Misadventures with a Professor Read online

  Misadventures with a Professor

  Sierra Simone

  This book is an original publication of Waterhouse Press.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2018 Waterhouse Press, LLC

  Cover Design by Waterhouse Press

  Cover photographs: Shutterstock

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  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic format without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  To Ashley Brown Morris and Kate Fasse—Our friendship uses only the good notes.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Don’t miss any Misadventures!

  Excerpt from Misadventures on the Rebound

  More Misadventures

  About Sierra Simone

  Chapter One

  Zandy

  I forgot the umbrella.

  I remembered a backup battery charger, lipstick, condoms, my passport, a disposable toothbrush, and an appropriate amount of petty cash in case of emergency. I spent hours perfecting my hair and makeup into a look that proclaimed the perfect blend of sexual and social experience. I researched my route and destination and reviewed my notes for the plan.

  I was prepared for every single contingency—except the most obvious one, which is that it rains in England sometimes.

  Okay, a lot of times. It rains in England a lot of times.

  And I forgot the damn umbrella in my hotel room.

  I squint up at the street sign on the building next to me and then back down to my phone, trying to get my bearings. Unfortunately, the rain has made it nearly impossible to view the app on my screen, and even more unfortunately, I’m certain I’ve never come across this street in all my planning and preparation, which means I’m definitely lost—although it’s hard to tell, given how London streets rename themselves at bafflingly random intervals.

  And it’s while I’m standing there trying to rub my rain-spattered screen on my equally rain-spattered dress that the silver drizzle decides to become a downpour, darkening the already dim evening and soaking through my dress and hair in a matter of seconds.

  “Shit!” I mutter, cupping a hand over my eyes, trying to peer through the chilling curtain of rain. I can’t even see across the street, much less try to get my bearings.

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  A black cab hisses by, sending a wave of water up and over my only pair of high heels—bought specially for tonight and the plan—and it’s the last straw. Screw getting my bearings. I want to get dry. I start walking, heels squelch-squelching as I go, and in a fit of pique, I yank them off my feet and start jogging barefoot down the slick sidewalk, wondering how my perfectly orchestrated agenda got so off-kilter.

  When my father arranged for me to spend the summer with an old friend of his as a research assistant, I was beyond excited. An entire summer in the English countryside cataloging old books and annotating metadata? Basically paradise for me.

  But my real excitement came when I realized I’d have a night alone in London before I went to Professor Graeme’s house. A single night in one of the best cities in the world to fix a very serious problem of mine:

  I, Zandy Lynch, twenty-two years old and soon-to-be-graduate student, am a virgin. And that is no longer acceptable.

  I’m tired of ending my nights with a skinny margarita and a vibrator. I’m tired of dates that go nowhere, tired of coming home alone, tired of lying in bed with a hollow ache that no amount of battery power can massage away. And it was as I was poring over my acceptance letter for library school that I realized I’ve become that silly old stereotype: the spinster librarian. The virgin nerd.

  Ugh.

  It’s not fair. I never asked to be a virgin at twenty-two! I never asked to be a spinster! All I ever asked for was a cute guy with a willing penis.

  Okay, well, and a college education—preferably graduate level or higher.

  And a good job—preferably in academia or a related field.

  And an extensive shared list of common interests—including, but not limited to, modern literature, premodern literature, postmodern literature, Tolkien marginalia, crossword puzzles, animals, coffee, travel to places where druids sacrificed virgins, and variations of fruit pie.

  So maybe my standards were a little high.

  I started the plan the way I start everything—with a trip to the library. I outlined my objectives, decided on my research methodology, and created a timeline. I devoured books, articles, studies, and anecdotal data about how to get over my hymen-hurdle, and after all that, I came to a very certain conclusion.

  I’d been going about this all wrong.

  Sex is supposed to be spontaneous, unforced, mutually initiated. I can’t plan my way into someone’s pants…but I can plan the perfect environment to facilitate depantsing. So when Dad surprised me with the research vacation, I knew this night in London was my chance to find the perfect depantsing environment.

  Except now it’s raining and I’m lost and barefoot and the plan has quickly unraveled into a wet, chilly disaster.

  Okay, Zandy, focus.

  There was a tube station marked on my phone’s map before the water made it totally impossible to navigate—maybe it’s just past the next cross street? I’ll duck inside, out of the rain, get my phone working again, and think of my next steps. And check my makeup.

  I only have tonight, after all, and I’m not ready to give up, umbrella or not.

  I pick up my jog, my head bent down to shield my eyes from the worst of the rain, the sopping-wet hem of my dress slapping and sticking around my thighs, when I collide with a firm chest and wheeze out an oof. Something resembling a grunt comes from the chest.

