Thoroughly Kissed (2 page)

He jogged up the steps leading to the 1970s eyesore the university had deemed the Humanities building. Built after the Vietnam war protests (in which one group of misguided university students had bombed the UW's Army-Math research center), the Humanities building had thick concrete walls, steel doors, and pencil-thin windows in only a few of the offices. There was an interior courtyard—and there were windows facing that—but all they showed was a patch of grass and the rest of the building. Sometimes, when he'd been hunkered in this building for weeks, he felt as if he were in a 1950s underground bomb shelter, waiting for the end of the world.

He let himself inside. The interior smelled of blackboard chalk and processed air—he doubted this place had had a breeze inside it since it was built. What surprised him was that he had missed the smell. The musty, fusty buildings he'd been in while he was in England usually smelled of ancient dust and mold. For some reason, the processed air smell to him was the scent of cleanliness.

There were no students in the hallways—for obvious reasons, no one hung out in Humanities—and those who were here were already in class. He hurried to the lecture hall where Professor Lost was teaching her two hundred–level undergraduate survey on the Early Middle Ages, and sighed softly.

He wished he were hiking in Cornwall. He had planned to end his trip there, but he had run out of time. He was going to use his favorite bed-and-breakfast in Mousehole (pronounced Mozzle) as his home base, and he was going to go around to all the historic and magical sites—even to one of the many purported sites of Camelot. Jogging concrete stairs and hallways in the Humanities building was a poor substitute.

The door to the lecture hall was open, and he slid into the back. It was a huge room, with stairs descending to what the faculty unaffectionately called “the pit”—a small floor with a large blackboard behind it, screens that could come down for film viewing, and a movable podium up front.

Michael had once told Mort that it felt as if he were a Christian in the Roman coliseum, waiting to face the lions. Mort had laughed and said that it was his job to capture the students, not to let them capture him.

Michael had never quite found the trick to that. He was better at research and scholarship than actual lectures. He actually liked the organization his administrative duties required of him, and if he never taught another class, he doubted anyone—including him—would miss it.

Obviously Emma Lost's students didn't feel that way.

Michael had never seen a two hundred–level Middle Ages class so full. And more surprisingly, most of the students were male—and, if he didn't miss his guess, several of them were the school's top athletes. He'd never heard of nonmajors taking a medieval history course as an elective—the nonmajors flocked to American history, and then to famous events, like the Civil War or World War II. And the jocks avoided the history department ever since Mort had canceled all of the History for Dummies classes (as they were affectionately called) ten years ago.

So what were the jocks doing here?

Michael gazed down at the stage and didn't see a professor at all. The teaching assistant had her back to him. She was gathering a pile of papers and placing them on the table that doubled for a desk.

Then she turned around, and his breath caught in his throat.

She was slender yet curvy in all the right places. She wore her long black hair loose, and it flowed past her knees. It caught the light, shiny and reflective like hair in a shampoo commercial. But her hair wasn't her most stunning feature.

Her face was. She had a true peaches-and-cream complexion, the kind he hadn't seen outside of Ireland, and never on a brunette before. Her eyes were almond shaped, her cheekbones high, and her mouth a perfect bow.

He sank into one of the ugly orange plastic chairs, his legs no longer able to hold him, and it took him a long time to remember to close his mouth.

No wonder this lecture hall was filled with men. No wonder they all stared like—well, like he was. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

She walked over to the podium and grabbed the cordless microphone. It thumped once, making him start.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “I just had to make sure you all had the revised assignments list.”

She had a throaty alto with a bit of an accent, an accent he couldn't quite place. It was almost Scandinavian, but not in the broad comical tones he usually heard all over the upper Midwest, the accent that had been so aptly lampooned in the movie
Fargo
. No, this was more like a hint of an accent, as if English were not her native language. She clipped the ends of words the way a German would who had long been acclimatized to the United States.

“All right,” she said, leaning against the podium but not stepping behind it. “Since you all seem to be having so much trouble believing that the people who lived a thousand years ago were the same as the rest of us, with the same problems, similar cares and worries, and similar feelings, let's try to bring their world a little closer, shall we?”

Even though she was chastising the group, she didn't seem at all angry. In fact, Michael felt himself being drawn closer to her.

“We still practice a lot of rituals that began in the Middle Ages,” she said and then she smiled. It seemed as if the entire room had been lit by its own sun. “And frankly, the rituals made a lot more sense back then than they do now.”

Michael's hands were shaking. He had never been drawn to a woman by her beauty before, but he couldn't help himself. She was absolutely, positively mesmerizing.

“For example,” she said, that smile still playing around her lips, “one of the Suebic tribes worshipped the Mother of the Gods. They wore an emblem to honor that rite—it was the image of wild boars.”

Half the class tittered nervously. The sound brought Michael back to himself for just a moment. He caught his breath, but couldn't make himself look away from her.

She didn't even seem to notice their reaction. “To them, the boar guaranteed that the worshipper of that goddess would be without fear even if he was surrounded by his enemies. At Yuletide, the warriors made their vows for the coming year on a sacrificial boar. You all continue that practice. You make New Year's resolutions.”

A young man in the front of the room said, “You don't know that the events are tied. You can't just say—”

“Justin,” she said in a weary tone. “What did I tell you about comments in class?”

“Geez, Professor Lost, I…”

Michael stiffened. He frowned at the woman, still engaged in conversation with the young man in the front of the room. She looked as young as her students. There was no way that this could be Emma Lost.

