Provocative (Tempting Book 3) (3 page)

“
W
hat the fuck
,” I whispered as I launched out of bed at an ungodly hour, making a beeline for the toilet just before my stomach upended itself.

“It was fucking toast,” I whisper-yelled as my hands clutched the cold porcelain. “Dry fucking toast. And water.” Still, vomit poured out of me faster than I could fathom. I tried sucking in air through my nostrils in between spews of barf, but it was coming so fast that I couldn’t keep up.

My whole face grew warm, and moisture collected behind my eyes. Why couldn’t I keep toast down? Was this normal?

Who knew something smaller than my pinky finger could hold all the power over your body? I’d flipped through a baby book and came across something that looked more alien than human, but it was the fetus, the itty bitty cluster of cells that was overruling me in all the aspects of my life that were most important—such as food.

I sat back on my heels and took a breather. “Get your shit together,” I said, poking the slight protrusion that rounded my stomach. “I need sleep.”

It was weird, right? Talking to your stomach, to something that couldn’t process language.

The vomit came again, more violently than before. My face was fully in the toilet at that point, and I couldn’t stop the tears that spilled over my cheeks. My throat was on fire, and my stomach was constricting and expanding, making noises that didn’t sound human. My knees hurt from where they dug into the tile as my fingers clenched on the toilet.

I was exhausted, after spending hours catching up on notes from the classes I’d skipped that day. Nathan had moved to touch me in bed and for the first time in the last year or so, I waved him off with a shake of my head. He’d kissed my hair instead before rolling over, which made me feel inexplicably sad.

But I could barely think about that now, as vomit curdled in my stomach again, and I held on for dear life as it came out of my mouth.

A hundred f-bombs were on my tongue, but the only things that came from my mouth were vomit and the occasional whimper, when I had a second to catch my breath. I’d never puked so much, not even when I’d had thirteen whiskey sours and then four shots of Baileys in quick succession.

I sighed into the toilet and half-heartedly reached for the handle so I could flush away the acidic smell that filled the bowl.

“Hey,” Nathan’s voice came from behind me.

The tears were still pouring from my eyes and because I was embarrassed, I didn’t turn to look him in the eye. “This blows.” It was all I could manage.

“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. I felt him squat beside me. “What can I get you?”

“I’d settle for a stomach transplant right about now.” I rolled my forehead across the lip of the seat.

“I’ll get in touch with my contacts on the black market.” His hand came to my back and just laid there, over the thin satin of my chemise. “What can I do?”

More vomit came before I could answer and my entire body bucked as I grabbed the toilet again. When I seemed to have a reprieve, Nathan was closer to me and rubbed the corner of a cool, wet washcloth along my forehead. “How’s that?”

I could only nod as I sighed, turning my head to give him more access to rub the cool cloth over my face.

After several minutes of silence and relief from not vomiting, I said, “I thought morning sickness was supposed to be in the morning only.”

“I think that’s just the saying, but I’m pretty sure it can happen anytime.”

“Sweet,” I said dispassionately. My body convulsed like I would vomit again, but it held it in. “If it wasn’t for the little … thing … inside of me, I would expect a six pack abs after all the times I’ve worshipped the porcelain throne.”

For some reason, calling it a baby—especially
my
baby—was still foreign; surreal. Admittedly, Nathan responded to the news a hell of a lot better than I did. I was still trying to adjust to the idea that pretty soon I’d be enormously bloated and probably pissed off at my sheer wideness. Thinking this would be caused by an itty bitty baby made up of Nathan and me was incomprehensible.

Nathan stood up and I heard him turn on the faucet and drench the washcloth again.

When he returned, I turned more fully into his touch. “This is so gross,” I said, but my voice was scratchy.

“It’s not that bad,” he assured me, brushing my hair from my face and tucking it behind my ears. “It could be worse.”

The thought played like a dream in my head—like Choose Your Own Adventure, with me alone in my dark and dank apartment, drunk out of my mind and relying on some college nitwit to support the life we created together.

I turned to Nathan, who was sitting on the floor beside me, running the washcloth over my face. “Thank you,” I sighed as he ran the washcloth down my neck.

“Anything you need—you just tell me,” he whispered.