  From him.

  Warm hands come up to my elbows to steady me, and I look up into a pale face marked by darkly slashed eyebrows, high cheekbones, and a squared, clean-shaven jaw. His eyes in the rainy night seem like every kind of color, light and dark, brown and blue and green, and they’re framed by the longest, sultriest lashes I’ve ever seen on a man.

  But it’s his mouth that fascinates me—slightly too wide and slightly too thin but hauntingly pretty, with perfectly formed peaks at his upper lip and a tantalizing hint of fullness to his lower one. Rain drips from his cheeks and the longish ends of his dark hair to catch along the sharp edges of his lips and gather in the tempting bow of his philtrum.

  And with a sudden illicit thrill, I realize I want to lick the rainwater off those lips. I want to kiss them until they’re warm and soft under my own. I want to feel the shape of his mouth under mine, murmuring my name—except…

  That perfect, rain-slicked mouth is currently creased in a harsh, unhappy scowl.

  Chapter Two

 
Oliver

  She’s shivering.

  It takes me a moment to notice, as I’m still processing how someone emerged out of this tempest right in front of me. I’m also still processing how this someone in question is a creature made of pale skin, dark hair, and a sinfully red and lush mouth. Like a vampiress straight from a storybook but with the most incongruously innocent eyes I’ve ever seen.

  She’s also young, drenched to the bone, and utterly, utterly inappropriately dressed for a night like this.

  “Why aren’t you wearing a coat?” I demand over the roar of the rain, and her gaze blinks up at me—which is when I realize she’s been staring at my mouth. A kick of heat goes straight to my cock.

  I ignore it.

  “And why are you barefoot?”

  Her eyes flick back to my frowning mouth, and her own mouth parts ever so slightly, as if my bad-tempered scowl fascinates her. Her tongue darts over her lower lip, licking away a bead of rainwater that settled over her fire-engine-red lipstick, and I find I want her to do it again. And again. And again.

  I could watch her licking rain off her lips for the rest of my life.

  “I’m looking for the Goose and Gander,” she finally offers. It’s hard to hear her over the rain, and yet even with the whoosh and churr of the torrent, I can hear her accent. Broad and wide and a little flat, American television style.

  I know where the Goose and Gander is. I just came from there, actually, having endured a meal deconstructed into various mason jars and served on a wooden plank for the sake of seeing some old friends. But I’d drawn the line at overpriced cocktails decanted into chemistry beakers and opted to go back to my hotel instead.

  Which is where I want to be—in my dry bed, with dry clothes and dry blankets and a dry book—not in the drenching rain with a barefoot little American. No matter how red her lips are. Or how enticingly her wet dress clings to her frame.

  I scowl again.

  “It’s back that way,” I say, pointing behind me. “Just around the corner.”

  “What?” she asks, clearly unable to hear me.

  “It’s back that— Oh, fuck it,” I mutter, taking her by the elbow and yanking her into the deep doorway of a closed shop. The absence of the rain is almost as shocking as the presence of it, although it still rushes down next to us in a dull, silver roar.

  “It’s just past the corner there,” I say again, and in the sheltered cove of the doorway, she can finally hear my words. “Left at the lights, then just a street down.”

  “Oh, good,” she says, looking genuinely pleased. And also genuinely cold. Goosebumps pebble her bare arms and chest, and I make a valiant effort not to notice her nipples bunched tight under her dress.

  A very valiant effort.

  I fail, of course.

  Her teeth chatter as she says, “Th-Thank you! My phone wouldn’t work in the rain, and I thought I memorized the way, but it all looked different once I actually got here, and then the rain made it so hard to see—” Her own shivers break apart her words, and for some reason this makes me unaccountably annoyed.

  “Here,” I say gruffly, shrugging out of my jacket and putting it over her shoulders. She’s flapping a hand in protest, but her hand stills as soon as the dry, warm interior of the jacket touches her shoulders. She practically folds herself into the jacket then, doing this thing where she rubs her cheek against the collar, and I know it’s to get dry—I know that—but fuck if it doesn’t look like she’s nuzzling into it. Like a kitten against the warm palm of its owner.

  “Thank you,” says the girl, her eyes wide pools of deep blue. I notice with a strange curl of satisfaction that she’s not shivering as hard now.

  “Why don’t you have a jacket?” I demand again, knowing I sound surly but refusing to care. Everyone else in my life has written me off as a miserable bastard and they ignore me as such—this girl might as well learn too.

  At that, her mouth forms into a defensive little moue. “It’s June,” she says. “I shouldn’t need a jacket in June.”

  I stare at her like she’s insane, which maybe she is.

  “And the bare feet?”

