When Sophy arrived at the café the next afternoon her eyes were scratchy but her heart pounded in anticipation. She had spent most of the night writing, and it looked as though Clarissa was going to fall in love after all. Or at least in lust.

Sophy had shut her laptop and fell into bed at about three o’clock and slept dreamlessly for five hours. She would have slept longer, but Hercules started batting at her head and yowling for breakfast just before eight o’clock.

Now her eyes were a little tired and her muscles a little stiff thanks to another five hours in front of the computer screen.

The walk to the café where she was meeting Max wasn’t long—only about twenty minutes. It was a beautiful day and Sophy raised her face to the watery sunlight filtering through the trees. May was almost perfect—the mosquitoes weren’t out yet but it was warm enough to wear shorts, and that was good enough for her. She walked off the stiffness in her legs and back and swung her arms around to stretch out the kinks.

Sophy’s brow furrowed and she shifted in her seat by the café window. Pushing a wayward curl behind her ear with one hand, she wiggled her toes in her sandals and dove into her bloated straw bag for a notepad. A shadow fell over her and she looked up and frowned.

“You’re late.”

Max pulled out a chair and dropped into it, his eyebrow shooting up. “Excuse me?”

“You’re late,” Sophy repeated. “It’s very unheroic.”

He looked blankly at her and shrugged his shoulders under his navy blazer. Then he glanced down at his wrist and one side of his mouth curled up. “I’m not late. You’re early.” He tapped his watch.

Sophy checked her phone. Oops. She must have walked faster than she’d thought. “Didn’t your parents teach you not to point out a lady’s deficiencies?” she grumbled.

Max grinned and opened the menu. “Sorry to disappoint you. I’ll take the matter up with them when I see them next.”

“Do your parents live here?”

A burst of air wafted across the table as he shut the large menu. “No, they live in Chicago.”

She made a note on her pad. “Is that where you’re from?” Sophy smiled at him, pleased that he was going to be so easy about this.

“Yes, originally,” Max confirmed. “I went to Northwestern for my first two degrees, and then to Stanford for my doctorate.”

“Nice.” She had to take out a substantial student loan just to attend the local college for one degree, much less three. Then again, she had decided to major in English Lit, which was not very smart of her. “So that makes you...” she trailed off and looked at him expectantly.

“Educated?” he offered.

She waved a hand at him. “Around thirty?”

“Ah. Twenty-nine, to be exact.” He smiled at her, flashing perfectly white and perfectly straight teeth. He probably had an expensive orthodontist’s bill to go along with his expensive education. Life just isn’t fair, Sophy thought. “How old are you?” he asked her.

If she hadn’t had her birthday only three weeks before, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him. It wasn’t fair that a man could have such mesmerizing eyes. They were as blue as the sickeningly sweet frosting on her recent birthday cake.

“Uh, twenty-four.” She did some fast calculations in her head. “Yes, twenty-four.” I think. Her pencil and her gaze was glued to the pad. “And you’re not married.” It came out of her mouth as a statement rather than a question, and she blushed slightly. God, she prayed he wasn’t married. She would crawl under the table and die if he were married.

“No,” was all he said, and she sighed inwardly in relief. He didn’t offer any explanations, nor any stories of long lost girlfriends and failed relationships. Sophy wondered, but didn’t ask. Then something occurred to her, and her head snapped up.

“Are you gay?”

His laughter echoed through the corner of the café and his eyes crinkled at her. “No, I’m not gay,” he reassured her. His warm gaze penetrated through the cotton of her dress and her heart started thumping wildly.

Her face got hot and she took another sip from her water glass. “You ready to order?”

Max turned to the waiter that had just appeared beside the table and ordered a club sandwich and an iced tea. “Only if it’s real tea. I don’t drink that powdered stuff,” he warned. The waiter nodded as if he had heard it before.

Sophy ordered a large spinach salad topped with fresh salmon and handed her menu to the waiter with a brilliant smile. “Thank you, Paul,” she said, peering at his nametag. A spot of color burned high on Paul’s cheeks and he retreated quickly, nearly taking out a nearby chair. Sophy turned back to Max, her smile fading when she saw the faint scowl on his face.

“Problem?”

“No,” he grumbled, his scowl quickly replaced by that disarming grin that made her heart race.

No man has a right to be this attractive, she thought. Graduate school might have appealed to her more if someone like Max Wright had been on the faculty.

