Untangling The Stars (2 page)

Now Silas Dove—Guy Wilder in all his “mortal coil” (as Lestat might have said)—was standing, tersely and abruptly, in her empty classroom, and looking dead at her with blue eyes bright enough to shine through the darkness of his shades. He looked in life as he did in nearly every photo she’d ever seen of him: perfectly imperfect. He wasn’t handsome exactly, at least not by conventional standards, but he was definitely some other kind of gorgeous. He wasn’t polished or dimpled. He didn't even have the traditional bad boy look down to a science. Frankly, with a general look of disarray and cheekbones so sharp they seemed to slice straight down to his chin through a face of unshaven stubble, he looked like trouble—if that was a thing—and the kind you were just begging to get into.

Andie let her breath out slowly and swallowed down the swarm of butterflies that threatened to fly out of her mouth. She hadn’t spent her career analyzing pop culture films just to get star struck the first time a TV star showed up unannounced in her doorway, right?
Right.
Even with her stomach tangled into a tight knot of want to dive into whatever guilty pleasure vampire melodrama Guy—or Silas—could offer, Andie could still count on her professional reflexes to zap her back to reality. She had noticed the slight tremor in his hand when he closed the door. After all, she had spent enough time navigating the emotional turbulence of young adults to spot that specific brand of discomfort. Then again, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to notice how he shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot practically broadcasting his anxiety. Whatever he was hiding from—probably the throng of his rabidly admiring fan base lurking just beyond the doorway—he obviously needed the break. Maybe laying low wasn’t so far from the truth after all.

Andie slipped her foot back into the cheetah-print oxford she’d kicked off under her chair earlier, straightened her chambray blazer, and stood up to greet him.
Play nice with the scared vampire
, she chanted to herself. “Dog eat your homework?” she asked in her most non-threatening voice. Obviously, he wasn’t here for class, but the homework thing was almost automatic—and the most disarming—thing she could think of. Honestly, she’d have said just about anything to get him to relax a little. That would help them both out, seeing as how she seemed to be having trouble putting words together with Guy Wilder staring her down.

Guy opened his mouth but stopped before any sound came out and tipped his head to the side as if puzzled. It clearly wasn’t the question he’d expected her to ask. Whatever response he’d readied on autopilot fizzled out unsaid. “Uh, no.” He shrugged his shoulders backward so the worn leather of his jacket resettled against the mold of his body and regained his composure with a low, rumbling laugh. Maybe he’d gotten the whole homework bit. “Sorry. Guy Wilder.”

She stretched out her smile and her hand toward him. “Andie—Andie Foxglove.” Crap, she hadn’t meant to sound all James Bond when she said it. She didn’t even
like
Bond movies; she was a
Mission Impossible
girl all the way. Go Tom Cruise—who’d, coincidentally, played Lestat in the film adaption of
Interview with the Vampire—
or go home. Vampires and secret agents—she might have to reevaluate her choices in men.

Guy gave her hand a brief, obligatory squeeze and then stuffed both of his in either of his jean pockets. He didn’t make a move toward the sunglasses. “So, what is this class?” he asked, tilting his head back to look—she assumed—around the empty hall.

The uncertainty in Guy’s voice was gone. In the blink of an eye, he’d gone from a fizzling ball of nervous energy to sounding as if he was unrelentingly bored. Andie knew better. If he were really so at ease, he’d lose the glasses. It wasn’t like he needed them in the building. They were less a fashion accessory and more of a privacy shield. But Andie could respect that. It couldn’t be pleasant to have a hoard of people flashing you with camera phones if you so much as even peeked your face outside. Andie didn’t even like posing for photos. She couldn’t imagine being chased down for one.

“Expository Writing. Television and American Identity.” Andie hoped she hadn’t said it too flatly, but even to her it came out sounding like she’d read it out loud from a college course catalog. Really, it was a second year critical writing course investigating how ideologies of contemporary television reflect and refract individual lives, but she left that part out. The fact that Guy had stumbled into this of all the classes on campus was more than a little tongue-in-cheek to Andie, since the course focused on ripping through the veil of the reality distortion field depicted in entertainment, and he was one of the hottest celebrities on the market. Besides, it wasn’t worth going into detail if it might make him even more uncomfortable.

