I swipe at the tears and suck in a shuddering breath—and that’s when I hear his low, furious voice.
“Hiding from me, little supplicant?”
2
Charley
Five years ago, I’d been a baby museum volunteer, tasked to shadow one of the docents giving a private tour of the Mesopotamian and Levantine galleries. Except said docent suddenly took ill—the kind of violent, stomach-cramping ill that can’t be endured anywhere except on a toilet—and I was stuck giving the tour with no training and barely any detailed familiarity with the objects on display.
The added joy? The tour group was a cluster of visitinghistory professors. You know, the exact group of people who would notice I had no idea what the hell I was talking about.
But I made the most of it. We’d had a section on Mesopotamia in my Neolithic Revolution course the previous semester, and so I faked it pretty well, adding in a few jokes and dimple-buttoned smiles to make the most of my sunny Americanness. By the middle of the tour, everyone seemed charmed, except for a lone, scowling professor in the back. Church.
I found out later that he’d drawn the short straw in his department and was tasked with babysitting the out-of-town colleagues while they were in the Big Smoke for a conference. For a reserved man like Church, not only was spending the day with a group of strangers nigh on unbearable, but subjecting him to a tour of a British Museum gallery was akin to subjecting Vermeer to a primary school art class. Church had dug things out of the ground that now resided in the museum; they’d consulted him when reworking their Religion and Belief narrative. There was nothing a second-year undergrad could tell him about the galleries that he didn’t already know so well he could put the actual curators to shame.
It was near the end, when I was pleasantly bluffing my way through a description of a Babylonian tablet depicting a naked, winged goddess, when Church finally asked a question.
“Why?” he asked in his low voice.
I paused my bullshitting, my brain stuttering at the interruption. “Pardon?”
“Why,” Church asked, putting a hand into the pocket of suit trousers too expensive for a professor to be wearing, “did the Babylonians do this? What was the instinct that drove them to mold Ishtar onto this tablet? Why do you think they needed to depict her—or any deity for that matter?”
It was an unfair question to ask any volunteer docent, no matter how seasoned, and the other professors seemed to know it, shifting uncomfortably and starting to make noises like they were going to answer on my behalf.
Except I found myself answering before I could think better of it. “I think that’s a reductive question. Sir,” I added, so I wouldn’t seem too rude. But really. It was a stupid question, on top of ameanquestion, and it was clearly designed to embarrass me. It didn’t matter how well this scowling jerk wore a suit or how narrow his waist seemed under all that sleek, tailored wool. Or how devastatingly sexy that scar looked running down his chiseled cheek.
Nope. Not having it. Not even from the embodiment of every dirty professor fantasy I’d ever had.
Church’s lips had parted the tiniest bit at my challenge, and then he’d drawn his lower lip between his teeth for the barest instant at the wordsir.Like hearing me say that word was enough to make him hungry and ever so slightly unsure at the same time.
I managed to drag my stare from his mouth to his eyes as I decided to say more. I wasn’t a total dumbass about this shit, and also fuck him. “What comes first, deity or depiction? Depiction forces us to manifest the god into reality. Trying to diagnose thewhyof depiction misses the better question ofhow—how did these gods actually become gods? How did the Mesopotamians leapfrog from faceless pillars at Göbekli Tepe to the fully realized form of Ishtar here on this tablet?”
The other professors murmured in approval, but Church seemed to notice them not at all. He stepped forward, blue eyes alight and mouth twitching at the corner. Not quite like a smile, but like—well, like he was enjoying himself a little. I got the feeling he was surprised by this, that he was planning on being both disappointed and vindicated in his own superiority by my answer, and the fact that I hadn’t just rolled over and given him an easy victory was...pleasing.
But his intense stare and cruel mouth made it very clear that he would have a victory from me of some sort. And boy if that didn’t make my lower belly flutter just the tiniest bit, if it didn’t make the Attenborough in my mind notice how primed I was to receive his mating display of intellectual feathers.
“So, Charlotte,” he said, reading my name off the tag pinned to my blouse.
“Charley,” I corrected with my dimples out, partly to goad him (he didn’t seem like the type to indulge in nicknames, not for himself and not for other people) and also partly because I wanted him to know. I wanted to hear him grate it out against my neck while he fucked me. I blushed a little at this realization, which he noticed.
The corner of his mouth twisted even more; the fox had just seen how little self-preservation this bunny actually had when it came to asshole professors.
Hell, the bunny was only just now realizing it about herself too.
“Charley,” he said, letting his rough voice linger over the syllables as he watched me lick at the corner of my mouth.
“Yes?” I whispered.
“That was a very pert little answer you gave me. But you answered a question with another question, and I don’t allow that.”
“We’re not in your classroom,” I said, a bit fuzzily. His stern “see me after class, you bad girl” voice was really making it hard to think clearly. Or remember the actual tour group now ping-ponging their attention between Church and me as we talked.
“I’m not finished yet, Charlotte.”
His refusal to use my nickname let me know that I was at the end of his indulgence.Mmm, I wonder what happens at the end of his indulgence. Spankings?
He said, “I want you to answer your own question.”