With a collective murmur of confusion, her students turned to face him. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn the color she saw in his face was a blush. “Dr. Adriano,” she said, “I’m glad you could make it today. I was half afraid you wouldn’t show.”
He gave her a knowing look. She’d trapped him like a rat, and he knew it. With thirty students watching him with rapt attention, he had two choices. He could follow her lead and complete her session for the afternoon, or he could look like a fool by turning to leave. Cora waited patiently while he weighed his options.
No surprise, he rose to the occasion. With what she could only define as a look of admiration, he strode toward the front of the room. “You’ll have to forgive my tardiness, Dr. Prescott. I was delayed.”
“I see. Well—” she indicated her class with a sweep of her arm “—I’m sure you’ll have no trouble convincing them to stay a little later. Even if it is Friday afternoon.”
From the looks on the girls’ faces, he’d have to toss them out of the room before they let him leave. He studied Cora with a lazy insolence that said he knew exactly what she’d done and there’d be hell to pay later. She picked up her briefcase and headed for the door. “You’re leaving?” he asked. His voice slid over her nerves like melted butter. In the interviews she’d seen him conduct, she’d noted that he could turn anything, even something simple like standing in the back of her lecture hall, into an erotic exercise.
She refused to be flustered. “Yep. You know how summer school is. Papers to grade. Exams to write.”
“I see.” He glanced quickly at her class, then back to her. “When can I see you again?”
Damn him. The question was deliberately provocative, and he knew it. By evening, the campus would be abuzz with the news that the reserved Dr. Cora Prescott was somehow involved with Rafael Adriano—America’s favorite pirate. “I’m not sure. My schedule is heavy between now and the end of the week.”
Her students’ heads swung back to look at him. He leaned one hip on the edge of her desk, much as she had done earlier, and said, “Mine is, too. I’ll call you later. Don’t worry. We’ll work it out.”
She thought about responding, then decided against it. Anything she said would just make the situation worse. Might as well leave him to deal with the students’ questions while she made a strategic retreat to the sanctity of her office. “Fine.” She turned to go.
“Dr. Prescott?”
Cora hesitated, then faced him a final time. “Yes?”
“I’m glad I could be here for you.”
The rake. Cora gave him a knowing look. “Then welcome to North Carolina, Doctor.”
CORA SLIPPED into her office with a quiet sigh of relief and a sense that she’d narrowly prevented disaster. She knew precisely why Rafael Adriano was in town.
He wanted her.
Or rather, he wanted her house. She’d been ignoring his most recent letter for weeks, trying to delay what she knew was the inevitable confrontation. He wasn’t about to let a potential lead on the Isabela elude him. When she’d discovered an original set of antebellum diaries hidden in the historical seaside house where she lived, his interest had been sparked. According to the news reports, Cora had happened on the diaries during a remodeling project. Initially, because the diaries were written in the form of letters to an unnamed lover, Cora hadn’t been able to identify them. After study and carbon dating, however, she’d confirmed that the diaries belonged to Abigail Conrad, the rumored lover of the Isabela’s captain. That revelation had put Rafael on Cora’s trail like a hound after a fox. Running her to death appeared to be his strategy.
As far as he was concerned, her house sat right on the secret that would lead him to the site of the wreck, and he was determined to have it.
She couldn’t think of a worse fate than having him underfoot—especially now, with her three nieces spending the summer with her. The thought of her sister, Lauren, made her frown. Lauren had dropped the girls off three weeks ago on her way to Florida with her married lover. She hadn’t called since, and all three of her daughters were showing signs of stress. Kaitlin, the oldest, seemed to stay in a permanent sulk, while Molly and Liza, her younger sisters, were prone to brooding. Cora was nearly at her wit’s end, and now Rafael Adriano had shown up to take over her life.
Following his discovery of the Argo, he’d become the center of world attention. Cora didn’t exactly relish the idea of being in the middle of a global fishbowl. She had too many things on her mind, too many lives to manage, too much work to do authenticating and documenting the diaries, to have him, his research and his ego disrupting her life. So she’d said no.
Unfortunately Rafael Adriano wasn’t the kind of guy who took no for an answer.
The door of her office abruptly opened, cutting short her brooding thoughts. “So, Professor—” Cora’s graduate assistant, Becky Painter, hurried into the shoebox-size office with two sodas “—what’s up with the stud in 203? You’ve got the whole hall in an uproar.”
Cora shot her a dry look. “You mean you don’t recognize him?”
“Nope. Believe me, if I’d seen that face and that body together in the same place at the same time, I’d remember.”
“You don’t get out much, do you, Becky.”
“Are you kidding? I’m in the last year of my masters program. Of course I don’t get out much. I work for you. I study. I write parts of my thesis. I go to class. I obsess. Sometimes I manage to sleep a little. There’s no time for out in that syllabus.”
Cora laughed. “I guess not. I almost forgot what that was like. I think when I was working on my Ph.D., I slept about nine hours a month.” The can of diet soda Becky handed her was coated in tiny shards of ice. Cora wiped it clean with a napkin before setting the can on her neatly organized desk. “The gentleman—and believe me, I apply the term loosely—is Rafael Adriano.”
Becky choked on a sip of her soda. “The Rafael Adriano?”
“I thought you didn’t get out much.”
“Jeez, I’d have to live in a hole not to know that name. I do read, you know. He’s, like, the hottest thing to hit the ocean since Jacques Cousteau.”
“Dr. Adriano is a bit flamboyant.”
“And sexy. Now that you mention it, I think I did see a picture of him in some magazine. I remember thinking that if I had time for hormones, I’d really be into this guy.” She tipped her head to one side. “What’s he in town for, anyway?”
Cora leaned back in her chair. “He wants to conduct some research. He’s looking for the site of the USS Isabela, and he thinks he can find it here.”
“Isabela?”
“It’s a ship from the Civil War—one of the fastest ever built. Juan Rodriguez del Flores captained it during the early years of the war. There’s some evidence to suggest he was a privateer who ran contraband for the Confederate and Union armies.”
“Both?”
“Whoever paid cash,” Cora assured her. “And when no one paid, he kept the booty for himself and his crew. If Adriano can find his ship and if it’s in any kind of decent condition, it might provide some invaluable information to Civil War historians.”
“So what’s he doing conducting your seminar on women’s fiction?”
A tiny smile played at the corner of her mouth. “Floundering, I hope.”
“I don’t think so.” Becky dropped into the chair across from Cora’s desk. “He’s drawing a crowd. Word is spreading across campus like wildfire, and your class is about to spill into the hall.”
“Great.