Just One Taste Read online

  He didn’t have to. Rosemary knew she’d be replaying his soft voice whispering about fun and good times until she fell asleep that night. And possibly even after that.

  Maybe tonight, he’ll be a Cylon.

  The thought filled her with a strange, elated anticipation.

  Yep. Totally frakked.

  Chapter 7

  The days passed in a blur of designing new hands-on chemical demonstrations for her students and afternoons in the lab where Rosemary faced, for the first time ever, considerable difficulty in keeping her busy mind on her own studies and off her irritating, fascinating research partner.

  After the bouncy-egg-ball class, Rosemary had to admit that not all of Wes’s ideas should be dismissed out of hand. He’d certainly been correct about what constituted a more interesting, vibrant learning experience.

  Perhaps, just perhaps, he was right about her paper, too.

  That paper. She’d toiled over her study of protein inhibitors and chain linking for months, meticulously recording data and interpreting her findings. It was a brilliant paper, she knew that. And yet they still didn’t want it.

  Rosemary didn’t deal well with rejection. Discouraged and angry in equal measures, she distracted herself by doing more in-depth research into Wes’s proposed project. The subject of aphrodisiacs turned out to be more intriguing than she’d originally thought—not that she’d said as much to Wes.

  But on her own, late at night when she was avoiding her bed and the possibility of any disturbing dreams, she read. And thought about the strange moments of connection, attraction, and intimacy she’d felt while sharing a variety of reputed aphrodisiac snacks with Wes.

  And she allowed herself to become aware of the possibilities inherent in this new, all but untapped, area of study. What she planned to do with it, she still hadn’t decided. But something fresh and exciting, something groundbreaking, waited for her—she was certain of it.

  Now if only she’d had the sense to keep her mouth shut.

  How did every conversation with her brilliant, analytical, uncompromising mother end up with Rosemary defensive and justifying herself?

  “Mother. No. Listen to me. If you would just—”

  “What is it, dear? I’m elucidating an opinion on this fantastical new scheme of yours! Are you having a break with reality? Aphrodisiacs are not real science!”

  Dr. Helen Wilkins paused for breath, and Rosemary leaped into the breach. “Mother!”

  “What?”

  Having finally managed to jam a word in edgewise, Rosemary wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted to say. Other than “good-bye.”

  So she said that, and hung up the phone. She didn’t need to hear the rest of her mother’s treatise on the importance of publishing articles in order to advance career standing, anyway. She’d been hearing it since she was nine—and she’d been able to recite it from memory after the first time.

  It wasn’t any easier to take, knowing that her mother was a total hypocrite. Dr. Helen Wilkins was a renowned psychologist, but most of her fame came from a string of bestselling self-help books rather than true academic research.

  Rosemary laid her cell phone on the lab table. She was still regarding it in disgust when Wes walked in with his customary cheerful, “Knock, knock.”

  He never did the second line of the joke. That was just one of the many mysteries that made Rosemary want to pick him apart like a newly discovered chemical compound.

  Damn her intellectual curiosity! It made her burn to know everything about him: his favorite movie villain, what shampoo he used that made him smell like green apples, how he’d gotten that scar through his eyebrow, how he came to own a scruffy, high-maintenance little dog like Lucille, why he hummed to himself when he worked, what he looked like when he’d just woken up …

  Rosemary forced herself to stop. She couldn’t be thinking about that right now. Not while he was walking over to her, flashing that smile that made the whole room seem filled with his presence, as if he were a much larger, more physically imposing man.

  Wes hoisted the familiar cooler onto the lab table one-handed, muscles standing out in stark relief along his lean forearm. He wasn’t a bodybuilder type, which Rosemary was glad of. That kind of wide-shouldered, no-neck jock always made her feel uncomfortable, almost embarrassed. As though she were foolishly attempting to carry on a conversation with a gorilla.

  And she was no Dian Fossey.

  “Whatcha smirking at, Doc?”

  Rosemary wiped her expression clean. “Nothing. I wasn’t.” Damnation. No more internal babbling!