“Why do you write romance novels?” he asked simply.

Sophy rattled the melting ice cubes in her empty glass. “Because I believe in romance.”

He frowned at her answer.

“Don’t you believe in romance?” she asked, but she could already tell by the suddenly grim line of his mouth that he didn’t.

“No, I don’t believe in romance.” He looked as though the word left a nasty taste in his mouth.

She tilted her head at him. Something told her these were dangerous waters she was approaching. “Why?” He shook his head to deflect the question. “Do you believe in love at least?”

“No.”

Sophy couldn’t help it—her mouth opened slightly and the air whooshed out of her chest. Feeling remarkably like a five day-old balloon, she reached up to smooth the crease from between her eyebrows.

“You don’t believe in love,” she repeated flatly.

Max squeezed some lemon into the iced tea that Paul had just delivered, and shook his head. “Sure you still want to use me in your book?”

She leaned back in her chair and laced her fingers in her lap. She hadn’t expected this. Well, maybe just a little. “Why on earth are you doing a study on romance novels if you don’t believe in romance, or love?”

He drank about half the glass then placed it back on the table. “That’s exactly why I’m doing it.”

She looked blankly at him. This was very confusing.

“I’m trying to prove that those books foster unrealistic expectations of love and romance in women,” he explained. “What they think is love is really just a chemical reaction. Call it lust, if you want. It’s pheromones and synapses firing, but not love. It doesn’t exist.”

Sophy was stunned into silence. At that moment their food arrived, but her appetite had vanished almost as quickly as her illusion that Max Wright was a model hero. He was turning out to be distinctly unheroic.

She was tempted to call the whole thing off, but physically he was perfect, and he was the only inspiration she had these days. And she had already wasted two months beating her head against the keyboard. All she had to show for it was the first ten pages of the manuscript and a nervous cat. Badly. She wanted so badly to prove she could write full-time. She couldn’t call the whole thing off, could she?

She took a deep breath and concentrated on picking the hazelnuts off the top of her salad. Talking into her plate, she asked, “Have you ever read a romance novel, at least?”

He grunted something around his club sandwich and she looked up and frowned. The muscles in his neck flexed as he swallowed and he washed the mouthful down with a swig of tea.

“I take it that means no?”

He nodded.

“Yes, you mean no, or yes, you’ve read a romance novel?”

By the time she laid out the options he had another mouthful of chicken and lettuce and he held up one finger.

Her heart sank. This was going to be tougher than she thought. “You’ve never read a romance novel, and you’re doing a study on them?”

He nodded again and poked a wayward piece of bacon back into his mouth.

“Who on earth gave you this grant?” she muttered to herself in disgust. Suddenly not going to grad school didn’t seem like such a bad decision. He started to answer her, but she held up a hand. “Forget it.”

Ignoring her salad, she reached into the overstuffed bag at her feet and plucked out a paperback book. It was the latest bestseller by one of her favorite historical authors, and she had been toting it around for nearly a week. She had finished it the day before, but had forgotten to take it out of her purse. It was easier than gifting him an ebook, since she didn’t know his email address. Thrusting it across the table at him, she met his curious gaze with a challenge.

“Read this, and I’ll help you.”

He swallowed and cleared his throat. “But you already agreed to help me.”

She squinted at him and lowered her voice menacingly. “Read this and I’ll still help you.”

Flinching slightly, a queasy look came across his face, and he glanced around the busy restaurant. “And if I don’t?”

Sophy shrugged with a confidence she didn’t feel. “I’ll find another hero.” God knows where, she thought.

He eyed the book as if it were a bomb ticking on the table, and sighed. “Okay.”

Sophy let out the breath she had been holding in, and picked up her fork. Maybe this could work. Just maybe.

* * *

“What have you got there, Wright?”

Max’s head jerked up at the voice, but the owner of it was blurred by the vague mist on his glasses. He pushed them down his nose and peered over the wire rims.

“Oh, hello sir.”

Max dog-eared the page he was on and tried to hide the book in his desk. Dr. Chapaty, the chairman of the department, stood in the doorway to Max’s office, a large grin on his round face and fluorescent light from above bouncing off his polished head.

“Since when do you have time to read… uh…?” His eyebrows lifted as he checked out the book stuck hanging halfway out of the drawer. “…fiction?”

Max groaned inwardly. “It’s research for the study I’m doing.”