I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting the hormonal overflow to continue leaking from my eyes. Nathan stayed with me on the bathroom floor until my legs cramped from the position I was in. As I clutched the corner of the wall to stand, Nathan swept me up into his arms and carried me to the bed as if he lived to do it for me. And as he tucked me in—actually fucking tucking the sheet around me—all I could think was that I wanted to be as fucking chill as Nathan was about all of this. As if he’d seen the future laid out in front of him and embraced it. The puke, the chills, the hormones—it was so easy for him to be what I needed.

He climbed into bed behind me and snuggled up against my back and I hoped I didn’t completely fucking reek. But if I did, he didn’t acknowledge it, burying his head into my neck and breathing one long breath against me—like I hadn’t just woken him up on a work night and had him take care of me when I couldn’t move from the toilet.

His arm snaked around my waist, pulling me flush against his front. I wasn’t sure what kind of good karma I had put out into the world to deserve this fine piece of ass—which was just one thing in a line of many wonderful and delicious things about him—but I wanted, more than anything in that moment, to be as strong and as solid as he was for me.

I
was
deep into reading a paper comparing Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando
with one of her essays from the late twenties for my Literary Theory in Comparison course when there was a sharp rap on my office door.

“Come in,” I called out, not looking up from my desk. Even though I had regular office hours like all professors, the students at Harvard had access to their teachers at any given time.

“Nathan, my boy.”

I smiled easily at Max Collingsworth, my mentor at Harvard and one of the most prestigious professors in the Arts and Sciences department. “Max, what can I help you with?”

He tipped his chin at what I was reading. “Any good?”

Edging the papers in his direction when he sat in a chair opposite my simple wooden desk, I shrugged my shoulders. “Not bad. Maybe a little too self-important for my tastes. Though my feedback should knock him down a peg.”

Max lifted a bushy white eyebrow at the opening line. “Huh.”

“I know.”

We laughed, and the ease in which I could interact with Max still completely mystified me. Coming from Northern University where I was never quite out of my dad’s shadow, it was such a massive relief to find people who not only respected me, but challenged me because they believed I was worthy of it. Not just my colleagues, but my students as well. Most of my classes only had ten to fifteen students in them, and every single day, the students made my mind race with how intelligent and thought-provoking they were. Without a doubt, it was the greatest job I’d ever had in my life.

Max handed the paper back to me and started asking about something when my cell phone vibrated on my desk. Normally I would have ignored it, but given how sick Adele had been lately, I gave Max an apologetic look.

A
dele
: If I die today from lack of fluids, just remember I love you and I’m sorry if I couldn’t clean up after myself before I succumbed to my affliction.

I
wiped
a hand across my mouth, shaking my head. If I thought it was difficult seeing Adele unsure about this pregnancy, that was nothing compared to seeing her unsure and completely miserable at the same time.

In my entire life, I’d never felt so helpless as I did the other night when she was hanging over the toilet. And it dawned on me, as soon as that thought swept over my brain, that seeing her puke was only a pinprick compared to what I’d probably feel like when she was actually giving birth.

“Everything okay?”

I dropped my hand and nodded at Max. “My girlfriend is pretty sick. I think I’m going to head home and check on her.”

As much as I was practically vibrating with the desire to tell him it was because she was pregnant, I knew Adele wasn’t ready for people to know. I didn’t talk much about my relationship with her as it was, given the difference in our ages and that she was still a student at Northern. There was always a lingering fear that someone would put together how we met. But Max smiled at me, the kind of fatherly smile that I’d never seen on my own parent’s face.

“What’s her name?”

“Adele.” As I was standing to tidy up my stacks of paper, I glanced down at the picture I had of her on my desk. The frame was a sturdy mahogany, with clean edges and no frills. She’d given it to me the day before I started at Harvard. I’d taken the picture while she was studying one day, not long after she’d moved in with me. Her hair was flipped into a messy bun held together by a pencil, and her white shirt was hanging off of one shoulder. What she’d been reading had made her smile, just a tiny lift of her lips. It was my favorite picture of her, even more than the sexy ones she occasionally took for me, because it was the unguarded, sweet side of Adele. She didn’t show her softness often, and to able to capture it with a simple click of my phone, I’d stared at it more times than I cared to admit.

He tilted his head to the side so he could see the picture that I was staring at. With a nudge, I changed the angle of the frame so he could see it more easily.

“She’s beautiful.”

I smiled. Max was nearing seventy, so what he said didn’t rouse any possessive urges. Besides, Adele
was
beautiful. And she was mine, so it probably wouldn’t have bothered me even if he was fifty years younger.