  “Oh no? I thought maybe you were happy about this.” He waved a piece of paper at her, grinning expectantly.

  “I have no idea what that is,” she snapped, still flustered.

  “Huh,” he said, squinting at the paper. “That’s funny, because your name is right here on it. Next to my grade on the final exam. I passed!”

  “Oh, that,” she said, unable to resist joining him in a smile. It was easier to resist joining his silly victory dance—at least until he swung an arm around her waist and whirled her out into the middle of the lab, away from the tables, the room spinning around her until the only steady point of focus was Wes’s face, lit up with laughter.

  She’d been surprisingly sorry to reach the end of her run as professor of the Food Chemistry 101 class—thanks to Wes’s timely intervention, it had turned out to be far more entertaining than she’d thought possible.

  And if part of her was intensely happy that the end of the class didn’t mean the end of her time with Wes, she intended to keep it to herself.

  “Yes, that,” he crowed. “I’m an A student, top of the class, teacher’s pet! Bet you didn’t think I’d pass, did you?”

  “Stop spinning me, you nitwit,” Rosemary gasped, laughter bubbling up inside her like acetone peroxide powder that had been heated enough to explode. “Of course I knew you’d pass.”

  “You’re a better teacher than Professor Prentiss was, especially after we started getting down and dirty with some actual experiments in class. But still, I got this grade without any extra help from you,” he said with a fiercely satisfied emphasis that made her frown. He seemed prouder of her lack of help than he was of the grade itself.

  “You know,” she said, disentangling herself from the distracting warmth of his arms. “You never did answer my question.”

  He smiled, and it should have looked free and easy, except Rosemary noted the tiny, spidery lines of tension that appeared at the corners of eyes gone dark green like the inside of a cored-out piece of jade. “What question is that?”

  “If you weren’t making a nuisance of yourself and sticking to my side like you’d been epoxied there in order to weasel a good grade out of me, then why? Why bother, is what I want to know.”

  Strangely enough, the tension around his eyes eased. In fact, his whole face softened, just a bit, into a look that Rosemary could only categorize as “sympathetic.” She crossed her arms over her chest defensively, suddenly and viscerally understanding how a cat felt when its fur was rubbed the wrong way.

  “Come on, Doc. Don’t tell me nobody’s ever wanted to spend time with you, just for you.”

  His gently playful delivery deflated some of her need to snap back at him. “I’m not usually treated as a leper, if that’s what you’re asking. But no. Historically, my company hasn’t been highly sought after when it comes to social occasions.”

  “Not a big party girl in high school, huh?” Wes asked, moving back a few paces as if aware of how raw she felt. He hopped up on the high lab table behind him and regarded her with his head cocked to one side, scarred eyebrow arched inquisitively.

  “I was twelve when I graduated from high school. Fourteen when I completed my undergraduate degree. No, I didn’t attend many keggers.”

  “That must have been so weird,” he breathed, sounding shell-shocked the way people always did when they began to actually confront the reality of what it mea
nt to be a child prodigy. “Did you have any friends?”

  Rosemary squeezed her arms tighter around herself to ward off the stab of loneliness, still sharp even years later. “Not really. My first year at Yale, the only people besides professors who paid any attention to me were the upperclassmen in my advanced Organic Chem course. I was flattered, of course—for about three minutes, until one of them made it clumsily obvious they were only talking to me to see if they could trick the brainy preteen into doing their homework for them.”

  He made a rough noise and his swinging feet kicked the door of the cabinet below the table with a sound like a gunshot. “No wonder you assumed I was scamming you. Damn. How many times has something like that happened?”

  “Enough that I don’t really want to talk about it anymore,” she said, moving to unpack the cooler he’d brought in, just to give her hands something to do.

  “Fair enough. But I still wish you’d tell me those Yale assholes’ names so I could go beat the snot out of them. We’re not that far from New Haven.”

  She shot him a look that had him rolling his eyes. “Yes, Doctor Smarty Pants, I know where Yale is. You don’t need a college degree to have a working knowledge of where to find them.”

