Beyond the Highland Myst(700)

Eyes snapping wide, she’d jerked her gaze to his face. His gaze had been locked on her face, his eyes narrowed, his gaze dark and hot. He’d flashed her a sexy, wicked smile that had been both invitation and challenge, catching the tip of his tongue between his teeth.

She’d backed hastily out and slammed the door.

The man was seriously hung.

An insane, utterly-uncaring-of-consequences part of her had wanted nothing more than to go right back in there, strip, get in the shower with him, push his hand away, and replace it with hers.

Get a grip, Jessi, she’d rebuked herself firmly. And not on mirror-man’s dick.

After shutting him in the bathroom and gulping a few steadying breaths, she’d gone to the phone and ordered room service, putting it also on her credit card.

“Why not?” she muttered to her reflection over the top of her laptop. “I may as well charge with impunity.” The way things were going, she probably wouldn’t live long enough to have to pay it off anyway. She made a face at herself in the mirror. It had been a long day and she was showing signs of the strain. Her makeup was as good as gone, her stubborn cowlicks were acting up, and her clothes were rumpled.

Plucking a tissue from a box on the desk, she dabbed at the remnants of mascara smudged on her lashes and ran a hand through her short glossy curls.

People often told her she looked like a curvier version of the girl who’d played Virginia, the heroine in The 10th Kingdom, and she supposed she did—after Virginia had gotten her hair whacked off by the wolfman. After the gypsies had cursed her for setting their poor birds free. Jessi would have set the poor birds free too. Not that her hair looked like it had been whacked off or anything. She got it trimmed every six weeks down at the Beauty Training Academy, and they did a pretty good job for six bucks.

She narrowed her eyes at her reflection. Breasts. They were undoubtedly her best feature. Some people got great nails and hair, some people got beautiful smiles or pretty eyes, some people got skinny little perfect beach-butts, those disgustingly ideal ones that actually stayed in bikini bottoms. She’d gotten good breasts. It wasn’t that they were so big. Frankly, she didn’t think they were. It was just that they were really round and really high and really perky, and she had a short neck (which was why she wore her hair short—the girls at the Beauty Academy said it made her neck look longer), and sometimes even she thought her breasts looked fake in certain tops, but they weren’t. They were real. Perhaps a bit too enthusiastically perky, but she figured she should enjoy that while she could, because she fully comprehended complex equations like gravity plus time.

The reflection of the glowing red face of the clock on the bedside table suddenly drew her attention, blinking as the hour rolled over.

4:00 A.M.

She stared at it in the mirror, aghast, realizing that in three hours and twenty minutes, classes would begin for the day. On Thursdays, she taught four one-hundred-level anthropology courses.

Or she’d used to. She certainly wouldn’t be teaching any today.

She considered calling in sick, but decided it was wiser not to. When this was over, she’d figure out what kind of story to tell. She might be able to get away with claiming to have been forcibly abducted and fully exonerate herself. Which meant if she called in sick now, it would make her look like a liar later. I know it’s odd for a kidnapper to let his kidnappee call in sick, but he was an odd kidnapper. Right. That would go over like a ton of bricks.

Exhaling gustily, she returned her attention to her laptop and plugged it into the hotel line. She’d decided to check her E-mail while he was showering, partly in a no-doubt-pointless bid for the comfort of routine, but also to keep her mind off sex, which, with him around, was like trying not to think about chocolate while sitting in a person-sized fondue pot of the dark, creamy stuff, surrounded by flowering cacao trees.

Her inbox was filled with the usual: newsletters to which she subscribed to stay apprised of significant developments in her field; E-mails from students in the undergad classes she T.A.’d, filled with impressively creative excuses as to why they should be the exception to the rule, forgiven their: a) absenteeism; b) failure to appear for an exam; c) late paper. The entertaining and inventive pleas for leniency were followed by spam spam and more spam, and finally, the one she liked best—the Naked Man of the Week pictures from her cyberfriends at RBL Romantica.

She made short work of her correspondence, shooting the newsletters to a suspend folder for later perusal, denying any and all excuses/pleas for extensions that didn’t involve a death in the family, reporting the spam, and perusing the Naked Man pictures appreciatively before setting one of them as her desktop background.