He nodded. “I agree.”
But he’d be watching closely, and he knew Rose would too.
After he opened her car door, Rose eased inside and tossed her purse onto the passenger’s seat. Buckling her seatbelt, she spoke without looking at him. “You know you’re just as much a man as your father and brother, right?” The buckle clicked into place. “And more importantly, you’re a better human.”
The last bit was kind of mumbled, but he caught it.
An outright compliment. God bless winter-festival dunk tanks.
“Being a man doesn’t even require a Y chromosome or a penis.” Martin grinned. “So yeah, I know I’m a man despite my master’s degree and shameful lack of dunking skills.”
She didn’t try to tug the door from his hands. Instead, she glanced up at him as the winter wind blew a strand of her hair across her cheek. “See you Monday?”
When he carefully tucked the strand back behind her ear, he could have sworn she nuzzled into his touch for a millisecond. “See you Monday.”
That dunk tank manufacturer was totally getting a thank-you note in the morning.
Nine
Halfway through seventh period,the fire alarm blared to life.
No surprise there. The school ran a drill monthly, and they’d reached the final day of January and the final period of the school day. Rose imagined someone in the front office had seen a calendar somewhere, checked for previous drills that month, muttered a silentoh, shit, and heaved a sigh while pulling the red handle.
In theory, she should depart the copy room and join the teachers and students streaming toward the exits. Their voices, raised in both laughter and complaint—because it was freaking cold outside—echoed in the hall just outside the closed door of her little sanctuary.
In reality, a staff meeting was starting ten minutes after the final bell. The copy room would be mobbed both before and after the meeting, so if she ceded her territory now, she’d be lucky to get her packets done before sunset. Besides, this was her damn planning period. She wasn’t giving up fifteen minutes of it to tromp around school grounds.
It was cold out there. A bit slippery too. And her heels didn’t have much traction.
Small though it was, the copy room contained a threadbare but overstuffed chair she could occupy during the less labor-intensive parts of packet creation. The heat from the machines kept the space toasty, and fresh stacks of copies warmed her hands better than gloves.
Nope. No way in hell she was leaving that room.
She added more paper to the appropriate tray, forced the machine to accept her top-loaded packet—damn copier should have been replaced before the turn of the century—and fiddled with the settings. Collation, definitely. Staples. One step darker than default, as per usual. Two-sided copies required another battle, but she prevailed.
All the pages appeared to load correctly. Hallelujah.
Then she was lounging in the chair, warm and peaceful, as the machine chugged next to her. And if she tweaked the blinds just a tiny bit…
There. In full view of her window, Martin had guided his students from her classroom out to the frozen tundra. As she watched, he urged them to don their jackets and circulated among the different factions that naturally formed as soon as the kids stopped walking.
Such a good teacher. Such a good man.
She had no idea why his ex-wife had let him go, but there was no way—no fucking way—that woman’s new fiancé could outshine Martin in intelligence, wry humor, or sheer human decency.
He bent over to study something on the ground, and Rose almost bit her tongue in two.
Not to mention that round, taut ass. Jesus.
She’d almost asked him about his marriage so many times over the past month or so, but always stopped herself before the words could emerge.
That night in the coffee shop last month, he’d exposed himself to her judgment, to her potential ridicule or incomprehension, as he told the story of his childhood. He’d trusted her to listen and understand, and she hoped to God she’d done a decent job of both, despite her raging hatred of almost his entire fucking family.
She understood the weight and gift of that trust. The strength required to make such a valuable, fragile offering.
But for all the friendly, private conversations and coffeehouse visits they’d had since then, she hadn’t offered her own trust, her own history, in return. So she didn’t have the right to ask for more intimate revelations about his marriage, his relationship with his ex-wife, or anything else.
Still, she wanted to know. She wanted it more than she wanted the truffle risotto at Milano, and that was saying a lot.
