Page 14 of Taming His Teacher

I stumble and fall hard onto the coffee table. Luckily the ugly wood thing supports my weight as Will looms over me. While I’ve dreamed of being overpowered by a man, physically moved and controlled, it’s never looked like this. This is frightening, not sexy.

“There is no fucking way. You’re getting rid of it.”

“Will, you need to quiet down. The boys will hear you.” I’ve dropped my own tone to just above a whisper in hopes he’ll follow suit, but he’s like a man possessed. He grabs my arm and hefts me up.

“Fuck waiting until Friday. Let’s go, right now. Clean up this fucking disaster.”

“You’re not being reasonable. Even if I were to agree, which I don’t, nothing’s open. No one could see me. You need an appointment. And you don’t have to have anything to do with it. I’m not giving you a choice here, so I don’t expect anything from you.”

His fingers are digging hard into my flesh, but it doesn’t turn me on like it usually does. The hardness in his face isn’t the kind that could set me on fire and this isn’t a game or an act. He’s pissed.

He thrusts my arm away and starts pacing. I wait for him to say something, rubbing where I’ll have bruises coming up in the morning, and wonder what his next move is going to be. He walks with hard, long strides back and forth in the tiny space and my eyes follow his lean form from one side of the room to the other and back like I’m watching a tennis match.

“Will—”

“Get out, Erin.”

“But—”

“I said. Get. The fuck. Out.” He’s yelling, but with the most perfect enunciation. I don’t want the boys to hear anything more than they already have, so I put my hands up in surrender.

“Okay, I’ll leave.” I take a step toward the couch where he threw my parka, but he bellows, “Now!”

“Okay.”

It’s going to be a cold walk with no coat, but there’s no way I’m putting myself in front of that charging bull again. I back up until my heels hit the wall and then pull the door open, slipping out and down the back staircase, tears welling in my eyes.

I don’t know how I thought that was going to go, but not like that. God, not like that.

* * *

Shep

I’m slaving over my Latin homework when a movement out the window catches my eye. Someone’s running across the green. It’s too late for a student to be out and it’s freezing cold. Who the hell—

That’s when I know. It’s Erin. Why is she out? And she’s coming from Gefflin. Why would she be in—

Mr. Chase is the dorm affiliate for Gefflin. I’ve seen him flirt with her and watched her blush when he does, but I’ve also see him flirt with pretty much anything that has tits. If it weren’t so obvious she’s not special to him, I’d like to think I’d be green with envy that he’s allowed to flirt with her instead of filled with a red burning rage. He’s a dick who doesn’t deserve to stand within a hundred feet of a girl like Erin.

I can’t have her, but I’ll be damned if he’s going to. Now she’s running across campus in the dead of night with no goddamn coat on. Again. Does the girl want to get sick? While I wouldn’t mind nursing her back to health—putting her to bed, passing a cool hand over her feverish forehead, and hand-feeding her so she wouldn’t refuse to eat—that’s not an option. I don’t want her to be miserable, laid up alone with the flu or pneumonia or whatever the hell she could catch running around campus in the middle of winter without a goddamn coat on.

Erin’s a grown-up, has taken care of herself for years, but I’d like to knock some sense into her. Her little form scrambles across the green. She doesn’t bother to keep to the paths zigzagging the dead grass, but takes the most direct route. When she yanks the door to Oliver open, I watch her climb up the stairs through the frost-cornered windows, rubbing her arms until she reaches the third-floor landing. She’s gone through the swinging door that leads to the hallway when there’s pounding at my door.

“Shep-Shep-Shepherd!”

“Yeah, Lucky.”

Lucky pokes his shaggy head into my room. “What’s your deal, man? You look like you’re having as much trouble with this translation as I am. It’s a bitch, amirite?”

The translation isn’t hard and I know from a glance at Lucky’s book I’m a good thirty lines ahead of him, but I wouldn’t mind the company to suffer through the rest of it. I gesture at the navy blue butterfly chair that passes for guest seating and turn back to my desk. It’ll get my mind off of Erin at least, and the wildly inappropriate thoughts I have about her.

“Yeah, it’s a bitch all right.”

Chapter 5

Erin

The email had been terse:

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