The grin on Chapaty’s face grew and Max wanted to crawl under his desk. “Ah, that romance novel thing, eh?”

Max nodded.

“Where do you plan to submit that study?” Chapaty asked, then offered a few suggestions from the doorway, which Max mentally filed.

“Thanks for the suggestions.” Max nodded, smiling tightly.

As he moved into the room and sat down heavily on the chair on the opposite side of the desk, Max’s smile turned into a grimace.

“Let’s see it,” Chapaty demanded.

“Uh, I haven’t finished writing the paper yet.” Barely started was more like it.

“No, the book.”

Max flushed and yanked open the desk drawer. He pushed the book across the desk at his boss, who picked it up and flipped open the front cover.

“My wife just read this,” he announced. “It’s been sitting on her bedside table for weeks.” He glanced up at Max. “Have you gotten to the stable scene yet?”

Max could feel his face glowing hotter and hotter and his glasses were starting to fog up again. He plucked them off his nose and wiped them nonchalantly. “I believe I just finished reading that scene,” he mumbled.

Chapaty leaned across the desk and chuckled. “Hot stuff, eh?”

“Yes, sir.” Max squirmed slightly. Go away! Go away!

He flipped through the book absently and then tossed it on the desk. Standing up, he remarked, “Isn’t your grant up soon?” He acted casual, but Max guessed that he knew exactly how much his grant was, to the dollar, and the day it expired.

“Yes, sir.”

Chapaty smiled solicitously. “I know you’re new here, Wright, so you might not know that we have a certain standard for publication in this department.”

Max nodded in understanding. It was the reason he had finally gone to Violet Honeypot—no, Sophy Hadden. He needed all the help he could get.

“We were happy to hire someone who had some experience outside of academe, but I’m sure you realize that your merit increases are contingent on your successful publication of this study. We don’t waste grant money in this department,” Chapaty warned.

Feeling like a puppet on a string, Max’s head jerked up and down automatically. “Yes, sir.”

Chapaty beamed at him and headed for the open door. “I look forward to reading your paper, Dr. Wright. Are you planning to present it at the conference in September?”

Max opened his mouth but no words came out.

“Good.” Before he vanished, he tossed a reminder over his shoulder. “Don’t forget the wine and cheese on Friday.”

Damn, he had forgotten. Probably on purpose, Max realized. Stuffy department affairs weren’t exactly his idea of a good time. But he was the new kid on the block, so to speak, so there was a requisite amount of sucking up and pointless schmoozing that he had to go through. Wine and cheese. They still did those things?

Max picked up the paperback and opened it to the page that he had dog-eared. He leaned back in his chair and reread the stable scene, where the noble hero, disguised as a stable hand, lasciviously lapped up the spilled burgundy from the heroine’s ample, and decidedly bare, bosom.

He shifted in his chair again. Would Sophy’s book be like this?

A misty vision swam behind his eyes, of him pouring red wine down Sophy’s open dress. It would trickle over her breasts, and gather in the creases around her distended, and surely, rosy nipples. He would lower his head to them, and lick the wine off her salty skin...

Max slammed the book shut. Damn, this was going to be harder than he thought.

* * *

He was still disturbed by the vision when he met Sophy a few days later at the local library. He finished the book the night before and was plagued all night by hazy dreams re-enacting the more sordid scenes.

It was only too easy for him to imagine her legs wrapped around his hips and her head flung back in ecstasy. He wondered if her hazel eyes would darken to chocolate brown or green with passion, or if she...

He shook his head and shoved the image aside. She was helping him with his study, that’s all. He dragged a hand through his hair and dropped his fist a little too hard on the table in front of him.

The librarian shot a warning glance at him. He pushed the legal pad away from him and looked around. The library was fairly full this afternoon; about forty people were milling around. A few sat in the overstuffed easy chairs in the corner by an enormous antique grandfather clock. Others browsed the stacks and sat at the long tables poring over their books and newspapers.

The library was a historical site, and one of the town’s oldest buildings. It evoked a forgotten era of dignified stateliness when rhetoric and learning was held in high regard. Now they had to hire a security guard to ensure that delinquent teenagers didn’t spray paint their own rhetoric on the side of the brick building at night.

Sunlight streamed through the windows and shone on the polished marble floor and oak trestle tables. Peace and an aura of divine intellect embraced the building, and Max could easily understand why it was so crowded on a Tuesday afternoon. Free computer stations always helped.

