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“Where’d your friend go?” I blurted out without thinking.
He had the gall to look confused. “What friend?”
“The girl,” I bit out. “The one you were talking to just now.”
“Oh.” He glanced behind him too, as if expecting her to pop out from behind a bench or something. Then he came back around and shrugged. “I didn’t even know her. She approached me after class to ask me about study groups or something. I don’t know.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Was she the one you needed to talk to?”
“What? No.” I shook my head. “Why did you follow me?”
“It looked like you wanted to talk to me? Why the hell did you take off? You looked upset. Kind of sad, and maybe pissed, but mostly just upset.”
Narrowing my eyes and stepping closer, I poked a finger toward his chest. “Well, you’re insane if you think I’m going to admit I was jealous of her.”
“Whoa!” Lifting his hands, he took a step away. But then he paused and hummed deep in his throat. “Jealous, huh? I didn’t even mention the word jealous. Didn’t even think it, actually. Why would you bring up the word jealous?”
I froze, internally cursing myself. Now he was going to think—
Gasping when he stepped right up into my personal space and set a hand against the wall near my head, half caging me in, I looked up into his intense brown eyes and lost myself. Everything about him was just so loud. It blared through me, taking control of my heartbeat, of my breathing, of my hormones.
“Or maybe I should ask why you’d be jealous of some girl talking to me.” His voice was low and reverberated through my ovaries, making them tingle and contract with lust. But then he added, “I’m not Brandt.”
My mouth fell open. I was half tempted to punch him in the gut and half tempted to burst into tears. After a hard, painful swallow, I lifted my chin and sucked it up. “I suppose I deserve that.”
“I suppose you do,” he murmured. The words were biting but the tone was not. He spoke too softly to be condemning and besides, the way his gaze traveled over my face was in no way bitter. He looked at me as if he wanted me for dinner.
My body heated in the most inappropriate, but pleasant places.
I wondered what he’d do if I lifted up onto my toes and kissed him.
“So why did you want to talk to me?” he asked, returning his gaze to my face after he did a slow, thorough body check of the rest of me.
I held my breath for half a second, commanding myself not to reach for him because he was so close and his stare was so hot, pressing against him was the only thing on my mind.
But we were having a serious, very un-sexy conversation. My body needed to chill the fuck out.
“Okay, fine, I did want to talk to you,” I admitted, lifting my chin.
He nodded, encouraging me to continue. “About…?”
I exhaled a long breath. “We’re going to share this class for the rest of the semester, right, and I’m sure we’ll cross paths again at the bar. So I just thought it would be in both of our best interests if…if…if I apologized for…you know, and cleared all this contention between us.”
“Contention?” He cocked his head curiously to the side. “Is there contention between us?”
With a huff of disbelief, I hissed, “Yes! You completely ignored me at the bar the day after the wedding, and then today, when you finally decided I was at least decent enough to talk to, you treated me like I was trash.”
“How did I treat you like trash?” he demanded, finally looking a little perturbed. “By calling you an idiot, an asshole, a jerk, annoying? Oh wait, no.” He snapped his fingers. “Those are things you’ve called me. My bad.”
I opened my mouth as words failed me. But wow, I really had been awful to him, hadn’t I? And he was very, very upset with me.
This was not good.
I had to fix this.
“That’s just how I am,” I blurted. “I’m bitchy. You are not. You’re charming and flirty and…and you let insults bounce right off you. You just…” I spread my fingers before him. “You don’t act like this.”
Okay, so that was probably the worst argument I’d ever given anyone, but it was pretty much the truth, so…I went with it.
“Oh don’t I?” he asked softly. “Because you know me so well then?”
