My life was not the best, but it wasn’t the worst either. I mean I had my challenges. I did some stupid crap, like get pregnant by my first boyfriend. I can’t even say his name, I hate his ass so much. But I learned my lesson quick and I had to thank the Man upstairs when I miscarried three months into it. I would have been dealing with the father’s drama until my baby was eighteen. I mean it hurt like hell at the time, but still it turned out for the best. I definitely got a break on that one. It’s funny how in love you are with a guy one minute—gonna stay together forever—then the next minute, he turns into this stranger when you tell him you’re knocked up. It boggles the mind.

I decided right there, I wasn’t going down that dead end with guys like him. I was going to make good choices, and that started with going back to school. Night school. Alright, it wasn’t exactly going back when I was only twenty-one. More like coming off a long break! But contracting at my dead end state job wasn’t cuttin’ it, so I had to deal.

Making that decision to go to college wasn’t hard either, when I considered living with my father for the next I don’t know how many years. God, he was enough to put me on Oprah for killing my parent when I was a teenager. Always ragging on me, always drunk. For real? I see why my mother ran off with some guy she picked up in a bar when I was thirteen. She was probably trying to avoid committing murder herself.

And I’m not even going into the drama with my best friend, Kendra, and her on-again-off-again relationship. But you see what I’m dealing with right? So why did I have to go up in Spanish 101 on the first night and lay eyes on the finest white man I have ever seen? Oh my God! He looked like…like…candy! No. He looked like white chocolate, all sweet and creamy—the kind that melts in your mouth and makes you moan out loud. Yeah, now you see what I’m saying.

It was raining. I forgot my umbrella. The stupid guard outside the stupid little box said I couldn’t park on campus without a parking pass or he’d give me a ticket. I pleaded with him. “Can’t you give me a break? I’m half hour late for my class and I’ll get soaked if I have to walk all the way back here from the street.”

He wasn’t buying it, “Sorry, Miss, you knew what time you needed to be in class. You knew the rules about parking too. No deal. Park on the street.”

Asshole! I cracked my window down another inch, “Look, just because you have to work tonight and you’re grumpy about it doesn’t mean you have to take it out on everybody else. I’ll get the pass later.”

Ok, so I can’t charm a bee with honey when I’m ticked, but damn I was late and didn’t feel like being there anyway. He still wouldn’t go for it so I flipped the car in reverse, swung a wide U-turn and made sure to splash him with as much water as I could. The giggles I enjoyed watching him shake himself in the rearview mirror helped tone down my tension just a little.

By the time I rolled into class, the professor was well into her spiel for the night and everyone was settled in their chosen places. I stopped in the doorway, scanned the crowd and hoped no one noticed that my clothes were soaked, my stockings were running and my new hair do was all jacked from the rain.

I spotted an empty desk toward the back of the room and tiptoed over to it, dying of embarrassment because my shoes were making that squishy noise from being water-logged. God, could this freakin’ night get any worse?

“Hola, Senorita.”

I froze curving into the seat. She could not be talking to me. And was she going to speak in Spanish all night? Why the hell did she think I was taking this stupid class? Not because I knew a lick of Spanish, that’s for sure.

I dropped into the seat and spared her a look. Or at least I intended to look at her. But somehow my head was cocked to the right when I looked up. I had to turn it back toward the front of the room and in doing that, I saw him. My neck stuck in its groove. My eyes locked. I couldn’t look away if Denzel was buck naked in front of me.

Luke Dorman, though I didn’t know his name at the time, was hot with a capital ‘H’! He was twisted in his seat, watching me, probably like everybody else. But I didn’t notice them. His big blue eyes were calling my name, and I’m telling you the class transformed into my bedroom and I was doing wild sexual things to his hard body, running my fingers through his silky blond hair.