move on.”

“Come on, then.” Emma raised her voice a little. “And screw Le Prof!”

Before going clubbing, they headed out on an obligatory pub crawl that began with the Blue Boar, an ancient inn next door to Christ Church College. As they approached the pub, everyone did the usual fumble for their IDs, knowing they wouldn’t get past the bar staff or bouncers without them. Carla and Michael, a medical research postdoc who supplemented his lab salary with a little tutoring, were the only ones not searching their wallets. As they squeezed around a table inside the tiny bar, the chimes of Great Tom, the bell on top of Christ Church, started their nightly toll.

Michael looked at his watch. “Ah, five past nine,” he said.

“Time to hang your knickers on the line.” The words just slipped out of her mouth, and she winced.

Michael threw her a quizzical look. “What?”

“Nothing. Just something silly Stephen used to say. It was an in-joke between us. I guess it must sound crazy when taken out of context.”

“Stephen?” His face fell, and Carla wasn’t sure whether he was disappointed that she might have a partner or had simply decided she was a bit crazy.

“Stephen was my husband. He’s dead, I’m afraid.” It was a blunt way of breaking the news to such a sweet young bloke, but Carla had learned from experience that it was far better to get the information over quickly and clearly. She’d found that it was the best tactic so that people didn’t go down that whole route of asking her what Stephen did and had they got any children, and so on.
That
was a conversation she didn’t want to even start. In fact, the familiar little flutter in the stomach had stirred even at the prospect.

Michael rubbed the bridge of his nose as if he wanted to wipe away his faux pas. “I’m so sorry. For what I said and for…for your loss.” He closed his eyes. “And what I just said was even worse.”

She shook her head. “Please don’t beat yourself up. It’s been four years now.”

“Oh, that’s okay, then!” he said before holding up his hands in horror. “Oh shit, Carla, I didn’t mean that. I just… Oh fuck, I don’t know what I meant. I’m digging a hole the size of Wales, aren’t I?”