Untangling The Stars (3 page)

When she remembered to open her mouth and say whatever came next, she saw that Guy’s expression was a mirror of what hers almost certainly looked like—stunned. Andie felt her cheeks pink in little warm blooms. She was blushing.
Fan-freaking-tastic
. Guy’s tongue flicked out to wet his lips—a little flash of red triangle through unshaven bristles on the edge of Andie’s vision. The sudden movement quickened her back to reality, and Andie was surprised to notice that Guy’s breathing was a bit uneven, too. He was gazing at her from a mere few inches away with the intensity of a…well, of a starving vampire. She felt her face switch from surprise to swoon to something that bordered on shock. Why was he looking at
her
like that? That couldn’t be a good thing.
Please don’t let there be anything gross on my face
, Andie prayed silently.
Did I fall asleep grading papers?

“I’m…sorry,” he stammered, handing her the fourth—oh yeah, she was looking for that—pen. “I didn’t mean to, um, startle you.” He rocked back onto his heels and stood up quickly. She followed him up, keenly aware that the top of her head only came up to the middle of his chest. He was a lot taller than he looked on TV, but then again, he was only about eight inches tall on TV.

She used the pen to wave away his apology. “My fault.” She managed a small, halfway confident smile, although her voice sounded thick and raspy, like it had been years since she’d spoken. “I didn’t hear you come down the steps.”

His fingers plucked the sunglasses from the top of his head. Absently, he bent their arms opened and closed in his hands. Another blink and the self-assured man dissolved back to the nervous ball of energy he’d been when he first walked through the door. Andie could almost swear she saw his metaphorical shields go up. This guy had a pretty thin veneer. “Yeah, I’m good at that.” It sounded sheepish.

“As vampires are want to do, I’d imagine.”
Shit.
She meant it as a joke but hoped it didn’t offend him. Things were getting a bit heavy with all the stargazing and lip licking and all. Maybe the quip would play to her favor and a little levity would lighten things up. A girl could dream.

Mercifully, a smile broke across Guy’s face and transformed it into something more…alive. He really did have a strange, vampire-like stillness about him. He laughed, and Andie let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.” Guy laughed again and then touched the tip of his finger to his mouth, a gesture that seemed a mixture of deep thought and amusement. “Actually”—he touched his finger to Andie’s shoulder in a familiar, though totally absentminded kind of way that made her jump slightly, which he didn’t seem to notice—“you said something. Chartreuse, I think. What did you mean?”

Holy crap, she’d had no idea she said that out loud. It made her wonder just how many idiot thoughts came parading out of her mouth without her hearing them. “Oh, gosh.” She hid her face behind the palm of her hand. Maybe she could cover up her blushing with a few fingers and some skin. “Chartreuse, yeah. Your eyes…” She swallowed, trying to ignore the phantom weight of his fingertip still on her shoulder that seemed to radiate heat. This had to be easily be the most embarrassing thing she’d ever uttered. “They have a ring of chartreuse green around them, right against your pupil. It’s…lovely.”
God—
lovely
, that was the best you could come up with?

Guy shook his head, smiling at some secret joke that Andie wasn’t sure whether was about her or at her. “You know, that’s what I thought. And, this is silly—I hope you’ll forgive me—but they used to say that the monks who made chartreuse liqueur got the recipe from witches in Italy, and that’s why they guarded the recipe so closely.”

Now Andie was the one caught off guard by a non sequitur. She blinked up at him with big, dumb cow eyes. He crossed his arms over his chest in a movement that made the leather of his jacket squeak, and fixed her with a beaming blue stare. “Supposedly chartreuse liqueur is a key ingredient in love potions, and if two people sit under a walnut tree and drink a glass together, they’ll be matched forever.”

Okay, yeah. She’d heard the story before, but Andie had no idea where he was going with this—though she had to admit she was pleasantly surprised that Guy knew the tale, too. Maybe her runaway train of thought wasn’t so bizarre, and it
was
perfectly normal to think of wine and monks and love potions for no reason at all. Much to her relief, her curiosity won out over those mesmerizing eyes and she was able to match his gaze with a lifted eyebrow and a few less butterflies fluttering around in her belly.

Guy bowed in—or rather, he stepped in and tilted his head down toward her—closing the gap between them. Whether he did it for effect, or to bring that thin ring of green back into her vision, she wasn’t sure. But he was close,
so
close. His voice was the tiniest step above a whisper, his mouth a breath away from hers. “You’re not trying to put a spell on me, are you, Andie Foxglove?”

Her insides turned to pudding. Every fiber of her being went limp and wanted to swoon at that comment and those eyes. Worse, something extremely naughty inside her gave a second’s thought to falling into what seemed like a taunting, waiting kiss on the edge of Guy’s still very-close lips. But somehow—miraculously—Andie stood her ground, even with a fever crawling up her skin and making her eyes burn. She wasn’t sure if he was flirting with her, or challenging her, or both, but she liked it—
really
liked it. The Guy Wilder who had slid in her classroom door had gone from nervous to flippant to downright coy, and nothing could whet Andie’s appetite like a good challenge. A good challenge wrapped inside the beautiful mess that was Guy Wilder wasn’t so bad either.

“Not today, Mr. Wilder,” she whispered in the space between them as the bell rang overhead.

Not today, Andie reflected as the door swung open and she turned to greet the students pushing their way into her classroom. But she never said never.

