Spell of the Highlander

Page 7

The professor’s office, precisely as it should be.
After a long moment, she tried for a laugh but it came out shaky, uncertain, and seemed to echo unpleasantly in the office—as if the room’s square footage and actual occupiable space didn’t quite coincide.
“Jessi, you’re losing it,” she whispered.
There was nothing, no one with her in the professor’s office but her overactive imagination.
With a dismissive toss of her head, she turned, flipped off the light again, and this time pulled the door shut behind her hard and fast and without a backward glance.
Hurrying down the corridor, she dashed out into the back parking lot, kicking up a swirl of red and gold leaves as she hastened to her car.
The more distance she put between herself and the building, the more ridiculous she felt—really, getting all spooked alone on campus at night! One day she would be working on excavations in the middle of nowhere, quite likely late at night and sometimes alone. She couldn’t afford to be fanciful. At times, though, it was hard not to be, especially when holding a twenty-five-hundred-year-old Druid brooch, or examining a fabulously detailed La Tène period sword. Certain relics seemed to carry lingering traces of energy, the residue of the passionate lives of those who’d touched them.
Though not anything like what she thought she’d just seen.
“How weird was that?’ she muttered, shaking off a lingering shiver. “God, I really must have sex on the brain.”
Watching the hottie and his girlfriend earlier had apparently done quite a number on her. That, coupled with exhaustion and the low lighting, she decided firmly as she unlocked her car and slipped behind the wheel, must have pushed her over the edge, into a brief, eyes-wide-open kind of hallucination/fantasy.
Because for a moment she actually thought she’d seen a half-naked man—an absolute sex-god of a man, no less—standing in Keene’s office, looking back at her.
A trick of the light, strange shadows falling, nothing more.
A towering, muscle-ripped, darkly beautiful man, dripping power. And hunger. And sex. The kind of sex nice girls didn’t have.
Oh, honey, you so need to get a boyfriend!
Looking at her like she was Little Red Riding Hood and the big, bad wolf hadn’t been fed in a long, long time.
Definitely a trick of the light.
Looking at her from inside the mirror.
In a place that was not a place, yet was place enough to serve as an inescapable fortress prison, a place to terrify, to drive the common man stark raving mad, six feet five inches of caged ninth-century Highlander stirred.
A hungry animal sound rumbled deep in his throat.
Just as he’d thought: He smelled woman.
2
A FEW DAYS LATER . . .
When next Jessi unlocked the professor’s office—late on Monday night—a distant part of her brain noted something askew, some tiny niggling detail, but she failed to process it, as she was currently the guest of honor at her own festive and highly enthusiastic pity-party.
That she turned the key, and back again, actually locking then unlocking the door, eluded her utterly.
Had she not been busy muttering beneath her breath about the depressingly huge stack of freshman papers that had been dumped on her in the professor’s absence, that she might have actually gotten time to work on grading if he hadn’t left her a message last night with a list a mile long of periodicals and sources he wanted her to collect from a dozen different places and bring to the hospital so he could flag notes for the book he was writing while laid up recuperating, she might have been cognizant enough of her surroundings to have reconsidered walking through the door.
Maybe closed it again, locked it for real, and gone and gotten campus security.
Unfortunately, enthused celebrant of her own misery, she didn’t notice a thing.
She paused with the door slightly ajar, puffed a few strands of hair from her face, and shifted the crammed-full backpack on her shoulder so her textbooks would stop gouging the back of her ribs.
“A hundred and eleven essays? Would somebody just shoot me and put me out of my misery?” She’d counted them in disbelief when Mark Troudeau, smirking openly, had handed them over. There went any hope of sleeping for the next few days.
Hey, I agreed to teach Keene’s classes, Jess, and you know how tight my schedule is. He said you would grade.
She knew exactly why Keene had said she would grade. Because, no doubt, Mark had called him over the weekend and “suggested” she grade. Mark had been a shit to her ever since last year, when he’d hit on her (unsuccessfully) at the department Christmas party. She couldn’t stand men who talked to her breasts, as if there was nothing above them worth noting, and he was one of the worst. She didn’t go around talking to men’s crotches.