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No, I’d just leave. I’d walk past and ignore him as if I’d heard nothing at all.

Courage bolstered, I tugged on my backpack and strode purposefully toward the exit, but stopped short halfway as he slinked out of his hiding spot.

Cheeks red. Hair mussed.

His blue-gray eyes found me at once, widened, then darted over my face and behind me toward my study table. Slowly, his gaze made the journey toward the stack in which he’d just audibly desecrated my secret corner by bringing a girl to orgasm. He connected the dots in seconds, the progression of thoughts clear as glass on his face.

Did she hear?

Oh, damn. Yeah, she heard.

Should I apologize?

Wait. Why did she stay?

Then something changed. A realization came over him, and a challenge took up residence in his features. Light caught behind his eyes.

You stayed.

Did you like what you heard?

I couldn’t look away from him. Couldn’t forget the sounds he’d elicited from that girl. Jealousy and arousal warred within me.

What are you going to do about it? His expression seemed to say, and my filthy, teenage mind conjured images of him crowding me against a shelf instead of Blair, reaching beneath my clothes, making me moan against his mouth.

I scowled and put on a haughty voice. “The library is for silent study.”

His smile spread like golden daybreak. “Maybe some studying isn’t meant to be silent.”

I snorted in derision.

“Like the study of anatomy.”

Indignation ignited in my chest, and I drew myself up. “It is very disrespectful to those studying to disrupt them with your⁠—”

“With my what?”

A frustrated, disbelieving breath escaped my throat. “You know what.”

“Can’t even say the words, Honeycutt?”

The challenge broke my composure, and I stepped closer to him. Heat crawled up my neck, burning across my face. “If you want to screw girls in public, I’d appreciate if you’d do it somewhere else. I don’t want to hear it.”

His lips parted, and a hint of daring darkened the blue of his eyes. He looked from my table to the exit. “You sure? You could have left at any time.”

My hand clenched. “I’m sure, Shepherd.”

“My apologies, then. It won’t happen again.”

He wiped his expression clean, bowed his head politely, and raised his arm as an invitation to precede him from the stacks.

Ever polite.

But it did happen again—multiple times—until I was forced to find a new study spot. He did it on purpose, of course, but back then I thought it was simply to get under my skin, to grate against my need to follow the rules, to rub my own prudishness in my face.

To drive me crazy.

Maybe it had been…something else.