My Nerdy Valentine (Nerds, #7)(36)
Author: Vicki Lewis Thompson

"I don’t want exclusivity, Gloria. I don’t want to get sexually involved with you at all."

There was a long silence. He wondered if she’d quietly hung up. That would be fine with him, but he was very worried about how this nasty little scene would affect Amanda’s relationship with her boss.

"So," Gloria said at last. "You’ve started this affair with Amanda, and now your conscience won’t let you drop her."

"It has nothing to do with Amanda. I just—"

"It has everything to do with her. Put her on."

Will closed his eyes. He had a bad feeling about how this would turn out. "She’s asleep."

"No I’m not."

He turned to find Amanda standing there looking like an angel who’d been forced to buy her robe at a thrift store. "Just a sec, Gloria." He covered the mouthpiece. "Justin told her we had sex."

"Justin? How did he—"

Will felt like a worm. "Last night it sort of … came out. I mean, he knew I was staying here, and he saw the hickey. So did Gloria, but she didn’t guess it was you. Justin did."

"Hickey?" She walked over and peered at his neck. "I did that?"

"Uh-huh. Yesterday morning, before we made it to the coffee table."

She took a long shaky breath. "Then I guess I did this to myself. Might as well give me the phone."

He handed it over reluctantly.

Amanda tucked her hair behind her ear and placed the receiver against it. "Good morning, Gloria." After that she did nothing but listen and nod. Finally she cleared her throat. "I understand. Consider it done." Taking the receiver from her ear, she pressed the disconnect button.

He didn’t like her resigned expression. Whatever she’d agreed to couldn’t be a good thing. "Consider what done?"

She gazed at him, her eyes revealing no emotion. "Either you move out, or she dumps me as an intern. You’re moving out."

* * *

Amanda should have known that something would come along to destroy her newfound happiness with Will. The hell of it was that she’d been tripped up by her own enthusiasm the first time they’d had sex. Now that he’d mentioned the hickey, she could see it, but she hadn’t noticed it before. It wasn’t very big, smaller than a thumbtack, but big enough for a hawk-eye like Gloria.

After she’d delivered the bad news, Will shook his head as if refusing to accept her edict. "You need someone here."

"Maybe, but it can’t be you." She sounded calm, but inside she was screaming at the unfairness. "Gloria said that if I told you to leave, you’d be released from all feelings of obligation."

"I hope you know I don’t feel obligated to stay."

That touched her, but she couldn’t afford to be touched. Her future was on the line. "I would assume you don’t."

"You don’t have to assume anything." He grabbed her, ugly bathrobe notwithstanding, and administered a toe-curling kiss.

She did her best to stay objective, but once he started using his tongue, objectivity took a back seat to lust. Soon she was clinging to him and wrapping one leg around his. They still had a lot of flannel obstructing their progress, but the goal was clear to both of them.

He pulled away and dragged in a breath. "So if you don’t throw me out, she’ll say you behaved unprofessionally to justify dropping you as an intern."

"Bingo." She dived in again, holding his head so she could kiss him with the kind of dedication he deserved.

By the time he came up for air again, he’d divested her of the bathrobe. He tossed it on the floor. "How will she know if I’ve left?"

"She’ll be here in an hour." She finished unbuttoning his pajama top and shoved it down his arms.

He unfastened the tiny buttons at the neck of her granny gown. "I could leave, and then come back."

"Nuh-uh. She’d quiz me in the morning, and I’m horrible at lying." She untied the drawstring of his pajama bottoms. "Once you leave, you have to stay gone."

"But you’ll be alone! What if he comes back?"

"I’ll buy all the things we talked about today. And he might not come back after the way you chased him." She gave his pajama bottoms a push, and they fell to the floor. "Now stop talking, get a condom, and come into the bedroom. We have a time crunch, here."

"Give me a key to your apartment. I could sneak in here after you’re asleep. Technically, you wouldn’t know I’d been here."

