Falling for the Feral Professor (Preview)

Chapter 1

“Are there any questions?”

Professor Emily Fenton cast her eyes around the lecture hall, letting the silence hang for a good 10 seconds, walking slowly from one end of the stage to the other. No hands appeared. She reached her desk.

“Okay. Good. Don’t forget that we have a quiz on the readings next week, so … you know what to do. Class dismissed.”

The hall filled with the roaring, fluttering sound of 70 students stuffing papers, binders, and notebooks into their bags. Emily sat down at her desk and watched as students filed neatly out of the rows of seats and up through the pair of double doors at the top of the theater-style seating arrangement. She let out a sigh of relief, as she always did, when the last few stragglers had finally departed.

Emily relished the few moments of decompression after each of her formal lectures. She’d been teaching English at T. R. Ferrell College for two years now, and she still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she wasn’t really qualified for the job – that one day, she’d be called into a meeting with the dean and dismissed from her post.

But it hadn’t happened. In fact, when her first annual review had come up last year, she’d been praised by many of her students, tired of being taught about heavy tomes by grey-haired professors as dusty as the books, for offering a much-needed female perspective on many of the classics.

Still, with each passing lecture, she felt as though she couldn’t truly breathe until those few minutes when she was left alone with her thoughts in the quiet, empty lecture hall.

But those moments couldn’t last forever. Once she’d caught her breath, Emily stood and set about gathering up her books, stuffing them into her brown canvas messenger bag and slinging it over her shoulders. Her lectures ended at 11:35 A.M. on the dot – perfect timing for her to walk to the staff cafeteria and sit down with her meal a few minutes before the noon lunch rush began.

White light from a bright, blank sky spread itself out over the grounds as Emily exited the classroom from a back door behind the projection screen. It was early January, and the air bit at her nose and lips as she hurried across the campus, cutting a diagonal line through the quad. It had snowed a week prior, and after a few days of warming, the slush had flash-frozen overnight into a thin, crisp layer of ice that crunched like the sugary top of a crème brûlée as Emily crossed it with her quickened stride. Her boots, old and worn but still watertight, made jagged half-impressions in the milky, glass-like topping.

The cafeteria was housed inside one of the older buildings on campus, built in the early 1970s in a Brutalist style. The entrance was a pair of glass doors that Emily had always found incongruous amid the great concrete slabs that made up the rest of the building’s exterior. It needed a good power-washing; dark-green patches of algae adorned the corners where the building’s angles met.

Emily swung the door open and made her way up the half flight of stairs to the cafeteria, rubbing her hands together as she did. She’d had poor circulation in her fingers since childhood, and the January air turned her nails a sickly shade of purply-blue.

A pair of teaching assistants were ahead of her in line. Emily grabbed a tray and had dragged it along the counter until she was right behind them before she recognized one of them as her friend Ted Danvers.

“Ted!”

Ted turned to her and smiled. He was a man of about 30 with wavy blond hair that looked better suited to a California beach than the icy expanse of a college in suburban London.

“Emily. Hey, how was your lecture?”

“Not bad,” said Emily, glancing at the whiteboard that listed the main courses for the day.

“Not bad.” Ted nodded, smiling as if he knew better than to take Emily at her word. “Sounds a bit rough.”

“Well, you know how it is,” said Emily, not looking at him. “Everyone’s still in holiday mode. It’ll take a couple of weeks before they adjust back to a class schedule. Morning lectures are always harder.”

“Fair enough.” Ted tapped on the shoulder of the woman beside him. “Oh, Emily, this is May Yeung. She’s a new TA in the biology department. May, this is my friend Emily. She’s an English teacher.”

“Nice to meet you,” said the woman with a nod. She was slightly overweight but wore it well. Her hat, tugged all the way down over her ears, suggested that she was easily chilled.

Emily returned the gesture.

“Did you hear about what happened to Professor Fielding?” Ted said, his tone turning conspiratorial.

“Darren?”

Emily was slightly acquainted with Darren Fielding, the head biology teacher at the college. He had been one of the first people to introduce himself after Emily had been hired, and they’d had lunch once or twice since then. Given their widely different schedules, though, and the fact that the biology building was on the opposite side of the campus from the English building, they rarely ran into each other.

“Yeah. He’s been sick — apparently it’s so bad that they’re hiring a replacement for the full semester.”

Emily furrowed her brow.

“What’ll it be?”

One of the kitchen staff, a reedy woman with a name tag reading “Doris,” was addressing the three of them. They paused their conversation to put in orders, then Emily said, “Sick? With what?”

Ted shrugged. “No one knows. We were wondering if you knew, since you guys are friends.”

