Nothing good.
Hardening myself against him, I decided he could shag the entire class, and I couldn’t give a damn.
I was, of course, lying.
And I also knew Mac would not tell me he loved me if he was sleeping with a student.
Get over yourself, Arro. But my eyes refused to move from Mac and the woman.
The young woman returned to her place in the front line, and Mac faced the class to address us. He searched the students until he found me in the back. “Arro, can you come to the front, please?” He looked at the young man before him. “Luke, do you mind letting Arro take your spot?”
“Not at all.” The guy was amiable and smiled at me through the others before he headed to take my place.
Hesitant, I passed him with the most grateful smile I could muster and took his spot right smack bang in front of Mac.
Wonderful.
Feeling attention on me, I glanced to my left to see the young woman who’d just flirted with him eyeing me with curiosity.
“Right.” Mac clapped his hands. “Let’s warm up.”
Everything went all right for a while. I mean, compared to my fellow beginners who had been taking the class longer than I had, I needed to limber up a bit. But Mac didn’t focus on me for most of the stretching session, walking around the group, adjusting other people’s form. In fact, it lulled me into a false sense of security. I thought maybe he’d stay away because he understood his presence confused me.
We finished up stretching and sat almost cross-legged, except Mac instructed us to press the soles of our feet together. The goal was to stretch the muscles at the top of the inner thigh, but I didn’t understand how until …
“You want to press your knees toward the floor to increase the stretch,” Mac’s quiet voice rumbled in my ear. Ignoring the answering goose bumps, I stiffened at the feel of his heat at my back before he pressed his large palms to my knees and gently pushed down.
The muscles immediately burned.
“Feel it now?” he murmured, his lips brushing my earlobe.
My breasts tightened, followed by an erotic flip deep in my belly. Holy crap.
I gritted my teeth and said through a fake smile, “Yes, now get your fucking hands off me.”
To my irritation, Mac chuckled, a rumbly, sexy sound that, combined with his hands on my legs, caused further inappropriate tingling at the apex of my thighs.
Bastard.
He eased away and instructed, “Keep pushing those knees down.”
His departure allowed me to breathe and concentrate again.
Honestly, by the time we’d finished stretching, I felt like I’d had a full and proper workout and was ready to go home.
“Right. We’re going to go back to some basics today, since we have a few new students who missed the closed guard lesson. Guard is any position where we find ourselves bum on the ground with our legs in front of or wrapped around our opponent. You have closed guard, full guard, half guard, and open guard. Closed guard is a fundamental guard type in jujitsu, and tonight, I’ll demonstrate with our new student Arro, and then you’ll work in pairs, taking turns as the opponent.”
I barely heard the end of his sentence, because all that kept repeating in my head was “I’ll demonstrate with our new student Arro.”
“Uh …” I let out a grunt of disbelief. “I’m not sure what is happening.”
“I’m fighting for you.”
Oh, I understood now! The bastard was playing dirty because he knew I was so physically attracted to him, it would distract me from all else.
“Arro, will you join me on the mat, please?” He wore a bland smile, but I saw the glitter of mischief in his eyes as he strode past me.
Trying not to glare, I followed him and caught the young woman, whose name I’d overheard as Annie, glower sullenly as I passed her. One other new student, a woman in her mid- to late-thirties, gave me a sympathetic and bolstering smile.