Free Miss Impractical Pants by Katie Thayne

one of these really for me? Are you serious? Thank you! … But why?”
    “I thought maybe we should do more than just talk about going to Thailand.” Jared was grinning so widely his eyes had disappeared behind big laugh crinkles.
                  Katie nearly leapt out of her seat with shock more than excitement. Travel opportunities with a willing and able partner never came this easily.
    “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she gushed. “When are we going?”
    “Whenever you want. Just say the word and I’ll be ready.”
    “How long will we be gone?” she probed.
    “As long as you want. I want to spend as much time with you as you’ll give me.”
    She flashed a luminescent smile that gave him courage.
    “Katie, I want you to officially be my girlfriend.”
     
     

Chapter Eight
     
    In anticipation of Katie’s arrival, the door to Professor Bell’s office had been left ajar.
    “You haven’t returned my messages,” Professor Bell, leaning on the window ledge, stated upon hearing Katie’s approach.
    Katie cast a dismayed glance over his unoccupied desk. She longed to have the barrier of the tidy desktop keeping them at a cool, formal distance. Obeying his gesture to take a seat in the university-issued office chair that faced him, she noted he was towing a very fine line between annoyance and anger.
    “And I noticed that you have been absent from my classes this week.” He waited for a response.
    Her reply was not immediate. She took the time to ponder the best way to explain her avoidance without having him suspect it had been deliberate. Which, of course, he did, and which it was.
    “It’s been a really crazy week for me,” she declared at last, offering no further rationalization.
    Raising his eyebrows in a way that conveyed he was clearly unimpressed with her answer, he sat straighter into the boxed window casing, folded his arms tightly across his chest, and bore his gaze directly into her face. Katie shifted in the chair designed to make students feel as uncomfortable as possible and tried not to notice how his biceps swelled over the cuffs of his short sleeves.
    “As I told you in the several unreturned messages I left,” his controlled, even tones were more severe than any angry rant, “your internship has, with no little effort on both our parts, been reluctantly approved by the Dean.”
    Neither one looked pleased by the news of this hard-earned victory.
    “I need to have all student internship files submitted by the end of the week and yours is still missing a work summary.”
    He heaved a long sympathetic, or maybe impatient, sigh—Katie couldn’t really tell.
    “Katie, this is a simple, twenty-minute assignment. Why are you dragging your feet? Is there something going on I should know about? You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”
    “No, of course not.” That was mostly true; she hadn’t changed her mind about going to England, she just hadn’t thought any more about it.
    Her quick reply earned a skeptical look from the professor. “Then you won’t mind staying here in my office a while longer until you’ve completed the assignment?” This was more a command than a question. “I have stuck my neck out too far on this for you to not follow through.”
    Katie flinched, not at the rising anger in his voice, but at the realization he had more than she understood riding on her internship.
    “For your own benefit,” he continued, “I feel compelled to remind you that without this simple assignment your file will be incomplete, which means you won’t have an internship, you won’t pass this class, and you won’t be able to graduate by the end of the summer.”
    The guilt Katie had been feeling was instantly usurped by fear and a desperate longing to have achieved a piece of her Amazing Plan—to have a neatly framed degree hanging on her wall boasting of her one and only accomplishment.
    Spurred on by that vision and the desire to make Professor Bell proud