“Uh … well, friends might be a bit of an overstatement,” said Emily mildly. “Anyway, no. This is the first I’m hearing of it.”

“Jeez, I’m sorry,” said Ted. “I was hoping you’d have all the hot gossip, but apparently he’s being really secretive about this for some reason.”

Emily frowned. “Well I hope it’s not too serious.”

Doris returned with three plates of hot curry, and Emily picked up her tray and followed May and Ted to the till. Once they’d paid up, Ted led them to a four-person table in the center of the large dining room.

The faculty cafeteria was slightly nicer than the student cafeteria, with wood laminate tables and vaguely artsy lighting fixtures rather than the austere fluorescents that adorned the ceiling of its counterpart. It wasn’t exactly a Michelin-starred establishment, but Emily had come to enjoy her lunches here.

She balked as Ted and May sat down at their chosen table. Ordinarily, Emily preferred to snag one of the booth tables in the very far corner of the room, where she could blend into the scenery and lose herself in a book. Now, though, her curiosity was piqued — so she sat down, unwrapping her fork and knife and flattening the napkin between her hands.

“So … do you know anything about the replacement?” she asked, flicking her fork through a bit of rice to mix it with the curry.

Ted looked thoughtful. “I haven’t. Nothing.”

“I heard a name today,” said May, glancing between them. “Lukas Elmbridge.”

“Elmbrige?”

May nodded and shoveled a forkful of curry into her mouth.

“Lukas.” Ted tested the name. “He sounds handsome.” A wink. “Does the name ring a bell?”

Emily shook her head. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Well, he’s supposed to arrive this Thursday, so I guess we’ll find out all about him then.”

Emily nodded, staring back at the growing line-up at the food counter. She shrugged and went back to her meal.

*****

After lunch, Emily led her three-hour Creative Writing class in a small room on the third floor of the English building. The class was small this semester — just 16 students. Most of them seemed keen, thankfully, and after marking their diagnostic assignments, Emily was relieved to find that there were no major stragglers in the grammar skills department. She ended the class at 4 P.M. sharp and made her way downstairs to the library.

The main library at T. R. Ferrell college was not huge — only two floors, taking up about half of the building’s footprint — but what it lacked in size it certainly made up for in content. Ever since her early teens, Emily had been deeply interested in mythology and legend, and she continued to be impressed by the college library’s collection of texts on the subject. Half the books were too old and delicate to be removed from the building, so she’d taken to curling up on one of the bean bag chairs in the second floor lounge room and flicking through tales of supernatural history for an hour or so before heading home to her apartment just off the campus grounds.

This afternoon, she was working her way through the final chapter of a book about the history of the Salem witch trials. Nasty stuff, to be certain, but Emily couldn’t help being engrossed in it, by some morbid fascination.

In fact, it was well after dark when she finally shut the back cover of the book and stretched upward out of the seat, feeling a satisfying crack in her spine.

It was just past six in the evening, but the library was deserted — it was the beginning of the semester, so the students didn’t yet have any exams or final projects to cram for.

Emily found her way through the stacks, relishing the peaceful silence and the warm incandescent lighting that glowed against the dark hardwood shelving and grey carpets.

Returning the book to its spot on the shelf, she buttoned up her coat again and left the building with a nod to the librarian, a middle-aged woman with striking white hair by the name of Ms. Cooper. Emily had never learned the woman’s first name, and she got the sense, after spending a couple of years at the school, that Ms. Cooper preferred it that way.

The grounds seemed to glitter in the darkness as she walked back across the quad, then turned onto a path lined with skeletal trees and the occasional street lamp. The moon, visible behind a friendly patch of clouds, was fat and oblong, hanging heavy in the sky.

It must be full this weekend, Emily thought.

Eventually, the path turned onto a sidewalk, which bordered a busy street where busses ran. A couple of the vehicles passed Emily as she walked — sometimes, if the weather was particularly bad, she would hop on a bus and ride the three blocks to her building. But tonight was a pleasant night, if only a little cold.

Her apartment was cool when she got in. She’d left the window open again. Kicking off her shoes, she walked over to the living room and closed it.

Emily’s apartment wasn’t big, but it certainly had character. Everything in it seemed at least 40 years old, though the appliances and fixtures were all impeccably maintained. Her refrigerator — covered in magnets holding marking rubrics and assignment guides from class — was a warm shade of avocado green and rounded at the edges like a fridge in a cartoon.

She flung open the door and crouched low in front of the appliance, searching for dinner.

Leftover takeout it is, she thought, pulling a plastic container of Chinese food off the top shelf. Should have done the shopping on the weekend.