Guy pursed his lips together and nodded his head faintly, still without looking at her. Perhaps he had caught the irony, but if he did, he didn't push it. Instead he looked over his shoulder toward the closed door and then back toward the empty risers. “Yeah. Sounds cool.”

Andie doubted Guy’s interest was about the class, but rather on staying out of the spotlight of attention he was surely getting in the crowded campus hallways. Either way, that echoing, throaty voice of his was some kind of sweet music that seemed to be interfering with her ability to think clearly. “You think the professor would mind if I sat in?”

Andie responded with a slight smile. Obviously, he’d mistaken her for a student. He wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last, Andie was sure. She didn’t take offense. Most days, running around in jeans and hoodie sweatshirts with her hair in a ponytail, she did look like every other female student on campus. She was younger than most of her peers by a decade if not more—and in some cases, many more. She’d bulled through four years of college and six of graduate school with fierce determination and a set of unrealistically high expectations that landed her at the top of her class. Beyond that, she did look surprisingly young for her age, being both petite and looking perpetually girlish with a mass of wavy honeycomb hair that fell almost to her waist, a propensity for vintage clothing, and thick, black-framed glasses she wore when the winds picked up and wreaked havoc on her allergies. She’d been of legal drinking age for a decade, but if experience proved anything, she was nowhere near beyond being carded for a glass of wine at dinner. Sometimes her friends joked that she was a missing cast member for
The Big Bang Theory
. But whatever, Andie could easily blend into the student population if she so desired—and she often did. It gave her a distinct advantage as a teacher; they often forgot she wasn’t one of them.

“I’m sure it’ll be the professor’s pleasure.” So what if he thought she was a student? It really made little difference anyway, seeing as how he wasn’t a student himself. Besides, it was true. Having Guy Wilder’s brilliant blue eyes in her classroom would be her pleasure indeed.

He seemed to take her answer as permission to stay. He nodded shortly, and one hand ventured out of his pocket to brush a stray lock of messy brown hair behind his ear, which made the angle of his cheekbones strike even sharper. It was like looking at the keen, shiny edge of a blade, and Andie had a strange urge to reach out to see if it was sharp enough to cut her. It was the same compulsion one might get if they stood on the edge of a cliff and thought—for just a split second—about jumping. She had read somewhere that cheekbones like his were supposedly an indicator of dishonesty in men. The devastating cheekbones of
Star Wars
villain Grand Moff Tarkin were the poster children of that hypothesis. Maybe it wasn’t just men, though. Angelia Jolie had had razor sharp prosthetic ones in
Maleficent
, too.

Maybe that was part of Silas Dove’s dangerous allure, Andie mused. It was easier to look at Guy Wilder without her head spinning if it was under the microscope of her academic opinion. Her thoughts wandered back to the course she’d be teaching in all of five minutes. This was definitely a train of thought worth bringing up in the morning’s lecture. After all, for as sinister and compulsively dark as he was condemned to be by force of his monstrous nature, there were hints of a heart of gold buried deep in Silas’s undead shell. In many ways, he was the classic anti-hero. Was there a heart equally as pure hidden inside his infamously “bad boy” human doppelganger Guy Wilder?
So much for academic opinion.
Whether there was any truth to either—the cheekbone thing or Guy’s inner sweetie pie—Andie couldn’t say. But, in any case, she was a sucker for a challenge…and admittedly all too eager to find out. Curiosity wasn’t just for cats, apparently.

“So, is it any good?”

Andie had to blink herself back to the present. Oh, he was talking about the class. Not waiting for an answer, Guy had already started to make his way to the farthest corner of the lecture hall, giving Andie that blissful backside view again before she could recover her thoughts. She was more than a little embarrassed when she realized her jaw has dislodged and left her mouth hanging open. Thank goodness he didn’t have another set of those piercing blue eyes in the back of his head to see her acting a fool and staring at his butt like a famished woman eyeing a plump, juicy pot roast.

“I, uh…”
For the love of Pete, get it together, Foxglove
. Andie sucked in her breath and, tearing her eyes off of Guy—who had folded every inch of his leather and denim manliness into the farthest chair in the farthest corner of the hall—turned to her empty seat to gather up her materials. “I like to get a front row seat, yeah.”

