gum at him, but not in a way that seemed hostile. “Get in line.”
He did. He hadn’t wanted to be late, and not knowing how long it would take to get to the Bronx from his Midtown hotel, he’d budgeted too much time for the journey.
After a minute or so, another boy came out of Dani’s office, and the girl went in. Ram Boy shuffled down the wall so he was closer to Dani’s open door.
“Are you enjoying Professor Martinez’s class?” Max inquired.
“I guess,” the boy said flatly.
The girl emerged, having only been in there a minute, and Ram Boy went in. Max edged closer to the open door so he could eavesdrop.
“Hey, Professor M, I need you to do me a huge favor.” I need you to do me a huge favor. Something about the way he phrased that, like a command, rubbed Max the wrong way.
“And what would that be?” That was Dani’s “I am not impressed” voice. Max smiled. He was acquainted with that voice.
The boy proceeded to make a weak case involving a diving meet, a book forgotten on the team bus, and a thesis all worked out but just not quite down on paper yet. Dani proceeded to systematically dismantle him, but subtly enough that the kid wasn’t understanding the full extent of the burns he was sustaining.
It was hot.
Dani was hot.
Interestingly, that was a fact Max could note with detachment, which was another new experience. All the years he’d spent assuming he was going to marry Marie had also been spent, he would freely admit, slutting around. He and Marie had agreed that their marriage would be in name only and that discreet “extracurricular” activities would be allowed, necessary even. Still, he’d viewed the last several years as his last gasp of singledom and therefore of freedom and had conducted himself accordingly.
So when the world offered itself to him, he took. And when you were an obscenely wealthy baron, you had a lot of offers.
What you didn’t have a lot of was refusals. But Dani, having made her disinterest in him clear from the moment she’d arrived on Eldovian soil, was a rare woman. Wickedly smart, deliciously witty, insanely beautiful, and not interested. There were no hard-to-get long games being played. Leo had told Max a bit about her ugly divorce, and Dani herself had used the phrase post-men more than once.
She was a goddamn delight.
To Max’s surprise, even though the boy was wilting under Dani’s questioning about the thesis he supposedly had all worked out—it didn’t seem he had actually read the book, which sounded like it was meant to be The Great Gatsby—she suddenly granted him a forty-eight-hour extension and abruptly dismissed him. “Happy holidays,” she said so flatly she might as well have been saying, “Good riddance.”
It was such an unexpected turnabout that Max, who had been lounging against the wall, stood up straight, startled.
“Are there any more students out there?” she asked the boy.
“Students . . . no,” the boy said, making brief eye contact with Max as he breezed by in possession of an extension he did not deserve.
When Max stuck his head into Dani’s office, it was to find her peeling off a blue blazer to reveal a formfitting pinup-girl dress that looked like it belonged on Bettie Page instead of a literature professor.
“Oh!” She jumped.
“My apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He smirked. “I’m merely here to ask for an extension.”
She rolled her eyes in lieu of greeting him, sat at her desk, and pulled a small mirror out of a drawer. “You’re early,” she said to her reflection.
“My thesis is all ready to go.” He sat on the guest chair and, as she started applying a deep burgundy lipstick, revised his previous assertion that he could appreciate Dani’s hotness from a purely intellectual perspective. “Want to hear it?”
“I guarantee you I already have.”
“None of the characters in The Great Gatsby have any inner life to speak of, making what is admittedly a masterfully written book into a mere melodrama.”
She glanced at him with one lip painted. The contrast between the dark red of the finished lip and the pale pink of the natural one certainly was something. “An interesting line of thought.”
He thought she was going to say more, but when she merely returned to her lips, he asked, “Why did you give that kid an extension? He was bullshitting you. And does he know you at all?”
One eyebrow rose, though she was still looking