Second Time Around (14 page)

And sex. Lots of sex.

She gnawed on the inside of her cheek as doubt started to set in. “This is so weird.”

“What are you talking about?” Jamie said. “It’s your dream date with your dream man. Over ten years in the making.”

“But think about it, you guys, it’s
Professor Clayburn
. I know he’s technically my peer now, but I spent all those years thinking of him as an authority figure. Totally off-limits.”

“Forbidden,”
Brooke said with a little shiver.

Anna fanned her face with her hand. “It’s gonna be hot.”

Cait paced between the sink and the shower. “What if he kisses me at the end of the night?” Then a horrible thought struck. “What if he doesn’t?”

“Stop obsessing.” Anna leaned out into the hall and glanced out the window. “A car just pulled up out front.”

“You look beautiful.” Brooke bestowed one last pouf of the powder puff. “Do us proud.”

“Yeah, you’re living the fantasy of every English major who’s ever undressed him with her eyes while he lectured about Seamus Heaney,” Jamie said. “Have fun. Be safe.”

“Don’t do anything Jamie wouldn’t do,” Anna said.

Cait laughed and hurried out the door with her handbag. Through the darkening twilight, she could see Gavin getting out of the driver’s side of his Jeep. He’d swapped his professorial blazer for khakis and a hunter green polo shirt that made his coffee-brown eyes appear even darker. He smiled when he saw her, then came around the car to open the passenger door.

Cait didn’t even get a chance to say hello before she heard giggles emanating from the porch behind her.

“Caitlin.” Gavin pressed her hand between both of his. “Nice to see you again. You look—”

Whatever he’d been about to say was lost amid another outbreak of female laughter and one high-pitched catcall.

Gavin laughed, too, low and deep. “Your chaperones, I presume?”

Cait covered her eyes with her free hand. “I’m so mortified right now.”

“Don’t be.” He helped her into the seat. “Some of those chaperones look familiar.”

“That would be because most of them took at least one class from you back in the day.”

“And you’re all having a private reunion weekend at Henley House?”

“Something like that. I’ll explain over dinner.”

Gavin waved to the trio on the porch. “I’ll have her back by midnight, ladies!”

“Take your time!” Anna called back.

“We won’t wait up!” Jamie yelled.

“Liars,” Cait said as Gavin buckled up next to her. “They’re going to pounce on me the second I walk back through that door and interrogate me in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention.”

Gavin started the car. “Well, then, we better make sure you’ve got something juicy to report.”

I
s Italian okay for dinner?” Gavin asked as the Jeep pulled away from the curb. “The options around here are limited, as you know.”

“Absolutely,” Cait said. “Sounds perfect.”

“And I hope you don’t mind a quick stop back on campus. I left my wallet at the library. One of the student workers called my cell on the way over here.”

“Left your wallet?” Cait relaxed enough to flirt a little. “A likely story. Admit it: You just want to get me down to Archivist’s Alley.”

He looked puzzled. “Archivist’s Alley?”

“Yeah. You know, the archivist’s office down in the basement by the geology texts and the map room?”

“What happens down there?”

“Everything.”

“And by everything, you’re referring to …”

“Snogging. Scamming. Canoodling. You name it.” She shook her head. “How is it possible that you’ve been at Thurwell for over a decade and this is the first you’re hearing about Archivist’s Alley?”

“I’m asking myself that same question.”

“Well, the students have good reason to keep it secret. You know, one faculty member finds out, he tells another faculty member, then word leaks to the dean and next thing you know, they’re cracking down and expecting everyone to use the library for studying and sleeping instead of drinking and carousing.”

He shot her a sidelong glance. “You used to booze it up in the basement of the library?”

“Well, not me personally,” Cait admitted. “I was always too paranoid about getting caught. But some of my chaperones back there at Henley House? They could tell you a few stories.”

“Interesting.”

“Come on, don’t tell me the instructors don’t have their own secret hideaways for angsting and assignations.”

“Nope.” He shook his head. “Not that I know of, anyway.”

