Misadventures with a Professor Read online

  “Especially not looking like that,” I add.

  Her cheeks flush dark enough that it’s visible even in the night shadows, and I realize too late she thinks I’m mocking her, not warning her.

  Fine. So be it. If that’s what it takes to save her from the greedy arseholes at the Goose and Gander, then I’ll pay the price. “What hotel?” I repeat.

  She worries her bottom lip between her teeth, and that simple act has my erection throbbing against the damp fabric of my trousers, begging to be let free, begging out to play. And oh, how it could play along the soft lines of her mouth and over the wet pink of her tongue. How rude and rough it would look against the overflowing handfuls of her tits…

  “The Douglass,” she says finally.

  “I’m staying at the Douglass too,” I say before I can stop myself, and then horror curls through my chest.

  She’s too close.

  Too real.

  Too…possible.

  Would it be so bad? a tiny voice whispers in my mind. Just one night with a girl you’ll never see again?

  Yes, goddammit. Yes, it would.

  Meanwhile, the girl seems to be having some sort of insight. Some sort of wild epiphany. “You,” she says slowly.

  “What?”

  “You!” Her entire face lights up. “You could be the one!”

  I stare at her. “You’re joking.”

  She’s too excited to catch on to the rhetorical nature of my statement, already bouncing on the balls of her feet. She’s so short that even on her tiptoes, the top of her head barely clears my chin. “I’m not joking! It’s perfect, don’t you see? We’re even staying at the same hotel! You can have sex with me and then just go right back to your room!” She beams up at me, as if expecting some kind of approbation for working out this problem of hers.

  “You cannot be serious,” I say in something very close to a stammer, which pisses me off. I’m not uncertain, I know how I feel about everything always, and I know how I feel about this: the girl is mad and I’m leaving.

  “I am serious,” she says, brow furrowed, as if puzzled as to why that would even occur to me. “I would just like to have sex with someone tonight, and you’re handsome and you’re here.”

  And that’s when I realize she’s not mad. She’s something much, much worse—she’s innocent. And willing.

  I turn to go, and she catches my arm, her little watch flashing in the shimmering glow of the streetlights. A stupid little watch that I bet she puts on every morning so she won’t be late for whatever burlesque antics she has devised for that day. I bet she’s on time for everything. I bet she’s early to every class or meeting or shift, sitting with a straight back and with a pencil caught between her teeth, a spare pencil speared through a bun of soft, glossy hair…

  Fuck.

  I pull free of her arm. “Keep the jacket,” I mutter, ducking back into the rain and away from this creature who seems to be built out of my most shameful temptations, every inch of me protesting at the distance between us, at pulling away from her.

  But there’s no other way. For the sake of her soul and mine, I should stay far away from her and her little watch and her wanton body with its big, soft curves and needy nipples.

  The chilly rain sluicing down is a relief, soaking me straight through without my jacket and quelling the heat inside my blood just enough so I can think again. So I can remember the life I built, free of temptation, free of chaos, free of sin.

  I take a deep, rainy breath. It’s going to be okay. I was tested and came up with full marks. And now to my reward, which is a chaos-free night. Alone.

  Fuck, what cold comfort. Comfort even colder than the rain soaking me through.

  But the cost of giving in to my urges would make my life even colder still.

  “You’re not married, are you?” a voice comes from beside me.

  I look over at the girl following me. She peers closely at me through the rain. “Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

  “I’m not married, and I’m not seeing anyone. Not that it matters.”

  I try to walk faster, shoving my hands in my pockets and ducking my head from the rain, but she keeps up, nearly jogging now. My jacket hangs open enough that I can see what effect jogging has on the glistening rounds of her breasts peeking up over her bodice.

  Christ.

  “I’m not either,” she says. “Married or dating, that is.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you think I’m pretty enough to have sex with?” she says, her voice growing louder as a bus sloshes by.

  “What?”

  “I mean, if you’re not attracted to me, I totally understand.” She hops over a puddle in an expedient, unself-conscious move that almost makes me smile.

  “Most men aren’t attracted to me. That’s why I had to come all the way to London to…” She trails off, clutching the jacket tighter around her. “Anyway,” she continues in a defeated voice. “I’d understand if you weren’t.”

  The lonely note in her voice draws me up short, even though the safety of our hotel shimmers mirage-sweet just across the road.

  I turn to her in the rain. “You think I’m not attracted to you?”

  “Well, most guys—”

  “I’m not most guys,” I growl, and her lower lip goes between her teeth again. But not in fear like it should.

  In interest. In desire.

  She’s too innocent by far.

  “You think men don’t want you?” I ask in a low voice, taking a step forward. She watches me with an eager trepidation, and it makes me harder than I thought possible. “Everything about your body reminds a man of fucking. Your tits, your mouth, those ridiculous hips. Even those big blue eyes of yours make a man wonder what they’d look like peering up at him with you on your knees. Looking at him from over your shoulder as he bends you over his desk.” I stop abruptly, my words getting too personal, too tailored to my own fucked-up needs.

  She releases that lower lip, and I’m nearly undone by how open she looks, how vulnerable. I want to sweep her into my arms and cover all that vulnerability with my body—protect her from the world even as I refuse to protect her from myself.

