I don’t answer. I can’t, as Faye chooses that exact moment to spin, her hair flying out behind her. Her face shines with joy. With freedom. Like she’s someone else—someone unguarded and real and so fucking beautiful it hurts to look at her.
“Damn.” Remy must follow my stare. “Who’s the blonde?”
“Nobody for you,” I growl. Territorial. Possessive. Which is insane because I have zero claim on Faye Rose.
But the idea of Remy—of anyone—looking at her the way I am now makes something ugly twist in my chest.
My brother does a double-take, his gaze pinballing between me and Faye. “Wait. Is that—holy shit, that’s the teacher?”
I don’t answer. My eyes are locked on Faye, on the way she moves, on the curve of her waist where her T-shirt is tucked in. On the length of her hair that I suddenly itch to wrap around my fist. On her smile—so different from the tight, professional one she gave me in the classroom.
“You old bastard,” Remy breathes. “No wonder you enjoyed getting spanked.”
I don’t reply. If he says something else, I don’t hear it. Don’t hear anything except the blood rushing in my ears as Faye lifts her gaze and sees me.
Our eyes meet across the bar—past the mist of too many people breathing the same air.
Space shirks down in a suspended intake of breath as the room goes from slow motion to a full stop. Like the universe hit pause and left the two of us locked in place.
Faye doesn’t look away. Doesn’t immediately ice over like she did at school. For a few precious seconds, she stares at me with something that looks a hell of a lot like fire.
Burning, molten, honeyed heat.
The colored lights from the stage play across her face—red, then blue, then gold—and in each shade, she brings me to my knees a little further.
She spins away without even a nod in my direction, turning back to Lila, still dancing. But something in her demeanor shifts. Tension creeps into her shoulders, and she doesn’t turn again.
“Oh, you’re fucked,” Remy says beside me, chuckling, as he pats my shoulder. “Completely, absolutely fucked.”
He’s right.
Because the look she gave me, before she remembered she’s supposed to hate me, it’s all it takes.
She has flames blazing under her frosty crust. All I have to do is melt the ice cap and reach the burning core. And heaven forgive me, I want to. I want to be there when she lets that fire loose.
Oh, I’m the one about to get very, very stupid over a woman.
6
FAYE
He’s here.
That’s my first thought as I spin away from him. Away from those eyes that found me across the crowded bar and pinned me to the dance floor with nothing of the contempt and dismissal from our classroom encounter. Ryder Evans replaced the disdain with a burning focus that I can only call predatory. Even turned away, I feel his gaze on my back like fingers trailing down my spine. And that awareness wreaks havoc.
My heart pounds faster than it has all night, harder than the bass thumping through the floorboards. My body sizzles from scalp to soles, as if I’m being slow-roasted over an open flame. Heat that starts deep and works its way out until every inch of my skin feels scorched thin and hypersensitive.
I keep moving in time to the music, hips swaying, arms loose, but my mind scatters. The band grinds out a fast, dirty tune, the guitar’s metallic twang wrestling with the singer’s smoky rasp.
I focus on the music, on the press of bodies around me, on anything except the magnetic pull dragging my attention back across the room. My hair whips all over the place as I move, and my balance is off, but I refuse to stop dancing. Refuse to acknowledge the cowboy behind me.
Lila grabs my hands and makes me spin, laughing, oblivious to my inner panic. The world blurs—lights, faces, the shimmer of glass and sweat—and then clarifies as I’m halfway through the turn. In the fraction of a second that I face his direction again, Ryder Evans is still there, still looking at me. Same stormy eyes as the day we met in my classroom. Different everything else.
His hair is combed back, slightly less unruly than it was that afternoon save for a rebellious strand that still curls over his cheek.
His jeans are clean, dark denim that fits him obscenely well, and he’s wearing a blue flannel that could start a religion—with him as the cowboy god and half the bar ready to kneel. Tonight, his jaw is clean-shaven. And if I thought the scruff was problematic, seeing the sharp lines of his face, the small cleft in his chin that was hidden before, makes Ryder Evans approximately ten thousand times harder to ignore.
But I do. I have to. I spin away once more. It’s okay. I’ll dance another song, maybe two, then go home and sleep off whatever allergic reaction my body is having.