She sat down at her kitchen table and looked out the window. Her apartment was on the third floor of the building and afforded a decent birds-eye view of the alley below. The building across the way was a flat block of shops, and Emily would often sit at the table and watch seagulls and crows fighting over bits of bread and dropped food on that rooftop.

Tonight, though, the flat expanse of roof was dark, with glimmering patches of ice, and not a living creature to be found. Emily looked up at the moon, instead. Tinted yellowish, and with that odd, not-quite-spherical shape, it seemed ominous in a way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Eventually, she got up and pulled the drapes shut.

*****

The end of the week came around quickly. Time always seemed to fly at the start of the semester, when schedules were still being occasionally rearranged, and names still being misremembered or forgotten entirely. Emily barely noticed the passage of time, but she did feel herself falling back into the routine of class work. Her evenings at the library were being cut short by marking, and office hours, and endless email queries from the most proactive of her students.

So, on Friday morning when Ted showed up behind her in the cafeteria line with the look of the cat that got the canary on his face, Emily could almost forgive herself for barely noticing him, yet again.

“I can’t believe you’re more interested in dusty old literature than me,” he said, putting on a sarcastic tone. Before Emily could apologize, he was speaking again. “Hush. It’s not important. I had to rush to get ahead of him.”

“Ahead of who?”

Ted raised his eyebrows. “Lukas Elmbridge.”

Emily’s stomach dropped. She knew the look on Ted’s face as the one that he usually got when he was having designs on playing matchmaker. She’d told him, time and again, that she wasn’t interested in dating anyone who worked at the university – she’d always thought of workplace relationships as unprofessional; a good way to quickly send a reputation into a tailspin. Ted tended to be respectful of that – she knew full well that if she was more open to his hairbrained ideas she’d have to endure a new blind date every week – but occasionally he couldn’t help himself.

“Ted …”

“Emily, before you say anything … oh, he’s cute.”

Emily looked back toward the staircase, bewildered, as Ted added, “Speak of the devil …”

And there was Lukas Elmbridge, in the flesh, coming up the stairs, kicking ice out of the soles of his boots. Emily glanced at Ted, then back at Lukas.

He is cute. I guess. She frowned. Though he doesn’t look old enough to be filling in for the head of the biology department.

“Lukas! Have you been following me?” There was no masking the boyish glee in Ted’s voice. Sometimes Emily figured that his predilection for setting her up was just a fallback for cases where the guy in question wasn’t displaying any interest in him. She smiled inwardly, both with amusement and sympathetic embarrassment.

“Uh …” Lukas smiled and rubbed his hands together as if suddenly realizing he was cold. “No, I … just came to get lunch.”

Ted smiled, and Emily could almost feel a tiny ping of disappointment radiating off him. He collected himself in a second, though, and gestured to her.

“I wanted to introduce you to my friend Emily. She teaches English here.” Lukas looked at Emily with an expression of mild amusement. He took her hand and shook it twice, then set about pulling off his wool hat and unbuttoning his coat.

“Nice to meet you, Emily,” he said.

Emily nodded. Her eyes traced his features – his light brown hair had collected static under the hat and now stood up at odd angles, giving the impression that he was in desperate need of a haircut. The slightly scruffy beard didn’t help. But his eyes, gray-blue, the same color as Emily’s, had a mischievous warmth to them that seemed to dispel the blast of cold air that had followed him in through the door.

“So … what’s good?”

Emily blinked.

“On the lunch menu, I mean,” he corrected.

Ted shot her a look that brought her back to reality well enough. “Um …” she said. “Well, they do a really nice curry. Or … there’s fish and chips … uh …”

“Fish and chips sounds perfect,” said Lukas.

They passed down the line in slightly awkward silence. Emily almost sighed out loud in relief when her transaction went through at the till, rendering her free to go and sit in her favorite secluded corner.

“Mind if I join you?” asked Lukas.

Yes! thought Emily. I very much mind!

“Uh … no,” she said.

Behind her, she thought she could hear Ted chuckling to himself. She looked back at him and saw only a knowing smile. “How about you, Ted? Are you staying?”

He shook his head. “No, I have to get back to the office, there’s a couple of students who wanted to talk to me.”

Emily swallowed and nodded, shooting him a look that she hoped Lukas didn’t see.

She led the way to her usual table and sat down, pressing herself into the very corner of the booth and placing her coat and bag next to her like a kind of barricade. Lukas took the seat opposite her. He took off his coat and hung it over the back of the chair – under it, he was wearing nothing but a light blue T-shirt.

