Reckless Hero

Ready for class to start, I looked around. Only a few other students were there at the moment—a group of girls conversing around an open notebook while a guy lounged in the back with a pair of headphones hanging from his ears.

Tucker wasn’t there yet.

At the thought of him, my stomach cramped and I broke out in a sweat. I had been dreading seeing him again. My head was still reeling from our unexpected chance meeting. I could still hear his voice and the words he’d said to me: I’m not letting you get away from me that easy.

Every time I thought about those words, I felt hot and bothered one second, then panicked and angry the next.

Deep down, I knew Tucker was bad to the bone. He tried to hide it behind a friendly smile and a laidback attitude, but the ruthless light in his eyes showed what an alpha he was under the veneer.

He was the kind of man determined to get whatever he set his sights on, and once upon a time, it had been me that he wanted. His persistence was one of the things that had drawn me in against my will. I’d hated the thought of being one of the cliché girls who fell for the bad boy, but when I fell for Tucker, I had fallen hard.

When he lef

t, it had destroyed me and made me doubt everything I thought I’d known about myself. Afterwards, I had vowed to never feel so deeply for a man again.

As if my thoughts had conjured him, he appeared in the entrance.

I involuntarily gasped.

Tucker James was still the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen, even if I hated admitting it. He was the walking definition of tall, dark, and handsome. Filling out a plain t-shirt and a pair of jeans, his attire was simple, but he still somehow looked like he belonged on the cover of a magazine.

He was accompanied by three other guys. Although they were younger than him, none of them carried an ounce of his raw sex appeal.

He had certainly aged sexily.

I was considered sensible to a fault, but when it came to Tucker, all my senses went right out the window. His presence awakened hormones within me that had been dormant for nearly five years. Suddenly, I could remember his intimate touch so clearly that it was like those five years had never passed.

Fearful that my entire body was flushing, I averted my gaze.

That’s when I noticed I wasn’t the only one who noticed Tucker’s entrance, or his attractiveness for that matter. The female students had perked up, smiling and trying to subtly fix their hair and clothing before he looked their way.

I caught a growl in my throat, barely suppressing the sound.

Being Tucker’s girlfriend had always brought out an unexpected streak of jealousy in me, and apparently, that hadn’t changed. Except the girlfriend part, that was.

I turned away, annoyed with myself for reacting so strongly when his eyes landed on me. There was no turning away from his gaze. The heat of it brushed my skin like a physical touch. Electricity raced up my back and made the hair at the nape stand on edge.

Tucker’s grin was slow and knowing, as if he knew exactly what he was doing to me. My cheeks warmed.

Peeling his gaze away from me, he said something to the guys he came in with. Without waiting for an answer from them, he then sauntered toward me and took a seat beside me, never even looking at the other women preening for his attention.

One of them shot me a dirty look.

Go ahead girlfriend. Been there done that. Not going down that road again, I thought, hoping with my all that it was true.

Just when it was time for class to start, the professor and the remaining students came through the door. The atmosphere in the room changed as everyone got ready for the lecture.

Thanks to the sudden bustle, I was finally able to take my focus off Tucker, even though I knew it would be impossible for me to entirely ignore him.

“All right,” the professor said by way of greeting. “Today, I would like you all to pair up in groups of two.”

Tucker immediately leaned towards me. “Told you, you aren’t going to get away that easy, partner.”

***

The class proved to be a lesson in self-control and I was grateful to have had my phone recorder running because I hadn’t been able to concentrate at all.

The professor had handed each group a worksheet to complete during his lecture that was to be submitted to him by the end of class.