Legal Page
Title Page
Book Description
Trademarks Acknowledgement
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
New Excerpt
About the Author
Book Description
Hot for the Professor
ISBN # 978-1-78651-133-1
©Copyright Nan Comargue 2017
Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright January 2017
Edited by Jamie D. Rose
Totally Bound Publishing
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Totally Bound Publishing.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Totally Bound Publishing. Unauthorized or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2017 by Totally Bound Publishing, Newland House, The Point, Weaver Road, Lincoln, LN6 3QN
Totally Bound Publishing is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.
Warning:
This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a heat rating of Totally Sizzling and a Sexometer of 2.
HOT FOR THE PROFESSOR
When Avery’s down and out, her embarrassing past with Logan forces her into an educational—and very sexy—future.
Years ago, Avery’s neighbor Logan proposed to her on his eighteenth birthday. She’d always known the genius next door was different. After all, he’d become a professor in his teens. But that day, for the first time, she’d actually seen him as a man and it had disturbed her, so much so that she’d avoided Logan for years afterward.
Now Avery’s broken up with her employer and live-in boyfriend and she’s out of a job and out on the street. As a last resort, she reaches out to Logan’s mother. Big mistake. Logan gets involved and suddenly Avery is facing all the accumulated history between them.
Logan is trying to help her get back on her feet, but Avery suspects he has an ulterior motive. When it comes out that he’s still suffering from that old teenage obsession with her, she severs the relationship, no matter how much it hurts in the process.
After all, the two of them couldn’t possibly work out, could they?
Trademarks Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
The Big Bang Theory: Chuck Lorre Productions, Warner Brother’s Television
Star Trek: CBS Television Distribution
The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling
Land Rover: Jaguar Land Rover Limited
Clue: Hasbro Inc.
The Olympics: United States Olympic Committee
Google: Google Inc.
Cabbage Patch Doll: Original Appalachian Artworks Inc.
Chapter One
How did this happen?
That morning Avery’d had a job, a savings account and a live-in boyfriend. Now, at the end of the work day, she had none of those.
Standing on the sidewalk outside her office—her former office—she struggled to fight back angry tears. She had nowhere to go, not even for the night. Her purse contained forty dollars, all that remained from the ATM withdrawal she’d made on Monday. Today was Friday. Where had the rest of the money gone?
Actually, she knew where—on lunches and lattes and all the little treats people with decent jobs indulge in without thinking. She’d had a decent job on Monday and Tuesday and the rest of it, up until today. Up until a half hour ago, when her boyfriend and boss had called her into his office and told her they were done, both personally and professionally—just like that.
Drew, her boyfriend—ex-boyfriend now—had promised her a severance check in lieu of the notice he should have given her. He should know. He was a lawyer. Presumably kicking her out of his life was all fine and good as long as he paid her for her trouble—except the check in her hand was worth nothing right now.
Oh, and he’d also frozen her bank accounts and credit cards. They were all joint with him and he couldn’t expose himself to that kind of liability now that they were no longer together, could he? Avery suspected that his action might have been slightly less than legal, but what did she know? She’d only worked at his law office. She didn’t actually know much about the law.
“Do you need any money?” he’d asked, oh so politely, before he’d opened the door to his office and bid her to get the hell out—though, again, more politely—“For a hotel room or cab fare to a friend’s?”
She’d refused. Asked like that, in those circumstances, she believed any woman would have done the same. He might have frozen her accounts—only temporarily, he assured her—but he hadn’t deactivated her pride. It was all that was holding her upright at the moment.
Pride aside, it was practicality that kept her from barging back into Drew’s office and demanding cash instead of a check. In reality, she’d set up her life in the worst way possible—working for her boyfriend, living in an apartment he rented, sitting on his couch, sleeping in his bed.
She had nothing to her name.
Sure, she’d always told herself that when her artwork started to sell, she would be better off. Living with Drew and counting on the handout that was her salary at his firm, she’d been able to fool herself into believing that it was only a matter of time. She would hit it big one day—not could or might.
