Page 28 of My Forbidden Professor

Steph comes up next to me and peers through the gap, but something inside me clenches and I can’t let her leave. I need her for five more seconds. I shut the door and cage her against the wood. “Come to my office for lunch.”

I fall into her warm coffee gaze when she stares up at me. Her fingers curl into my sweatshirt and her lips part. I think she’s going to say something but she rises on her toes and brings her lips to mine. “I’ll bring us something from the cafeteria.”

I want to feed her gourmet, but cafeteria food will have to do today. I capture her in my arms, sweep my tongue into her mouth and kiss her like I don’t want her to leave. It’s easy because I don’t. I make myself draw away and content myself with watching her slowly come back to her senses. Knowing she’s as affected as me almost makes parting from her easier.

Almost.

She offers a small smile before she steps outside, darting to the end of the corridor and through the outside exit. She pulls the hood over her head and disappears, taking the long, but solitary, way round back to her dorm.

I make myself wait ten minutes before I force my way across campus to Marcus’s office beneath the guise of taking my morning jog. Gods knows why the man is here so early. It’s not like he’s beating the pathways himself.

I pass his admin assistant’s empty desk, knock on his door and step inside without waiting for his usual ‘enter’. The man doesn’t deserve my respect. He sits behind his desk, computer open.

“You messaged?” I hang back instead of sitting in one of the smaller chairs this side of his pretentious desk. I don’t care to get too close to him today.

As I suspected, Marcus opens with his usual concerns about his laundered money. “I’m looking through my accounts, but I don’t see Chandler’s donation distributed anywhere.”

I force myself not to roll my eyes. If the guy was more intelligent, he wouldn’t need someone like me to wash his money. “I can’t just push that amount of money through the usual channels without an alarm going off somewhere, so I’ve opened another shell company. The university is the brand-new owner of a division for private mentorship tuition. I’m waiting for the official documents to come back. I’ll need to set up a fake online presence to legitimize it before I even start, otherwise we risk being discovered.”

“You mean, you risk being discovered.” Marcus’s pale blue eyes pin me.

He’s holding the same threat over me. He goes down. I go down. I place my hands on my hips and stare while I try to ignore the bile swishing around in my stomach. “When everything is set up, I’ll distribute the money through a series of offshore accounts and crypto currency exchanges. That will also take time, but rest assured it’ll end up in your Swiss account.”

Like every other fund I’ve stolen on his behalf.

“In the meantime, the other investment businesses I’ve set up are generating significant interest returns. I’ll withdraw the dividends when they’re available and begin the process of sliding them into your accounts.”

Marcus runs his thumb over his bottom lip and fails to hide the greed in his eyes. “Good. Good.”

I could tell him anything, and he’d agree. He has no clue how I’m doing this. All he sees are the end figures in his account. Not the time or complexity of how the funds get there. Unfortunately, I’m making him a lot of money in the process.

The best I can hope for is his early retirement. He can roast his bloated carcass on some beach on the other side of the world for all I care. I hear the Australian beaches in Queensland have crocodiles. And lethal jellyfish. In fact, now that I think of it, he should go there. There’s a lot of lethal wildlife over there.

“Have you processed my dissertation request?” I hate asking anything of him. It’s no surprise when he steeples his fingers and peers at me over the top.

“Why would you want to write a dissertation with an undergrad?” he says.

I fire off the only arguments he’ll listen to. “She’s a star student. It’ll look good for the university to have undergrads working on dissertations. Once the paper is published, it’ll drive more ambitious students here. Which will be good for the university.”

“You’re up for a lot of extra work,” he says. “A lot of extra close contact hours. Do I need to be worried, Black? You do have a track record.”

I grind my teeth. My track record was a week spent with Emily while we worked out if we still felt that same way about each other. I take a moment and swallow the real words I want to spit out. “Stephanie Smith is not Emily. She’s highly intelligent and will make a good ambassador for the university. Besides, I was looking for another paper to publish to my name. Surely the university won’t pass on the opportunity for a professor to build a portfolio to promote the faculty in which they work.”

I don’t pass it off as a question. I put the thought in his head. He settles back in his chair, pretending to consider it and I press my most important point. “More published dissertations mean more students. And more donations.” I swallow bile when greed lights his eyes. He flicks his hand as though that needn’t be said. “Talking about donations, I have a lead on the Chandler girl.”

He taps his computer and turns the laptop around where a blurry photo of a gaggle of private school girls fills the screen. None are familiar, although I recognize the uniform as exclusive. That, at least, makes sense.

“Which girl is she?” I ask, when it’s not immediately apparent.

“This one.” Marcus points to a girl walking behind the group, hugging books to her chest. It’s too blurry to make anything out at all.

“I can’t recognize her from that.”

“You telling me you don’t know your own students? She’s in your class,” Marcus says.

“Which year level? I have over two thousand students in my classes.” On Tuesdays I fill one of the biggest lecture theatres in the university. I’m about to offer a smartass comment on asking students to replicate the photo but I keep my mouth shut. I don’t actually want to find this girl.

“That’s not my job to find out,” Marcus says, always passing the buck when he doesn’t have the answer.

---