Then the professor walked into the classroom and introduced himself as Dr. Parrish. Jenna anticipated that calculus would be her hardest class. She was good at math, but she had to work at it, so all thoughts of Hot Guy, or anything else that wasn’t calculus related, flew out of her mind for the next fifty minutes.
Dr. Parrish finished the class by going over his gra
ding system. “This class isn’t going to be easy, so I suggest you all pair up with a study buddy.” He clicked off the overhead projector. “That’s it for today. See you all on Wednesday.”
The buzz in the room immediately went into overdrive.
“Ben!” Melissa said, not even trying to be discreet. “You have to be my partner!”
He turned around and shrugged. “Sorry, but I’ve already got a partner.” He looked at Jenna. “Right?” His dark eyes bored into hers with a mixture of humor and desperation.
Jenna squelched the urge to turn around and see if he was talking to someone else. “Um, yeah, sorry,” she said to Melissa.
The girl frowned at her, then gave Ben an overly bright smile. “My loss.” She handed him back his pencil, along with a slip of paper that he automatically tossed into his backpack. Every pair of male eyes were on her as she sashayed her way out the front door.
“Did that girl just give you her number?” Jenna asked incredulously.
“I didn’t look,” he said in a tone that suggested girls threw their numbers at him every day. “So how about it? Want to be study partners?”
“You were serious about that?”
“Says the girl who spent the last hour taking more notes than anyone else in class.”
“I need to make a good grade in this class to keep my scholarship.”
“Then we’re in the same boat.” He pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down his name and phone number, then handed it to her. “I have a full schedule and I also work part-time, but that’s at night. My best days to meet up are probably Sunday and Monday.”
“I never said yes to being your partner. It’s nothing personal. But I need to get an A in this class, and…sorry, but I really don’t have time to tutor anyone.”
He looked more amused than annoyed. Taking back the paper he’d given her with his name and number, he flipped it around to the side that was blank. “Open up the calculus book to the first review problem.”
“Why? What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to audition to be your study partner.”
“Seriously?”
He scribbled on the sheet for a few seconds, then handed it to her. “Is this how you’d set it up?”
“There’s a mistake. Right here,” she said pointing to the second line. “You used a sine when you should have used a cosine.”
“Check again.”
He seemed so sure of himself. Not cocky. But…
So she checked again.
Rats. He was right.
“Okay, so my bad.”
He handed her back the paper. “This Sunday at six?”
She was big enough to admit when she was wrong, and she did need a study partner. “Sure. Sunday works for me.” She wrote down her information.
“Jenna Pantini?” he said, reading her name off the paper. “Sounds Italian.”
“One hundred percent, both sides.”