“That she is.”

He was quiet for a moment, and I prayed that he didn’t ask where I’d met her. I never knew how to answer that question, so I tried to stick to the truth. We met in the hallway of a Boston bar, when she ran into me coming out of the bathroom. No mention of classrooms or students or professors were necessary, and so far I’d been lucky that my answer appeased the few people who’d asked.

“How long have you two been dating?”

Dating. It felt like such a thin, unfulfilling word for what we had. For what we were. She and I weren’t even like a match and a dry piece of wood. We were both fire-starters. No matter whether it felt like a terribly underwhelming way to describe our relationship, to describe her—my love, my lover and the person who held every piece of me in her slender hands—that’s what she was.

I lifted my eyebrows when I realized he was still waiting for me to answer. “Ah, about a year now.”

Max knew about Diana, which is probably why he didn’t pry any more than he already had. People tended to use grief as a self-made restraint. They couldn’t dig the way that they wanted to, because your tragedy held them back. In this situation, it worked damn well.

“Well, I hope she feels better soon.” He lifted his hand in a wave and shut the door quietly behind him.

“Thanks, Max,” I replied, but he was already gone. I stared at my desk for a second, debating whether I should take the time to clean it up, but the urge to get home to Adele was far more pressing.

By the time I walked into our kitchen, a solid forty-five minutes had passed since I got Adele’s text. I didn’t see any lights on or hear the TV, and I frowned thinking that it meant she was upstairs on the bathroom floor again.

“Nathan?” Adele’s groggy-sounding voice came from the family room. When I turned the corner, she was curled into a ball with a bowl next to the couch on the floor and a blanket covering her legs and feet. I could tell by the way she was blinking that she’d been asleep.

I set the grocery bags onto the coffee table and sank down next to her, running a hand over her side. “Sorry I woke you.”

In response, she stretched a little bit and groaned. “It’s okay. I ate some saltines and that helped my stomach settle down. Figured I should sleep while this thing decided it didn’t hate me momentarily.”

This thing
. I swallowed down my immediate desire to correct her and say,
it’s not a thing, it’s our baby.
But considering that I didn’t have a death wish, I rubbed the edge of my tongue along my teeth instead.

“It doesn’t hate you. Morning sickness is usually a good sign.”

She harrumphed, rolling her eyes. “Says the man who doesn’t have to yack up everything that touches his stomach lining.” Adele tangled her fingers with mine where they rested on her hip. “I feel cursed. Like I’m never going to be able to eat a full meal ever again.”

“You’re not cursed,” I said, sliding my hand under her shoulders so I could help her to a sitting position. “Come on, I got you some stuff.”

Adele gave me a small smile, smoothing her hair after she was sitting upright. “What kind of stuff?”

Grabbing the first bag, I started unloading the contents one by one. Saltines, ginger candies, lemon candies, lemonade, Vitamin B6. Adele looked at me like I was insane when I went for the second bag. Acupressure bands for her wrists, peppermint essential oil, ginger tea and all natural, organic lemon ice thingies that the woman at the health store absolutely swore by.

“The fuck…” Her voice trailed off. “Were you Googling again, Professor Easton?”

“A little. I figured if some of this stuff worked for other women, maybe you can try them all. And if none of it works, we can talk to your doctor about a prescription that may help. I guess they have that too.”

Adele leaned forward and picked up the box of ginger candies, shaking her head a little when she read the label. She set it back down and shifted to face me. “You’re feeling particularly thorough today, huh?”

The spark in her eye, that fiery, indefinable thing that made Adele
Adele
was there again. I licked along my bottom lip and she immediately zeroed in on it with her emerald eyes. Blood heated and pumped through my veins, the familiar rush of sheer, unadulterated need and lust that never abated with her. Always with her, about her, and because of her.

“Thorough.” I hummed, shifting to accommodate my growing erection. “Yeah, I guess I’m feeling very thorough.”

She smiled, pulling the blanket off of her lap. “That’s convenient.”

“Is it?”

Adele stood and held her hand out to me. “It is. Because I’m feeling very turned on, Professor. And I’m going to need you to do something about it.”

I stood and slapped her ass, which made her squeak. “Lead the way.”

As she walked backwards to the stairs, she curled two fingers in a come here gesture. “I want you in a bed. In our bed.”

“Yes, ma’am.” And then I chased her up the stairs, delighting in the sound of her laughter.