Then he walked away without looking back.
Jules sat there for a long while wondering just what the fuck had happened. Had he finally approached the man he’d longed for? Had they truly spoken at length without the world falling apart?
The bartender came by to ask if he wanted a drink. Jules shook his head, though he wondered why the bartender hadn’t approached during the entirety of his conversation with Connor. It seemed like an odd inconsistency with how the big man had been handling the crowd.
Maybe he’d been told to stay away until summoned. Or he could have possibly seen how the interaction was hanging on by a hairsbreadth.
Straightening his shirt uselessly, Jules stood and walked out of the club with a false air of confidence.
Outside, the air was cool and tasted like endless possibility. Jules leaned against his car, taking a few deeps breaths to settle himself before attempting to drive home. He needed to get ahold of himself.
Connor Thorne had been running a game tonight.
Jules liked games. He just hadn’t expected to find someone whose game might be better than his.
Once he’d calmed enough to drive, he sat with his hands on the wheel and replayed the conversation once, then again, cataloguing every pause and micro-expression. He filed it all into his mind, placing them in the collection boldly labeledConnor Thorne.
Three years of research and planning had come to a head. Now he had a baseline to use for his next run in with Connor. Jules started his car, smiling to himself as he thought of what was to come.
Marion’s semester started in three weeks.
So would his class with Professor Thorne.
CHAPTER 2
JULES
Jules had rearrangedhis entire course schedule for a man who’d called him interesting and walked away.
He’d dropped Microeconomics. Swapped his Thursday elective. Gotten up at an ungodly hour to camp outside the registrar’s office and sweet-talk the woman behind the counter into overriding a section conflict, because Professor Thorne’s Introduction to Corporate Strategy was capped at thirty-five students and Jules Goode was going to be one of them.
This was reasonable behavior. Absolutely normal stuff. A logical next step in a long-term campaign that happened to involve the one man who made his pulse do things no amount of cardio could replicate.
Trust him. He’d tried.
His friend, Davis, had watched him iron a shirt at seven in the morning through squinting eyes and asked if someone had died. It was a wonder he’d climbed out of bed before noon.
“Just my dignity,” Jules had said, which was only partially a joke.
Marion University’s Business Hall was a relic of an era that had believed higher learning was a religious experience. The cathedral like building had everything you’d expect of an actual church. Tall ceilings. Arched windows in the foyer that let in dramatic amounts of natural light, as if the architects had wanted every lecture to feel anointed. Room 412 was on tucked down one of the many corridors in the massive structure.
Jules arrived early to class, eager to grab a spot on the front row. He chose dead center.
A bold move, strategically speaking. Most students treated the front row like a quarantine zone. It was reserved for the overachievers and the students trying to compensate for poor eyesight. Jules was neither. He was a man on a mission who needed an unobstructed view of his target, and he wouldn’t pretend otherwise.
He pulled his messenger bag off, pulled out a notebook he had no real intention of using and a pen with his name engraved in it. Details mattered. He’d learned this from the same man he was about to pretend he hadn’t spent years learning about.
Students shuffled in the closer it got to the top of the hour. They all moved with the half-awake energy of a Monday morning, finding seats, plugging in laptops, doing the whole first-day small talk that Jules had never had the patience for. A girl with dark curly hair dropped into the seat next to him and gave him a smile he returned reflexively.
“Is this Corporate Strategy with Thorne?” she asked.
“It is.”
“I heard he’s brutal. Like, doesn’t-curve-exams-or-accept-late-work brutal.”
Jules could have told her that Connor Thorne’s standards weren’t brutality. They were intentionally meant to mirror the real world. That the man didn’t lower bars because he respected people enough to expect them to reach up. His refusal to bend was his belief in the competence of his students.
It was far more attractive than any physical feature, in Jules’s mind. Which was saying something given Connor’s physical features were already operating at an unfair advantage.