  “My feet got wet,” she says, as if this is an entirely adequate explanation. “I didn’t like it.”

  “You realize they’ve gotten even wetter without shoes.”

  “It’s better this way,” she insists, waving her shoes at me. Once I see them, I have to agree. I don’t see how anyone could walk in those across the width of the shoe shop, much less along slippery, uneven pavement.

  “I hope whoever you’re meeting sends you home in a taxi,” I mutter.

  “Oh, I’m not meeting anyone,” she says.

  “What?”

  She reaches up to brush a wet strand of hair off her cheek, but I beat her to it. I don’t know why, but it’s instinctive, like breathing, like blinking. Touching her.

  My fingertips linger on her cheek after I brush the hair aside, and she stares up at me with something too close to trust. I drop my hand.

  “I only have one night in London,” she says, all that trust and big-eyed nuzzling replaced by something matter-of-fact and utterly practical. “And I spent days researching where to go for a drink tonight. It had to be within walking distance of my hotel, it had to have several five-star reviews on multiple restaurant rating sites, and it had to be established enough to have regulars but new enough to be trendy. The Goose and Gander met all of those requirements.”

  Well, that’s where research will get you. An obnoxious hipster cave of Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood.

  “And why that specific criteria?” I ask, but I’m already peering back out into the rain, wondering if it’s let up enough that I can send this crazy, shivering girl on her way. Get back to my night. My night in a dry bed with my book, alone.

  Somehow it doesn’t sound as appetizing as it did just a few minutes ago.

  “Oh,” she chirps, like she’s pleased I asked. “I wanted to find a man to sleep with.”

  It takes a moment for her words to unfold in my brain, and I’m still staring at the rain when her meaning becomes clear. An unpleasant bolt of something hits me with a muffled thud.

  My head swivels slowly back so I can look at her. “Excuse me?”

  Her face is animated now, all red lips and high brows and dark lashes in the shadowed, rainy night. “Well, I have a plan, and I think it’s a very good plan, but unfortunately my circumstances are narrowed to this one night in particular—”

  “A plan.”

  She nods, that pleased look again, like I’m her star pupil.

  Fuck that. I’m the professor here, and I have the sudden urge to tell her so. To press her against the wall and put my lips to her ear and murmur all the ways she’ll respect my authority and experience.

  My cock responds to the image, straining full and heavy at the thought of touching her. Teaching her. Punishing her.

  “You see,” she says, totally oblivious to the deviant lust pounding through me, “I really need a man with a willing penis—or I suppose I should say a willing man with a penis, but when I say it like that, it sounds very dismissive of non— You’re scowling again.”

  She’s right. “So what you’re saying is that you have a plan to go to a place you’ve never been, in a city you’ve never visited, to find a man you’ve never met to fuck you?” My voice is frigid, bordering on cruel, and I see her blanch.

  “That’s very judgmental,” she scolds, but I’m not to be scolded. Not right now, because I do the scolding, I make the rules, and the sooner she learns that—

  Wait, no, what am I thinking? She’s not going to learn anything from me. I’m not going to teach her anything. I’m not even going to spend another ten minutes with this deranged, bedraggled girl.

  Even if she has the kind of long, thick hair that begs to be wrapped around a fist. Even if she has a rain-chilled body just crying to be loved warm again.

  Even if she has the kind of plush red lips designed to drive men
mad.

  But I’ve been down this road before, and I know what lies at the other end of it. Bitter memories and a life left in pieces.

  Never again.

  “I’m judgmental because it’s an idiotic idea,” I reply in a sharp voice. “Do you have any idea how unsafe that is? How foolish?”

  Even in the dark, I see how heat glints in her eyes, and she sticks a finger in my chest as if she’s about to deliver me a scathing lecture. As she does, her arm leaves the warm confines of my jacket and reveals a delicate wrist circled with a thin band of leather.

  A watch.

  I don’t know why that’s the thing that does it, but something shears off inside my mind, sending my control bumping and careening off the tracks.

  “Where’s your hotel?” I ask before she can start in on whatever she was about to say.

  Her brows pull together and her mouth closes. Opens again. “Why?” she asks suspiciously.

  “Because I’m taking you back there.”

  “Why?” she asks, genuinely confused now.

  “Because there’s no way in hell I’m letting you prance off to a bar to find some stranger to fuck you,” I say. And I give her a brief once-over, my eyes tracing where the fabric of her dress clings to her breasts and her soft belly and her achingly shaped hips. There are no secrets through that wet fabric, and those shockingly abundant curves are on clear display for anyone with eyes. For the undoubtedly many willing penises back at the pub.

  The thought makes my chest tighten with something uncivilized and jealous.