Living in Shadow (Living In…) Read Online Free

she’d told herself she didn’t feel. She only smiled coolly back and walked on, not bothering to speak to him, ignoring both the flicker of heat that settled in her gut and the annoyance that the flicker of heat was even there in the first place.
    Jesus, what did he think she was? Sixteen? She was thirty-eight and long past the stage of getting hot and bothered just because some outrageously good-looking young man kept staring at her.
    “Eleanor?” James Devon was at her elbow and she realized she’d stopped short of the café doors. Luc wasn’t even looking at her now, the blonde sitting next to him had her hand on his thigh and he’d turned his head toward her, smiling.
    Her irritation deepened. Fuck’s sake. What was the matter with her?
    She pushed through the café doors and out into the corridor, clutching her latte, letting the hot liquid burn through the paper cup and into her palm. So much better to concentrate on that small pain than on the other, far more dangerous heat down low inside her.
    “You okay?” James, who taught international law and was one of the few people in the faculty who wasn’t a fuckwit, looked at her curiously. “Or were you stunned by the magnificence of Lucien North?”
    Of course James would notice that. He’d always had an eye for handsome men.
    Eleanor gave him a filthy look. “Are you kidding me?”
    James shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first. You should see Carly.”
    Carly was one of the criminal law professors and a sucker for a good-looking student, though, since she was nearly sixty-five and married, with her it was purely a visual-appreciation thing.
    “She’s like that with everyone.”
    “Luc is a little different, though.”
    He had that right. Eleanor didn’t say anything for a moment as they strolled down the corridor toward her office. Then, when a decent-enough amount of time had passed, she said, “Is he in any of your classes?”
    “Yeah. International law is his thing.” James grinned. “I’m not complaining. Whenever he comes to one of my lectures, everyone else shows up too. Especially the girls.”
    “Popular then.”
    “Extremely. And a brilliant student too. Wrote me the most fabulous essay on—”
    “Thanks, James,” she interrupted gracelessly as they stopped outside her office. “Got a mountain of assignments to mark.”
    She wasn’t curious about Lucien North. She wasn’t.
    Yet when Thursday rolled around and she stepped into the lecture theatre for her legal history class, her gaze went straight to the desk where he normally sat, in the front row, right in the center. And found his seat empty.
    The sharp point of an emotion she refused to call disappointment needled at her.
    Shit. What the hell was her problem?
    She’d kept away from men for a long time after her divorce from Piers. For years the thought of another relationship—hell, even just sex—was too much to contemplate and though she’d broken through that little block with a couple of guys since, in the end she’d found being single easier. Her career at the law school was much less complicated, even with the usual university/faculty politics that sometimes drove her round the bend. She liked teaching, enjoyed the interactions she had with her students and found the intellectual challenge of law stimulating. That was all she needed. That and an excellent vibrator.
    Lucien North was nice eye candy, but that’s all he’d ever be.
    Eleanor gave the lecture, irritated with the way her attention kept going to the place where Lucien normally sat and catching the eye of the young woman who was sitting there instead. Which probably weirded her out as much as it did Eleanor.
    After the lecture was over and the usual crowd of students and their questions had vanished out of the door, Eleanor was sliding her laptop into its bag when she noticed someone standing in the doorway, leaning against the doorframe.
    Lucien.
    The irritation and annoyance gathered in a small, hard