Page 1 of The Biker and the Professor
Chapter 1
Toni
I feel hiseyes on me.
They’re always on me. I’ve gotten used to it, used to being his prey.
My back is turned, but I know those azure blue eyes with streaks of gray as well as I know calculus, and they are all over me.
I’m never able to escape them on C-Tech campus. Down the halls, across the parking lot, in class…I can alwaysfeelhis pressuring, unrelenting eyes on me.
Four months ago, when I walked into this class as the new calculus professor and met his bold, simmering gaze for the first time during roll call, it had made me uncomfortable. In my six years of being an on and off math teacher, I’ve never had a student look at me the way he did. At first, since I was new to Colorado, I figured that was just the way of the younglings on this side of the State. I’m eight months in now and that conjecture has been debunked. Onlyonestudent watches me as though I’m perpetually snaking my half-naked body around a pole to the beat of Massive Attack’sAngel.
Nero Gunnar.
I spin around from the whiteboard and pop the cap back onto my marker as I continue to explain the problem on the board.
As forty-two pairs of eyes stare past me to the board, one pair meets my direct gaze. He chews on the cap of his pen, his square jaw ticking with each movement.
I avert my gaze and maintain focus. I’m used to it now. As well as I’m used to the flutter in my belly each time our gazes meet, no matter how brief.
Where I used to feel uncomfortable before, now I feel…well, sexy. Wanted. Like I’m not some dried-up old prune whose beauty and sexual appeal is no more.
Which is how I used to feel about myself before I moved here to get away from my self-loathing, self-blaming thoughts and rejections. Except that my thoughts and rejections had also packed up their belongings and came right along with me, refusing to set me free.
Until Nero Gunnar's eyes found me.
I notice the two girls to his left whispering and giggling while ogling him. He doesn’t even notice.
Spitefully, I call on one of the girls to come up to the board and solve a problem. She’s stumped, as I knew she’d be. The girl hasn’t got a clue. I’m convinced she’s only in this class to get Nero’s attention. She’s failing miserably at that, too.
Fifteen minutes later, I dismiss the class. As everyone noisily shuffles out, I turn to clean the whiteboard.
I’m not surprised when I turn back around to find that everyone has cleared out except for Nero.
At this point, it’s a routine. I don’t bother to ask if there’s something I can help him with. The last time I did that, he smirked at me and said, “What’d you think?”
Under his heated and unwavering gaze, I gather my belongings and turn left to exit the classroom.
He doesn’t follow.
That’s not part of the routine.
~
I teach two more classes for the day. Two classes devoid of Nero Gunnar’s uninhibited stare. It’s a bittersweet feeling. I’m mildly annoyed and largely anxious when I have a class that he’s in, yet I feel strangely bereft and inexplicably irritated when I have a class he’snotin.
It’s ineffable.
He’s twenty, and my student. Impure thoughts are forbidden. He shouldnotbe having this kind of mental effect on me. I’ve never been more ethically and emotionally flustered in my life.
Later, when I’ve wrapped up for the day and I’m trotting through the parking lot toward my car, I inhale a deep breath in preparation for the final part of the routine.
I smell the cigarette smoke before I see him, straddling his Harley that’s parked in the slot next to my SUV.
Dammit,it is so very wrong of me to say this but screw it, he’shot.
Insanely.
