Chapter 5
Igroaned. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d just taken down several thousands of dollars worth of antique books with my clumsy ass, I might have enjoyed the way Adam’s body was flush to mine.
His pelvis lined up with mine and rock hard abs that I never would have guessed were beneath that crisp button down shirt and cashmere sweater of his pressed against my soft, by comparison, belly.
I lifted my hands to his shoulder, running my palms down the equally ripped biceps.
Good God. When did he find the time to work out? Academia didn’t leave a lot of free time and yet, the man had muscles that didn’t just come out of nowhere.
“Oh my God, Harper,” he said. “Are you okay?” He cradled my jaw tenderly, scraping his thumb across my cheekbone.
Staring down at me, backlit by the dim overhead archival lights, Adam looked like an angel. A beautiful angel … sent here to torment me.
“Harper?” he asked again, more concern in his voice this time.
Fine. I’m fine. The answer lodged in my throat right along with my breath.
Adam was quite literally so breathtaking that he was robbing the breath from my lungs.
Finally, I said, “Can’t… breathe…”
“Oh,” he whispered on the exhale. Then, looking down at our bodies, with him still pinning me to the floor, fallen books framing us on either side, realization slammed into his expression. “Oh! You literally can’t breathe!” He scrambled off of me, rolling to the side and careful not to touch any of the fallen books. “I’m so sorry.”
He got to his feet and offered me a hand to help me sit up, too.
I whimpered as I looked around at the additionally damaged books, the panic of our new situation settled into my bones. “Is this room fucking cursed or something?”
“Calm down,” Adam said, his voice somehow, impossibly, even.
“Calm down? Calm down!? We just knocked down an entire bookshelf of priceless, antique books!”
“Maybe they’re fine?” he offered.
Scrambling, I started grabbing each book one by one, inspecting them to make sure I hadn’t ripped a page or dinged up a corner. The first few were fine, but when I picked up a copy of Robinson Caruso, sure enough the corner of the cover, likely where it had hit the ground, was dented.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“This one, too,” Adam said, handing me another book.
“And this one.” I realized, picking up a third.
We placed the non-damaged books back on the shelf, then gently piled the damaged books on the table… seven in total.
Seven additional books to fix on top of the dozen or so from the fire.
Adam sighed heavily. “I’ll pull up the incident report for us to fill out on the website,” he said, then dragged his palm down over his face. “They’re going to revoke my privileges to use this room.”
“Wait.” I snapped out my hand to grasp his elbow. “Just… wait a second.”
I flipped through the damaged books again. “These aren’t that bad,” I said. “I can fix them in no time. No one has to know what happened.”
“Are you kidding? I could get fired for not reporting the incident.”
My eyes fall again on the security camera in the corner and I wince. “I guess there is video evidence.”
“That?” Adam asks. Pointing to the camera, he shakes his head. “It broke in the fire. The heat or the smoke was too much for it.”
“Okay. Okay. We can do this.” A glimmer of hope sparks in my chest. “Look, I’m here and I’m really good at my job. I can fix these within twenty-four hours and no one will know the difference. I’m already here. I won’t charge you for that extra work, obviously. So why risk both of our reputations for something that can be fixed quickly?”
“And what happens if someone comes in here to look at one of those specific books while you’re attempting to fix them?” He hissed as though someone might be listening to our every word.
Then again, I didn’t know for a fact that the room was soundproof. Maybe I needed to keep my voice down.
I drop my voice to a whisper that matches his. “If someone comes in for those books, I’ll be honest and say I accidentally dented them while I was in here alone. I can play dumb and pretend I didn’t know to fill out an incident report.”
“I don’t like it.” His mouth blanched as he pressed it to a thin, straight line, deep in thought. After another moment, he asked, “Twenty four hours is really all you need?” he asked.
I nodded. “I have tools and materials arriving to the apartment this afternoon. I can guard the room until they arrive, then come back in tonight, pull an all-nighter and fix these.”
His jaw ticked. “Fine. You have twenty-four hours. But if they’re not good as new by this time tomorrow, then I’m filing that incident report.”
Narrowing my eyes, I saluted him. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
“I’m serious, Harper. My job is on the line.”
I didn’t love the insinuation in his voice… that I wasn’t serious. “So is mine, Adam,” I snapped back, attempting to match his condescending tone.
He exhaled deeply. “Sorry. I’m just stressed. Ever since the fire…”
“Right. The fire that you were going to go into detail about.”
“Again,” he added. “But only after you promised to reveal something humiliating about yourself.”
I clicked my tongue and shook my head. “I didn’t say I’d reveal my humiliation first. Only that I would. So you spill those deets again. After that, I’ll tell you my embarrassing story.” The hard part will be narrowing down which embarrassing story to share. There were way too many to choose from.
“Fine,” he hissed and dropped into a seat in one of the hard backed wooden chairs. “I might not have been entirely honest with you on the phone.”
I snapped my fingers. “I knew it!”
I didn’t know it. I didn’t know shit. I could barely remember getting home and brushing my teeth that night.
Adam glared at me like he could see right through my bluff. “Yes, I was here when the fire started,” he admitted. “And in some ways, it was my fault. But I wasn’t the one who started it. I came in to take care of the coffee cup for Dr. O’Macklin and… someone else followed me in here.”
“Someone else…” I repeated.
He didn’t give any more info, just nodded slowly. “That’s right. She followed me in here and… and had a plan to seduce me. Which involved candles.”
I winced. “Candles. In a rare books room. No offense, Adam, but is she stupid?”
