The professor and his passion...

I've been getting a lot of hits on my website for my upcoming M/M romance, The Professor's Secret Passion. So this morning, I thought for fun I'd post an excerpt.

Here's a blurb to give you some basic info about the story...

Professor Aidan Sheridan has secretly fantasized about his grad student, Nathan Turner, for two long years. And now Nathan is hinting he’d like to move beyond their professional association to something on a deeper, more intimate level. Although Aidan longs to claim the sexy, younger man as a lover, he doesn’t dare admit that he, too, burns for more. Not if he intends to protect Nate from a bitter event in his own past that still haunts him.

When Nate suspects Aidan is hiding his real feelings, he takes matters into his own hands. The long-pent-up passion between them explodes into a night of erotic and emotional intensity neither man can forget. But in the light of day, will Nate’s love be enough to heal Aidan, or will the professor’s fears tear them apart?

And here's an excerpt for you...

Nate curled his fingers over the top of Aidan’s, savoring the feel of warm skin against his palm. “Let me ask you something.”

Aidan’s eyes squeezed closed and he rubbed them between the thumb and forefinger of his free hand. “What?”

“Let’s say, hypothetically, that I wasn’t your student. That I didn’t even go to school here. If we had met somewhere else, gotten to know each other in a different environment, is there a possibility there could be more between us?”

“I’m not going to answer that because you do go to school here and you are my student.” Aidan hesitated for a moment, then slipped his hand free. “I’m sorry, Nate. That’s just the way it has to be.”

“Humor me. If I weren’t your student, what then?”

“You are my student.”

“I won’t always be."

Aidan’s eyes were clouded, but he shook his head. “No. I’m not saying anything else on the subject. Let it go. It doesn’t matter.”

He stood and started back around his desk, effectively shutting Nate out.

But Nate grabbed his hand again and tugged him to a stop, waiting until Aidan had turned to face him. His chest felt as if an iron band had wrapped around it and was slowly constricting, cutting off his air. “It matters to me. I can’t keep living like this, working with you day after day, feeling the way I’m feeling about you with all this...” He grimaced and put a hand against his own chest. “Damn. With all this powerful emotion ripping up my insides, but not knowing whether or not you feel the same. The not knowing is killing me.”

Aidan’s calm expression had faltered while Nate spoke, and now it radiated a confusing mix of sympathetic understanding one moment and tightly held control the next. “I hear what you’re saying. But the knowing, especially if it’s not what you want to hear, might only be worse.”

Nate dragged in a deep, pained breath, trying to force his tight lungs to function. “No. At this point, no. Just, please, give me the truth. One way or the other. At least have that much respect for me.”

An emotional storm churned in Aidan’s eyes, and the lines around his sensual mouth, formed from years of easy smiles, now compressed into troubled furrows. He reached out as if he were going to stroke Nate’s cheek, but then he stopped, his fingers curled into his palm, and his hand fell to his side. The intensity of his gaze, which seconds before had been a swirling window to his soul, grew dull. He shook his head and his voice was little more than a hoarse whisper. “I’m sorry, Nathan. You’re my student, and my friend, but nothing more. I don’t feel what you want me to feel.”

The cold plunge of the words hit the pit of Nate’s stomach, then spread outward, leaving him numb. He’d been so certain there was something there... He stared at Aidan, wishing him to take it back, change his mind. But as the seconds ticked by on the wall clock, he didn’t.

So that’s in then.

He nodded, but it was like an out of body experience—he was present, but not. “I understand,” he murmured.

Mechanically, he released Aidan’s hand, grabbed his book bag, and let his heavy feet carry him to the door. Felt his hand close around the cool metal of the knob. Felt it begin to turn from the rote guidance of his fingers.

But then, as if he were suddenly stepping out of the fog, his head cleared. Puzzle pieces shifted in his mind, and in a moment of crystal clarity, everything fell into place—Aidan’s odd behavior this evening, his hot and cold emotions, his denial moments ago.

Nate released the knob, spun around, and turned toward the professor, who still stood by the desk. Aidan looked startled. His face was paler than Nate had ever seen it.

The book bag thunked to the floor. Keeping his gaze locked with Aidan’s, Nate crossed the space between them in two steps, lightly grasped the man’s head in his hands, and settled his lips over Aidan’s. He tasted warm and cinnamony, like the cinnamon mints he kept in his desk drawer. He teased at Aidan’s lips, sucking, nibbling, slowly urging them open, and Aidan put up no resistance. In fact, when their tongues at last made contact, he moaned softly, and his hands snaked around to clutch Nate’s back, confirming everything Nate had suspected.

Nate kissed him thoroughly. Passionately. Pouring all his own intimate feelings into it so Aidan would understand this was the real thing. When he finally pulled back, he gazed into those green eyes he’d come to know and love so well. “I don’t believe you don’t care. When you’re ready, I’ll be here.”

This time Nate’s steps to the door were as light as his heart. All he’d needed was to know that Aidan felt something. And now that he had that, he could wait until Aidan was ready to accept those feelings.

Before he reached to open the door, however, Aidan was behind him.

He gripped Nate’s arm, turned him around, and pushed him backward until the heavy wood collided with Nate’s backside. It was Nate’s turn to stare in surprise. At the intense, impassioned expression on Aidan’s face, a surge of heat coursed through Nate and detonated in a white-hot burst right below his balls. Aidan slanted his mouth over his with a hungry, forceful urgency that caught the younger man off guard. It was pent-up desire in its rawest form. Almost more of a claiming than a kiss.

“Damn you, Nathan.” Aidan’s voice was thick with emotion. “You were supposed to walk away.”

“But I didn’t.”

“No. You didn’t. Sometimes you’re too stubborn for your own good.” With one arm braced on the door next to Nate’s head, he rested his forehead against Nate’s and sighed. “I shouldn’t be feeling these things for you that I feel.”

Contented satisfaction filled Nate. “Why the hell shouldn’t you,” he demanded. Then quickly added, “Never mind, we’re not going to have that conversation again. The point here is that you do feel them.” His hand automatically moved up to caress Aidan’s lightly stubbled cheek, and he stared in appreciation at this man he’d admired, craved, cared about for ages.

“I’ve wanted for a long time to kiss you like that,” Aidan admitted, eyes closed as if he were struggling with himself.

“Then you should have. I would have let you, you know?”

“Nathan—”

Nate pressed his lips against Aidan’s to silence any protests he might make. He’d managed to pull the man out of his shell, and now he wanted to concentrate on keeping him there, showing him how good it could be between them so he’d stay out.

As the kiss deepened, and as their tongues moved in slow, sensuous thrusts against one another, the burn of arousal that had begun when Aidan pushed him against the door, continued to build in Nate. His cock, never truly soft anytime he’d been around Aidan for the past few months, stiffened to full size. It bulged indecently—and damned uncomfortably—against the seam of his pants. He didn’t want to scare Aidan off by jumping his bones this fast, but he didn’t have a prayer of hiding his blatant hard-on if their bodies got any closer together.

Aidan rendered the thought moot when he cupped the back of Nate’s head with one hand, and slid the other around his waist, tugging him in tight against his own body. Their groins notched together, melding them in perfect, complimentary harmony...

The Professor's Secret Passion is tentatively scheduled for release on September 3rd from Amber Heat!

M.L. Rhodes
Hot nights. Hot heroes. Hot reads.
www.mlrhodeswriting.com