"Technically, I would probably bash you in the head with the collected works of Freud! Don’t sneak, please. Just come to bed with me right now. We’ve never done it on a mattress before." She turned and walked toward her bedroom, pulling her granny gown over her head as she went.

"Don’t think I haven’t noticed."

In her bedroom, she threw back the covers and stretched out on the bed. Life would be hell once Gloria arrived, but that wouldn’t happen for another hour. She glanced at the bedside clock. Correction, fifty-five minutes.

Will arrived, nak*d except for his glasses. He was bearing a shiny packet in one hand. He paused in the doorway. "Just let me take a mental picture to sustain me."

"Good idea. Me, too." She cataloged his thick dark hair, which fell untamed over his forehead after a night’s sleep. How she would miss those green eyes, even the horn-rimmed glasses. And his mouth. She’d loved his mouth from the beginning.

He was no muscle-bound weight lifter, but he had decent pecs sprinkled with dark hair, a respectable six-pack, and then came the piece de resistance as they probably said in French bordellos. That magnificence was all hers until Gloria showed up in fifty-five minutes. She looked at the clock again. Fifty-one minutes. She beckoned him forward.

"Yeah." He took off his glasses, put on the condom, and joined her on the mattress. "Ah." He gathered her close. "How is it that we’ve never tried it this way?"

"Circumstances." She wiggled against him.

He kissed her and brushed the hair back from her face. "How much time do we have?"

"Allowing fifteen minutes for you to pack up and leave, I estimate that we have approximately thirty-four and a half minutes."

"Spoken like a true nerd." He rolled on top of her.

She spread her thighs to give him access. "I am not."

"You are so."

Then he slipped deep inside her, and she was willing to be anything he wanted if he would only keep up that certain rhythm that was exclusively Will’s. He had a gift, and she was the lucky girl receiving it right now. She wouldn’t think beyond this moment.

Her first orgasm rocked her world. The second turned her into liquid fire, and by the third, she was ready to levitate.

"We’re not finished, you and me," he crooned into her ear.

She moaned and lifted her hips. "I hope not."

"I’m not talking about coming."

He might not be, but he was the master at that activity, and she couldn’t think while he plied his craft. "Okay."

"I mean it."

"Me, too." She meant every whimper, every cry. Beyond that, she saw no future for them. They were victims of bad timing. He wrenched one more cli**x from her thrumming body before riding her hard and letting go with a groan that was half blessing, half curse.

They sank together onto the mattress. This was cuddle time, pulling up the covers and basking in the afterglow time. They couldn’t afford it.

She waited until his breathing returned to normal. Then she gave him a nudge. "You have to leave."

"This sucks."

"I know. But right now, she holds all the cards." He sighed. "And she plays dirty." "It’s her game."

Rising up on his elbows, he looked into her eyes. "I’ll find a way around this."

"Please don’t take chances with Gloria."

"I won’t." He gave her one last, lingering kiss. "But I will be watching over you, somehow. You’re not facing that wacko alone."

"He could be gone, scared away." Because she couldn’t cling to Will, she’d cling to that hope.

Will went home, although he would have loved to stay and tell Gloria what he thought of her high-handed tactics. But he couldn’t jeopardize Amanda’s standing with the university. So once he got home, he flipped through the phone book until he found the number he needed.

When Chester didn’t answer, Will figured out that Chester and Mavis were still holed up in Mavis’s apartment. Will envied them the luxury of spending then Sunday morning together, when he’d been summarily run out. Thank God for those last moments with Amanda, though.

He hoped she’d understood what he was trying to say, without saying it. If they let go of this special connection, they’d be making a huge mistake. He hoped she realized that what they’d found—the amazing sex, the easy conversation, the natural friendship—didn’t come along very often. Sometimes never.

Sure, she had her goals, and he respected that He only wanted to add to her list of things to want—a special person to share the life she wanted to create, a person who wouldn’t drag her down, someone who would support and enhance her dreams. He could be that person, if she would let him.

Going further into the telephone book, he found Mavis Endicott and dialed the number.

Mavis answered immediately, sounding irritatingly cheerful.

"Mavis, this is Will, Amanda’s friend."