“Aren’t you cold?” asked Emily, who was wearing a thick sweater over a long-sleeved shirt.

“Hm? Ah … not particularly, no.” He smiled and popped a French fry into his mouth. “Are you?”

“Well … not right this moment. But it’s freezing out, and all you’ve got on is a T-shirt.”

“I’m very warm-blooded,” he said. From anyone else, the statement might have sounded smarmy, but somehow Lukas’ words only came across as charming. Emily shrugged and turned her attention to her food.

“So, you teach English, Ted was saying?”

She nodded through a mouthful.

“Like, literature, that type of thing? Or just grammar?”

Emily swallowed and laughed mildly. “I’d like to think I teach literature, though sometimes I end up teaching grammar on the side.”

Lukas laughed.

“Forgive me for saying,” said Emily slowly, “but … you look awfully young to be filling in for the head of an entire department.”

A strange look blossomed across Lukas’ face, then. He paused, and for a moment Emily wondered if he’d heard her properly. Then he said, “Well, looks can be deceiving, can’t they?”

“How old are you, then?”

“Old enough,” he said with a cryptic smile. Emily took it for what it meant: back off.

She gave a curt nod and rummaged in her backpack for the text that she was working on annotating for class. Pulling out the worn, dog-eared copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, she laid it on the table in front of her – between her and Lukas – and flipped it open, clicking a pen in her other hand.

“Is that … Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?” asked Lukas. There was genuine curiosity – almost delight – in his voice, and Emily, though slightly miffed, couldn’t bring herself to ignore it.

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s what I’m teaching my first year class for the next month or so. Are you a fan?”

“It was one of my favorites when it … uh, when I first read it. Still is. One of my favorites.”

Emily looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “I had to read it when I was in college,” she said, “and I loved it then, but I don’t think I really appreciated the nuances of it until I had to teach it myself.”

Lukas nodded, tilting his head to try to read some of Emily’s annotations. She bristled, but he turned back to look at her before he could have really read much of anything.

“I don’t think I ever had to read it for school. But it was one of my dad’s favorites, so I used to read it sometimes when he was away.”

“Away?”

“Oh. Uh, yeah, he … went on a lot of business trips.”

Emily narrowed her eyes. There was something strange about Lukas — she got the sense that he wasn’t telling the whole truth about himself. And odder still, Emily didn’t sense any malice in that omission. It was as if he were ashamed of something.

She gave him a polite smile. “Of course,” she said.

“So, uh … how long have you been teaching here?”

“Only two years. Well. Two and half now, I guess. I started last September.”

Lukas brightened. “Oh, good. That’s not too long. I was worried everyone else here was a battle-axe; thought I’d look awfully green.”

“Battle-axe! Sheesh, I hope the stress hasn’t done that much damage,” Emily said with a grin, casting her eyes back to her book.

Lukas laughed. “No, no. I certainly didn’t mean to imply you looked anything less than youthful. Radiant, even.”

Watch it,” she said, “now you sound like you’re describing a pregnant woman.”

Lukas raised an eyebrow in an expression of mock contrition. He took a bite of fish and chewed thoughtfully for a while, then asked, “Do you like teaching here?”

Emily looked out the window, then back at him. The harsh white light that reflected off the overcast, snowy landscape cast him in a frank, honest-looking frame.

“For the most part, yes. I … I haven’t made many friends here, yet. I was hoping I would but … I spend all my time buried in books in the library, and then I go home. I moved here from Wales when I got this job, so I don’t really have any family nearby.”

“You live alone, then?”

Emily nodded, then shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Sorry! At any rate, it’s a nice enough school — the staff are good people, and the students are enthusiastic, for the most part. I have a pretty easy job, truth be told.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m glad you think it’s a good school. I wasn’t certain about applying for the position, but now that I’m here … I think I’ll fit in.” He looked around and smiled with a hopeful innocence that made Emily almost jealous. She brought another forkful of food to her mouth.

When she didn’t say anything in response, Lukas added, “And … maybe you haven’t had much luck yet … but I hope we can be friends.”

Emily looked at him. Who says something like that? But his face was sincere. She broke into a tentative smile and nodded.

“That would be nice.”

“Great!” He finished the last bite of fish on his plate and pushed aside the fries. “I’ve got to head back to the bio building and set some stuff up, but … maybe we can meet for lunch again? Next week?”

“Sure,” said Emily. “Um … I’m here every day at 11:40.”

Lukas smiled and gave her a heavy nod. “I’ll see you around, Emily.”

“Yeah. Uh … bye.” She waved lamely and watched him deposit his tray by the bin and head out the door, pulling his coat on as he walked. He had a long, confident stride, and even under the loose coat, it was clear that he spent at least some of his time in the gym.

