Need Me (Broke and Beautiful #2)(25)

“Whose idea was it to name you Honey?”

She sighed. Not in an irritated way, but in the way someone sighs when they’ve just taken a sip of hot chocolate or seen a picture of a newborn deer. “My mom. She’s a whimsical sort.” She picked up one of his hands and threaded their fingers together. “She and my daddy tried for five years to have a baby, but it wasn’t happening. She even went to see a fancy doctor up in Lexington, but nothing worked. One night, she went to the diner for dinner and put some honey in her tea.” Her slender shoulder shook with laughter. “There’s a censored version to what happens afterward, the one I grew up with. But when I turned eighteen, we split a bottle of cheap red wine and she told me the real dirt. My mother swears up, down, and sideways that as soon as that honey hit her belly, she went home to my father and made a baby. Me.”

Ben let his hand hover over her hair a moment, then gave in to the urge to stroke it. Felt like silk. No. Way better than silk. He just had no name for what that better thing might be. “So she named you that, even knowing you’d probably have to tell the story behind your name constantly.”

Her lips curved into an even wider smile. “Where I come from, a good story is a gift.”

“You must be buried in gifts, then.”

She looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

Feeling a little uncomfortable, he tried to sit up straighter, but she shook her head and he stilled. “Your papers.” He cleared his throat, and it echoed in the empty classroom. “I’ve read the classics ten times over, I’ve studied and written enough words to drown us both, but I bet I’ve never held anyone’s attention the way your papers hold mine.”

“You’re lying.” She shook her head at him, sobering when she saw his expression. “Really?”

“I think you’ve figured out by now I’m not the joking type.”

“True.” She fused her lips with the hollow of his throat, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Just then, it felt like it was. “Why did you become a professor, Ben?”

Oh f*ck, he liked hearing her say his name. In the heat of the moment, it had been potent, but now it made his limbs feel heavy. Like he could finally relax. “I love words. On the page. Knowing someone felt them and immortalized them.” He swallowed a knot in his throat. “And sometimes it’s easiest to do the thing least expected. Instead of trying to get close as possible to what is expected.” God, he sounded like a jackass. This was definitely twenty-first-century pillow talk at its finest. “Never mind.”

“No. Not never mind.” She slid her hand into his hair and tugged comfortingly. “Mind.”

Ben’s lips tugged. “Forget what I said about your talent with words.”

She yanked his hair and his cock swelled underneath her ass. He’d never been turned on by such a thing before, but it appeared tonight was a night for firsts. Had he actually begged her to pull his hair a few minutes ago? Honey looked up at him in a way he recognized from having her sit in the front row of his classroom. It unwittingly spoke volumes. See anything you like, Professor?

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

His body responded to her husky question appropriately. No. Severely. Get a handle on yourself, man. “Yes, we should go. We don’t want to be sitting here when a janitor walks in.”

“Or worse,” she added before sneaking a look up at him from under her eyelids. “Would you . . . I mean, do you want to come over to my place? We don’t have to go inside. Even though Louis is probably there watching reruns of Arrested Development. There’s a roof . . .”

Immediately, his mind began forming excuses. Reasons why he couldn’t go home with her. There were too many to count, really. Except he wanted, very badly, to go sit on a rooftop with Honey and listen to her talk. Watch her smile. And yes, f*ck her as many times as possible before the sun came up. She was most definitely still in his system, more than before. So much more. He could go to the roof and no one would ever know. Nobody could stop him.

Honey trailed her lips over his jaw to kiss his ear. “Stop thinking so hard about it.”

Holy shit, he was going to do it. “All right, I’ll—”

His cell phone went off in his pocket, loud and mood-ruining. Son of a bitch. Honey sighed and hopped off his lap to fix her clothes, covering her breasts by tying the halter back behind her neck. It was quite possibly the most depressing thing he’d ever seen.

Until he looked at his phone and saw the name Tracy. His mother. When he let it ring too long, it rolled over to voice mail, but a text message popped up instead. At your place. Need to crash.

His neck started to burn, nausea rolling in his stomach. He could feel Honey looking at him curiously, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to kneel in front of her and wrap his arms around her waist. Feel her fingers in his hair again. Get a nice, long pull of her cinnamon-and-sugar scent. But he couldn’t. He had to go. Based on the resignation in her big eyes, she already knew. She just didn’t know why, and he could see every possibility ping-ponging in her head. Another girl. The guys wanting to drag him out for a beer. Why wouldn’t he go? He’d already gotten what he wanted. That’s what she thought. He could see it clearly on her beautiful face.

She smiled tightly and started to move around him. “Maybe next time.”