  “You didn’t go to college?” she asked, focusing in on a rare smidgeon of real information about Wes’s past. He wasn’t evasive, exactly, but she’d go back to her campus housing after spending an afternoon with him and realize that never once had the conversation centered on him.

  “Decided to come here instead,” he said, moving to help her with the unpacking. She’d paused for a moment, arrested by the opportunity to pin him down.

  “But you didn’t just graduate from high school,” she prodded. “I assumed you’d gone to college before deciding to become a chef.”

  Wes wasn’t looking at her; his attention was focused on the large stainless steel bowl he’d pulled from the cooler. “Nah, I took some time off after school. Bummed around, saw the world. I was never that big on formal education, to be honest.” He shot her an utterly unconvincing smile. “That probably shocks you, huh? But I’m here to tell you, school ain’t fun when you ain’t smart.”

  “Stop that,” she said, her voice sharper than she meant it to be. “Don’t pretend to be stupid, because I won’t believe you.”

  The motions of his hands slowed to a stop; in fact, everything about him stopped. Rosemary would almost swear he stopped breathing.

  It felt like an hour, but could only have been seconds before he moved again. When he did, it was only his head, turned toward Rosemary like a clockwork doll. His eyes sought hers, the expression on his face still and blank. And then, with a shock of disbelief, Rosemary realized she could read his emotions as if they were scrolling down her computer screen.

  She’d scared him—but part of him liked it, and he wanted to believe what she said. Rosemary glanced down at his hands on the edge of the bowl. He wanted to believe her with an intensity that curled his fingers into white-knuckled fists.

  “Come on, Wes,” she said softly, echoing his words from earlier. “Don’t tell me nobody’s ever seen you for who you really are before.”

  The bowl, chilled from its sojourn in the cooler, seared against his palms like the coils of a superheated electric burner. But Wes couldn’t make his fingers unclench until his heart stopped kicking like it wanted to escape from the prison of his rib cage.

  Her eyes were so damn blue, and so piercing—but not icy, not cold at all. They made him feel naked, though, like she could laser through his chef whites and his skin and his bones and see all the way to the frantically beating heart of him.

  For once in his life, he didn’t know how to react.

  He came up with: “So. D’you want a strawberry?”

  She blinked once, making him afraid she’d push and push and not let him have the easy out he needed, then she pursed her lips and leaned over to peer into the bowl.

  “What nice specimens of the genus Fragaria.”

  “Uh. Yeah. Strawberries are my favorite fruit, pretty much.”

  Wow, sound dumber, Wes.

  Evidently, Rosemary agreed this time, because she was giving him her patented scornful look. Wes found himself welcoming the return to normal with relief.

  “Strawberries are not a fruit—at least, the part we eat isn’t derived from the ovary of the plant, as a true fruit’s flesh would be.”

  “Whoa there, Doc, getting a little hot and heavy for me,” Wes said. He was only mostly kidding.

  “Oh, shut up and give me a berry,” she said, all grumpy and cute. Her shiny blond hair was caught up in a messy knot on top of her head. An actual knot, too, not a bun or whatever; it really looked like she’d twisted her hair into a rope and tied a knot in it, close to her scalp. The end of the hair rope tufted out of the top of the knot, just begging to be tugged.

  Wes restrained himself manfully and handed over a big, plump strawberry. “I found a few references to strawberries in a couple of old aphrodisiac cookbooks—not sure if they’re really supposed to have any supersexy properties or if they’re just pretty and fun to cook with.”

  “There is something sensual about them,” Rosemary said, biting into the berry. Wes’s mouth dried up as he watched her pearly teeth cut into the cool, ruby flesh, juice staining her lips deep pink.

  “I’ll say,” he croaked, temperature soaring. “Hey, I brought something else, too. Hold on a sec.”