Then he was gone. Emily let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and went back to her book.

*****

Lukas stopped outside the door to take several gulps of fresh air. He’d never minded the cold – in fact, he’d always preferred it to the oppressive heat and humidity of summer. Cold air helped to clear his thoughts – something that he desperately needed at the moment.

He began to walk toward the biology building, tromping diagonally across the field instead of walking along the path. Thoughts raced through his head, and he tried to catch each one as it surfaced, sorting and categorizing it for later study. Really, they all boiled down to one idea.

She’s beautiful.

Just thinking it, distilling the torrent of convoluted ideas down to that one, simple phrase, set his heart racing. He ground his teeth as he walked.

This is bad.

He’d been overjoyed to receive the letter that he’d been hired at T.R. Ferrell. Access to the university’s considerable laboratory facilities would mean that he’d have everything he needed to continue his studies – and the relatively small size of the student population would allow him to do so without interruptions. Lukas intended to focus on his work.

But … Emily.

Just the thought of her name, those three melodic syllables, sent a thrill of electricity straight from his brain to his belly, and down between his legs.

Work. Think of the work.

Eventually, as he came upon the entrance to the biology building, he settled on a vague fantasy of sitting in front of a microscope while Emily watched, clad in a white lab coat and very little else.

*****

It took Emily the rest of lunch hour to regain her focus, and even in class she felt slightly foggy. Her thoughts kept drifting back to Lukas’ friendly, puppy-dog smile. When one of her students came to her with a particularly convoluted philosophical question regarding the text, she was almost relieved at the opportunity to pick apart something besides her own disorganized thoughts.

Behind on her annotations, she skipped her library trip that evening and walked straight home, keeping her mind firmly entrenched in a one-sided discussion of the sociological context in which Jekyll and Hyde was written. The wind picked up just as she was getting to her building and blew a few errant strands of blonde hair across her face.

Feeling a sudden chill that was more than just the weather, Emily glanced down the alley next to her building as she passed it by. For a split second, she thought she saw movement, but she quickly realized that all she was seeing was her own reflection in a puddle on the ground – once a patch of ice, now warmed back to a liquid state by the heat coming from the laundry vent directly above. Emily shook her head and took a few deep breaths.

You’ve been spending too much time reading about witches and ghouls, she told herself as she climbed the landing steps to her apartment and stuck her key into the lock.

Once upstairs, she found a can of soup in the cupboard and emptied it into a pot, dropping a slice of frozen bread into the toaster. The drapes were still drawn shut from the previous evening, and she flung them open in one decisive motion in an effort to quell a rising sense that something would be waiting for her behind them.

Of course, there was nothing. She sat down heavily at the table and placed the book in front of her.

Maybe some background noise would help. She got up, gave the pot of soup a quick, idle stir, and went to the living room to turn on the TV. Flipping through channels, she settled on a rerun of a nighttime talk show, then returned to the kitchen.

The added noise helped; Emily often found that turning on the TV was a quick and easy way to make it feel like there was someone else with her in the apartment. With the volume set just low enough that it was impossible to make out words from the kitchen, she settled easily into her evening routine.

Of course, a few hours later, when she turned off the TV to go to bed, the effect dissipated immediately. Emily pulled her bed covers right up to her chin and curled into a tight ball on her side.

She’d been right in her prediction – the moon was full and massive in the sky, casting an uncharacteristically bright light through the gap in her bedroom drapes. Just as she was drifting into uneasy dreams, Emily thought she heard something. A strange sound – like wolves howling.

But there are no wolves, here, she thought. Then she was taken by sleep.

*****

She spent the weekend productively, marking assignments, reviewing notes, and most importantly, picking up enough groceries to last for the week to come. She even managed to spend a few hours on campus, in the library, sitting in her favorite well-worn bean bag chair.

As she left the library on Sunday afternoon, Emily felt a sudden, odd impulse to start walking toward the biology building rather than take her normal route home. Her own thoughts betrayed her. You just want to run into Lukas again.

And perhaps it was true. She had felt strangely compelled by the man, though she was reticent to admit to anything more than that. At any rate, she had only spoken to him once, and even then, only for about 15 minutes – it seemed within reason that getting to know him more would only prove that he was, in fact, a jerk and not worth Emily’s time.

This is why you don’t have any friends, Emily. She quieted the voice in her head by taking the back entrance out of the library and heading toward the biology building.

The biology department was housed in a building that was a good couple of decades older than the English building. The college had, after all, gotten its start in the sciences, so these were the first buildings to be constructed. Luckily, the older buildings were better maintained – one of them contained an operating theatre dating back to the 1920s, so it was practically a heritage site.

