Island Girls Read Free

into a clump high on her head. The cool air on her neck felt sensational.
    A soft breeze drifted over her skin, tickling her slightly, making her senses stir in the most pleasurable way. Leaning back on her elbows, she sighed deeply, closed her eyes, and breathed in the salty island air.
    And allowed herself to think of Liam.
    ——
    She’d been in her cramped office in the liberal arts building of Sudbury Community College, bowed over her desk with a pile of English composition exams. Occasionally she tilted her head to face the ceiling and relieve her neck and shoulders. She sometimes stood up and loosened her stiff back with some light exercises, knee bends, waist bends, arm swings. But mostly she worked steadily, not allowing herself to look out her window at the green lawn where students lolled in the warm sunshine.
    Meg had been happy. Okay, if not exactly
happy
, she’d been content. She enjoyed her work; was amused, challenged, and annoyed by her students; and spent a lot of time wondering whether the semicolon and colon would fairly soon disappear from common usage, or at least blur and blend. In the Twitter age, punctuation was an endangered species.
    So, she prized her work. But she missed having a love life. She was afraid she’d end up like the head of the department, Eleanor Littleton, PhD, a charming if rather homely single woman whose entire world revolved around the English department and her two Yorkshire terriers.
    Meg’s desk was of battered metal with three drawers down each side and a shallow drawer in the middle where she kept pens, rubber bands, scissors, breath mints, and Scotch tape. Its top was layered with blue books, exams, and e-mails she’d printed out because she got tired of staring at her computer screen. She sat on a basic government-issue secretary’s chair with a squeaking back that provided little support. She kept calling maintenance about it; they kept promising to bring her a better chair.
    “Big fat liars,” she muttered.
    “Who?”
    Meg didn’t have to look up to identify the man standing inher open office door. She knew Liam’s voice all too well. That was a pleasure and a problem.
    Liam Larson. Liam Larson, PhD. Professor Larson, full professor of English, author of the well-received
Nineteenth-Century American Poets
, a poet himself, published in several online and university reviews. Liam Larson, tall, fair, Camelot handsome, and five years younger than Meg. The first time she’d seen him walk down the hall, she’d said under her breath, “Oh, come on.
Really?
”
    Probably five pounds lighter than Meg, too. At twenty-six, Liam was six three and as slender as a marathon runner. At thirty-one, Meg was five four, and while no one would call her fat, they might say—men had said—that she had a fine full figure. A big bust, wide hips, all of it highlighted by her white skin. She let her pale red hair grow past her shoulders and often wore it loose, trying to make her hair seem equal in volume to the rest of her body. She camouflaged her shape with khaki slacks and baggy skirts, corduroy jackets, tailored shirts buttoned to the neck. In the summer, she wore shapeless tunics. If she was ever going to get tenure at this college, she had to appear professional. Academic.
    Liam looked academic and sexy at the same time. Chinos, white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, blue tie to set off his blue eyes.
    Meg smiled at him. Leaning back in her chair, she stretched her arms and yawned. “The maintenance men,” she explained. “They’ve been promising to bring me a decent chair for two weeks.”
    “Let me take a look.”
    Before she could object, Liam was in her space, filling up her incredibly small office. He squatted behind her chair and fiddled with the knob, trying to tighten it. His breath stirred her hair. His knuckles brushed her shoulders.
    Please don’t say I’m too big for this chair
, Meg prayed silently. She knew the chair was too small for her; it was too