He heard a chair scrape across the tile as it was pulled out beside him, and turned to see Sophy settle into it.

“Hi,” she whispered, and plopped her straw bag on the table.

Damn, she was pretty. Too bad she was such a romantic. He couldn’t help but compare her to Trisha, his ex-fiancée. The two couldn’t be more different if they had been raised on different planets.

Trisha, with her long ebony hair and patrician features that only wore expressions of bored disdain and carefully reined satisfaction, believed more in the occasional diamond bracelet and a new German car every three years than eternal love. When he had decided to do his doctorate, she had thrown up her hands in disgust and reminded him that she hadn’t planned on marrying an academic.

If he was going to become a “doctor,” she protested, he should go to medical school. Or just forget the whole thing and join her father’s investment firm—he was good enough with numbers and didn’t need to sleep much. He had disappointed her immensely when he left for Stanford, and she hadn’t let him forget it.

The diamond ring he had given her after a year of surviving on boxed macaroni and cheese had left a sizable chip in the back windshield of his car as he drove away feeling guiltily relieved. When Trisha lost her cool, she really lost it. Though not much of a romantic, she had one hell of a right arm. It probably helped her with her social climbing.

Max watched Sophy as she excavated her tote bag to withdraw a notepad and pen in triumph. Her hair was shot through with streaks of gold from the sunbeams spreading across the table and her eyes sparkled at him, as warm as the rays on her head. He shook his head a little. Maybe he’d read too much of that damn book.

She pointed at the empty legal pad in front of him. “Working hard, I see.” Her voice remained low, and Max suddenly realized that anything over a whisper would sound like a shout in the large room. “Did you finish the book I gave you?” she asked.

He nodded silently and handed it to her.

She flipped through it quickly and glanced up at him, a frown marring her features. “Did you mark these sections?”

Oh no. His habit of dog-earing books was coming back to haunt him. Max’s arm shot out but she twisted away from him and opened the book to the stable scene.

She held the book out of his reach and grinned at him. “What did you think?”

“This is basically porn, you know. And not even good porn,” Max whispered. “I guess clichés are clichés for a reason.”

She frowned. “What did you think of the dialogue, the characterization, the conflict, the plot? And wait, what is good porn, according to you?”

He ignored the latter question. “I don’t read fiction much,” he admitted.

“But?”

“But I found the dialogue hokey, the characters stereotypical, the conflict lacking, and the plot contrived.”

Her eyes flashed hurt and disappointment at him and guilt soured his mouth. It wasn’t that terrible. He just wanted to push her buttons.

“Didn’t you enjoy anything in it?”

He shrugged. “The sex scenes were pretty hot.” It wasn’t what she was hoping for, obviously.

“Love scenes. They’re love scenes.” The disappointment in her gaze hardened and Max backtracked suddenly. It sure seemed like porn to him. At least it had the same effect.

“Maybe I just don’t know enough about romance to tell what’s good and what isn’t,” he added.

“I’ll say,” Sophy muttered.

“Maybe you could tell me why women read this stuff,” he suggested in a low voice.

Sophy scanned the page open in front of her and murmured, “Escapism. Fantasy.” She turned towards him and met his gaze. “Don’t you ever fantasize?”

A vision of a wine-stained nipple flitted through his brain and his face burned under the warm rays of the sun. He squinted and pushed his chair back a little to escape the glare slanting across the table.

“No,” he replied, thankful for the cool shadows. “I don’t.”

Sophy splayed her hands over the pages of the book, flattening them out on the table. “What did you think of this scene?” She bit her lip and began to read out loud. “The throbbing in her loins increased as his rough tongue laved over her aching nipples. The heady aroma of the wine dulled her vision and her desire intensified as he made his way down her body.”

A blush crept across her face, her pitch lowering as she read to him. “Her heart pounded fiercely as he kissed her stomach and drew his tongue across her navel, and further down her body…”

* * *

Sophy’s heart started pounding in tandem with the heroine’s and something mysterious curled low in her belly. She had never read love scenes out loud before; she hadn’t realized how erotic it was. Lost in the book and the melody of the images evoked in her mind, her tongue tumbled over the words.

“She could feel his hot breath on her inner thighs and the stubble on his chin scraped against her skin. Drowning in her own desire, she reached out and tangled her fingers in his soft hair, pulling him closer—”

Suddenly Max reached over and shut the book on her fingers.

