Читать книгу You Let Me In - Lucy Clarke - Страница 16

Elle’s skin held the deep tan of a summer holiday spent largely unoccupied. She was running late, still learning to navigate the sprawling campus, and she slipped into the back of the lecture theatre, breathless.

She scanned the sea of heads looking for an unoccupied seat, dismayed to spot only one at the front. As she tiptoed down the central stairway, trying to make herself invisible, the lecturer paused mid-sentence.

He was sitting on the edge of a desk, the screen behind him illuminated with the words Shakespeare’s Tragedies. He had foppish brown hair and wore a well-cut cord jacket, over a pair of dark jeans.

‘I should mention,’ the young lecturer said, ‘that if anyone is late, they have the regrettable task of being my assistant at the end of the lecture and handing out the day’s notes. So,’ he said, his gaze finding hers, ‘that role is awarded to you, today.’ He smiled. A boyish smile that lit up his face and created sunbursts of lines around his eyes.

The attention in the auditorium swung to her, as a hundred pairs of eyes followed his. Perhaps because she was nineteen, perhaps because she was still buzzing from the shots she’d only stopped drinking at four a.m., she had – right there in front of a packed auditorium of English Literature students – grinned as she curtsied to him.

‘At your service.’

Luke Linden, he was called, ‘but just call me Luke’. He was one of those lecturers, she would learn, who abandoned the lectern and preferred to roam, striding expansively from one end of the hall to the other. He had a flair for using a pause to great effect, causing even those students with a tendency to drift, to suddenly look up as if silence had summoned them. Luke Linden was a man who could talk passionately about semantics and notions of romantic love in Jacobean England – yet still looked like one of them.

Except he wasn’t one of them.

And that’s where Elle had made her first mistake.