CHAPTER TWO

The lecture hall had enough seats to accommodate nearly one hundred students, but it wasn’t long before every spot in the empty room was brimming with the idle chatter that radiated from a chorus of several dozen voices. Andie smiled as she watched her students fill the rows past her chair, handing out hellos and high-fives here and there as they flocked past. A full classroom was a good classroom, and the recent term break seemed to have done everyone some good. Cody Matthews looked especially tan in the fluorescent lights, his sun-kissed bronze skin an interesting contrast to the shiny violet streaks in Fiona Reagan’s otherwise jet-black hair. Morgan Ryder’s softball injury looked like it was healing nicely, judging by the way she was pelting the back of Nick Murphy’s head with paperclips as he tried—unsuccessfully—to woo her sorority sister, the shy yet resourceful Hilary Nguyen. Nick might have better luck if he stopped wearing an endless parade of chauvinistic t-shirts. Today’s selection proclaimed that he was a proud member of the Female Body Inspection club.
Cute.
Apparently, that joke never got old and the boys of Phi Kappa Whatever were bent on keeping the tradition of groan-worthy t-shirts alive.

It made Andie’s heart happy to see their faces; besides she had a debt to repay them—and she’d been looking forward to it all break.

Andie did a quick scan over the classroom. No absences. She let her eyes move through the crowd of students and up to the dark corner of the risers. Luckily, no one had noticed Guy, who had slipped back to his spot in the far corner and lowered his sunglasses firmly back into place. The rich, expressive face that had just lingered millimeters before hers only seconds before was now a canvas wiped entirely blank of emotion. But when he caught her looking up at him, he changed—came back to life, it seemed. One corner of his mouth twitched just as a little in the tiniest smile Andie had ever seen. She tore her eyes away from him, lest she get flustered again and accidentally give away his secret. If the kids bouncing around getting settled in saw him, it would be pure and absolute chaos. She’d been to a comic convention once. It was mayhem.

From vampires to fairy tales, if the past few minutes were any indicator, Guy Wilder was going to give Andie a run for her money. For a woman who had spent her life planning her every move like a carefully executed game of Battleship, this morning’s events had been a plot twist Andie never would have seen coming. Of course, he could tip his head at her when class was over and walk straight out of her classroom just as easily as he had walked in and she’d never see him again, save for television and the covers of glossy magazines. That was the most likely—the most realistic—outcome. There was no sense in getting all caught up in daydreams.

The reality of it all struck a note of instant regret in Andie. It seemed suddenly like it would be a terrible thing never to have Guy Wilder’s chiseled face and heart-stopping blue eyes looking directly at her again. It would be an even more tragic loss to think she could have gone for broke and kissed that handsome mouth—even if it were a tease that might have ended in a case of sexual assault. It wasn’t like
she
had leaned in to him, babbling about French wine and love spells. Besides, who would blame her for planting one on Silas Dove when she’d basically been handed the chance? Two could play at that game, and Andie was a go-for-broke kind of girl.

The second bell sounded, abruptly announcing that class was now in session. All chatter came to a sudden halt as the attention turned to her.
All right, Foxglove
, Andie muttered under her breath as she clipped her microphone to her blazer and walked onto the lecturer’s platform and into the proverbial spotlight.
It’s show time.

***

Andie’s eyes didn’t return to the man in the corner as she addressed the crowd of anxious students facing her. Her thoughts centered on one thing and one thing only: getting them back for a delightful birthday prank they’d sprung on her right before the break. From the apprehensive looks on their faces, it seemed they were waiting for her to say something about it, too. Somehow, the lot of them had managed to sneak into her room after hours, and those devious little devils had transformed the boring classroom into a birthday surprise fit for a grade schooler, replete with Mylar balloons and crepe paper. Andie was grateful she had a lecture hall to herself. Most of the lecture halls were divvied up and shared by a group of professors, but Andie had wanted her classroom to feel like home—both for herself and for her students. She had made it her mission, once she’d arrived at the university, to commandeer her own room from the abandoned bank of rooms in the outdated English wing that had been more or less forgotten in the wake of its shiny new replacement. Out with the old, in with the new. The campus had been so busy building new wings, that these forgotten halls had gone largely unused in all the rearranging. No one seemed to want them, so Andie had won out and managed to secure her own. It didn’t have all the latest and greatest of gadgetry in the campus, but it had chairs and a whiteboard and it was enough. And, her efforts had paid off. Sometimes these four walls felt more like home than her loft apartment off campus. She certainly seemed to spend more time here these days.

Stepping onto the platform, Andie let the quiet in her classroom hang in the air as she walked to her desk in the center of the stage. She’d pulled down the projector screen, creating the perfect set up with which to give her performance. Earlier in the day, she had rehearsed it half a dozen times, making sure to get every detail down perfectly. It was super important to Andie that her delivery went off without a hitch—not only because it was important (which it was), but because she knew the effort the kids had gone through for her birthday surprise and she wanted to repay them properly. Tit for tat, or something like that.

To be fair, they had littered her classroom with hundreds of inflatable balloons, yards of crepe paper, and what had to have been a dump truck full of confetti. Technically, it was completely against university policy—suspension-worthy, in fact—to sneak into a professor’s room, not to mention create the mess they’d left for the unsuspecting cleaning staff. For as much as she’d tried, it had been just about impossible for Andie to reach the ends of those balloon strands—even standing on top of her desk. A crinkled, barely afloat
My Little Pony
balloon that had refused to be caught still hovered in her tiny office space. It was worth it to make them sweat a little.

“We will begin this morning’s lecture in short order,” Andie’s voice bit into the quiet. It wasn’t the normal warm, friendly tone she used with her students, and intentionally so. She wanted to push them all to the edge of their seats. With her back to the classroom, she could hear the faint sounds of nervous shuffling.
Good
, she thought,
so good so far
. “But first, I want to take a moment to address something of a more serious nature with you.”