Rough and Ready (More Than A Cowboy #2) - Vanessa Vale Page 0,25

the game. Coming to the gym like this… it’s new, even for me,” Gray added.

Yeah, I didn’t like it either, but I could defend myself, in the ring and on the street. I doubted they were here waiting to jump me in the lot. If I was hurt, there was no fight. No purse. Injuring me did them no good.

“We watch the women,” he said, turning away. I knew he was going to his office to call Emory. If she was out, he’d meet her in the lot, walk her inside when she got back. He’d said “women,” meaning he wanted Harper watched, too.

For once, I was relieved she was in another country. Safe from danger that could be my fault.

10

HARPER

Jet lag was killing me. It did every time, and I had yet to find a way to make it better. I barely made it through the last lectures of the term and the staff meetings, and that was before I left. Now in the UK, I turned down the polite offers of dinner to instead return to my hotel room to sleep. I came to England about three times a year and stayed at the same quaint place, met with the same professors in the art history department. It was familiar. The faces were familiar, and I considered many to be friends. Lately, London was a safe haven. I was an ocean away from Cam, from my life. I could take a break from it, compartmentalize it all in my head and let it go, knowing it was so far away.

I was safe in England. I felt safe, like I was a different person. I’d been coaxed and swayed several times toward taking a permanent teaching position at the university here, but I’d always turned them down. But now with Cam getting out of jail, with him pressuring me, perhaps it was time to go where he couldn’t get me. Since it would be a parole violation, he wouldn’t follow.

I’d be safe.

My mind spun, circling around and around. It was the middle of the night, and I was wide awake. The street lights filtered in through the break in the curtains of my hotel room, street sounds muffled by the thick windows. I was comfortable in the dark, cozy in the room with the slanted ceiling and exposed beams.

Yet I’d never felt more alone. I picked up my cell from the bedside table, checked the clock. Two-thirty. I’d come directly back from the last meeting, taken a shower and slept a solid eight hours. There was no chance I was going back to sleep. I found a text I’d missed earlier from Giles. Giles Armstrong-Smythe, the lecturer who specialized in Norman architecture. It was a few centuries before my area of expertise, but we were in the same department.

I saw his face in my mind, the dark hair, the aristocratic nose. Heard his clipped English accent. He was handsome and a few years older than me. He’d been married once, now divorced. I was the foreigner, the woman he could fuck and forget every time I flew home. I should have been bothered by the casualness of it all, but I liked it that way. He probably didn’t realize just how much. It had only happened twice and both times in the musty storage closet next to his office in the Arts building. Only the required clothing had been removed to get the job done. Nothing more. I hadn’t come either time, but I’d made the connection, soothed the loneliness I’d felt if only for a little bit. Eased the burden of remembering what had happened to me and the lack of support from my family.

Of course, he knew I was back for the meetings and presentations and wanted more no-strings-attached action. Why wouldn’t he? I offered him no-strings fucking. I wasn’t clingy, I wasn’t anything really to him. He wasn’t anything to me.

The vision of him transformed to Reed. His dark hair. His ice blue eyes. The way his lip kicked up at the corner when amused. The heated anger at seeing me with Larry. His voice when he’d coaxed me to come from just the motion of his thumb. He’d texted me while I was in a morning meeting. I got hot all over just thinking about the words.

Reed: I want you on my lap again.

God, that sounded really, really appealing, yet it scared the shit out of me. While I’d allowed men like Giles to touch