In Love With The Dangerous Professor
"I don't play games, Miss Moretti. I end them."
Celine Moretti has a plan after catching her boyfriend with the new beautiful transfer student. It’s simple, really.
Step one: Don't cry. Get even. Step two: Seduce the transfer student’s uncle—the icy, terrifyingly handsome Professor Reed—and destroy his niece’s perfect little life.
It was supposed to be a game. A little revenge to soothe a broken heart. Celine thought she was the player. She thought Professor Reed was just a target, a rigid academic with a god complex and a stick up his ass.
She was wrong.
Professor Reed isn't just a teacher. He is Caelum Morano, the ruthlessly efficient Don of the Morano Crime Family. A man who hides in the halls of academia to hunt the shadow organization that butchered his fiancée. He has spent years perfecting his mask of indifference, living a life of cold solitude, surrounded by a loving but dangerous family he keeps at arm's length.
Until Celine walks in. She is chaos in red lipstick. She is defiance wrapped in a short skirt. And she looks exactly like the ghost haunting his dreams.
He tries to reject her. He tries to scare her away. "You’re playing with fire, little star," Caelum warned, his hand closing around her throat, not tight enough to hurt, but firm enough to own. "And I burned down the world a long time ago."
"Then burn me," Celine whispered, trembling not with fear, but with a dark, twisted need. "I’d rather burn with you than freeze alone."
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Chapter: Ninety FourCaelum's POVHope asked why Celine could not get up.I told her it three times over the first week, in different iterations, adjusted each time to what she appeared to digest and where she dropped the thread. The baby required close supervision right now, I told her. Mama was doing the most important work there was, and that work demanded she not move. She processed this information each time with the focused seriousness she applied to things that were vexing her, and each time come back to the same conclusion.She would carefully climb onto the bed and sit next to Celine, telling her she was doing a good job.The first time this happened Celine looked over Hope’s head at me with the kind of expression I didn’t have a word for. Something so close to being undone but on the right side of it.I had been managing the household for years in the operational sense, the logistics of safety and movement and security, but the daily texture of it, the meals and the laundry and getting Hope dres
Last Updated: 2026-04-13
Chapter: Ninety threeCeline's POVI stared at the bonds for a long time and said nothing.Paper and numbers. The physical evidence of fifty million dollars that had once been Vivienne’s money, then become Victor’s dupery, now reached here as the attempt for something that a dead man could not name cleanly. Caelum sat opposite me with his hands flat on the table and his jaw set in that way it got when he’d already made his mind up about something.“I want to destroy it,” he told the committee."All of it.""All of it. I do not want his money. I do not want his amends. I do not want his any version in our life including the financial version.”I understood that. I experienced the gravity of that and I did not ignore it. But I looked at those bonds and thought of Hope sleeping in the next room, and the child I had been carrying silently for three weeks, which we hadn’t told anyone about yet."It is for Hope," I said. "That is what he said. It is not for you or for me. It is for her future."“His blood money
Last Updated: 2026-04-12
Chapter: Ninety TwoCaelum's POVI covered Celine as the third shot came through what was left of the front window and reaped a chunk out of the wall behind where we had been standing.It was loud with it, glass and plaster and the particular brand of chaos that belonged to the experience of being inside a building while under fire, how sound reverberated off hard surfaces and took on a plastic-wrapped quality that made it difficult to use as navigation. I flattened Celine behind the couch with my finger on my own weapon and made a quick assessment of the angles.Victor was at the secret stash, moving with an efficiency and speed that did not belong to a man who had spent twenty five years living quietly in a suburb but I opened for just a second the question of what those twenty five years had actually consisted of and then I closed it shut again because this was not the time."Expecting what exactly," I said."This." He found the window, opened it a crack and gazed out in the measured way of someone wh
Last Updated: 2026-04-11
Chapter: Ninety OneCeline's POVThe name dropped in the room and was here to stay.I saw it land on Caelum the way you see a thing hit water, the first splash and then rings spreading away from it, altering all it touched. He did not move for a moment. He sat with his phone in hand and the call already finished, staring at a point halfway between himself and the wall across.I did not speak. I had learned, in the time I had spent next to this man, that certain moments were ones you walked into with caution and that the first act was simply to be there in them without encumbering them.He told me what Chen had said in the unemotional flat style with which he delivered things that were too big to be matched by their delivery. His father. Victor Morano. Dead twenty five years, or rather dead, buried in a grave Caelum had stood beside at fifteen in a suit two sizes too big and with Vivienne's hand on his shoulder and no one standing beside him who was there for him instead of for the sake of her performance
Last Updated: 2026-04-10
Chapter: NinetyCaelum's POVWhen I spotted the vest, I froze.Everyone stopped. The kind of stop that required no command, that arrived from the simultaneous realization of an object that shifted the parameters of the room. I heard Kent's breath go out once, controlled, then nothing behind me. I still, also Ryker to my right. At the south entry, also still, Vivienne’s people.Dmitri was standing in the middle of the floor and looking around at all of us with the patience of someone who had been waiting, and he was glad the waiting had come to an end.I ran the arithmetic. Increasing blast radius from that size vest in a confined space, everyone in the building. His thumb already rested on the detonator and his hand was steady in a way that told me the steadiness was not performance. A shot to the head wouldn’t stop the detonation if his hand closed by reflex. A shot to the hand could, given the right circumstances, but those necessary conditions would entail distance and angle and time, all of which
Last Updated: 2026-04-09
Chapter: Eighty NineCeline's POVThe doctor’s hands were gentle and thorough and I sat on the edge of the examination table and let her work and looked at the wall and tried to be present in the room.Physically we were fine. That was the term the doctor used. Fine. Bruising, a split lip that had started to close, some soft tissue tenderness along my left side from the wall I’d been tossed against. Nothing broken. Nothing that time and rest couldn’t remedy.She said rest and I nodded and didn’t tell her that rest was not something I imagined myself finding anytime soon.Maddie was in the next room. Sometimes I could hear her voice through the wall, low and irregular, the voice of a person speaking through something they were still contained by instead of something they had moved away from. Her therapist was a small quiet woman who had come in an hour after us and who had the particular stillness of someone who has sat with a great many people at the moment after awful things happened.When they released
Last Updated: 2026-04-08
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