Now, for the first time, she seriously doubted it would all work out.
She was thirty-seven years old and had never had a job paying more than minimum wage, except for the one her boyfriend had given her. As Drew had repeatedly complained, she’d spent most of her days paint-splattered, with her hair bundled up under a handkerchief to keep the dust out of it. She was a little vain about her long, glossy black hair, but most of the time she couldn’t even be bothered to get it cut or styled properly. Drew had wanted to show her off at parties, but she dressed and acted so differently from his friends’ wives and girlfriends that they’d usually ended up in an argument on the way home.
He was right. She was a mess—a hopeless one.
Sniffing forcefully, Avery stepped away from the side of the building she’d come out of and into the stream of afternoon commuters. They had little patience for the idle and jostled her while she made her way to the edge of the curb.
Taxis passed, their roof lights extinguished. Of course, they were all full at this time of day.
What is the point of hailing a cab, anyway? She didn’t know where she was going.
Her only remaining family member, her grandmother, was in a nursing home. The elderly woman rarely recognized Avery when she visited. The only smart financial move Avery had ever made was putting the money she’d gotten from the sale of her father’s house into a trust that paid for her grandmother’s living expenses at the home. The last thing she needed was to be worried about both her and her grandmother being homeless.
That left Marian, the woman next door, who’d always been something of a surrogate mother to Avery.
Marian would take her in. She was too sweet and kindly not to.
Making up her mind, Avery started walking to the nearest bus stop. It felt like a very long walk.
* * * *
“Andrew threw you out?” Marian asked for what felt like the hundredth time.
“Not threw me out,” Avery said, “fired me and evicted me. He was perfectly within his rights.”
At least, she’d thought so when he’d explained it. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
“You should talk to a lawyer,” said Walt, Marian’s husband.
“Drew is a lawyer,” Avery reminded him.
“Well, you can’t just take his word for it,” Walt told her. “This can’t be right, leaving you jobless and homeless like this.”
They were all seated on Marian’s flowery living room set, the older couple appropriately on the loveseat and Avery lost in the depths of the sofa. Tea and cookies sat on the low table between them and, although she was hungry, Avery couldn’t take a sip or eat a bite.
“Lawyers cost money,” she said, remembering the totals on some of the bills she’d posted. “And it’s his apartment and his firm. He can do what he wants. He gave me a check in lieu of notice. If I take it to the bank, I’d have to wait a few days for it to clear, or I guess I could go to one of those check cashing places that keeps a cut off the top.”
This was what it had come to—emergency check cashing and mooching off her relatives—if she could even consider Marian a relative. Legally and technically, Marian was no relation to her. Thankfully, that wasn’t how Marian saw it—or how Avery herself saw it, either.
Marian had been a loving, if overwhelmed, surrogate mother to her for many years. Overwhelmed, no doubt, because she hadn’t known what to do with the moody, creative teenaged girl who had slouched over to her home every day when she had been busy single-parenting her own child, Logan, a quiet, studious little boy. Fortunately, Marian had done the right things—asked few questions and showered Avery with attention, exactly what her soul had needed after her own mother had passed away so young.
“You can’t go to one of those places,” Marian said, aghast. “They practically bankrupted Sally’s granddaughter.”
The building they lived in now was filled with people in their seventies and eighties who had nothing to do but share horror stories about their lives all day long. Marian, only in her fifties, was the youngest in the group, but her second husband, Walter, was pushing seventy.
“You can stay here,” Walt said, “while you get back on your feet.”
Avery looked surreptitiously around the small apartment, crowded with heavy old-fashioned furniture. It was a one-bedroom, barely enough for the two of them.
Maybe she could sleep on the couch, although it was lumpy enough for just sitting. There was always the floor—
“Ow!”
Marian was pinching Walt on the thigh. She drew her hand back as Avery glanced their way, otherwise she wouldn’t have known why Walt was yelling.
“Sorry, dear,” Marian said, blinking at her husband. “I was trying to remind you about our trip.”
