Dani’s floor was a long hallway that had little stubby corridors off it, each marked with nameplates indicating whose offices were at the ends of the branches. He spied one with signs for “D. Martinez” and “M. Gable” and took the sharp turn, whereupon he ran into two students. Ran into one of them literally. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t expect anyone to be here.”
A boy wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt with a Superman logo on it looked him up and down. “No prob, man.”
The girl closer to Dani’s door said, “Are you looking for Professor Martinez?”
“I am indeed.”
She snapped her gum, but not in a way that seemed hostile. “Get in line.”
He did. He hadn’t wanted to be late and, not knowing how long it would take to get up to the Bronx from his midtown hotel, he’d budgeted too much time for the journey.
After a minute or so, a boy came out of Dani’s office, and the girl went in. Superboy shuffled down the wall so he was closer to the door. Max did the same.
“Are you enjoying Professor Martinez’s class?” Max inquired.
“I guess,” the boy said flatly.
The girl emerged, having been in there less than two minutes, and Superboy went in. Max edged closer to the door, which was ajar, so he could eavesdrop.
“Hey, Professor M, I need you to do me a huge favor.” I need you to do me a huge favor. Something about the way he’d phrased that rubbed Max the wrong way.
“And what would that be?” That was Dani’s “I am not impressed” voice. Max smiled. He was acquainted with that voice.
The boy made a case involving a diving meet, a book forgotten on the team bus, and a thesis all worked out but not down on paper yet. Dani proceeded to systematically dismantle him but subtly enough that the kid wasn’t understanding the full extent of the burns he was sustaining.
It was hot.
Dani was hot.
Interestingly, that was a fact Max could note with detachment, which was another new experience for him. All the years he’d spent assuming he was going to marry Marie had also been spent, he would freely admit, slutting around. He and Marie had agreed that their marriage would be in name only and that discreet “extracurricular” activities would be allowed—necessary, even—once they’d done their duty with the turkey baster. Still, he had viewed the past few years as his last gasp of singledom and therefore of freedom and had conducted himself accordingly.
When the world offered itself to him, he took. And when one was a wealthy duke-to-be, one had a lot of offers.
What one didn’t have a lot of were refusals. But Dani, having made her disinterest in him clear from the moment she’d arrived on Eldovian soil, was a rare woman. Wickedly smart, deliciously witty, extremely pretty, and not interested. There were no hard-to-get long games being played there. Leo had told Max a bit about her ugly divorce-in-progress, and Dani herself had used the phrase post-men more than once. He had no doubt that she meant it.
She was a goddamn delight.
To Max’s surprise, even though the boy was wilting under Dani’s questioning about the thesis he supposedly had all worked out—it didn’t seem he had actually read the book, which sounded like it was meant to be The Great Gatsby—she suddenly granted him a forty-eight-hour extension and abruptly dismissed him. “Happy holidays,” she said so flatly she might as well have been saying, “Good riddance.”
It was such an unexpected turnabout that Max, who had been lounging against the wall, stood up straight, startled.
“Are there any more students out there?” she asked the boy as he was on his way out.
“Students . . . no,” the boy said, making brief eye contact with Max as he breezed by in possession of an extension he did not deserve.
When Max stuck his head into Dani’s office, it was to find her peeling off a blue blazer to reveal a dress that looked like it belonged on Bettie Page instead of a literature professor.
“Oh!” She jumped.
“My apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m merely here to ask for an extension.”
She rolled her eyes in lieu of greeting him, sat at her desk, and pulled a small mirror out of a drawer. “You’re early,” she said to her reflection.
“My thesis is all ready to go.” He sat on the guest chair and, as she started applying a deep burgundy lipstick, revised his previous assertion that he could appreciate Dani’s hotness from a purely intellectual perspective. “Care to hear it?”
“I guarantee you I already have.”
“None of the characters in The Great Gatsby have any inner life to speak of, making what is admittedly a masterfully written book into a mere melodrama.”
She glanced at him with one lip painted. The contrast between the brick red of the finished lip and the pinky-beige of the natural one certainly was . . . something. “An interesting line of thought.”
He thought she was going to say more, but when she merely returned to her task, he asked, “Why did you give that boy an extension? He was clearly feeding you lies. Does he know you at all?”
One eyebrow rose, though she was still looking at her reflection. “Do you know me at all?”
“I’m thinking the way to get an extension from Professor Martinez is to level with her. Own the fact that you erred—with time management or laziness or what have you—present a plan for ameliorating your error, and state your terms.”
Ah, that cracked her. She put the mirror down and truly looked at him. Almost looked as though she might smile. “Did you hear the student before him?”
“No.”
“She asked for a twenty-four-hour extension because she works two part-time jobs and she fell asleep at her computer last night.”
“Did you grant it?”
“Yes. I told her to go home and take a nap and to take another week with the paper.”
The fact that he had been correct about how to handle Professor Martinez when you were a wayward student in need of mercy was strangely, sharply satisfying. “Why?”
“Because she shows up to class prepared and has never asked for anything before. Because I see her working at the campus Starbucks all the time, and if that’s only one job of two, that’s a little sobering.”
“Why did that boy get an extension, too? He sounded like his problem was merely laziness. I wouldn’t have pegged you as a pushover.”
“I have forty-seven American Lit papers to grade in the next week, so it doesn’t really matter to me when they come in. And frankly, it’s not worth the bad reviews on my student evaluations.” She put away her mirror and took out her phone and looked at it for a long moment. She seemed to be reading something.
He took the opportunity to contemplate the concept of Dani receiving bad reviews. It was difficult to imagine. Along with her unexpectedly blasé response to the boy’s request, it created a disturbance in the mental picture Max had of her, a surprising—and intriguing—lashing of paint across an image he’d thought complete.
“You ready?” She stood and reached for her coat, and his appreciation of her dress—and her lips, and her everything—grew even less intellectual.
“You want to give me any background on the Picasso fanboy? Did you say his name was Vince?” he asked while he tried not to be too overt about his escalating appreciation. “Or about the new girlfriend?”