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any further explanation, and I stared after her, trying to put these strange events into some sort of context. “Scott…”
    “I’ll explain.” As the door swung shut after Beth, he took my hand. Startled by the unexpected contact, I almost snatched my arm back, but my self-training kicked in out of habit and I just blinked at him, waiting for the promised explanation to materialise.
    He pulled me over to the nearest couch and beckoned for me to sit. Once I did, he sat beside me, so close that his knee brushed my thigh. “I promise you’re safe here, Holly.”
    “How do I know I can trust you?” I wanted to relax against him, let him magic all my cares away—but life didn’t work that conveniently, in my experience. “You show up in my class with tattooed wrists and flirt with me, and then you drag me over here to some restricted area of the building, and now you want me to…” I trailed off, realising that my imagination was getting ahead of me. He hadn’t said outright that he planned to kiss me, touch me, fuck—
    “Only one way to know for sure.” Sensing my mistrust, he kept his distance, his expression somewhere between curiosity and longing. “It wouldn’t take much to prove to you that I’m not one of the Focused.”
    Imagining exactly what that would entail, I closed my eyes, turning my head so he wouldn’t see me bite my lip. Here he was, the guy of my dreams, sitting right here asking me to make out with him…or more. It seemed way too good to be true. It had to be a trick… right?
    “Let me guess. You have cameras hidden somewhere in this room, and then you’ll try to blackmail me into giving you all my money.”
    Scott stared at me as though the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. I wanted to believe him. I really, really did. But what if he was an actor, hired to trick me into admitting that I was lying to the university? I couldn’t throw away my dreams just for the sake of a raging libido.
    He sat back, holding up his hands as if to prove that he meant no harm. All that achieved was to make me fixate on how they’d feel running up my thighs, and I tried not to squirm.
    “Okay, Holly. We’ll do this your way. What do you want to know?”
    I wanted to know a lot of things—some of which I didn’t even have coherent thoughts about. Whether he was a good kisser was right at the top of the list, but I couldn’t risk it. “Why haven’t you been in any of my other classes?”
    “Because there were delays in my three-strikes treatment. I took a semester out. Between strikes two and three, the committee interceded with one of their own doctors and I got a free ride to the tattoo lab—no questions asked, no procedure attempted.”
    “Committee?” There was an organisation that interceded in these things? Where the hell had it been when I’d been going through my treatment?
    He glanced towards the door, seeming amused. “You were going through three-strikes and you’ve never heard of them? Beth will be over the moon. She’s always fretting about the university getting wind of the committee’s work.”
    “What committee?”
    Why didn’t they help me?
    I bit back the words, still too cautious to risk saying them aloud.
    Sensing my anger, he took my hand without thinking. It was such a natural response that I started to really believe in him—the Focused were never so quick to use physical contact when comforting someone. “I don’t know what happened in your case, I swear. I didn’t even know you were in my class. All I did know was that you went to the university, and when I checked you out, you checked me out back, even with these.”
    He ran his fingers lightly across the underside of my tattooed wrist, and I swallowed a sigh out of habit. He continued stroking softly as he said, “I told Beth about you and she asked me to find you. I planned to stake out the med library after my class, see if you came in. I didn’t know you’d just land in my lap like this.”
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