Emily felt a sense of contentment come over her as she neared the buildings. Where the newer, starker, steel and concrete buildings made her feel small and insignificant, these buildings were always welcoming, and warm. She felt as though she was being invited as she stepped through the double doors at the entrance.

She spent the better part of 20 minutes wandering through the various wings and floors, peeking into classrooms and a broom closet that had been left ajar.

What am I hoping for? For him to rush out of some classroom and bump into me? Am I really that desperate for human contact?

Her memory flashed to the warmth of Lukas’ hands, and she was filled with a sudden, intense desire to feel it again.

She wondered, idly, what those hands would feel like in other places.

Caught up in the daydream, she didn’t bother to check the convex mirror hanging at the top of the wall as she turned the next corner. A second later, she slammed full-on into someone coming in the opposite direction. Pulling away quickly and brushing herself off, Emily uttered a stream of frantic apologies – before realizing that it was Ted she had bumped into.

“Emily! I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.” He laughed. “But apparently neither were you. What are you doing here on the weekend?”

Emily drew in a breath and stood there, hoping a suitable answer would materialize if she was just silent for long enough. To her horror, Ted interpreted her anxiety with his usual stunning accuracy.

“Ah-hah! You’re looking for Lukas, aren’t you?”

“Not looking for him …” said Emily vaguely. Are you sure about that?

*****

Sunday was a day for rest – a message that Lukas’ parents had been careful to impart, and something that he’d kept in mind long after they’d stopped forcing him to comb his hair for church on Sunday mornings.

This Sunday, in particular, he lay on his bed, reviewing his notes from the previous two days of research. In the back of his mind, a nagging voice reminded him that he had student assignments to mark, but he kept pushing it back, reminding himself that rest meant doing whatever he found restful.

Correcting the grammar of 20 young, eager biology students was not exactly his idea of restful. Examining the minutiae of chemical reactions as observed through a microscope lens two days ago, however …

Idly, he wondered whether he might ever outsource the grammar to another teacher.

Emily?

He chastised himself silently for considering offloading good, honest work – and at the same time, felt the mere mention of the name pulling him away, once again, from his own work.

I wonder what she’s doing. I wonder what she finds restful.

An image of her – wavy, dirty blonde hair, ice-grey eyes, those perfect, strawberry-colored lips – invaded his consciousness. To be a student in her class. He almost laughed at himself. He was old – far too old to be getting so carried away with idle fantasies of a woman he barely knew.

And yet, he couldn’t deny the ache in his chest and the rush of blood that accompanied the very idea of her.

Perhaps if I spent more time with her … maybe I’d find that she isn’t so supernaturally perfect. Maybe she’s just a normal woman. Maybe I could even forget her.

Letting his notebook fall to his side, he thought, I seriously doubt that.

At length, he stood and paced his small apartment. It was bigger than a dorm room, thankfully – the paycheque from T.R. Ferrell was decent and had allowed him to find living quarters off campus that suited his needs. A small bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom. It was enough. He was rarely home and didn’t particularly enjoy cooking for one, so most of his time in the apartment was spent either sleeping or stretched out on the bed like he was now, reading or thinking idle, unproductive thoughts. Still, the flat afforded him a pleasant view of the dense forest that bordered the university campus.

Outside, the moon was nearing orblike fullness. The sight of it filled him with restless energy. Taking one last furtive look at his notes, Lukas grabbed his keys and left the building.

*****

Emily was on time as usual for lunch on Monday – and to her genuine surprise, so was Lukas. At least, he was on time. She couldn’t say for certain whether it was usual.

“Morning,” said Lukas sidling up to the food counter behind her. By way of a handshake, he gestured with a metallic silver coffee thermos.

“Good morning,” said Emily. She glanced at the thermos. “Up late last night?”

“Hm?” He traced the line of her vision. “Oh. No.” He took a sip. “Actually, I slept great over the weekend. I was up half the night on Friday, though, so … making up for lost time, I guess.”

They ordered their food, and as they made their way to Emily’s corner table once more, Emily asked, “Were you at a party or something?”

Lukas laughed, then looked distant. “No … just … trying to get things set up at the biology lab.”

“Oh … you could have asked me for help,” Emily said. It was an absurd suggestion – she knew little about biology – but she found that she couldn’t ignore even the smallest chance to spend more time with him.

