Well, hell. He hadn’t expected that. “Excuse me, Professor?”
“You were looking at me. I assumed you wanted some attention.”
He leaned back in his chair, forcing himself to relax. “Of course I want some attention. Who doesn’t?”
Maddy snorted and Eleanor flicked her a brief glance before looking back at him. “It appears you have plenty of that.”
Oh, she was so cool, so calm. Pretending nothing had happened, that she hadn’t felt the charge of electricity between them. Which presented him with an irresistible challenge.
She wasn’t going to pretend, no fucking way. He was going to make it his goal to see under that smooth, sophisticated front of hers. Get beneath it. Get the truth out of her, one way or another.
Starting now.
The decision gave him far more satisfaction than it should have, but he didn’t bother to hide it. “Surely you can never have too much attention, Professor?” he said and smiled at her, an expression he’d once had to practice in the mirror to get it working right.
She stared at him for a moment, gray eyes narrowing, clearly sensing something was up. Her colleagues were looking at her strangely but she didn’t seem to notice.
She opened her mouth as if to say something, but one of her colleagues said, “Are you coming, Ell?”
A fleeting look of annoyance crossed her face before the cool smile was back. “Yes, possibly you’re right.”
“What’s all that about?” Maddy asked as Eleanor went through the café doors. “I didn’t know May was giving undergraduate classes?”
“She’s giving Prof Holmes’s legal history class this semester.”
“Huh. What’s she like?”
Luc put his hands behind his head and smiled. “So far? Interesting. Very fucking interesting indeed.”
Eleanor was extremely pissed. Somehow Lucien North seemed to be everywhere she went. It wasn’t that he was stalking her—at least she didn’t think he was—it was that she seemed to notice him a lot more than she had before. The Auckland University law school wasn’t terribly big by international standards and she knew a lot of the students, at least by sight. He’d never been in any of her classes but he’d been there on the periphery, a tall, striking figure she’d glanced at many times and acknowledged—at least in the privacy of her mind—as being pretty stareworthy. But now he’d somehow insinuated himself into her consciousness, made it so that she was exquisitely aware of him.
In the student café, where she went sometimes to get coffee, he’d be there in a group of students, either talking with them or reading. He seemed to be pretty popular—understandably—and there always seemed to be a woman or five hanging around him. In the library when she went to pick up a book, she’d find him sitting at a desk with some headphones on, doing something on his laptop. Or walking down a corridor, he’d be there in deep discussion with another member of the faculty or another student.
It annoyed her. She wasn’t consciously looking for him, it was only that somehow her brain had decided he was a person of interest and so kept an eye out for him.
And whenever it did, she found she couldn’t help looking at him, almost as if she was seeking out that disturbing black gaze. Which was insane. He was a student and that was all he ever should be.
As for him, only once did he acknowledge her and that was in the student café, as she and a colleague were getting coffee. She was on her way out and he was sitting at the table he’d been at the week before, by the doors, leaning back in his chair, legs stretched arrogantly in front him, hands linked behind his head. There was a woman beside him, leaning close in, obviously telling him something. And he appeared to be paying attention. Until he lifted his head as Eleanor passed and his eyes met hers, hot and dark.
And the same thrill passed through her as it had that previous week. The one she’d told herself she didn’t feel. She only smiled coolly back and walked on, not bothering to speak to him, ignoring both the flicker of heat that settled in her gut and the annoyance that the flicker of heat was even there in the first place.
Jesus, what did he think she was? Sixteen? She was thirty-eight and long past the stage of getting hot and bothered just because some outrageously good-looking young man kept staring at her.
“Eleanor?” James Devon was at her elbow and she realized she’d stopped short of the café doors. Luc wasn’t even looking at her now, the blonde sitting next to him had her hand on his thigh and he’d turned his head toward her, smiling.
Her irritation deepened. Fuck’s sake. What was the matter with her?