Kait Ballenger - Midnight Hunter

She dragged her still-slightly stoned ass to the front door before pressing her eye to the peephole. She nearly shit bricks when she saw who was waiting on the other side. She parted her lips to release a resounding, “Fuck, you have got to be kidding me,” then clapped her hand over her mouth, realizing he would hear her through the paper-thin walls. Why in the name of all things holy—or, well, more like unholy, considering what she had been up to in the past hour—was her drop-dead gorgeous religious studies professor knocking at her door?

A shiver ran down her spine. Every bit of the power high she had experienced from her relapse into black magic disappeared as if a massive bucket of ice water had been dumped over her head. There was only one reason Dr. Grey would show up at her door like this in the middle of the night and, well...it wasn’t because her midterm paper was two days past due.

She’d been Dr. Grey’s student for the past several months. Aside from being an intelligent, astute and caring professor, far more lay underneath Dr. Grey’s muscled, sexy-nerd exterior. She knew firsthand the badass-ery of which he was capable. The man had once cracked one of her bar patron’s skulls open after the sick creep had palmed her ass in a very unwelcome way. The patron had returned a few nights later for his usual debauchery, but he had never once tried to lay a hand on her since. So yeah, there was much more to Dr. Shane Grey than met the eye, including the fact that he was a witch hunter, and she’d had one too many run-ins with the Execution Underground already. The elite organization of hunters fancied themselves as the police of the supernatural community, and they didn’t take kindly to black magic practitioners.

Was it coincidence that he’d showed up at her apartment right after she’d fallen off the wagon? She thought not. Shit. Had he been watching her? Waiting for her to screw up?

Only a month earlier, Dr. Grey and two of his fellow hunters had approached her, asking for her magical aid in one of their cases. Well...asking politely was what Dr. Grey had done. As for his colleagues, they had made it clear that if she didn’t cooperate, there would be negative consequences. Considering she already had a not-so-bright past history with the Execution Underground, she’d agreed to cooperate. But she knew full well that her cooperation didn’t grant her a free pass when it came to future wrongdoing, and unfortunately, it had placed her back on the organization’s radar.

Several years ago she’d done some pretty stupid things and landed herself in their godforsaken hell-hole of a detention facility after a run-in with the Detroit division. She’d relocated to Rochester shortly after her release, and had ended up aiding Dr. Grey and the Rochester division shortly thereafter. She couldn’t go back to the detention center. She couldn’t.

Bolting down her hallway, she scrambled into her bathroom, clamoring for some perfume to cover up the herbal spell scents that clung to her clothes, scents Dr. Grey was bound to recognize, given his glorious intelligence. She snatched a bottle of Britney Spears’s Fantasy that one of the dancers had given her for Christmas but she’d never worn, and spritzed the sugary sweet scent all over her body. She quickly straightened her mussed hair until it looked halfway decent, wiped some smudged eyeliner from the edge of her temple and ran back to the door.

Momentarily, she considered cracking open her living room window and rushing down the fire escape, but since Dr. Grey already knew she was home—she seriously needed to check the door from now on before yelling, “Coming!”—there was no way a seasoned hunter like him would fall for that. If he was here to collect her for practicing black magic tonight, she might as well go peacefully. She really hoped it didn’t come down to that.

Finally, she wrenched open the door, trying to feign surprise. “Dr. Grey, what brings you here, especially in the middle of the night?” She leaned against the door frame as he scanned her up and down. Heat rushed to her cheeks. She was suddenly very aware of the fact that she was still wearing a plaid miniskirt that barely covered her ass cheeks. Just great.

He met her gaze as he adjusted the gold-rimmed eyeglasses hooked to the collar of his long-sleeve polo shirt. “Can I come in? We need to talk.”

Okay...so clearly he wasn’t here to arrest her or he would have done it by now, but for the life of her she couldn’t understand what in the world he would need to talk about.

She crossed her arms over her chest. “Look, if this is about my midterm essay being late, I’m really sorry, but I’ve been working. I know you care about my success in your class and all, but regardless, I think it’s a little weird for you to show up...”

“Vera, this isn’t about your paper,” he interrupted her nervous word-vomit. “I would have really appreciated it if you’d turned it in on time, but if you get it to me by class tomorrow, consider the tardiness forgiven.” He pinned her with a sharp look. “Just this one time.”

Yep, there it was. That stern teacherly look that all truly good educators possessed, the one that simultaneously made you feel like shit for being a disappointment, made you think that you could have done better and also told you they expected better from you because you were better than that—all rolled into one. Damned if he didn’t make her want to be a good student. Aside from the fact that he really was a great professor— always expressing the ideas and concepts clearly, helping his students when they needed it, being firm yet forgiving, making the subject matter interesting and really just overall caring about their success as undergraduates—the man was all things sexy and perfect in one package. She would be severely lying to herself if she tried to deny that in many ways she had a bit of a crush, along with pretty much the entire female student body at the University of Rochester.

Really, what woman in her right mind wouldn’t have a bit of a crush on him, though? Dr. Grey was smart, kind, just nerdish enough that it was cute, with those gold reading glasses of his, and if you couldn’t see the sleek mean muscles beneath his button-down shirts and blazers, you were freaking blind. Couple that with the short ponytail, which she was pretty sure every girl in his class wished she could run her fingers through, a sleek jawline, warm brown eyes and an award-winning smile that could make a woman’s panties drop to the floor, and you had the recipe for lots of young horny twenty-somethings fantasizing about being privately tutored by him.

He appeared pleasantly oblivious to all the attention, though. The man had no clue as to why his classes were always filled to the brim and in fact had a waiting list every semester, and were disproportionately filled with women, just like every other class in the religious studies department—not. Honestly, she’d taken his class just to see what all the hullabaloo was about. And boy, had she seen. She wasn’t sure whether she regretted that or not.

“This isn’t something to do with that demon thing you wanted my help with last month, is it?” She remembered all too clearly watching the crime scene she had used her white magic to recreate for him. The thought still haunted her. She had cooperated with Dr. Grey and his fellow Execution Underground hunters then for the sake of getting them off her back. Not to mention the plight of Dr. Grey’s fellow hunter...what was his name again? David? His clear love for the woman he had been trying to save had given her heart the warm fuzzies, so she’d felt she had to help. She was a huge sappy sucker for a good love story.

He shook his head. “Not exactly, but I do need your help. Can I come in?”