He gave a sad chuckle. “No one at Dartmouth is stupid. But… there might be a lack of common sense there.”
My mind immediately went to Jasmine. But nothing about her seemed to lack common sense. She seemed way too smart and put together to ever bring an open flame around valuable antique books.
“Was she the one who also dumped water on the books?”
He sighed. “Yes.”
“Why are you protecting her?”
“Because…” he paused to run a hand through his hair. “She’s one of my students.”
My brows lifted. “All the more the reason to tell someone, Adam. What if she comes forward first with a different account of the details?”
He shook his head. “That won’t happen. She’s a good kid. One of my grad students and here on scholarship. She’s worked so hard to get here despite a shitty upbringing and terribly abusive parents. If she loses that scholarship…”
His voice broke as his words faded off. He didn’t need to finish the thought.
“Did you tell anyone?” I asked.
“I told Dr. O’Macklin. Since we all had something to lose—him included since it was his coffee cup that I was coming to retrieve—he agreed to let me take the fall for her. Just this once.”
I glanced again at the camera in the corner. “And no one checked the footage?”
Adam shook his head.
I snorted. “This school should also hire me to fix up their security here.”
Adam’s mouth twitched. “But only after you’re done breaking the rules yourself.”
“Obviously.”
“Okay,” Adam said. “Your turn. I was promised embarrassment. I was promised humiliation. I was promised some juicy secret that will make your cheeks flush like that time your bathing suit loop got caught on the edge of the hottub and untied.”
My laugh surprised me, bubbling up like an overflowing drain pipe. “Now that’s a throwback.” We’d only been dating a few months at that point when I invited Adam over to use the hottub with me, under my dad’s supervision, of course. And sure enough, it happened just as he described. The loops at my hips got caught on one of the hooks that latched the lid onto the hot tub and untied my suit, revealing my bare butt for Adam’s viewing pleasure.
And my Dad’s.
It was horrifying.
Especially when my dad’s only comment was that it wasn’t a tushie he hadn’t seen and wiped before.
Freaking dads, man. They live to embarrass their kids. Cole, Cohen, and Lacey will find that out for themselves soon enough.
“I don’t remember promising all that,” I said. “But… Okay. There’s a reason I needed you to repeat all this to me today.”
Curiosity gleamed in his eyes. “Why’s that…?”
“That night when I called you about the Pride and Prejudice book… I was blackout drunk. I don’t remember calling Dartmouth, let alone talking to you, specifically. Hell, I didn’t even know I had this job here until the next morning when my best friend told me what had happened.”
Adam’s eyes went wide. “That’s why you were so surprised to see me at the airport,” he whispered, more to himself than to me.
I winced. “Unfortunately, yes. Drunkenly, I stumbled into the store and bought that copy of Pride and Prejudice on a whim, pretty much clearing out the entirety of my savings.”
An emotion I couldn’t quite read washed over Adam’s expression. “We talked for two hours… and you… you don’t remember any of that conversation?”
Biting my lip, I shook my head.
“Because you were drunk.” His voice hardened, taking on that tone again.
But I couldn’t blame him. I was drunk. Beyond drunk. Irresponsibly drunk. But self-preservation edged its way in and my defenses went up. “I’m twenty-five years old. I’m allowed to get drunk, Adam.”
The muscle in his jaw flexed as he quickly dropped his gaze to the floor. “I didn’t say you weren’t.”
“Are you telling me you never get drunk?”
Blinking he lifted his eyes to mine. “Not often. And never blackout drunk.”
“Well then, I guess Adam Stone is still above us all. Still better than Harper Meyers.”
“I didn’t say that,” he snapped.
“You didn’t have to. The look you’re giving me says it all.”
“Am I not allowed to be disappointed? Jesus Christ, Harper, we talked for hours. I spent time catching up with you. Telling you things I haven’t told anyone. And—and not only do you not remember it, but… you…”
“What?” I pushed him. “I what?”
“Nothing,” he mumbled. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. You’re mad and upset and I understand why, but it’s not like I intentionally did it. It’s not like I looked you in the eyes and lied to you. I just… wasn’t myself that night.” I paused, swallowing the lump growing in my throat. “And you know what? If I could go back and change it? I wouldn’t. Because sober Harper never would have taken the risk to buy that book. Sober Harper never would have reached out to several Ivy League schools to start her own business. Sober Harper plays it safe. She doesn’t bet on anyone, least of all herself. It’s because I was drunk that I’m here. And I’m reconnecting with you now.”
It was the most honest I’d been with Adam in seven years.
We stayed locked in a staring contest. Standing there, chests heaving as though we’d just finished running a marathon. “Maybe that’s the problem, Harper. If you don’t believe in yourself any time other than when you’re wasted? You’ve got some serious work to do.”
“It’s not like that,” I whispered. “I haven’t been drunk in years. For good reason, too. Exhibit A: our phone call. And for the record… this self-conscious girl is your doing. Not feeling good enough or smart enough or ambitious enough? That’s thanks to you and your dad.”
“Thanks to me?” he repeated. “How can you even say that? I was always your biggest cheerleader. I believed in you and always stood up for you?—”
“Except when it came to your dad. I heard you two talking that night on the phone. The night we lost our virginity. I heard him say that I wasn’t good enough and could never get into a school like Dartmouth. And you didn’t say anything to him in return. Not a damn thing. It was like… like you agreed with him.”
A hard swallow moved the column of Adam’s throat before he yanked his blazer off the back of the chair. “You know what? I have a class to teach.”
And with that, he left the room.
Left me with the damaged books in a cold, empty, sterile room.