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Unless he had butts to wipe every step of the way.
And Sophie…she’d been preoccupied all semester. In the two years he’d known her, Sophie had done nothing but amaze him, with her diligence, her reliability, but mostly her vision. She could make magic out of an empty stage with almost nothing. Whether she was working as lighting designer, stage manager or sound engineer, she was always the glue that held the rest of the students together.
Until this semester. She’d been late, absentminded, short-tempered. She’d lost weight.
Something was wrong.
Not that Matt had any intention of finding out what.
“You busy?”
He glanced up from his desk in the office at the back of the performing-arts center to see who actually had the nerve to interrupt his lunch hour—the one time he could let down his guard and allow free rein to whatever thoughts he felt like having.
Dr. Phyllis Langford was standing there. The psych professor. Matt’s stomach dropped at about the same rate his heart sped up.
The day just kept getting better and better. Not.
“Finishing my lunch,” he said, indicating the empty sandwich wrapper on the desk in front of him. He wadded up the debris, put it and the empty chip bag in the little brown sack he’d brought from home and lobbed the whole package into the trash can beside his desk.
“I knew you had class this afternoon and I wanted to catch you before you went in.”
She hadn’t come any farther into the room. Just stood there, not quite meeting his eyes, but not looking around at anything else, either. An odd mixture of confidence and disinterest. Funny, the month before, he’d only noticed the confidence.
Confidence and passion and… No. They’d forgotten that insane lapse in the production room. They were both going to ignore it, both going to act as though it had never happened.
He studied her through narrowed eyes, hoping they had indeed forgotten. He’d sweated for a couple of days after their tumble that afternoon, afraid she’d come calling with expectations he’d never meet.
And had been honestly, greatly relieved—despite a slightly damaged ego—that she hadn’t. Apparently he’d lost his touch with women; under the circumstances, that was nothing but a blessing.
“You can come in,” he said when she continued to hover. He didn’t want her anywhere near him or his office, but she was making him edgy, just standing there silently full of something to say.
That same sexy scent—the one that had lured him to insanity last month—drifted in with her as she took a seat on the other side of his desk. Phyllis Langford didn’t perch on the edge of her chair as many women did—at least in his office. There was nothing tentative or uncertain in the way she sat, somehow commanding the space around her with her model-slim body. She’d had on black lycra bell-bottom pants the day he’d spent with her. Today she was wearing a circumspect, honey-colored business suit.
He wasn’t sure which he found sexier.
“I’m pregnant.”
Matt blinked. Froze inside. “Pardon?”
“I’m pregnant.”
He waited.
“I just thought you should know.” Dr. Langford, as he preferred to think of her, looked far too calm sitting there, her honey-colored purse, which matched her honey-colored shoes, still slung over her shoulder.
Her hair, a red version of Meg Ryan’s stylishly messy do, distracted him.
“I don’t understand why I’m the one you’re telling,” he said carefully, studying that hair. He knew it wasn’t polite to ask a woman who the father of her child was, but what did a guy say when it wasn’t him? He might have lost a good piece of his mind that Saturday in the theater, but not so much that he hadn’t protected himself, and her, from any and all consequences.
“Because you’re the only man I’ve had sex with since I divorced my husband four years ago.”
He shook his head, not thinking her a liar, just knowing h
is stuff. “I pulled on that condom before I got anywhere near you.”
“Condoms fail.”
“Not likely.”
