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“What the hell. Bring it on.” She took a deep breath.
“My dear mother called Deb Dilley yesterday, informed her of the occasion, and sent flowers directly to Deb for me to give to you.”
He paused. Then, he quickly finished with the obvious. “She handed them to me this morning to give to you.” He stood resolutely behind the chair, hands clenched on its back.
“Somehow, I’m not surprised by any of this.” In fact, she discovered the chain of events actually amused her. She pushed her chair away from the desk and swiveled it around in a circle once, then stopped to talk.
“It could be worse, you know,” she said to her love. “Dr. Chare could have been included in this loop.”
A voice boomed from the door. “I have far too much information about your love life. I’m the department chair, so why do I feel as if I’m some kind of matchmaker? I’m out of here.”
She scrunched her face, gave Kenn a bewildered look, then crossing her arms on the desk, she buried her head in them. Her life was careening out of control.
She found it incredibly, insanely amusing.
Chapter 45
“There’s an underlying universal truth behind this morning’s curious twist of events,” JJ said as she and Kenn walked to class, his arm lightly brushing hers.A comfortable feeling but still incredibly arousing, even after a month of intimacy. There’s something to be said for this life.
“Can you guess what it is?”
“Hmm. That’s a tough one. Going to give me a hint?”
“Nope. Just going to tell you. It proves that unexpected conspiracies are all around us. More than we think. We just fail to connect the dots.”
“You think our month anniversary is a conspiracy? Does that mean our relationship is a conspiracy, too?”
Of course, it is, she thought.My characters purposely jumped out of the pages of my novel to orchestrate this. But there’s no way I can tell you that and still sound sane.
She stopped, turning the ninety-degree angle necessary to face him. “Not the relationship, but our awareness of the anniversary. Really, would we even be talking about it if your mom and Deb weren’t in cahoots with each other?”
“Cahoots? What a word.”
“Yeah. It’s a colloquialism meaning—”
“I know what it means.” Kenn tilted his head smiling broadly at her.I wonder what he’s thinking.
She smiled back every bit as broadly, gazing up at his brown eyes. She could easily get lost in those gorgeous, deep brown eyes. She tried to put that out of her mind.
“You can’t deny they were in cahoots, can you?”
“You got me there.” He started walking again but she stood still as if frozen in place.
“Oh, my goodness. Speaking of cahoots, you don’t think that Alex and Blake are cahooting, too?” She scurried to catch up to him, about twenty paces beyond her and tugged at his elbow.
“I just had a horrible vision of Alex and Blake presenting us with an anniversary cake or something in front of the entire class.”
“Good grief, JJ. Get over the cahoots, will you. I can’t imagine them doing something like that.”
“We are talking about the same couple that wallpapered our classroom withThe Daily Digit’sfront page?” She couldn’t even bring herself to describe the event which was known campus-wide as simply,The Kiss.
He laughed. “They do love to embarrass you. Is that their goal in life?”
“It may seem like that—and there’s even times I wonder that myself. But they really have nothing but good intentions. They’ve been worried about me burrowing into my novels for hours or days on end and not living my own life.”Their ultimate goal is to get you and me firmly established in a relationship. And it appears their cahooting is working. Go figure.
They continued walking, then as if without warning the classroom door loomed in front of her. A tsunami of horror washed over her. Walking slower, as if treading through unknown territory, she approached cautiously.
“Here, you go first,” she said, lightly pushing Kenn forward. “I’ve got your back.”
