Chapter Five
Blair Reynolds stole the show last night in a red dress that had everyone talking. Looks like someone’s over her fiancé . . .
—Capital Confessions blog
Gray
I knew she’d be here, but nothing had prepared me for the sight that greeted me when I turned around.
Under normal circumstances, she was beautiful. It wasn’t obvious or flashy; it was quiet, bone-deep, and steady. Tonight she was something else entirely.
She wore red, a dress that exposed more of the delicate skin I’d dreamed of than I’d ever seen before. She walked toward me, her arm linked with a woman who looked like her mother. The expression on Blair’s face said she wanted to be anywhere but here.
When I’d received the invitation and saw the last name Reynolds, it had all clicked. She was Senator Edward Reynolds’s daughter. I’d never met him, but I knew of his reputation and the Reynolds family’s reach in D.C. She came from a different world, one where family name, blood, and voyage on the Mayflower counted a hell of a lot more than money. My bank account got me into these parties, but I never really belonged.
Mrs. Reynolds stopped in front of me, a smile I knew all too well plastered on her face. In Chicago, my ex-wife had dragged me to more society events than I could count, each one worse than the one before it. Everyone had been polite, wanting donations to their charity or their political candidate, everyone wanting something, their smiles all show and no substance. I’d hated it, which was why I was pretty sure I’d only come tonight for the name on the invitation, and if I were really honest with myself, to see her.
“Professor Canter, isn’t it? I’m Elizabeth Reynolds. I’m so pleased you could come tonight.”
Which basically translated to, I’m so pleased that you, and more importantly, your money, could come tonight. Please give some to my husband’s struggling political campaign.
“Thank you for the invitation, Mrs. Reynolds.” I spoke to her while my eyes all but devoured her daughter. Christ. I was lucky I was able to string together a sentence.
“Have you met my daughter, Blair? She’s a first-year law student at Hannover.”
She said Hannover like it was a communicable disease.
My lips twitched. “Yes. I’ve had the pleasure.”
Blair snorted and I choked back a laugh.
Her mother’s eyes narrowed and then her gaze jerked away, her attention momentarily diverted. I couldn’t take my eyes off of Blair.
Mrs. Reynolds turned back to face us. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to speak to the caterers. It was lovely to meet you.” She shot Blair a pointed look before walking off, leaving the two of us alone.
I’d written a hefty check to attend tonight—a check to a man whose campaign I never would have supported under ordinary circumstances. All so I could see his daughter without the barrier of our roles in the classroom. All so I could spend a few minutes with her alone.
She was worth every fucking zero.
Blair
Fuckity fuck, fuck, fuck.
Okay, so I might have had a sexual fantasy, or two, or twelve about the man. And he was on the list of my top five least favorite people thanks to the weekly interrogations he subjected me to. But I could do this. I’d give him two or three moments of polite small talk and then I’d flee. Preferably to the bar. He already had me during class time, during my dreams; it didn’t seem fair that he’d invade my social life as well. What was left of it, at least.
I pasted a smile on my face, the one perfected from years of helping my mother hostess.
“Professor Canter, it’s lovely to see you.”
Lie, lie, lie.
His smile deepened as though he knew I was full of shit and found it amusing.
I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. He just stared at me. He’d been staring ever since he’d turned around, hadn’t taken his gaze off of me once. It was unnerving as hell. And then he finally did speak, and I slid past unnerved into mind blown.
His lips curved, his voice like whiskey-soaked sin. “Call me Gray.”
Gray.
The name was just another intimacy in a long line of intimacies he’d already taken, and yet it felt like the lynchpin. Once you stripped “Professor” and “Ms.” from our names, we were just two people a few years apart in age. Two people who held a match to a flame.
I couldn’t call him Gray.
“No.”
An eyebrow rose, curiosity sparking in his eyes. “No?” The word was silk falling from his lips. “Why?”
Even though he didn’t wear his wealth like he’d been born to it, as though it was effortless for him, it was clear that he was a man used to having his way.
This was not good.
“You’re my professor,” I protested, barely resisting the urge to take a step back and put some space between us. He’d been standing apart from the rest of the party when I’d joined him, but now I realized he’d maneuvered me even farther away, fencing me into a corner, one step away from the wall at my back, his big, hard body pressing me in.
“I’m seven years older than you,” he answered, his voice dry.
“You probably shouldn’t know that either,” I muttered, fighting for composure when all I wanted to do was have the rest of the distance between us disappear until I felt the strength his clothes hinted at.
Push and pull.
“Do you think I care about playing by the rules?”
He delivered the words in a tone that was sensuously smooth with a knife’s edge, both seduction and warning. He beckoned me closer at the same time he pushed me away.
I’d never been rebellious. I didn’t go looking for trouble, didn’t put myself in situations that screamed, bad idea, and this one definitely screamed, bad idea. From the top of its lungs, with a megaphone, broadcasting over Times Square.
I could have made up some bullshit excuse, could have left the trouble brewing between us for the safety of hostessing and mingling with the other guests.
But I stayed.
I hadn’t been looking for trouble, but it seemed that now that I’d found it, I wasn’t running from it, either.
Yet.
There had been times in class when I’d caught him looking at me, when I’d seen a flicker of something I didn’t see when he looked at anyone else. But now, with the veil of our titles lifted, that flicker was a full-blown flame and the second it ignited, I took one step forward into his body when I should have seen that step for what it was—
The beginning of my fall.
He started with my eyes, his gaze holding mine as if we both felt the same nearly imperceptible shift—was it my dress, his first name, the way his body anchored mine in place without having to touch me? Or was it the inevitability that had always been there since that first day—the recognition that we would never be just student and teacher.
There was something wild in him, something barely restrained that called to the part of me that had never been anything but safe. I’d never felt temptation, true temptation, until now, until he looked at me like he wanted to devour me in a room filled with D.C. society, with my parents, until I had to curl my fingers into a ball to keep from reaching out and taking what he offered, no matter how reckless or dangerous.
Gray’s gaze shifted, drifting lower, the power of it a caress against my skin. There was heat coming off of him in waves now—heat and a frustrated emotion I couldn’t quite name. It was as though he didn’t want to look at me, but he looked anyway, and I didn’t doubt he was the kind of man who knew the effect he had on me.