“Of course, yes. But you know how it is. When it’s your office, or your classroom, you want it to be exactly right. Not that the last guy … uh, Darren? Was that his name?” Emily nodded. “Yeah. Not that he was messy but … I’m a bit particular. Plus, you know, I didn’t get here until a week after the semester started — I’m adapting Darren’s planned curriculum while trying to cram two weeks’ worth of material into one class.”

“Right,” said Emily, with sympathy. Her workload was already heavy enough; she couldn’t imagine what a burden Lukas already had on his shoulders.

“And how was your weekend? Get up to anything interesting?”
Emily smiled and shook her head. “I spent some time catching up on reading in the library,” she said. “It was interesting to me.”

Lukas’ look was one of genuine intrigue. It surprised Emily – she was used to most of her colleagues’ eyes glazing over whenever she started to get into too much detail about her favorite literature. Lukas’ eyes, though, seemed to burn past Emily’s defenses. She felt exposed, and even more strangely, she didn’t mind.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Um … Well, I just finished a history of the Salem witch trials, and … that led me into some stuff about the werewolf hunts that were going on around the same time … or, earlier, in most cases. You know, everybody knows about the witch hunt stuff, but it’s interesting to know that there were also a lot of people – and more men – that were accused of being werewolves.”

Lukas nodded, glancing over Emily’s head at the wall behind her. Once again, the look on his face seemed to suggest something hidden or denied. Emily got the momentary sense that he was uncomfortable. He recovered quickly enough that she couldn’t be certain whether she had truly seen it.

“Well, nice to keep the playing field even, hm?”

“I mean … a lot more women than men were still executed for that sort of stuff, but …”

“Of course. I didn’t mean it that way.” He smiled. “But it’s true. I’ve actually … studied werewolf mythology myself. It’s quite interesting.”

Emily nodded and took a bite of the lunch that she’d been neglecting since they’d sat down.

“So,” she said after a moment. “They hired you for the semester … are you living somewhere, or did they put you up in a dorm or something?”

Lukas swallowed a mouthful of his sandwich before answering. “I found an apartment that was willing to let me stay on a four-month lease. It’s pretty close by, actually. I don’t think I could stand living in a dorm.” He grinned as he said it.

“I think I had more than enough of that when I was a student,” said Emily in agreement.

They sat in silence for a moment. Emily tried to focus on her lunch and classwork, but she could feel Lukas’ eyes on hers, her skin growing hot with the attention. She watched him take another sip out of his coffee thermos, then said, “So … do you know anything more about Darren’s illness? It seems like it’s quite serious, but nobody seems to know exactly what it is. It’s weird. You’d think if it was like … I don’t know … God forbid, cancer or something, someone in the office would already be setting up a donation drive or something.”

Lukas set down his coffee mug and glanced out the window next to their table. Something flashed briefly behind his eyes, and Emily furrowed her brow as she watched him. He turned back to her. “It’s weird. Yeah. I haven’t really heard anything else myself. I … I only know what I was told when they hired me, which is that he’ll be out of commission for the rest of the semester at least.”

“At least?”

Lukas gave a solemn nod. Emily fell silent again. It was true that she hadn’t known Darren particularly well, but he had always seemed like a good man. He’d been small in stature and tended to fade into the background whenever there was a packed room, but she’d watched him give a lecture once and discovered that his friendly, almost paternal air had translated exceptionally well into academic monologue. His lecture had been fascinating, and he’d held her attention, and the attention of every student in the hall, for the entire two hours. And now he’d been cut down by some mysterious illness …

She shook her head. “He’s not even that old. Mid forties, no more. Too young for something awful like this.”

“You care about him, don’t you?”

Emily shrugged. “I liked him. Biology isn’t my department, so I didn’t see much of him, but … you know. He showed me around the school, made me feel welcome when I was still new here.”

Lukas nodded. He made a slight movement, extending a hand toward her as if to touch her. Then he seemed to think better of it. Instead, he smiled at her. “I know that feeling,” he said. “And I’m glad that I have you to make me feel welcome here.”

The way he said it was warm and earnest enough to make Emily’s cheeks flush slightly, even next to the window where it was just barely warm enough to take off her jacket. She cast her eyes down at the table, then looked up again. He was still looking at her, still smiling as though she were sunlight incarnate.

She gave him a quick, embarrassed smile, then looked down at her phone.

“I have to start heading back to the English building,” she said, picking up the device and putting it in her pocket. “Class starts in half an hour, and I have a couple of things I need to set up on the projector.”

Lukas nodded. “May I walk you there?”

Emily’s heart leapt, but she steadied herself. “You won’t be late for your own class?”

He shook his head. “Unlike some people, I did all my setup in the morning, before I came to meet you.” He laughed, amused by his own impertinence. They stood, Emily shrugging on her jacket and swinging her bag over her shoulder.

