My Nerdy Valentine (Nerds, #7)(40)
Author: Vicki Lewis Thompson

"No. No, thanks." Stunned, she turned to go.

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely sure." He’d left Chicago without saying a word. No matter how many times she tried to get her mind around that, she found it impossible. Had she meant so little to him, then, or so much? Regardless of the answer to the question, he was lost to her.

Will stood still as the crowd of graduates leaving the ceremony eddied around him. He hoped to hell he wouldn’t miss Amanda. Three times he’d thought he’d spotted her, only to have the blonde turn around and be somebody else. What evil, lost-in-the-mists-of-time impulse had decreed that all graduates wear the same black robes and mortarboards?

As it turned out, she found him. If he’d reasoned out that she might, he would have worn red, even if it was a bad color on him. The green polo shirt probably blended in with the grass he was standing on.

"Will?" She approached cautiously. Before she reached him, Gloria swooped in and gave her a hug. "Congratulations! This deserves a round of Chi-Town Lakefront Breezes, and I’m buying!"

"I’ll take you up on that." Chester walked up behind Gloria.

"And then you’ll buy a round, right?" Mavis linked her arm through Chester’s. Then she glanced over at Will. "Will! I didn’t know you’d be here."

Gloria spun around. "Will? What are you doing here?"

Justin stepped into the group. "I’m probably the only one who knows, and I was sworn to secrecy." He gave Amanda a hug. "Congrats. We’ll all meet you at Geekland. It’s up to you if you want to bring that guy over there, the one with the hopeful look in his eyes."

Amanda stole another glance at Will. She wasn’t convinced he looked hopeful.

"Come on, everybody," Justin said. "Let’s make ourselves scarce."

Throughout the commotion of their leaving, Amanda continued to stare at Will. "They said you’d left town."

"They said right." He waited until Justin had herded everyone away before stepping closer. "I left three weeks ago."

"Without telling me?" Her voice quivered, and she hated that, but what he’d done seemed like such a betrayal.

"You were finishing up, taking finals, doing all those last-minute requirements. I wasn’t about to get in your way."

"But you should have known I’d want to know!"

"Well, now you know."

"Three weeks after the fact!" She was losing control of herself, and people were staring, but she didn’t care. "Why bother? Why not just disappear, never to be heard from again?"

"Because—"

"Never mind that I went to your office this morning and asked about you."

"You did?" He began to smile.

"Yes! And never mind the shock to my system when I discovered you’d left the firm and you’d even left town. Never mind that I—"

"Amanda, I love you."

"Never mind that I expected to run into you, and for these last three weeks you weren’t even there to run into …" She paused. "What did you say?"

"I love you."

She would not cry. She would not. "So what good does that do us? You left town."

He moved closer. "I didn’t just leave town. I moved to Boston."

Boston? "You moved to Boston? But that’s where—" "Uh-huh. I was able to transfer to a Cooper and Scott office there. Last week I found an apartment in Cambridge.

I had to wait until the students started moving out at the end of the semester."

"Oh." Her brain didn’t seem to be functioning quite right. It sounded as if Will had moved to the very place she was going next week.

He gazed at her uncertainly. "Amanda, if this won’t work for you, then I understand. I made some assumptions, and maybe I was wrong."

"If what won’t work?"

"Getting married. See, I thought if we had the summer to ‘ get used to hav**g s*x all the time, then maybe by the fall semester we’d settle down enough that you’d be able to study."

Finally she figured out what was going on. She’d had to make a complete one-eighty from her previous belief, and the shock of seeing Will suddenly appear had been too much to assimilate all at once. But she had it, now.

With a whoop of joy she flung herself at him, knocking her mortarboard to the ground. "It works for me." She grabbed his face in both hands and laid one on him. After a few minutes, she realized they might be into it a little too thoroughly when someone nearby let out a wolf whistle.

Will lifted his mouth a fraction. "We need to continue this somewhere more private."

She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. But people were expecting her. "I have a party at Geekland."

"I have a hotel room two doors down from Geekland. And I told Justin that if everything went well, you might be a little late."

She nibbled on his lower lip. "Everything’s going exceedingly well."

"So the marriage thing is a definite?"

"Definitely a definite. I love you, William Sloan."

Smiling, he eased away from her, wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and steered her toward a cab waiting at the curb. "Then come with me, Ms. Graduated-with-Honors. It’s long past time to celebrate."

Yes, it was. As Will helped her into the cab, she marveled that he’d cared enough about her future to leave when he had to and come back when she was ready. Finally she’d found someone she could trust with her dreams, and that was worth a gigantic celebration, one that would only require two people, a bed, and an adequate supply of condoms.