"Will! Why are you calling? Why not just drop over?"

"I’m not at the apartment building right now." And he felt that acutely, as if the world didn’t sit quite right on its axis now that he’d been banned from Amanda’s place.

"That’s a shame. Chester and I are having rooibos tea. It’s that bush tea they talk about in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency mystery series set in Africa. Chester doesn’t much like it, but he’ll get used to it. You should come over and try some."

"I need a bigger favor than sharing a cup of tea." Will hesitated, needing to know but not wanting to know. "But first I have to ask… how much can you hear through the apartment walls?"

Mavis didn’t answer right away. "That depends," she said at last.

This was uncomfortable, but Will pressed on. "On what?" "Whether Chester and I turn off our hearing aids." "Oh."

"We turned them off last night," she said quickly. "Any noises that came through weren’t clear. It could have been the TV, for all we knew."

"Right. The TV." Will didn’t bother pointing out that Amanda didn’t have a TV, so anything Mavis and Chester had heard had been a live performance.

As for Will, he’d been concentrating so hard on Amanda that he hadn’t even considered the noise level. He’d thought about it in his own apartment earlier in the day, which told him his involvement with Amanda had escalated the longer he’d stayed with her. That wasn’t the point of his question, though. The transfer of noise from one apartment to another was vitally important for another reason entirely.

Mavis cleared her throat. "Did you hear anything from … my apartment?"

"Didn’t hear a thing." Amanda might have, although that didn’t matter now. "I have to know whether, with your hearing aids turned up, you would be able to hear someone crying out in distress in the next apartment."

"Oh, my, yes. With our hearing aids turned up, we hear every little scuffle. I know how thin the walls are, so I’m careful to be quiet. Chester is, too. But it turns out we both had the same idea, not to tell Amanda about the thin walls. That way we can watch over her without her knowing."

"I see." He and Amanda had been playing to quite an audience, between the stalker outside the window and the neighbors with their ears to the wall.

"But we really didn’t hear much of anything last night," Mavis said. "Honestly."

Will didn’t believe a word of it, but he’d get over his embarrassment. That was chump change compared to keeping Amanda safe. "Circumstances have forced me to move out of Amanda’s apartment," he said.

"Oh, dear. Please tell me you didn’t have a fight. I was assuming the yelling had to do with—um, not that I heard much yelling at all. Maybe a teensy bit, but like I said—"

"It’s okay, Mavis. We didn’t fight." Will explained the situation with Gloria. "So I need to be there, but Amanda can’t know I’m there. And I need a key, in case she has a problem."

"That’s simple. I have a spare key Amanda gave me in case she ever locks herself out. She never does, of course. Very disciplined girl."

Until I interfered in her life.

"And you can hide out in Chester’s apartment for as long as you need to," Mavis continued. "He’s not sleeping there anyway. That way you can take one side of Amanda’s place, and we can cover the other side. Chester and I can show you the best spots for maximum hearing."

"Okay." Will controlled the urge to laugh.

"Not that we use the spots to listen in on Amanda. But naturally, when you live somewhere, you notice these things."

"Of course."

"When do you want to set things up?"

Will gave thanks for snoopy neighbors. Mavis and Chester already had the surveillance thing down. "I’m sure Amanda will be going out sometime today. If you could call me when she leaves, I’ll head over then."

"Perfect. Don’t worry, Will. We won’t let anything happen to that girl."

"No, we won’t." And because Will wanted to be completely alert tonight, he’d take a nap after he finished this call. If that wacko showed his face, Will would take him out.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I am furious with you, Amanda, absolutely furious. But I can’t have you getting raped on my account." Gloria stood, hands on hips, and gazed at the white heart spray-painted on the window. "What were you thinking, renting a first-floor apartment? No single woman rents a first-floor apartment."

"It was cheap and available. It’s right on the bus line. I have good neighbors."

"You mean Mavis and her boyfriend Chester, the ones I met last night? They were spying on me through a crack in the door as I came down the hall. I call that nosy, not neighborly."