Red Hot Reunion - Bella Andre Page 0,4

was white-collar. Wonder bread.

Perfect. He’d only been on campus for an hour and already he’d met a cute brunette who was an Olympic gymnast. She hadn’t made a big deal out of it, but he was star-struck anyway.

Not that he’d ever show it, of course. Leaning against the bottom of the stairs in a Rolling Stones T-shirt and faded jeans, he watched one fellow student after another drag heavy suitcases into the dormitory lounge. He memorized every detail—the oversized diamonds on the mothers’ hands, the well-groomed fingernails on the fathers’, the confident, excited expressions on their kids’ faces—and yet to the casual observer he looked almost disinterested in the comings and goings around him. It was something he’d perfected over the years, a casual, effortless presence: cool enough to fit in with anyone in any situation, but not too cool that people thought he was a snob.

And thenshewalked in and his cover was blown.

The girl was blonde and thin, nearly too thin, but what really stood out to Jason was how nervous she was. Painfully so. He wanted to reach out and pull her away from her parents, who were obviously more concerned with assessing the wealth of the fellow students than they were with their own daughter’s welfare. He kept his face averted, but his eyes remained on her.

Something about her pulled at him, made him want to hold her, kiss away her uncertainty. He wasn’t a virgin by any means, but he’d never felt this way about a girl within the first minute of setting eyes on her.

He waited until her parents had disappeared, then moved to stand beside the girl.

“I’m Jason. Need some help with your things?”

The grateful smile she gave him lit her up from the inside out. All the beauty he suspected beneath her overly pale skin, her prominent cheekbones, bloomed to life before him.

“That would be great,” she replied, staring into his eyes, seeming to get lost for a second.

His groin jumped with awareness and his gaze moved to her lips instinctively. He couldn’t wait to taste her. A taste that he was certain would be sweeter than anything he’d ever had on his tongue.

And then, polite little girl that he knew she’d been raised to be by the stiff-as-a-board couple who had dropped her off, she held her hand out. “I didn’t mean to be rude. My name’s Emma. Emma Holden.”

He curled his large fingers around the fine bones of her soft hand. And in that moment Jason Roberts wanted Emma Holden more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. He might have been only

eighteen, but already he knew he’d have her. And it would be exactly right. The best thing they’d ever done. For the both of them.

Jason Roberts firmly believed that charging in on his white horse to save Emma Holden that first day of college was the stupidest thing he’d ever done. And somehow, he couldn’t escape the foreboding that attending his ten-year reunion might also end up at the top of his list of worst decisions.

He hadn’t been planning to come back to Palo Alto tonight, but his old drinking buddies had been hassling him for months to show up at the reunion. “The three of us are the reigning heroes of our graduation class,” was what they kept telling him. “It’s up to us to do a victory round, to show all those chicks with their noses in the air what they could have had.”

Jason had never thought about it exactly like that, but yeah, he supposed they had a point. None of them had hung out with the jocks, the sorority girls. They hadn’t been the big brains or future Olympic champions. Just a crew of good guys, tough guys who knew that they weren’t going back to where they came from. Each and every one of them had made a name for themselves in atypical ways, not by any means your average Stanford graduate who becomes an investment banker.

Rick Stodler had created an international construction empire. Ace McKinty had turned his flying lessons into one of the hottest low-cost airlines in the country. And Jason, well, he was proud of everything he’d accomplished. Damn proud.

He’d left Stanford as a poor kid who’d earned a fancy Economics degree on scholarship and had returned a multimillionaire. A world-famous chef. ANew York Times bestselling cookbook author. And the

recipient ofPeople magazine’s Sexiest Bachelor of the Year Award. Two years running.

The moment he walked into the Stanford Faculty Club, he