Page 20 of Night Shift

I shake my head. “You insufferable nerd.”

Vincent tosses his head back and lets out a surprised bark of laughter. The sound of it is glorious. “What? You don’t care about mitosis?”

“I’d rather take a class with Richard fucking Wilson.”

Vincent laughs again, and I’m so proud of myself for pulling the sound out of him that I have to press my lips together to hold back a self-satisfied smile. I shift in my seat, uncrossing and then angling my legs. Vincent’s gaze drops and lands on my bare thighs—the right one now sporting a big pink oval where it was sandwiched under the left—and his laughter dries up in his throat.

When his eyes meet mine again, there’s a curiosity burning in them that makes me feel like he can clear the distance I’ve tried to put between us.

“Maybe I can tutor you sometime,” he offers. “You know, in exchange.”

The heat in his eyes tells me that both our heads are in the gutter.

It’s both a thrilling realization—that maybe I’m not entirely alone in my thirst—and a terrifying one. Because I bet a more experienced girl would know what all the teasing smiles and innuendos meant. What if this is how Vincent is? What if he flirts with everyone (baristas, professors, classmates in his labs) and I’m just a girl who overthinks everything and has a bad case of main character syndrome?

The smile falls off my face. I tug at the hem of my shorts again and tuck my hair behind my ears. Vincent notices I’m pulling back. That little furrow between his eyebrows reappears.

“Are there any other poems you need to go over?” I ask. “I have a lot of reading to do before my class this afternoon, so if we’re done . . .”

Vincent’s eyes are heavy on me. The heat of his assessing stare makes me squirm, but then the seam of my denim shorts rubs the exact right spot and I’m reminded that I liked his little poetry reading a little bit too much.

“What?” I demand.

“Nothing.” Then, like it’s an afterthought: “You look good, Kendall.”

A startled laugh escapes me. “Oh, fuck off.”

“No, I mean it,” he says. “It’s nice to see you in broad daylight.”

I wish we weren’t in public. I wish I had the nerve to tell him, point-blank, that something about reading poetry with him makes me wet and wanting like a pent-up Regency woman.

Instead, I say, “Yeah.”

Yeah, it’s good to see you too. Yeah, I still think about you too. Yeah, I’ll let you bend me over this armchair and—

“You never answered my question, by the way,” Vincent says.

I frown. “Which one?”

He nods toward my backpack. “How’s the book?”

Ten

Right. I guess he’s not letting that slide.

I fight the urge to angle my knees and block Vincent’s view of my backpack. The boy may be perceptive as fuck, but it’s not like he can see through canvas and three layers of notebooks. Still, I feel weirdly exposed. I catalogue the faces of the scattered students and professors and baristas around the Starbucks, but they’re all fully absorbed in their conversations and laptops and caffeinated beverages. The only eyes on me are Vincent Knight’s.

“It’s a good book,” I say. Then, more honestly, I amend: “Actually, it’s a little silly.”

Vincent waits. He wants me to elaborate.

“Okay, so,” I say, taking a giant breath and hooking one foot up underneath my butt, “this duke asks this woman who can’t stand him to pose as his fiancé because there was a clause in his father’s will that says the title will get passed on to his shitty brother if he doesn’t marry in a year. And the brother’s addicted to gambling and knocked up a married woman back in London, so it’s all very high stakes and—well, messy. There are lots of balls and scandals and plot twists. It’s not at all historically accurate, but it’s fun. And silly. But in the right way. If that makes sense?”

If Vincent thinks my book sounds like a waste of time, he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t laugh at me. He doesn’t shame me.

But he does say, “So, college boys are trash, but a duke with family baggage is fine?”

A laugh bubbles up in my throat, partly because I’m relieved he’s not being completely judgmental about my genre of choice and partly because he actually remembers what we talked about in the library. I wonder if he’s replayed our conversation in his head the way I have.

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