Emily scoffed, picking up the joke. “Oh, don’t lie. You only had time to do that because you didn’t have a class this morning. I work much harder than you, and don’t you forget it.”

Lukas laughed again, and for a split second, Emily thought he might put his arm around her shoulder. Once again, he seemed to stop himself halfway into an impulsive gesture. Emily might have imagined it, but it seemed to her that there was some effort involved. He shook his head, still smiling.

Outside, a light dusting of snow had begun to fall, and the sidewalks and tree branches were already collecting a delicate, powdered-sugar coating of the stuff. Lukas looked around in apparent wonder as they walked.

“Where are you … uh, where are you from? Originally?”

Still gazing more at the tree tops than at the path ahead, Lukas said, “Oh, I grew up near here.”

“I’ve never seen an Englishman so enamored with snow. Usually the novelty wears off sometime in primary school.”

Lukas chuckled. “It’s sometimes an inconvenience; I won’t argue that. But you’ve got to admit that when it falls so delicately like this … it’s rather beautiful.”

Emily looked around, examining the way the fresh powder snow made even the grey, half-melted ice look slightly prettier. He was right – it was beautiful. And of course, that wasn’t anything new. Everyone knew that snow could be beautiful. But she had to admit that it had been many years since she’d personally taken the time to look at it like this.

“I suppose it is,” she said lightly.

She was jolted from her reverie a moment later when Lukas did put his arm over her shoulder. It happened quickly; he pulled her toward him in a slightly fraternal motion, more of a half-side hug than anything else, then let her go. But Emily felt as though her heart might burst out of her chest with the shock of it.

Get a hold of yourself, she thought, pretending to be fascinated by the memorial plaque on a bench they’d just passed to avoid looking at him and showing him just how red her face had become.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Sorry?” Emily turned to him. “For what?”

Apparently realizing that she wasn’t angry at the unexpected contact, he smiled and ran a hand through his hair. “Oh, I just … I know some people aren’t into hugs, and I should probably ask before doing that kind of thing.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, no … that’s … that was fine. Don’t worry about it.”

I kind of liked it.

I liked it a lot.

They were approaching the entrance to the English building.

“This is me,” said Emily. She clicked on her phone screen to check the time again. 12:40. Twenty minutes to set up her presentation for class.

Lukas turned to face her. “Have a good class. Oh, and uh, Emily …?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you … want to get coffee some time?”

She raised an eyebrow. Her heart rate, still settling from the earlier surprise, picked up again.

“Are you asking me out?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said simply.

She returned the smile. “Then I accept. There’s a cute place on the opposite end of the campus, in that new recreation building that they just finished … maybe you haven’t seen it yet.”

“I don’t think I have. Maybe you can give me the campus tour.”

Emily laughed and glanced toward the door. She nodded once, firmly. “Okay. Then, uh … tomorrow? After class?”

“Works for me.”

They exchanged numbers, and Emily saw that she now had only 15 minutes to set up for class.

“Alright. Now I really have to go,” she said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

They stood for a moment, looking into each other’s eyes. Emily felt too hot under her winter coat, and an image flashed briefly in her mind of Lukas tearing it off of her. She glanced away, hoping he couldn’t see it in her eyes.

Emily watched him go, wondering what she was getting herself into.

---

“Falling for the Feral Professor” is an Amazon Best-Selling novel, check it out here!

The only pleasure in Emily Fenton’s mundane life was spending all of her free time with her nose in a book. But soon enough all that changes for our English teacher! When the head of the university’s biology department falls mysteriously ill and disappears from the campus, everything is about to get upside down. When she meets his replacement, a man by the name of Lukas Elmbridge, she has a strange feeling about him. But when she’s called for help, will she be ready to face the reality?

Lukas Elmbridge is not only a solitary man, but his past is completely veiled in mystery. He certainly enjoys his job as a teacher but this pleasure was not his ulterior motive when he decided to take the position in the university’s biology department. Everything was perfectly planned but Emily was a variable he hadn’t calculated. As Lucas grows closer to Emily, strange things begin to happen on the campus; attacks by mysterious beasts, rumors of men shot by silver bullets. Will he be able to hide his real identity in order to keep her safe? Or is it too late?

As their feelings for one another become hard to ignore, Emily is drawn into a world where the supernatural is all too real – and dangerous. Can she shed her disbelief, or will Lukas’ dark secrets come to haunt both of them?

“Falling for the Feral Professor” is a paranormal romance novel of approximately 80,000 words. No cheating, no cliffhangers, and a guaranteed happily ever after.

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