Their annual months-long exodus to Florida. How could she have forgotten? Although it was barely October and the weather was showing strong signs of continuing into an Indian summer, this was the time that the older couple usually chose to make their trek south.
That meant the apartment would be empty.
Walt’s expression sobered. “That’s right. I forgot, Ave. We have my granddaughter Jessie coming to stay for the time being. Her husband’s been giving her a hard time, and we thought it might give her and the kids a break to spend a few months here.”
“It’s close enough that the kids won’t even have to change schools,” Marian added.
Avery remembered Jessie, a harried young mother of three with a husband who was borderline abusive. She knew it was still borderline, because Walt was just waiting for the day it went over that line and he would have an excuse to intervene. Everything else he’d tried to do to help Jessie had proven to be a failure.
Maybe this time away was the break the family needed.
“That’s okay,” said Avery, trying to sound cheerful. She’d wasted more than an hour in Marian and Walt’s apartment. “I was planning on staying with one of my girlfriends, anyway.”
They didn’t need to know that both of her closest girlfriends lived in the suburbs, more than an hour away. The distance seemed insurmountable. Marian and Walt didn’t even own a car she could borrow.
Shouldering her purse, she got to her feet without any idea where she was going.
Marian appeared relieved by the lie. “You know, ordinarily we would love to have you here, dear.”
“I know,” she said, reaching down to hug the older woman before doing the same with her husband. “Don’t worry. It’s not a problem. Have a safe trip.”
Marian followed her down the few steps to the door. “If you’re in a bind, there’s always—”
Avery turned back so quickly the other woman recoiled. “No, there’s not! Don’t even mention him.”
Marian’s small, worn face seemed suddenly older. “He’s my son, Avery.”
Avery shook her head, willing herself not to say more. He’s a freak. He’s obsessive. He’s scary.
How could she say any of those things to Marian about her little boy?
Pushing a scrap of paper into her hand, Marian said, “Here’s his number and address. I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you.”
Avery pocketed the paper without glancing at it. “Right.”
More hugs and she was allowed to escape.
A minute later, she was again standing on the sidewalk. This time she had thirty-seven dollars in her purse—and she really had nowhere to go.
A shelter? Didn’t she have to be a victim of something other than her own stupidity to get into one of those?
Maybe she could sit in a twenty-four-hour coffee shop until morning.
She walked to the little park next to the building then sat down on a bench. The light filtering between the tree branches was a mellow gold, but soon it would be dark. She couldn’t sit in the park in the dark. Anything might happen to her.
She could go back upstairs and ask to sleep on Marian and Walt’s couch. Then they would really worry about her, and that was the last thing they needed on the eve of their holiday.
No, she couldn’t do that to them. She was far too old to become a burden on the older couple.
She probably sat there as long as an hour, worrying and trying to come with up any sort of plan—certainly long enough for the golden light to darken to orange, then red. Long enough to grow cold, even on the warm October night.
Her thoughts were too jumbled for planning. Instead of sticking to the immediate problem, they kept trying to take her into the past, stirring up memories that had lain sleeping for many years. Memories of her father, now years in his grave, mercifully gone before he could realize how truly disappointing she’d turned out to be. About Marian. About her own mother, who was only a shadow now since she’d died so long ago.
Memories of Logan.
Her cellphone rang, an incongruous sound in the tiny park. Avery fumbled to answer it.
Marian’s voice tumbled through the phone. “I’m sorry, dear, but I thought it was the best thing to do. I know how you feel, but I don’t want to worry about you.”
“You shouldn’t have done it, Marian,” came Walt’s voice from the background.
“What did you do?” Avery asked, clutching the phone tightly. She already had her suspicions.
Instead of answering, Marian posed a question of her own. “Where are you, dear? Still close by? He seemed to think you would be nearby.”
He? Her suspicions darkened. Oh, God, Marian couldn’t have…
Someone was tramping through the grass in the little park, making a lot of noise doing it, perhaps consciously trying to warn her of their presence.
Marian’s voice continued to flutter in her ear, but Avery hung up the phone.
“Avery?”
