Chapter 50: The New Professor

Chapter 50: Chapter 50: The New Professor

Iris walked into the classroom with her jaw clenched so tightly that she could feel the tension gathering along her temples. The memory of Jason’s audacity was still fresh in her mind.

The nerve of him to corner her outside the classroom, demand that she speak to him, and then kiss her after she had explicitly told him not to touch her was enough to make her hands curl into fists at her sides.

She reached the nearest empty seat, dropped her bag beside it, and sat down before taking a slow breath.

Then she pulled a small compact mirror from her bag, looking at her lips. Her lips still felt wrong, when Jason kissed her earlier, she felt disgusted....like she didn’t want that at all, and the feeling was intense.

With a displeased frown, she pulled out a tissue wiped them with a vigour that suggested she could scrub away the entire encounter, as though she could erase the memory of Jason’s mouth from them entirely. Once she was satisfied, she meticulously reapplied her lipstick with careful precision and snapped the compact shut.

When she looked up, she caught two girls sitting across the aisle watching her. The moment their eyes met, they immediately looked away.

Iris sighed. This is wonderful. Apparently, she had barely returned to campus and had already provided enough material for someone’s morning gossip.

She sank farther into her chair and glanced toward the door. Please don’t let that end up on the Campus Pulse. She prayed in her mind.

The university’s anonymous social platform had a talent for turning the smallest incident into a full-blown scandal. A couple arguing outside the cafeteria could become a "secret breakup."

Someone leaving a professor’s office could become an affair. A simple photograph could acquire an entire fictional story within an hour.

The last thing Iris wanted was to become today’s entertainment. She had spent the last few days trying to put Jason behind her. She had returned from Spokane determined to start the final semester of her Business Administration degree without carrying the wreckage of the past with her.

Unfortunately, Jason Montgomery apparently had other plans. And as if he were not enough of a problem, there was another man Iris had been trying very hard not to think about....Alexander.

Even his name, whispered internally, made something inside her shift uneasily. She’d told herself that what happened between them had been nothing more than one reckless night. A mistake, born from heartbreak, fueled by alcohol, sharpened by anger, and propelled by an overwhelming, primal attraction to a stranger she’d known for barely a few hours.

Well...she’d left before he woke, and that, she’d declared, was the end of it. Yet somehow, the memory of him, which was insistent had refused to disappear.

Those impossible blue eyes, the way he had looked at her, the way he held her that night, while she screamed his name, the strange electricity that had passed between them the first time their hands touched and when he entered her that night. And that inexplicable sensation she had experienced ever since she woke from those strange dreams.

Iris absently rubbed the mark on her neck, a small wolf-shaped tattoo that had appeared seemingly out of nowhere. She truly had no idea why it had manifested, or why a wolf now haunted her dreams.

But she had noticed something else: whenever her thoughts strayed to Alexander, the mark seemed to grow warm, a faint pulse beneath her fingertips. She frowned, quickly lowering her hand, silently admonishing herself to stop.

Instead, she opened her textbook, determined to distract herself. Around her, the classroom slowly filled. Students chatted in small groups, chairs scraped against the floor, and phones buzzed constantly, the course group chat a torrent of messages.

The new professor was apparently the only subject of interest today. Rumours flew around, of a guest lecturer from the corporate world, some big shot with real-world experience.

Iris glanced at her phone despite herself, a scoff escaping her lips at the ridiculousness.

"Does anyone actually know who he is?" someone had typed.

"I heard he’s coming from Stanford," another replied.

"No, my cousin said he’s some corporate executive."

"Apparently he’s a billionaire," a particularly enthusiastic message claimed.

Iris rolled her eyes, muttering under her breath, "A billionaire teaching at Emerald Heights? Please. People really need hobbies."

"Maybe he’s hot. That’s all I care about," another student typed, followed by a string of laughing emojis.

She muted the conversation, and she opened her textbook again and began reading, determined to ignore the noise around her and lose herself in the text. But the anticipation in the room continued to build.

Their capstone strategy course was one of the most important classes in their final semester. It was the course where they were expected to stop thinking like students and start thinking like actual business professionals.

Their former professor had apparently been reassigned, and the department had chosen someone new to take over the course.

Nobody knew why. The head of the Business Administration department, Professor Whitmore, was not known for making unnecessary changes, and certainly not in the middle of an academic year.

If he had personally sent a message declaring the first class mandatory, then whoever was coming through that door had to be important.

The clock moved closer to the scheduled start time, and then the classroom door opened, which made the room gradually fall silent.

Iris didn’t look up immediately. She was halfway through a paragraph when she heard footsteps approaching the lectern.

Then came a man’s voice. "Good morning everyone.We’ll be dissecting corporate takeovers and hostile acquisitions this semester, looking at case studies from the last decade. It’s a bloody business, and I expect you to treat it as such."

Her fingers stopped moving, there was something about that voice that sounded familiar. It was deep, controlled. Smooth in a way that immediately made her spine straighten.

Her heart gave one hard, inexplicable beat. That voice. It was a sound imprinted on her very bones, a sound that had murmured filthy, beautiful things in her ear as she came apart in his arms. Her core clenched, a sudden, involuntary spasm of pure muscle memory.

Iris stared at the textbook for another second, then she slowly lifted her head, her gaze fixed on the man standing at the whiteboard.

The man standing at the front of the room had his back to the students. He wore a perfectly tailored expensive charcoal suit, the jacket sitting flawlessly across broad shoulders.

His dark hair was styled neatly, though there was something effortless about the way it fell into place. One hand rested casually against the lectern while the other held a marker.

He turned to the students as he spoke and turned back towards the board. And Iris stopped breathing.

The murmur that had started to rise from the classroom died a quick, abrupt death. It was the same man... Alexander.

The name echoed in the silent space inside her head, thick with a mixture of disbelief and a strange, primal recognition.

No. Iris’s fingers tightened on the edge of her textbook. It couldn’t be....It was him. The stranger from Obsidian.

His profile, sharp and undeniably powerful, was etched against the whiteboard. The strong line of his jaw, the slight curve of his nose, the way his dark hair brushed the collar of his expensive suit. He was even more imposing in the stark, bright light of the classroom than he had been in the dim, intimate lighting of his penthouse.

The man whose penthouse she had escaped from before sunrise. The man whose arms she had awakened in. The man she had spent the last several days desperately trying to convince herself she would never see again.

Alexander lifted the marker and wrote across the board in precise, elegant strokes.

CAPSTONE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Iris stared at the words without actually seeing them.

"Strategic management," Alexander continued, his voice carrying effortlessly across the room, "is not about memorizing theories and repeating whatever happens to be written in your textbook.

Since it’s your final year, you should already understand that businesses rarely fail because their leaders lack intelligence. They fail because those leaders misread circumstances, underestimate competition, make decisions based on incomplete information, or become too attached to strategies that have already stopped working."

His voice was exactly the same, that deep, unmistakable voice. The one she remembered whispering against her ear, telling her to ’cum’ for him.

Iris swallowed. Alexander continued as though nothing in the world could possibly disturb his composure.

"Over the course of this semester, I expect you to learn how to identify opportunities before they become obvious, recognize threats before they become crises, and most importantly, understand that every decision carries a cost. Sometimes the cost is financial. Sometimes it is reputational. And sometimes the cost is something far more difficult to recover."

He finished writing, the marker making a faint squeak against the board, a sound that seemed to reverberate through the sudden, heavy silence.

His hand lowered, and he turned from the board. The world tilted on its axis. It was Indeed him. The devastatingly handsome stranger from the club.