He had expected a middle-aged woman with a narrow mouth that never smiled, and small beady eyes that constantly moved back and forth searching for people who saw through her terrible scholarship. He should have realized that she was tiny and telegenic. After all, he'd been hearing that she made the lecture rounds before she came to the UW, and she was still being called by interviewers as an expert on all things historical.

“My favorite senseless thing that's still practiced in this century,” she was saying, “occurs in the spring. Now remember, that medieval people understood the world based only on what they could see.”

Michael gripped the plastic top of the chair in front of him. She looked so relaxed down there, one ankle crossed behind the other, the microphone held easily in one hand. He was always behind the podium, struggling with notes.

“There is a bird in England called a lapwing which, for those of you who don't know, is a plover—”

The hand of the boy in the front row rose again.

“—which,” she continued with a grin, “for those of you who don't know is a wading bird—”

The boy's hand went down.

“—and it builds a nest, which looks remarkable similar to the scratch of a hare, which for those of you who don't know, is a rabbit. Because of the similarity in nests, many of the early English believed that rabbits—”

She paused, waiting for the class to come up with the answer on its own.

“Laid eggs,” Michael whispered.

“Laid eggs,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “And that's why the Easter bunny lays Easter eggs.”

Another hand went up. This one belonged to a studious girl who sat in the middle. “Our books mentioned that the word ‘Easter' came from the pagan goddess ‘Eostre.'”

The grin faded from Professor Lost's face and she was watching the girl intently. Michael felt his back straighten.

“We haven't discussed the pagans much—”

“We've discussed the Christian church's influence and various beliefs.” Professor Lost sounded almost defensive.

“A little. But the book mentions that it's impossible to know what pagan beliefs really were because the early Christians did what they could to destroy any history of paganism.”

Professor Lost's magnificent eyes seemed to have grown larger. Michael wondered what it was about this topic that made her uncomfortable. It was well known that the Christian church did its best to convert all it contacted to Christianity. Had she run into trouble in the past by teaching pagan history? He doubted that. She didn't look old enough to have been teaching long.

“What's your question?” Professor Lost asked.

Apparently the girl heard annoyance in the professor's tone and flushed. “Well, in, like, fiction books, they say the pagans practiced magic. Did they?”

Professor Lost's face shut down completely. All the personality left it. Michael leaned back wondering how she would handle this. Magic was his special area of historical expertise—and the subject of his next book. He knew the answer. He wondered if she did.

“We don't discuss magic in this class,” she snapped. “Now, if there are no more questions, let's return to our discussion of Alfred the Great. He was about twenty-three years old when he was crowned in 871…”

Michael stood. He knew more about Alfred the Great than he wanted to. Even though medieval history hadn't been Michael's area before, he'd had to study it as his history of magic project grew.

“…was an outstanding leader both in war and in peace, and is the only English king—”

There was a small break in her voice. Michael looked over at her and found her staring directly at him. He felt her gaze as if it were a touch. Her eyes were wide, her mouth parted, and all he wanted to do was run down those stairs and kiss her. For a long, long time.

He shook himself.
That
would have shocked the students. The new chairman of the history department going from class to class and kissing the professors. That would really shock old Professor Emeritus Rosenthal who was giving a lecture on British Naval History in the next room.

The thought of kissing Professor Rosenthal broke the spell, at least for Michael. But Professor Lost was still staring at him as if he were the answer to all her prayers.

She would soon discover that he wasn't. He hadn't been all that impressed with her famous lecturing skills.

“I wouldn't call Alfred the Great a king of England,” he said, his voice carrying in the cavernous room.

She blinked as if catching herself, and then said into the microphone in a very cold voice, “And who might you be?”

“I'm Michael Found.”

“Michael
Found
?”

Several students tittered. She glared at them and they all leaned back. Michael felt like he wanted to as well.

“I don't appreciate jokes, Michael
Found
, and I know your name is not on my student roster, so if you would kindly—”

“I'm the new chairman of the history department.”

To his surprise, she blushed. She turned a lovely shade of rose that accented her dark hair and her spectacular eyes. “Oh, well, then, I guess you can interrupt at any time.”

They stared at each other for a moment. The students seemed to be getting tennis neck turning their heads back and forth, trying to see what was going on.

She cleared her throat. “What would you call Alfred the Great if not a king of England.”

“England was divided into tribal areas at that period. Alfred was king of the West Saxons in southwestern England, but he didn't—”

“He conquered London in 886,” she said. “All the English people who weren't subject to the Danes recognized him as their ruler. By my book, that makes him a king of England.”

“By your book, yes,” Michael said, “I suppose it does.”

She frowned, obviously not understanding the comment. She would later.

“I didn't mean to interrupt your class,” he said. “You're the only tenured professor I haven't met yet, and I wanted to hear you work.” He glanced at the students. “You can all go back to learning about Danelaw.”

That blush rose again on her skin, and he felt that same attraction. He dodged it by turning and going out the door. As he did, he heard her say, “Well, you never know what's going to happen on a pretty May morning. Let's talk about Alfred, though. He was the youngest son of…”

Michael hurried down the hall. His heart was pounding. He hadn't challenged a professor in front of a class since he was a student himself. And as a professor, he hated being challenged by a colleague. He had no idea what had provoked him to do that.

But as he reached the stairwell, he realized he did know. It had been his reaction to her beauty. He knew that her work was poor and that she had gotten fame, fortune, and an undeserved tenure for her rotten scholarship. She had looked bright enough, but she clearly didn't understand that history was about facts, not fiction.

He had always been attracted to smart, capable women. Men who were interested in women solely because of their beauty were contemptible. He had always prided himself on seeing a woman's intelligence before he noted her physical attractiveness.