AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Anger heated Callie’s face. The blue-eyed stranger, his jaw tight, narrowed his gaze on Markham’s retreating figure.
“Qualem blennum,” he remarked, his voice increasing in volume.
An unexpected laugh burst out of Callie. Markham turned, drawing his bushy eyebrows together in suspicion. Callie swallowed another laugh and waved. “See you at the weekly meeting, Professor Markham.”
With a huff, the senior professor stabbed the elevator button and turned his back on them. Before she started laughing again, Callie unlocked her office door and ushered the stranger inside.
“Not many people know how to say ‘what a doofus’in Latin.” She closed the door behind him and put her keys and satchel on the desk. “I’m impressed.”
“Then I’ll have to learn more Latin insults.” Leaning his shoulder against the filing cabinet, he crossed his arms and regarded her warmly. “I’d forgotten I knew that phrase.”
“Where did you learn it?”
“I took Latin in high school, so it must have been one of the few things that stuck. Along within vino veritasande pluribus unum.”
Callie smiled again, even as his mention of “high school” tickled a memory at the back of her mind. Did she know him from high school?
No. Surely she’d remember this man with his crystal-blue eyes and strong Roman features, and good lord, hisbodythat had all sorts of warm, carved muscles and that incredible abdomen that had so captivated her.
What would touching him feel like? She imagined sliding her hand underneath his navy T-shirt, stroking the hard ridges up to his bare chest and—
Stop it!
“In any case, I appreciate the support.” She sat in her office chair and briskly pressed a button on her keyboard. The screen flashed with a bucketload of new email messages. “But I need to start responding to student excuses and pleas for extensions on their papers. So what can I do for you?”
She’d have sworn his eyes darkened at the thought of what kind of response he could make. She had little doubt he could do a lot of things for her, and none of them were at all polite.
He shrugged. “I don’t have any papers that need to be turned in, and I’m sure you’re not interested in hearing any excuses about me being here coincidentally.”
“Actually, that might be the only excuse I am interested in hearing.” She slanted him a glance. He’d looked her up and deliberately found her here. But why?
“What’s the most ridiculous excuse you’ve heard today?” he asked.
“One student tried to convince me his pet turtle had somehow tipped over his tank and spilled water all over his laptop.” Callie rolled her eyes. “Of course, he hadn’t remembered to back up his assignment to any cloud software, and there’s simply no way he can rewrite the whole paper in time. Therefore, he needs a whole other week. He didn’t say what happened to the turtle.”
Her mystery guest chuckled, a deep pleasurable sound that settled somewhere inside her. She suddenly wished she was funny enough to make him laugh again. Unfortunately, she was the least funny person she knew.
“That’s better than anything I could have come up with back in school.” He shook his head, his eyes twinkling. “I can’t imagine why you didn’t give him an extension.”
“Because I’m not teaching creative writing. Or the history of tall tales.”
Amusement curved his mouth again. “I remember trying to talk Mrs. Swanson into an extension. Told her our power went out and my laptop battery was dead.”
“I get a ton of dead laptop sob stories.” Callie unfastened her satchel. “Along with Wi-Fi outages, accidental deletions, crashes, hacked computers…Mrs. Swanson?”
The memory tickle in her mind intensified. Mrs. Swanson had been one of the history teachers at Bliss Cove High.
Callie swiveled, squinting at the stranger as if to sharpen her vision. “Did she buy it?”
“Not even for a second.” He sat in a chair across from her, stretching his long legs out. “She stared me down over her cat’s-eye glasses and demanded to know why I hadn’t gone to a friend’s house or the library or a coffee shop. I stood there stammering and shuffling my feet until I couldn’t take it anymore and confessed I hadn’t even started writing the paper. Mrs. Swanson was not surprised. And when I got a D minus on the assignment, I was alsonot surprised.”
“What was the assignment?”
He grimaced. “A final research paper discussing revolutionary texts in world history. Mine was on the U.S. Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution.”
“Mine was on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.” She’d turned in her paper early and gotten an A. Had he been in the graduating class before or after her? Or was it possible they’d graduated together?
“Did you get your paper finished?” she asked.