“Ow!” She glared at him, forgetting to whisper. “What did you do that for?”

He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head towards the circulation desk.

Sophy glanced over at the shocked expression of the librarian she had known since she was a child. The woman looked pointedly at the “Please Be Quiet” sign on the wall. Sophy felt the heat curl up her cheeks and she slowly turned her head to see almost every patron in the library watching her—some with shock, some with prurient interest.

Her fingers twitched within the closed paperback and her hackles rose defensively. Damn it, this was what she did for a living, sort of, and she shouldn’t have to feel ashamed of it.

“Did everyone catch that last bit?” she asked loudly and clearly, her head turning around to take in the fascinated expressions of the library patrons.

She cleared her throat and opened the book again, projecting her voice to the far corners of the library. “She reached out and tangled her fingers in his soft hair, pulling him closer to her quivering nest of desire.”

Somewhere in the distance Sophy heard a gasp and she blinked at the words swimming on the page in front of her, realizing she had lost her place. She would not be embarrassed.

Her voice rose as she skipped ahead a few sentences to finish the paragraph. “—she melted against the scratchy straw at her back and her body tensed in anticipation.” Sophy drew out the last word clearly.

When she turned back to Max, she saw the strangled expression on his face and the small flush in the hollow of his throat, exposed by his starched white shirt. Even though he looked as though he wanted to crawl under the table and die, he gazed at her with a mixture of fascination and something more dangerous. His dark blue eyes were almost black, and it was hard to tell where his pupil ended and his iris began.

She glanced down at the book again, her mouth suddenly dry. She licked her lips and cleared her throat, determined to continue. The sound of her voice in her ears competed with the violent drumming of her heart as her mouth formed the words.

“When his tongue rasped over her sensitive core—” Sophy swallowed, but couldn’t dislodge the golf ball in her aching throat. “—lightning shot through her, and the straw beneath her felt like a thousand knives stabbing her feverishly. He raised his head after what seemed like hours and his eyes gleamed at her in the flickering light from the kerosene lamp. ‘Now,’ she whispered.”

Sophy swallowed again, refusing to look at Max. Her own anemic history of love or lust aside, she prided herself on her application of research and imagination when writing. But now she was discovering rapidly that there was something to be said for a captive audience as well. It was like a kind of focus group. Only she didn’t feel very focused at all.

She clenched the fingers of her right hand into a fist to stop them from shaking, and read on. “Her entire body was trembling with the fire of her submerged passion, and the knowledge that he would soon make her his, in every way.”

Max made a choking kind of sound. His chair screeched on the floor as he pushed away from the table and rocketed up. The paperback skidded along the oak surface and teetered near the edge as Max grabbed Sophy’s arms and hauled her up against him.

What? Oh.

When his mouth covered hers, her mind suddenly went blank and the slamming of her heart in her chest was the only sound she heard.

His mouth moved over hers roughly, as though he could barely contain himself. It was like she was being kissed in revenge, or anger, but his passion wasn’t dulled by the ferocity of the embrace.

She clung to him, momentarily stunned.

He must wear numbing lip balm, she thought. Nothing else could explain her sudden paralysis and the tingling in her body. Her skin burned where his fingers clamped on her shoulders and the thumping of her pulse in her ears grew louder and swifter. When he finally raised his head, she blinked and stepped back.

The room erupted in applause.

The noise was almost deafening in the old building and when Sophy grabbed the edge of the table to steady herself, she felt it vibrate under her fingers from the exuberant clapping of several dozen people. Someone whistled sharply in the background, making her wince. Raising the back of her hand to her swollen mouth, she had to raise her voice to be heard over the din.

“What did you do that for?”

Max shrugged it off, but his chest rose and fell pretty quickly under his button-down shirt. “It was the only way I could think of to shut you up. You were creating a scene.”

She didn’t feel so numb anymore. “I was creating a scene? I was?”

He stepped towards her, a glint in his eye.

She backed away and held up a hand. “Fine. Forget it.”

“What?” He blinked at her innocently.

“Excuse me.”

They both turned to the matronly looking woman standing two feet away. “Yes?” they chimed.

Sophy felt the heat crawl up her cheeks again as the woman shifted her weight nervously.

“Is that a library book? I’d like to take it out if you’re done with it.”