The voice was strange, but the inflection wasn’t. No one else said her name like that, as if she were their salvation.
Her throat tightened. Her hands clenched into fists. All her instincts were clamoring for flight, but she stood—or sat—her ground. This confrontation was long overdue.
A dark shape emerged from the night, halting as she came into view. For a moment, it was only a silhouette, tall and broad-shouldered. Then a passing light struck and created a brilliant silver flare.
Only one person she knew had such bright flaxen hair—Marian’s son, Logan Stern, the genius. And that particular genius played a starring role in a story that still took center stage in her life.
It was the funniest story her friends had ever heard—so funny that they had told it over and over whenever they all met up. The story of ‘the ring’. Except this story wasn’t about a heroic quest or a cursed videotape. It was a story about an eighteenth birthday and the most awful day of Avery’s life.
Chapter Two
Twelve years ago
The day began normally enough. Avery, fresh from a shared exhibition with a few other up-and-coming artists, was planning to sell her father’s home and move into a loft with a couple of those same artists. It was an exciting time for her, but the anticipation was tempered by the shadow of her grandmother’s lingering disapproval. She’d wanted the home she’d purchased decades ago as a young wife and mother to remain in the family. Even her gentle next-door neighbor, Marian Stern, had expressed regret at Avery’s decision to move out so soon after her father’s death. That had hurt, because Marian was as close to a mother as Avery had. The two families had lived next door to each other for many years, but they had grown especially close during her father’s lengthy illness. Marian had whipped up storms of casseroles for Avery while her father had been in the hospital, but now everyone found it more convenient to simply eat their meals together in Marian’s bright kitchen.
Just being in Marian’s presence had a way of calming Avery. Unfortunately, their new closeness also meant Avery spent a lot of time with Marian’s son Logan.
Something was off about Logan Stern.
For years, Avery had chalked up the oddness of her young neighbor to differences in age and gender. She was an only child and so was he. She’d hardly known her mother, and he’d never met his father. They were almost exact opposites in this and many other ways.
As Logan progressed through school, she’d marked his strangeness up to his child prodigy status. He hadn’t merely excelled in school, he’d triumphed over it, winning prizes and skipping grades before his peers had properly understood that they were being graded.
Avery had always been an indifferent student, but a voracious reader. Logan had been the opposite in this, as well. While she had devoured poetry and novels, he’d read what Avery would consider ‘school books’ outside of school.
Though he was seven years younger than her, Logan had finished college at the same time she had. Of course, they’d gone to different colleges—she, an art school, and he, an out-of-state Ivy, which he’d attended on full scholarship. For large swaths of time, she had been able to forget he existed. Though she hadn’t been naturally competitive, it had irked her to constantly be compared to her much younger neighbor and always come in second. As the two families had grown closer, her father had spent a great deal of time with Logan, becoming a father figure to him, as Marian had become a surrogate mother to Avery.
Although her father had never said in as many words that he was more proud of his brilliant neighbor’s accomplishments than his own daughter, his praise of them had seemed very lopsided. He’d claimed never to understand the first thing about the art that had, by then, been Avery’s whole life—which had been funny because he’d understood the science and math Logan studied even less.
Logan had gone on to graduate school when he had still been in his teens, while Avery had taken the first of many shots at independence, living in the city and earning barely enough to eat from the odd jobs she had been able to find. In her early twenties, she’d begun a cycle of returning home between attempts at living on her own—though, on her scant income, ‘on her own’ inevitably meant with a series of roommates who’d either stolen from her or flatly refused to pay their part of the rent.
Logan had completed his doctorate in record time, just before he’d turned eighteen, so his birthday was supposed to have been a celebration of both milestones, meaning that Avery could not have avoided attending.
By now, her feelings for Logan were a little more complicated. She was old enough to be proud of her neighbor’s unique accomplishments and wise enough to feel sorry for his outcast status. His peers considered him a freak, and he was awkward in their company from having spent his entire life among adults. But his intellectual equals were similarly wary—or so she could glean from his few remarks about his work. He seemed to have no friends at all.