“Really? At Shayland, the English profs pass around a key that gives us access to the roof of the building. Any student caught up there faces disciplinary hearings, but you can always find a faculty member up there with a bottle of wine when the weather’s nice.” As she said this, Cait couldn’t help thinking about Charles and the romantic interludes they’d shared up there, watching the moon rise and the stars come out. But French kissing alfresco was as far as they’d ever taken it; neither one of them had really gotten a thrill from exhibitionism.

“And you left that job
why
?”

Cait was scrambling to formulate a response when something bumped against her bare ankle. She reached down and pulled from beneath the seat a pair of paperback books. One
was a dog-eared copy of
Great Expectations
. The other looked brand-new and featured a cover illustration of an eerily lit silver obelisk on the cover.

“Prevnon’s Pantheon.”
Cait read the title aloud and glanced over at Gavin with surprise. “Is this yours?”

He grabbed the book out of her hand and tossed it over his shoulder into the backseat. “You never saw that.”

“What? Your secret sci-fi novel?”

“It’s not mine.” He looked supremely embarrassed. “My brother must have left that here when he was in town last month.”

“Sure, sure; that’s what they all say.”

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks to change the subject.”

“So you have a thing for Klingons and Vulcans,” she teased. “I won’t tell anyone. I think it’s refreshing, to tell you the truth.”

“Genre fiction has its place; I don’t deny that.” His rakish grin returned. “But come on. We’re literature professors. Imagine if you went around telling your colleagues that you spend your free time reading, I don’t know,
romance
novels. You’d never live it down.”

“Mmm.” Cait turned her face toward the window.

He parked the car in a reserved faculty space next to the library. “I’ll make this quick,” he promised. “Would you rather come in or wait out here?”

“I’ll come in,” she said. “It’ll be a blast from the past.”

He held the door and Cait stepped into the high-ceilinged vestibule of the library’s main floor. The “Libe,” as it was affectionately referred to, had been designed and built during the 1960s. The exterior featured a façade of arched cement columns that bore a striking resemblance to an old-timey floor radiator, but the inside felt airy and modern.
When Cait closed her eyes, she immediately recognized the scent of photocopy ink and stress permeating the walls.

She wandered over to examine a glass display case filled with college memorabilia from the past 150 years—old yearbooks, varsity jackets, even a propeller beanie in Thurwell’s school colors—while Gavin spoke to the worker at the circulation desk. A few minutes later, he joined her, wallet in hand. “Problem solved.”

Cait looked up at him and smiled. “I’m ready when you are.”

He hesitated for half a second, then asked, “Can I talk you into a quick detour? I have to see Archivist’s Alley.”

“Right now?”

“Why not? It’s Friday night; the whole building is deserted. At least we won’t be disturbing anyone’s drunken debauchery.”

“Well.” She feigned a crisis of conscience. “All right. But I refuse to be responsible for ruining a time-honored student tradition. You have to swear never to reveal what you’re about to see to The Powers That Be.”

“I swear on that propeller beanie.” He placed one hand on the glass case and his other in the air. “I shall never knuckle under to the tyrannical overlords. Death before dishonor.”

“Exactly. Long live the rebel alliance.”

He blinked. “What?”

“You know, like in
Star Trek
.”

“That’s
Star Wars
, not
Star Trek
.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the elevator.

As Gavin had predicted, the basement was deserted at this hour on a Friday evening. The towering bookshelves down here were more closely spaced than on the upper floors, and
there were no chairs or study carrels. The gray carpeting and exposed concrete walls added to the drab, utilitarian atmosphere.

“Follow me.” Cait led the way through the maze of shelves and metal wall cabinets. “It’s back in the corner.”

The total silence seemed to amplify the rustle of their clothes and their muffled footfalls against the carpet.

“This would be a great setting for a slasher film,” Gavin whispered. “The college should charge movie studios to come film down here.”

“And I thought I had a wild imagination,” Cait whispered back.

“Why are we whispering?”

