NOVEMBER 2005
“DOCTOR COX!”
The roar echoed around the lecture hall accompanied by the stirrings of students who alternately snickered and waited eagerly for the fireworks to begin.
Giselle’s mouth tightened as she clipped down the stairs to the dais to collect her assignment. So help her— She snatched it out of her professor’s hand with a glare and opened it only to see a big red D. Her nostrils flared and her jaw clenched as she raised her narrowed gaze to his.
“A D?” she growled and the class shifted a bit uneasily. She knew why. If Giselle could sink so low as a D in this class, everyone else could. She wasn’t a class leader by a long shot, but she did solid B work consistently. Considering she did it while working full time …
Furious, she stared into that smirking face she knew as well as she knew her own.
“Ah, even the great ones fall from time to time,” he said, his baritone voice filled with satisfaction that he’d gotten a decent response from her. She knew she shouldn’t give him that, but he knew what her buttons were and exactly how to push them.
“Fuck you,” she snarled. The class gasped, but she couldn’t enjoy it. She crumpled her paper in one hand and threw it in his face before she whirled and took the stairs up out of the lecture hall three at a time.
“DOCTOR COX!” he bellowed again as she picked up her books. “Come to my office for a conference this afternoon.”
Her back stiffened and she looked over her shoulder. “If you think,” she said slowly, each syllable perfectly enunciated, “that I’m going to drive up to ass-fuck Egypt to discuss this inexplicable bullshit, you’ve got another think coming.”
“Fine. After class, then. This is not optional.”
Without a word, she picked up her things and walked out, flipping him off as she went.
Forty-five minutes later, her classmates filed out, each casting her furtive glances where she sat on the floor, her back to the wall, her arms crossed. No one wanted to get between her and the professor. He’d made her toxic. Even her study group was a bit skittish about her contributions.
“DOCTOR COX!” Damn. That roar could be heard all the way to Gladstone.
“Good luck, Giselle.”
She hid a smile as she took the hand belonging to her standing lunch date, and allowed him to haul her to her feet. She didn’t dare put his—or any of her other classmates’—unease about her professorial issues to rest. “Thanks, Neal. See you at the cafeteria?”
“You bet.”
She clipped down the stairs. “You’re an asshole, you know that?” she grumbled at Knox’s back while he erased the whiteboard.
“Your bed’s closer than mine. Let’s go.”
Giselle stared at him for a moment, her mind fuzzed. “Uh … Has Sebastian been in your ear again?”
“No,” he said and turned, his smug expression having melted into plain exhaustion, and she felt an answering weariness in her soul. “I just want to get this over with, you and me.”
Get it over with? She had no idea what to say to that. “Why are you hitting me with this right here? Right now? You couldn’t wait until I got home from work tonight?”
Knox ran a hand down his face and sighed. “I don’t know. Stress, maybe. You’re here, now, convenient. I’m tired. The Den of Iniquity … ”
Convenient. “You’re that hard up?” she demanded.
He shrugged helplessly. “Maybe?”
“What about Justice?”
“I’m not interested in twenty-three-year-old girls.”
“You are very interested in that particular twenty-three-year-old girl.”
He said nothing for a moment. “Well, maybe we should try anyway.”
Be careful what you wish for, Ms Cox. You might get it.
“I’m not interested in fucking a man who thinks I’m convenient. If you’re at the end of your rope, pay for it.”
His mouth tightened.
“I don’t care about OKH. I don’t care I’ll probably die a virgin. I don’t care what Sebastian wants. I care that your problem is on me and Sebastian, and that when you had the chance to get this done and take the heat off us, you fucked it up by throwing me out of Leah’s suite and now you want to cross something off your to-do list. How do you think that makes me feel?” Dammit. She was about to cry.
He flinched and looked away.
“I have a lunch date,” she muttered, wanting to get away from this conversation. “What did you give me on that paper?”
“B-plus. You could do better.”
“I work full time. I notice you got your education paid for.”
“That dog don’t hunt. Fen offered to pay for yours, too.”
“I’m morally opposed to dancing to someone else’s tune.”
That barb hit home and his mouth flattened.
“Not only that, but I had a job I loved that was making money, something of my own, that I built, and your problem got that stolen from me. I’m here because of you. My life revolves around you. I can’t even walk in this building without it being about you.”
He sighed heavily. “Look, I’d just— I’d rather end up with you than no one.”
She gaped at him. Knowing it was one thing. Hearing it was another thing entirely, and never, in her thirty-five years on Earth had he said or done anything so devastating to her. Now she couldn’t hold the tears back.
He grimaced. “Uh, that didn’t come out right.”
“Fuck you,” she said quietly. “Just … fuck you to hell and back.”
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