Free Saint and Scholar by Holley Trent Page B

dreamy expression morphed into something darker. “You’re playing with me!” Carla pushed herself up on her elbows and put her palms on his chest to give him a small shove back.
    He grasped the tops of her arms to hold her still and laid her back down on the sofa. “No I’m not. I’m not some little boy who plays word games to get a woman to take her pants off.”
    Her eyes narrowed a hair, but she said nothing.
    “You don’t believe me? Well, I guess, why should you? You hardly know me.”
    “Precisely.”
    He forced out a breath through his lips and let go of her arms.
    Shit. If she were any other woman, how would I be behaving right now?
    No matter how hard he pondered, there was no satisfactory answer…or at least not one that could subdue his advances. Carla wasn’t any other woman. She was the woman.
    When he trailed a finger around the blossoming bruises on her neck, she closed her eyes and giggled.
    “Hey, look at me,” he whispered.
    She opened her eyes.
    “I want to confess something that’ll either scare you off or make you unbelievably horny. Hard to tell with you complicated creatures.”
    When she tried to sit up, he unstraddled her and got on his knees on the floor beside her. She furrowed her brow again and covered her breasts with her arms.
    Best to just get on with it. “Look, Carla, I want to help you with your project, but more than that I want to have a go with you.”
    She raised one brow. “A go ?”
    “I…” He stood and raked his hair back from his face as he paced in front of the picture window in the living area. “This will probably sound incredibly stalkerish, but I’ve been thinking about you for seven years, almost daily.”
    “ Me ?” The look she wore was one of absolute incredulity.
    “Yeah, you.” He crouched next to the sofa and folded his arms atop her lap.
    She pushed his hair behind his ears.
    He took her touch as a good sign. “Do you know how hard it is to want to give someone a hug make them feel better but you can’t because of how unseemly it would be? You were quiet before, but when you came back to my class after your dad’s funeral, I wanted to take you home and spoon you until you felt better. I probably would have overstepped my bounds if you had looked at me just once. Good thing you didn’t.”
    She sat back agape. “I guess I…” She put her arms back over her chest and shrugged. “I suppose I didn’t think anyone beyond my friends was paying any attention to me.” She rolled her eyes and blew her hair out of her eyes. “Even my mother was offline. My advisor told me in no uncertain terms to suck it up because people die all the time.”
    He pulled his arms away from her and leaned back onto his heels. He didn’t want her to think his fists had anything to do with her. He’d always gotten a bad vibe about that particular undergraduate advisor. Quite a few undergraduates had ended up taking his freshman-level courses late because the guy had steered them wrong. The man didn’t know how to read the handbooks, and that was his job . He steadied his breathing and tried to relax the tension in his jaw. He’d deal with it when he went to campus. “I’m sorry for that. Really, I wish I’d known.”
    “It’s okay,” she said with a shrug. She was lying. Although her voice was sunny, the way her lips quivered indicated she’d just ripped open an old wound.
    “No, it’s not okay. Someone should have been there. No siblings?”
    “I have two brothers, but they were caught up in their own stuff. I didn’t want to bug them.”
    He didn’t understand that. He hadn’t had siblings of his own, but wasn’t one of the built-in benefits of having them that they were a sort of support network? “Why not?”
    “I don’t know. I guess they were so busy propping up my mom that I figured I wouldn’t pile on.” Carla curled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Can we talk about something else?”
    “Of course, I