Heroes (Hollywood Heartthrobs #1) Read Free

of
his silly antics. She came at him with a vengeance. He was ready with a quick
step back, then forward in a lunge. She blocked him with a high inside parry,
followed by a quick riposte to his torso.
    “ Touché !”
she said triumphantly. They returned to the engarde line at the center of the
fencing strip.
    “I
wasn’t ready!” Adam shouted back in jest. “Mulligan on that hit, Jessie.”
    “Yeah,
yeah, take all the mulligans you need, old man,” Jessie answered.
    “Well
I guess we can’t all have your catlike reflexes,” he said, sadly.
    “Just
call me Lightning,” she shot back, advancing on him with her foil.
    After
two more hits, she couldn’t resist rubbing it in a tiny bit. “Jeez Adam,
someone slip decaf in the department coffee again?”
    “Some
of us don’t spend all our time with the foils, Jess. I have to carve out time
for my active social life,” Adam replied.
    “Oh,
please. If either one of us ever spent any time with anyone not a pasty
graduate student, an ancient bearded professor, or a dead guy on a page we
wouldn’t know what to do,” Jessie replied, laughing.
    “Hey,
when I meet a live guy half as interesting as Charlemagne or Richard the
Lionheart I’ll be all over it, promise,” Adam replied. 
    Jessie
was just glad to be out of her tiny office. She loved the cramped little room
in the English building that always smelled of old books and freshly brewed
tea, and was incredibly proud of the small sign on the door that read J.
Brooke. But this week, she needed to be out. Fencing always cleared her mind,
and Adam was still her favorite opponent. He joked he could tell whenever
Jessie hit a roadblock in her research, as she would start pestering him to
come fencing all hours of the day and night. It was actually Adam who had first
gotten her into fencing way back when they first met as freshmen at the
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. On a lark, she came with him to a meeting of
the fencing club and was instantly hooked. It reminded her a bit of the ballet
classes she had taken as a kid, but with a healthy edge of fierce competition.
The movements were graceful and elegant, but required quick thinking and fast
reflexes. She loved the challenge of it. Great exercise, and you gained the
ability to kick serious ass. Nine years later, she and Adam were still at UM,
now both postgraduates with PhDs under their belts, and still fencing together.
She was a researcher in the English department, he was a teaching assistant
with the History department. But over the years their shared love of fencing,
late night arguments over the importance of The Song of Roland to the
history of the First and Second Crusade, and each other had endured.
    At
various points, each of them had tried to get the people they dated interested
in their sport, but it never seemed to work out. Jessie’s boyfriends seemed to
find it threatening, Adam’s boyfriends found it brutish.
    “ Touché !”
Jessie shouted again.
    “Uncle!”
Adam called out, reaching up to remove his fencing mask. “I am not worthy of
your attentions, my warrior queen. Long live Boudicca,” he said with a grin. He
had jet black hair, parted crisply to one side, and was always carefully
clean-shaved. With his dark brown eyes, long, ebony lashes, and very fair skin
he had the look of an extra in a film about Victorian London. Jessie had once
bought him a derby hat as a joke, made all the more hilarious when he put it on
and looked like he was born to wear it.
    Part
of what made Adam such a great fencing partner was their similarity of size. At
5’9” they matched each other’s height almost to a millimeter. Jessie, however,
glowed with a distinctly modern American woman vibe. Soft brown hair fell
nearly to her olive-skinned shoulders, framing a face anchored by bright green
eyes. She had a girl-next-door kind of appearance that belied her studious
nature. Her skin was radiant from the exercise as she took off her mask and
plopped down on a