Page 32 of The Professor's Wife

I knew her.

Not her name or where she came from. I didn’t know why she was sitting alone with grief clinging to her like a second skin.

But I knew her.

The moment her eyes found mine, the world shifted—violently, intimately—and no one else felt it. My fingers slipped on the strings. I caught the chord a fraction late, and nobody in the crowd seemed to notice. They kept watching me sing while something inside me split wide open. The numbness I had carried for so long shattered like glass. The fragments fell inward, cutting through flesh and sinew, reaching something I thought had gone dead inside me.

A fucking heart.

Bleeding.

Beating.

Alive.

It struck hard against my ribs, frantic to get to her.

Then she turned away.

My heart dropped so violently it almost hurt.

Every part of me tightened with the need to move. To follow. To stop her before she disappeared into the crowd and took whatever had just awakened inside me with her.

It wasn’t only lust.

God, I wanted her.

But this was beneath that. Older than that. A pull so deep it felt less like desire and more like memory.

I fucking knew her.

The certainty of it terrified me.

I wanted to walk straight up to her and say,I know you. I don’t know how, but I do. Some part of me has been looking for you longer than I’ve been alive.

But Daisy looked ready to disappear.

One wrong word, one step too close, and I knew I would lose her before I had the chance to understand why finding her felt so important.

So I swallowed the truth.

I watched her leave the patio and forced myself to finish the song while every instinct inside me screamed to go after her.

To find her.

To keep her from becoming another thing I had lost before I understood what it meant to have it.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE PAST

“You’ve been hunched over that textbook for hours,” came a deep voice behind me.

Startled, I looked up from my biology textbook.

A gorgeous man stood before my table, looking down at me with a smile that instantly made my heart pound faster. He was tall, wearing black slacks and a white button-up shirt. He was impossibly broad and built. My eyes trekked across his vast chest and then traveled back up to his eyes.

My face warmed.