  Reaching into the duffel, he rooted around until he’d pulled out all the various pieces of the fondue pot and laid them on the lab table. He assembled the device quickly, suspending the stainless steel pot on its spindly legs over a brand-new can of Sterno. He lit it up to warm the pot, then carefully removed the covered, insulated bowl from the cooler.

  He’d made the fondue ahead of time so all he’d have to do in the lab was warm it up. And try not to picture Rosemary naked and painted in swirls of dark chocolate.

  She sniffed appreciatively as Wes poured the chocolate liquid into the fondue pot. The scent got stronger, headier, as the mixture heated.

  “What’s in that?” she asked, leaning down until her face was almost in the bowl.

  Wes had to grin. No one could resist chocolate fondue. “It’s bittersweet Scharffenberger chocolate, very pure, melted with cream, butter, and a little cognac for depth of flavor.”

  “Is it ready? I have to taste that. Give me one of those.”

  She selected a berry as if she’d be docked five bucks for every blemish or irregularity, then dipped it in the pot.

  Warm, silky chocolate dripped from the tip of the berry as she lifted it to her mouth, and her tongue darted out to catch the drops, a sigh of happiness high in her throat.

  Wes ground down on a moan and shut his eyes to the sight of her biting into the strawberry, chocolate smearing her lower lip, her eyelashes fluttering as she hummed in enjoyment.

  Seeking a distraction from the temptation incarnate beside him, Wes reached for a berry just as Rosemary eagerly went back for seconds. Their fingers tangled in the bowl, but instead of flinching as if she’d been burned, as Rosemary sometimes did when he strayed too close, she tightened her grasp on his hand in a compulsive clasp.

  Desire was a spark that leaped from her skin to his like a fire popping and crackling into flaming life.

  The weeks of careful seduction, playful advance and retreat, peppered with judicious brushes of fingers, hips, flanks as they moved past each other in the quiet, enclosed intimacy of her lab—all of Wes’s plans, his good intentions, his knowledge that this was different, she was different—all of it flew out of his head in that instant.

  He slid his hand up to circle the fine, thin bones of her wrist and tugged firmly, pulling her slight body in against his larger one. She fit against him like a teaspoon inside a tablespoon, curves angling together in all the right places to lock them into place with a nearly audible click of perfection.

  Her strawberry-stained lips parted, wet and irres
istible, and Wes had never been all that good at resisting temptation. He ducked his head and swept his hungry tongue across her startled, gasping mouth. Rosemary’s wrist trembled in his grasp, the leap of her pulse easily discernible through the fragile skin beneath his fingertips. Wes grinned into the kiss and took it further, tongue stroking fast and deep.

  One fluttery kick of a heartbeat later, she was kissing him back.

  Wes couldn’t contain the gruff, satisfied noise that rumbled in his throat. He didn’t even try to stop his free arm from winding around her back and hauling her in even closer so that his thigh—lucky, lucky thigh!—slid between her legs and forced her higher.

  She tasted like spring and sunshine, sweetly tart and eager, and he devoured every tiny whimper and muffled gasp. Her hands were in his hair, flexing and pulling, the slight pain a counterpoint that somehow drove the swirling pleasure even higher.

  A clatter at the door pierced the fog of lust surrounding them like a slice from a sharp chef’s knife—there was a frozen moment of disbelief, followed by dismay as Rosemary wrenched herself out of his arms and stumbled back in horror, her gaze fixed on something behind him.

  With a sense of inevitability, Wes turned to find President Wally Cornell gaping at them in transparent horror, eyes bulging like popovers.

  Chapter 8

  “What … is the meaning of this?” Cornell’s voice was strangled and squeaky, like a mouse gasping for its last breath.

  No mice, Rosemary thought hysterically. That’s all this situation needs!

  “President Cornell,” Wes said smoothly, stepping sideways just enough to block her from her small, irate employer’s view. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

  “Oh no?” Cornell asked. “It’s not an illicit, inappropriate embrace between a professor and her student? At my academy! This has to be the worst day of my professional life. First the debacle with the Market extern, and now this …” He squeezed his eyes shut and scrubbed a palm over his large expanse of forehead.