Learning Curves - By Elyse Mady Page 0,17
slept with me, because you never thought you’d have to see me again? Sorry your friends walked in and got an eyeful of my winter-white thighs? Or just sorry we slept together, period? Well, forgive me for making your life difficult but that’s tough. Because you can’t regret what we did any more than I do.”
The disbelief on his face was almost enough to make her regret her rash, out-of-character words but she was still too shell-shocked by his reappearance to moderate her comments. The Leanne Galloway she knew didn’t shout or rant or raise her voice. Yet here she was, shouting at a perfect stranger and goading him with details of their abortive fling. Her life was careening out of control and she hated it. Hated what he did to her good sense and what she did around him.
As if he could read her unflattering thoughts, his face darkened. “Don’t put words in my mouth,” he spit out. “I’m trying to apologize, for God’s sake. I would have called you but—”
“Called me? What for?” she scoffed. “I don’t need or want your apologies. What’s done is done. You got caught up in the moment. So did I. But it didn’t mean anything. It’s a big university and we’re in different departments. As long as you keep it quiet, no one will ever know and we can both move on with our lives.”
“Me?” he snapped, anger erupting through his outward calm like molten lava. He looked stunned at her accusations and a small part of her brain—the part not consumed by guilt-fueled fury—felt a flicker of shame at her behavior. “You think I’m the one who’ll let the cat out of the bag? Charming. Really, really charming. You’ll go far with those kinds of people skills.”
She brushed aside his insult, too furious to assemble a coherent comeback. His coworkers’ cruel, jeering comments echoed in her brain, and she couldn’t understand why he was being so stubborn, insisting there was connection between them despite all the evidence to the contrary. She was making sense but he wasn’t listening.
“I’ve got my career to think about,” she explained tersely, trying without much success to control her volatile mood. “Tenure. A reputation for inappropriate liaisons isn’t going to do me any favors in front of a hiring committee. You know I can’t risk it. The bar for female faculty is always higher, no matter what official policies might claim.”
“Inappropriate liaisons with a stripper, isn’t that what you really mean?”
She gasped. He was putting words in her mouth. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker—it didn’t matter what he did. What mattered were the consequences to her nascent career if she got a reputation for sleeping around. “I didn’t say that.”
Men were protected against many of the dangers that could beset an unwary female intent on making her mark in academia. He’d told her that night that he didn’t sleep with women for money and she’d believed him. But even if he did sleep around, the impact on his career would always be less dire. Unfair, but the unspoken reality on campus.
He was a man. A beautiful, gorgeous man, who had to have women throwing themselves at him left, right and center. While their encounter had been miles from ordinary for her, Leanne couldn’t believe he’d never taken advantage of his good looks to get what he wanted from partners willing to overlook the downsides of a casual hookup. He glared at her through narrowed eyes, his mouth pulled into a thin scowl. “I’m very good at reading between the lines.”
“Oh, really?” she jeered, masking her insecurities with biting sarcasm. “Then read this—I don’t care what you do. I just want you to do it far, far away from me.” She tried to walk away but he stopped her escape with an unrelenting grip.
“Let go,” she cried. “I’m not going to discuss this with you anymore.”
Why was he trying to prolong the misery?
She was equally angry, as much at herself as she was at him. At her body’s susceptibility to his beauty and his sexual allure. Heat poured from him, and she was captured again by the beauty of his eyes, alight with fury. They had darkened to a mutinous indigo, and one corner of her mind registered that the shade was the same as when he’d come inside her. The reckless memory set off a riot of electrifying shocks. They rocketed through her and she shuddered, with lust or humiliation she couldn’t tell.
“Is that what we’re doing?