He turned back to her and dropped his voice. “Are you armed?”
“Armed with…” She flicked the red pen with her fingernail.
“Nah.” He pushed aside his cut, and showed her the gun weighing down its inside pocket. “That kinda armed.”
She gestured for him to cover it and he did, sighing. “Those aren’t allowed on campus,” she whispered.
“Baby,I’mprobably not allowed on campus. I meant for you.”
“I’m not allowed to have one here either.”
He made a face. “Do you think anyone here to hurt you would be worried about what he was ‘allowed’ to do?”
A chill rippled across her skin, made her want to pull her sweater shut. “Is someone going to try to hurt me?”
His eyes shifted away, jaw tightening. “World’s dangerous.”
“So are you,” she said softly.
He hesitated, gaze coming back to her face. When he realized she was mostly teasing, his tension eased. “You’ve probably got me confused with one of my brothers.”
Probably not, she added in her head. “Hey, how did you know where my office was? You’ve never been up here before.”
“I asked Ava.”
“You wanted to talk about your Shakespeare paper?” she guessed.
“I didn’t want you walking to your car in the dark.”
Oh…that could melt a girl. “I walk to my car in the dark a lot of nights.”
“Yeah, but that was before me.”
She sat very still a moment, letting his words hit her full force and then double back to wrap around her. Her smile felt natural, warm, happy. “Before you, huh?”
“Yeah.” He grinned back, a small smile that seemed private, quiet, just for her.
Melting. So much melting.
She started gathering the scattered essays across her desk. “I can finish up here if you’re ready to go.”
“Nah.” He dropped into the chair across from her, the one where her students sat when they came for a consult. “Finish working, then we’ll go home. I’ve got nowhere else to be.” He gave her another of those smiles, like there was nothing else he’d rather do than watch her grade papers.
“It’s boring,” she warned.
“You aren’t, though, and that’s what I’ll be looking at.”
“Are you trying to make me swoon?”
“Is it working?”
“Yes.”
“Then yeah.”
Grinning like a lunatic, she shook her head and tried to clear her thoughts. Shakespeare. Focus.
For almost a half hour, she worked in silence, falling into the rhythm of the words, red pen wielded sparingly. She understood grammar and punctuation, and therefore wanted to see it within the papers…but she understood the way the mind didn’t always work cleanly, too. She knew that skill could be cultivated, and artistic appreciation was something innate and precious that needed nurturing, rather than squelching.
