“I wrote it down.” Hugh, who regularly got lost in the library stacks and had addressed Dex as Dixie for her first three months as his teaching assistant, fished through his pockets. He dragged out a laundry receipt and his campus health card before handing her a crumpled note.
Dex squinted at the ink-smeared letters. “‘O wavy hair, O beauteous maiden,”’ she read, and stopped. Obviously, this was not a telephone message but a poem of an embarrassingly personal nature.
Hugh’s cheeks, or what was visible of them beneath his gray-flecked facial hair, flushed bright red as he snatched back the paper. “That’s…some random thoughts I jotted down. I can’t think where I put your message.”
Dex adjusted her stack of essays. “I’m sure it was for someone else.” And so was the poem, she hoped. “I’d better get going. I’ll have these graded by Monday.”
“Have what graded? Oh, the papers, yes.” Hugh patted his shirt pockets. “I know that note’s here somewhere. Let me check in my office.”
“Thanks, Hugh, but you don’t need to…” She didn’t bother to finish. He was already gone.
There was no point in waiting. Once inside, he would get so busy pawing through piles of journals that he’d forget what he was looking for.
Anyway, Dex had another job to do. In addition to assisting the professor, she made ends meet by working as a campus courier.
She’d earned a B.A. and a master’s degree in English, but her parents, both college professors, weren’t impressed. Dex had completed the coursework for her Ph.D., but found herself stuck on writing her dissertation.
She just couldn’t seem to work up much enthusiasm for it. Or, maybe, for becoming Dr. Dex Fenton and having to leave the friendly environs of Clair De Lune, California, to take whatever college teaching post she could scrape up.
So she worked two part-time jobs and rode a bicycle and lived in an efficiency apartment over a garage. Most of the time, she rather enjoyed things the way they were.
Out in the sunshine, she hurried around the brick building to the bike rack, where she stuck the essays into her bike’s side compartments and put on her helmet. She hoped she had enough room left to carry today’s campus deliveries. Fortunately, today was Friday, usually a light mail day.
As she mounted her bike and set off, a few jacaranda blossoms drifted onto Dex’s arm. Some of the lavender petals, which appeared every spring as sure as the swallows came back to Capistrano, clung to her pink sweater and blue jeans.
“O wavy hair, O beauteous maiden.” Spring was certainly getting to Professor Bemling, Dex thought. He was a cute guy, if you liked absentminded forty-year-olds. At twenty-six, though, she considered him too old for her.
The kind of guy she wanted was in his early thirties, with sun-streaked dark hair and alert brown eyes. He gave the impression of being tall, although he wasn’t quite six feet, and he had slim hips that moved with a sensuous rhythm.
She shook her head. Why on earth was she thinking of a man she wanted nothing to do with?
The main section of De Lune University was laid out in an old-fashioned rectangle, its symmetry marred only by the jutting addition of the glass-and-steel faculty center. Dex was passing that facility, which was probably why her mind had gone skittering across memories from a crisp evening four months ago.
The holiday faculty party had featured mistletoe and dance music, tipsy flirtations and a general letting-down of inhibitions. In an eggnog-induced blur, she’d felt a man’s dark eyes catch hers with unexpected intensity.
He’d asked her to dance and laughed at everything she said. She didn’t resist when he whirled her onto the patio.
He’d smoothed her unruly curls with both hands, then kissed her senseless. It was all so blurry, so sensational and so…insane. Dex pedaled faster, trying to put the scene, and the memory of what had followed, behind her.
Half a quadrangle farther, at a rear entrance to the administration building, she banged on the door. This was the squirrely abode of Fitz Langley, the maintenance and communications supervisor.
“Hey, Fitz!” she yelled. “Got any stuff for me to deliver?”
The door rattled and shook as the rusty lock stuck. Finally, it wrenched open and out poked a head worthy of mounting on a hunter’s wall. A shaggy chestnut mane framed a broad leonine forehead, a flattened nose and a mouth that could roar but rarely did.
The door opened wider under pressure from Fitz’s short, stubby frame, and he handed her two padded envelopes and a box. “Most of the stuff’s already been delivered, but these just came in. By the way, some lawyer called you.”
Dex got that sinking feeling again. Apparently an attorney really was looking for her. And looking hard.
Could someone be suing her? If so, he’d be sorely disappointed. Her two jobs barely paid enough to scrape by, and she owed a pile of student loans that would become due the moment she finished her doctoral dissertation. Whenever that might be.
“What lawyer?” she asked. “Has he got a name?”
“I e-mailed you.”
“I only check my mail when I enter grades in the computer.” Dex was annoyed by e-mail, phones, answering machines and anything else that interrupted her thinking. Not that her thinking was terribly profound, but how was it ever going to get that way if things kept jangling and blipping at her? “Can’t you just tell me?”
“Once I input data, I erase it from my personal memory banks.” With a shrug, Fitz vanished into his lair.
Dex strapped the deliveries onto the back of her bike. As she pedaled off, she wondered if someone could have died. She hoped not. And left her money. She still hoped not.
Her parents in Florida were both in excellent health, as far as she knew. She called them infrequently, since they listened only when she had some accomplishment to dazzle them with. Still, she would have heard if they were ill.
Her only other close relative was her younger sister, Brianna, a precocious twenty-four-year-old magazine editor. If anything happened to her, it would be her husband calling, not a lawyer. Dex was certain they had no Midas-touched great-aunt who might have popped off. In fact, no rich person had ever crossed her path except once, and she would just as soon never see or hear from him again.
As if to remind her of that one lapse, she found herself again passing the faculty center, going in the other direction. Dex gritted her teeth and sped up.
She didn’t know what had gotten into her that night. He was the wrong sort of man for her entirely. Too bold. Too confident.
She needed someone gentle and understanding, someone who could offer the warmth she’d missed while growing up. Even at the holiday party, she’d known she was making a big mistake. Yet in the arms of Mr. Hot Stuff, she’d been transformed into a hormone-charged Jezebel.
The only fortunate aspect to the whole night was that no one had noticed the man entering and leaving Dex’s apartment. In Clair De Lune, the walls might not have ears but everyone else did, and took notes, too.
She rounded a corner and jerked the handlebars to avoid colliding with two lovesick students standing on the sidewalk, their jean-clad legs entwined, their lips locked and their hands earnestly groping each other. Spring was, of course, the mating season among primates enrolled at De Lune University.
At the art department, Dex raced up the steps and, with a brisk greeting, set the box on the secretary’s desk. Some days she stuck around to chat, but today she was sure she could hear those essays grumbling in her saddlebags. And then there was the annoying question of why that lawyer might be calling her.
She left one of the envelopes at the music department