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lecture—he’d had to have coffee with his grandmother and missing it would have meant her worrying about him—and he hadn’t been able to resist the urge to go and apologize for his absence personally. Then she’d said she hadn’t even noticed he wasn’t there and he’d…gotten angry.
    He’d had years of learning how to detach himself from his emotions, and in one second Eleanor May had brought them all flooding back to the surface again. And dickhead that he was, he’d gone ahead and said those words to her. I want to take you home and fuck you senseless.
    Stupid motherfucking prick.
    He’d said the words because he was angry and he wanted to shock her. Jolt her somehow. And he’d seen the flash of heat in her eyes and known she’d liked it, no matter what she said. But the satisfaction he’d gotten from that had then been ripped away by what had followed the heat.
    Fear.
    Oh, she’d tried to hide it from him, but he knew what fear looked like. Knew it like he knew the tattoos that covered the backs of his hands. Fear was an old friend of his and had been for years until he’d learned how to cut his emotions off. Then he’d started to recognize it in the eyes of other people every time they saw him coming. Those who ran screaming from him and the members of his squad. Some of his fellow soldiers had gotten off on the power of that fear, had loved how it gave them respect.
    But not him. He knew how it killed you inside. How it reduced you. He would never want to do that consciously to anyone ever again.
    Especially not her.
    Christ, he shouldn’t have said those words. And yet…he couldn’t forget that heat in her eyes before fear had drowned it. She’d liked hearing him say it.
    Luc groaned softly, covering his eyes with his forearm. The woman’s contradictions were driving him fucking insane. And the worst part was, every little piece of her he saw, he wanted more. He wanted to know what made her afraid and why she kept the world at a distance. Who or what had hurt her. And she had been hurt, because fear always followed pain.
    Why do you want to know?
    Good fucking question.
    The sun crept over his legs, the heat seeping through the denim of his jeans. Ever since he’d returned from Africa he’d felt like he could never get warm enough. As if parts of him were encased in ice, frozen in shadow. Numb.
    He’d thought it a blessing since numbness helped make it easier to fit back into society and try to be a normal person with a normal life. But something about Eleanor touched those frozen parts of him, thawing them slightly. Making him remember what it was like to be warm. What it was like to even be fucking alive.
    That’s why he wanted to know. That’s why she was important.
    She made him realize that he wasn’t numb all the way through.
    Luc stared into the darkness behind his closed lids. Shit, why did he even want that? It was dangerous. There was a reason he kept all his emotions locked down. He’d had to detach from them in order to survive Charles Inza’s army, and he’d done the same when he returned so he could survive real life.
    So he could be the average twenty-five-year-old Kiwi he was pretending to be and not the boy who’d commanded one of the death squads. Who’d killed people.
    Beneath the noise of the city traffic and the wind in the trees came another sound, a light footfall coming closer.
    A normal student wouldn’t have heard it, but of course he wasn’t a normal student. And he’d been in situations where his life had depended on being able to hear the slightest of sounds.
    Fuck. It had better not be Maddy. He didn’t think he could deal with another of her come-ons right now.
    The footsteps stopped near him, a familiar perfume threading through his senses, and he felt a moment of dizzying relief. Because the perfume wasn’t Maddy’s usual grapefruit body wash but something more sophisticated. Subtle. Complex.
    Luc didn’t open his eyes. “Hello, Professor