Marie sat in her office, her mouth on her knuckles, elbows planted on her desk. She stared at her wall calendar, seeing not the photo of the French countryside, but Logan’s neck stiffening as she’d flashed the first set of slides onto the projector screen.
Yes, the back of his neck had stiffened, and when she’d gone to the front of the room to get her notes from her desk, she’d noticed more. His jaw jutted pugnaciously toward the older Xavier’s image, and the tendons under that stern jaw line had corded. His lips flattened, instead of curving in their normal mocking sensuality.
Projecting his grandfather’s image on that screen had definitely either provoked or upset him, and she wasn’t sure she was interested in awakening any sleeping demons in Logan’s past.
Yet somehow Miss Amelia had outfitted her for the job, and it was all the more disturbing that Logan was one hot, sexy guy. However, he’d better keep his libido to himself.
He’d used his disturbing sexuality to harass her silently until the slides went up. She was still furious about it, but curious about that turning point. Those first two slides had disarmed Logan, made him forget about squaring off with her, and focus on… what? Some long-ago rift with his grandfather. Logan was not only fighting her, fighting the situation, but fighting the past.
She thought about it some more. For heaven’s sake, the man taught sky-diving for a living. He had a battle going on with gravity itself. While eventually the laws of nature won, bringing him down to earth, he still defied them on a daily basis.
The only person who’d made him lay down his weapons was Miss Amelia. He wasn’t savage enough to disregard her. But even she was throwing him back into a wrestling match with his grandfather.
Marie recalled what had happened after the first set of slides. When she’d launched into a presentation of Xavier’s work, Logan’s posture relaxed and his eyes hooded with deliberate boredom. He crossed one ankle over the other.
So he wasn’t intimidated by his grandfather’s creativity or talent. He was just angry at the man himself. That was an important distinction. But by blocking out the elder Xavier’s raison d’etre, he was refusing to engage with him. He was rejecting the man’s form of communication with the world.
How was she, as a teacher, going to reach him? Marie continued to consider the problem, while trying desperately not to consider him naked.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Logan entered her classroom the next Tuesday carrying a folding lawn chair and an insulated quart-sized cup that rattled with ice.
She put her hands on her hips as he slid a couple of desks aside to make room for his lounger. As he bent at the waist to do so, three of her female students shamelessly glued their eyes to his glutes.
Marie herself couldn’t help noticing the muscular, tanned forearms emerging from the rolled sleeves of his flannel shirt. Dark hair dusted those arms, glinting under the fluorescent lighting, and she had an uncomfortable flashback to his naked chest gleaming sweaty in the sunlight.
A spark of heat ignited in her belly, and she grabbed for the Diet Coke on her desk. She’d drown the embers before they could flare up. What was wrong with her?
Irritated, she said to Logan, “This isn’t a beach, you know.”
Caramel eyes challenged hers as he settled into the chair, leaning back with his knees spread.
Classic gorilla-man mode.
“What a shame,” he said, quirking an eyebrow. “And here I was, hoping you’d teach today in a bikini.” Ignoring the gasps of her other students, the horrid man looked her up and down. He didn’t miss anything, not even her toes. Doubtless he was checking to see if she’d painted the other seven yet. She had.
She gritted her teeth. So Logan liked to jump out of planes voluntarily? She was beginning to have fantasies of pushing him out.
Unconcerned and unaware that his professor’s mind was straying to homicide, Logan scooped his quart-sixed cup from the floor. The ice rattled noisily, and he drank.
The liquid poured down his sexy gullet, and she watched his throat master each swallow. In some insane corner f her mind, she wanted to be that liquid, wanted Logan to suck her through a straw.
The spark in her belly licked into a bona fide flame now, and she told herself it was anger.
She was positive it was anger when his even white teeth grinned at her around the straw. He released it, but then flicked at the tip with his tongue. Horrid, horrid man!
Marie turned on her heel, marched to the door, and flipped off the lights without even calling roll. The blessed darkness hid her mortification.
How dare he? Had she somehow inherited her mother’s shameless hussy genes? Was she ending the bastard siren signals? Surely not. She didn’t wear shrink-wrapped clothing, or bare provocative body parts. She hadn’t even let a drop of drool escape her.
If he didn’t keep that lizard tongue between his teeth, she’d poke it right back into his mouth with her pointer, by God she would.
For the rest of the class, she was hyperconscious of his presence, lousy with testosterone.
She could feel her own heartbeat in her throat and had difficulty coming up with adjectives to describe the images projected on the screen. She knew she was losing her mind when she used the word ‘compelling’ for the fourth time. And what the blazes did that mean? It was one of the most useless modifiers she’d ever encountered.
Logan creaked every so often in his lawn chair and rattled his ice or cracked his knuckles.
The sixteen young women in her class all sat in various pretzel-like contortions to make sure they had a good view of him. She tried not to take it personally, but it was hard.
Chopped liver. I am chopped liver in my own classroom, while that man is filet mignon.
The whole atmosphere of the class had changed because of Logan. On the first day she’d been in command of a small battalion of earnest, studious, young female achievers. They were dressed conservatively, in baggy unisex clothing, and half of them wore glasses.
By the second class, bare legs and short skirts were in abundance, as were spandex and small T-shirts. The young women had swapped their eyeglasses for mascara, and it was simply amazing how much their posture had improved. Sixteen pairs of breasts now followed Logan’s every movement. Disgusting.
West Point College women had the reputation of being intelligent, articulate, and self-possessed. Tanya Ullman, for example, was the senior class president and had spent her junior year in Hamburg studying economics. But when Marie asked her a simple question about Charles Xavier’s educational background, Tanya looked blank, then giggled.
“I really couldn’t say, Miss D’Ancanto.”
“Maybe Logan knows the answer to that question,” offered Jennifer Schmidt, turning toward him and actually batting her eyelashes.
Logan returned her eager smile with bone-melting ease, and she looked as if she wanted to throw herself naked on his chest. Marie blanched.
“Chuck attended the Ecole Des Beaux Arts, I believe, from 1923 to 1925. He traveled for a few months after that, and then returned to the States in early 1926.”
“When did he meet your grandmother?” Deirdre Weinburg cooed the question, almost falling out of her scoop-necked top.
Marie was horrified. She’d never seen Deirdre in anything but oversize turtlenecks, and she was attending West Point College on a chemistry scholarship. Yet another Brain was metamorphosing into a Bimbo under her eyes.
“They met in ’29,” Logan told her. “And married two years later. He got jobs with the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, and she taught piano lessons to help make ends meet until he was more established.”
His voice mesmerized them all, while Marie’s did not. Of course, her voice didn’t resound with masterful gravel. It didn’t ooze masculinity, or echo with the timbre of testosterone. Her voice didn’t purr like a jungle cat’s, edgy and dangerous and sexy as hell… Marie blinked.
Please God! Just smack me. Just deliver me from the force of this awful attraction to the Jerk. This Pied Piper and his peter-power are driving us all insane.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Possibly the last chapter I'll be posting for a few days due to family coming over until the end of the week. Of course, now that I've said that I'm sure I'll be struck with inspiration that leaves me staying up every night writing new chapters in the dark of my bedroom... but then again, maybe not. ;)