At the next evening session, she graded exams. He’d given her a list of points each essay should cover. “Just mark them. I’ll put the grade on later.”
In the same awkward manner as before, they settled down to work. The silence wasn’t interrupted until the telephone rang. Grant hauled himself up from the sofa, where he’d been stretched out on his back, the exam book he was reading propped on his chest.
“Hello,” he said into the receiver when he picked up the telephone on the end table. “No, Miss Zimmerman, I don’t think it’s been graded yet… . No, you’ll find out your grade when everyone else does… . Well, I can appreciate that, but … No. Good-bye.” He hung up with a sigh of irritation. “That girl never gives up!”
“Pru?”
He turned to Shelley with a disbelieving scowl wrinkling his brow. “Pru?”
She held up the coed’s exam, which she had graded minutes earlier. “Short for Prudence. It’s written right here. P-R-U-D-E-N-C-E with quotation marks around the first three letters.”
He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Boy, if that’s not a misnomer I don’t know what is.”
“Does she call often?” Shelley asked casually as she neatly stacked the exam books she’d already read.
“Jealous?”
“No,” she said shortly, but the smoky hue in her blue eyes told him of the fire smoldering just beneath the surface.
He grinned wickedly. “She calls on the days she doesn’t leave something in the classroom that she has to come back for or when she doesn’t accidentally run into me in the Student Center. She’s about as subtle as a locomotive.”
Shelley was about to tell him she didn’t think one of his female students should be calling him, but what gave her the right? When it came right down to it, she and Pru Zimmerman were on an equal footing. “She’s attractive in a blowsy sort of way,” she said offhandedly.
“Is ‘blowsy’ another way of saying she’s got big bosoms?”
Her mouth dropped open in stunned surprise and he laughed at her expression. Miffed, she snapped her mouth shut again. “I see you noticed,” she said through stiff lips.
He laughed harder. “I’d notice a bulldozer if it were coming at me all the time, too.”
“You poor thing,” she said. “You can’t help it if every girl on campus is smitten, can you?”
His smile suddenly changed into a fierce frown. “You’re a fine one to talk. I’ve seen that guy who sits next to you making cow eyes across the aisle.” His expression softened somewhat. “I guess I ought to thank you for keeping him awake during class.” He walked toward her until he was only inches away. She had to tilt her head back to look into his face. “I can empathize. Fantasies about you have been keeping me awake, too.”
Her mouth went dry and she looked away as she stood up quickly. “It’s time for me to go,” she said hoarsely, stepping around him and bruising her hip against the table in her haste to leave.
Surprisingly he didn’t try to stop her, but he tracked her like a hunter as she went around the room picking up her purse, her coat, a folder she’d brought along.
“Shelley?”
“Yes?” she said, whirling around to face him before her name had completely left his lips.
His eyes roamed her face, lingering a long time on her mouth. “Nothing,
” he said with a sigh. “Is it all right if we work Friday night? I have a department meeting Thursday evening.”
“Yes.”
“See you then.”
“Is that rain?”
Grant rose from his deep chair and crossed to the window, sliding open one panel of louvers. “Yes. It’s raining hard.”
“It was cold when I came in this evening.”
She had almost been late. That afternoon her honors sorority had hosted a tea for the women on the faculty. She’d stayed afterward to help with the cleanup and, since she was running late, had walked to Grant’s duplex. It was closer than the lot where she had parked her car earlier in the day.
She had arrived out of breath, still wearing her gray georgette blouse under a tailored slate-blue suit. “Did someone just get married?” he had quipped when he answered her knock. He was wearing the jeans that seemed to be his uniform while at home and a gold crew-neck sweater.