“So the crazed serial killer won’t hear us, obviously.” She turned the corner and pointed out an orange metal door flanked by battered old filing cabinets. “Here we are.”

Gavin held out his hands, clearly disappointed. “This is it? Here I was expecting a hotbed of sin and hell-raising. But it looks so subdued.”

“To the untrained eye, perhaps. But you see, it’s the illusion of subduedness that makes it the ideal haven for hell-raising.”

“True.” He gave her a meaningful look. “That goes for people as well as places.”

She felt her cheeks flood with heat.

“I have to admit, there is something about the smell of all these ancient reference volumes.” He took a few steps into the shadowy cul-de-sac between the bookshelves and the wall and ran his hands along a tightly packed row of leather-bound volumes. “It’s musty, but it’s also kind of …”

“Sensual,” she finished a bit breathlessly.

“Yeah. Sensual. And it’s so cold down here, the covers are all smooth and cool.”

She followed him in toward the archivist’s office door. “That rippling noise when you flip through the pages.”

“Maybe you have to be a book person to get it.”

“I’m a book person,” she said.

“So am I.”

He turned around to face her, their eyes met, and suddenly, they were kissing.
Really
kissing. Not tentative, first-date bussing, but full-on, openmouthed making out like two freshmen gone wild with their first taste of freedom. His fingers curled into her hair and cradled the back of her neck. She pressed him up against the stacks of books and hooked her ankle around the back of his knee.

All of her senses went on high alert, along with several nerve endings she’d forgotten existed. She felt overwhelmed by the feel of his tongue and his scent and his skin against hers.

They broke apart for a moment, both of them panting and dazed, and Cait managed to murmur, “We should probably …”

Gavin cleared his throat and nodded. “Yeah, this isn’t really …”

She attacked him again before he could finish. The intensity of her desire both thrilled and terrified her, but she was in no mood to overanalyze. The girl who’d been too cautious to misbehave in infamous Archivist’s Alley all those years ago was about to make up for lost time. He kissed his way down her neck into the hollow of her throat, and she pulled back a bit to give him better access. Then she was digging her fingers into his back muscles and he was tugging up the hem of
her shirt. His hand slid across her bare stomach and her whole body tensed in anticipation.

A high-pitched ding echoed through the silence, followed by the clanging of a metal cart rolling toward them.

Cait’s eyes flew open. Gavin froze in mid-grope. As the clanging grew louder, they tried to compose themselves. He tucked in his shirt. She smoothed back her hair. They shared a conspiratorial grin and were just rounding the corner to make their escape when they found themselves face-to-face with a student worker preparing to reshelve a pile of books.

The student’s gaze darted from the lipstick smear on Gavin’s cheek to the bra strap peeking out from Cait’s neckline. “Hey, Professor Clayburn.”

“Hi, Jason,” Gavin said. “How are you?”

Cait readjusted her bra as unobtrusively as possible.

“Fine.” The student gave up trying to maintain any semblance of a poker face and gazed down at the carpet. “So, uh, see you in class Monday.”

“See you in class.” Gavin grabbed Cait’s hand and started back through the labyrinth of bookshelves. They boarded the elevator in decorous silence, but burst out laughing as soon as the metal doors slid shut behind them.

“You’re busted,” Cait said. “Have fun teaching on Monday.”

“Could be worse.” Gavin shrugged. “I could have a visible hickey.”

“The night’s not over yet.”

“Don’t tempt me.” He stopped laughing and shot her a look that could only be described as smoldering. “You still up for dinner?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Most of the restaurants here
close so early, and all of the bars and pizza joints will be crawling with gossipy undergrads.”

“We could go back to my place. I’ll make dinner for you.” “That’s a very tempting offer.” Cait couldn’t suppress a grin. “But aren’t you the one who scorched a can of soup? I’ll settle for a cold beer and good company.”

“Done,” he said. “And I promise I’ll control myself, so long as you don’t start in on the sound of flipping pages. Speaking of great literature, how’s the novel coming along? Any chance you’ll let me read what you’ve written so far?”