There, that had been a reasonably articulate response, even if it was more than a little delayed. The bell would be ringing any minute and her students would flood through the door and expect her to be on point, and Andie didn’t have the foggiest idea what she’d been thinking about two seconds before Mr. Hot Mess came stumbling into her classroom. Something about the evolution of gothic literature to today’s current mainstream horror fascination and its impact on the desensitizing of today’s youth? Yeah, that sounded about right, more or less. Oh—Andie rolled her eyes—wasn’t that lovely. That theme sure wasn’t going to seem like it had a bull’s-eye painted all over the real-life vampire (Andie grunted at the oxymoron) sitting in the back of her classroom or anything. Now that she thought about it, maybe inviting Guy to “lay low” in her class wasn’t such a great idea after all. If she was so affected, who knew what his presence would do to a room full of hormone-riddled students, most of whom could probably recite every episode of his hit show,
My
Bleeding Heart,
from memory. Ever self-indulgent, Andie allowed herself to pretend she could easily ignore Guy and started shoving globs of highlighters back inside her book bag. Sure, she could ignore him. Guy who?

“I’m more of a back row seat kind of guy myself,” Guy called down to her, sounding lighter and suddenly playful. His voice thumped against that knot in her underbelly like the twang of a rumbling steel guitar. “Although I have to admit the view is pretty decent from here, too. Maybe the best in the house, actually.”

As if on cue, Andie dropped the bunch of pens in her hands, sending them rolling across the floor at her feet.
Oh great,
she thought,
hey I have an idea.
You play the popular hot guy and I’ll be the nervous bookworm.
Self-indulgence was over. Ignoring his presence was going to be out of the question. And, wait—what? There was no way Guy Wilder—that fidgety, brooding, deliciously dark man who’d slinked into her classroom with his tail between his legs three minutes ago—was calling her the best view in the house…right? Either she had heard him wrong or ascending the few risers up had given Silas Dove his groove back. Anyway, whatever clever response she should have had—and she was usually reliably witty in awkward situations—completely failed her.

The best she could manage was a nervous sounding chuckle. She evaded the need to say anything at all by bending down to pick up her pens. She refused to let herself even think she was hiding. She was absolutely
not
hiding.

All right, Foxglove
, Andie scolded herself as she crouched beside the desk.
Get it together, girl. Four pens, four sane thoughts to get your head back straight: go.
She grabbed the pink highlighter at her feet.
He’s trying to be nice, forget it.
That was probably true. He had a fan base to keep happy and wanting after all, and he probably thought she was one of them. He obviously thought she was an average college girl. She tossed the highlighter to her free hand and snatched up two dry erase markers half-wedged under her bag.
Class starts in, like, two seconds, and you’re teaching a class on
not
being disillusioned by entertainment, remember?
He’s just a normal guy—acting is just a job. Besides, he’s not
that
handsome
.
Great, she had almost talked herself back to normal. Now, where was that last pen? She surveyed the floor in front of her, under the chair, beside her bag. There had been a fourth, damn it—

“Oh!” Without warning Andie found herself staring level into the matching nebulas that were Guy’s achingly blue eyes. He’d finally pushed away the dark sunglasses—using them now as an arm to hold back falling locks of tangled coffee-colored hair—and their brightness was in full effect. She had been so lost in her inner pep talk that she hadn’t heard him step lightly back down the risers and sneak up beside her—much less heard him squat down barely two feet in front of her. It was a miracle she didn’t fall right backward onto her graceless ass.

His face, striking and chiseled from a distance, up close was like some beautiful piece of art carved from polished stone. This close, Andie could see that his eyes weren’t merely blue, but that there was a thin, barely noticeable ring of contrasting color flaring out around his pupil. It was a color halfway between yellow and green. Chartreuse, she thought it was called, named from some old French liqueur that was itself named after a monastery in some mountains somewhere. Why she was thinking of secret recipe French wine while staring into this man’s eyes she had no idea, but if it were possible to get tipsy just thinking about it, she was about halfway to drunk. And it was nowhere near five o’clock.