Need Me (Broke and Beautiful #2)(4)

Her tongue came out to wet her lips, and he watched it happen in slow motion. Felt the muscles in his abdomen tighten at the image of her mouth skating down, down, to deal with the turmoil in his pants. She stopped right at the front of the podium and traced a finger over his lesson plans. No one had ever touched his lesson plans before, and it felt intimate. Maybe more intimate than a kiss for someone like him. She opened her mouth to speak—

“Ben.”

The familiar voice broke through his red haze of lust. His colleague, Peter, stood at the entrance, eyeing him strangely. Why? Oh, probably because he was sweating and staring at a student like he wanted to eat her for lunch. Eat her . . . f*ck. What color panties was she wearing? He’d give anything to know.

“Hey, Ben,” Peter said with a little more oomph. “We’ve got that faculty meeting.”

The blonde, looking more than a little disappointed with their audience, gave him a small smile and walked away. Just like that. She’d aroused him out of his mind, made him question his strict rules, then walked away so casually she might be headed to a beach party. When she passed Peter in the doorway, the fellow teacher looked at her speculatively, and something ugly reared its head inside of Ben. Don’t look at her. Don’t you f*cking look at her, he wanted to shout.

Jesus, man. Reel it back. Repeating those words on a loop, he gathered his things quickly and joined Peter at the door. At least he had his body under control now. The icing on this cake of a day would be explaining his peter to Peter.

“What was that about?” his often nosy colleague asked him. “That looked . . . bad.”

Ben scratched his chin. “No idea what you mean. It was nothing.”

“It didn’t look like nothing.” Peter bumped him with his shoulder, and Ben gave him a dark look. He found Peter irritating on a regular basis, but something about him discussing the blonde in any capacity was making him twice as unbearable. They were both new to the faculty, though, and taught the same course. They were required to share notes and compare lesson plans, which put them in one another’s company pretty frequently. “Listen, we have to be careful. We don’t have tenure yet. One wrong move—”

“Stop. I don’t know what you think you saw, but you need to drop it.”

Peter held up his hands. “Just looking out for you.”

Ben stayed silent the rest of the walk to the meeting. He thought of the blonde the entire way.





Chapter 2



HONEY WALKED INTO the apartment that evening and froze. Was she in the right place? She leaned back slightly and checked the apartment number. Yup. She lived here.

Candles everywhere. Streamers. Balloons. Sugary pop music pumped from Abby’s pink MacBook where it sat on the kitchen table. Bottles upon bottles of booze were lined up on the kitchen island in every flavor imaginable. Red plastic cups and an ice bucket were placed handily beside them. The lights were out in the entire apartment, but the candles flickered, lighting the walls with an orangey glow. This is what she got for staying late at the lab to finish her organic chemistry project, hoping to distract herself from thoughts of Professor Dawson. She came home to a whole new world.

No, not Professor Dawson. Ben. She knew his name now.

Abby almost bulldozed her as she ran into the living room with only one eye of makeup and two different shoes on her feet. “There you are!”

“Here I am.” Honey gestured to the room. “Why does it look like Mardi Gras threw up in here?”

“Roxy landed a part today.” Abby was practically vibrating. “A big one.”

Honey’s hands flew to her mouth. “No way. Oh my God. What is it?”

“I don’t know yet. She wanted to tell everyone in person.” Abby latched onto Honey’s arms, and they both started jumping up and down. “Louis brought all this stuff over and went back out for more. We’re going to surprise her.”

“She’s going to hate this.”

“I know, right? She’ll get over it.”

The apartment door swung open and Louis backed in, holding a . . . fog machine? Honey might have had her reservations about Louis in the beginning. No way could this gorgeous lawyer with a trust fund that could purchase a small island be as nice as he seemed. But she’d warmed to him when it had become obvious he would do just about anything and everything to make Roxy happy. As in, saw his own arm off if it improved her day by even the tiniest degree. The fact that he always brought over butter pecan ice cream for them didn’t exactly hurt his cause, either.

Louis set down the fog machine and started jumping up and down with them, sending them both into a laughing fit. Another thing about Louis? He’d grown up with two—certifiably insane—twin sisters, which had made it easy for him to fit in with their girl crew. Roxy had once called him the * Whisperer, and it had kind of stuck. For the sake of brevity, though, they simply called him P-Dub.

“Rox just texted me that she’s hopping on the train,” Louis said, holding up his phone. “That gives us about twenty minutes.”

“Where is every—”

Honey was cut off when the door opened and people began to stream into the apartment. She recognized Louis’s sisters from a picture he’d once shown them, although she would have known anyway, since they shared his good looks. Walking in behind them was a huge group of people, including two girls with yoga mats and tattoo sleeves, three guys with scraggly beards carrying guitars, and a woman dressed like Madonna, circa 1989. Louis’s coworkers and Roxy’s actor friends continued to arrive until their voices drowned out the music, forcing Abby to turn up the volume.