  Get a fucking grip, Oliver.

  This can’t happen.

  But what if it could? I won’t ever have to see this girl again. She’s not my student.

  She’s not Rosie, the little voice reminds me. She can’t hurt you.

  “Well, then it’s simple,” the girl says, as if she can read my thoughts. “If you’re attracted to my body and you’re unattached—”

  “It’s complicated,” I say, pushing past her to splash my way to the hotel. She has no idea how complicated.

  She has no idea how wrong.

  Like before, she follows me. “Please. I promise I’m not crazy. I’m just tired of—” She stops, seems to change her words. “Tired of not having sex. Please.”

  “It’s for your own good,” I mutter, even though my entire body is swirling with the need to give her what’s actually for her own good, which is her over my lap, legs kicking adorably, as I redden her ass with my palm.

  I’m so hard now. Hard enough that it must be obvious. Hard enough to be past caring. Hard enough that the minute I slip inside my hotel room, I’m going to have a hand braced on the door while my other fists my cock.

  “How do you know what’s for my own good?” the girl asks, and it’s the way she asks that makes my steps falter. She doesn’t demand it like most women would, and she doesn’t deny that I might. That I might know what’s for her own good and that I might know it well enough to tell her.

  No.

  No.

  “We’re not doing this,” I tell her as we reach the doors of the Douglass, and I recognize how ridiculous it is that I’m holding the door open for this woman even as I’m trying to push her away. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  She steps inside, and it’s so bright that my eyes take a moment to adjust. When they d
o, I see that she’s shoving my jacket at me.

  “Here. Thank you for this, and take it back. And for the record, I don’t trust you, and why should I? I’m a grown woman and I don’t know you—and also I’ve done a lot of research about sex, so I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about.”

  She’s gesturing now, the hand still clutching her shoes waving them around, but I’m not watching the shoes, I’m watching her—the almost embarrassingly generous curves of her. Not embarrassing because of the generosity but because of the near-wantonness of them. The illicit thoughts those curves conjure even fully clothed as she is.

  Of course, fully clothed is a misleading term at the moment, because yes, that little waist and those lavish tits and hips are covered with fabric, but the wet dress clings to every contour and swerve of her body. I can even make out the gentle dip of her navel, the place where her thighs meet her body. The sweet bullets of her nipples.

  Even the rest of her body is wanton: the long arch of her neck, still slicked with rain, the exposed square of her shoulders, the long wet hair that waves in dark webs down her back and over the elegant line of her collarbone.

  Even her innocent anger feels tempting. Even the cocoon of inexperience around her drives me crazy.

  Even that goddamn watch is irresistible.

  I take my jacket and start walking to the lift. I have to put some space between us or my skin’s going to catch on fire.

  “Please?” she asks one last time. “Please?”

  “No.” I’m almost to the lift doors now, I’m almost safe.

  Or rather, she’s almost safe.

  “Then I’m going to the Goose and Gander,” she says, frustrated. “Or anywhere. But I’m not giving up, not when I only have one night here.”

  I’ve already hit the button for the lift by the time she’s uttered the words, but it’s not too late to spin around and glare at her. “What did you just say?” I ask in a low voice.

  She’s already turning around, and I realize with some mixture of fury, horror, and lust that she means it. She’s going to go back out into that gale. To find another man.

  My hand finds her elbow, and I pull her into me with a growl. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  She gives me a glare as turbulently aroused as my own, pressing her wet curves against me in something between a challenge and a request.

  “What exactly are you going to do about it?” she dares.

  My cock is a hot bar of steel between us, fussing at the seam of my trousers, and I can’t help but press it into her belly. And my mouth is dry, so fucking dry, with wanting her. “Girls who disobey get punished,” I warn.

  “By you?”

  “By me.”

  Suddenly, I find that I’m not holding her to me so much as she’s holding herself to me, her high heels dropping to the floor in a dull clatter as her fingers find the flats of my chest under my thin sweater.

  “Punishing bad girls… Is this you being kinky or a serial killer?” she asks, that red mouth curved in what could only be called impertinence.

  I can barely breathe. And I can’t even fathom saying the word kinky like she’s just said it, like she would say tall or English. Like it’s nothing. Like it’s no big deal.

  Like she might want it.

  All I choke out is a husky, “I’m not a killer.”

  She has no reason to believe me, no reason to believe that I’m safe, which is exactly why I didn’t want her trawling for strange men in the middle of London.

  And all thoughts sizzle and melt away in a searing instant because she’s hooked her arms behind my neck and pulled herself up to my mouth.

  Because she’s kissing me with red, rain-spattered lips.

  And I am done for.

  Chapter Three

  Zandy

  He tastes like mint.

  Not toothpaste mint, but fresh mint, straight from the garden, herbal and with the tiniest bit of cold sting. I moan the minute I taste it, the minute our tongues slide together, and his answering moan has me throwing all lingering doubts onto the floor along with my dumb shoes.

  I don’t care that I don’t know him. I don’t care that he’s not the plan. I want it to be him. Him with his testy refusals. Him with his dark threats. Him with those hypnotic eyes that are every color and that mouth shaped somewhere between elegance and cruelty.

  His hands are spread big and possessive on my back now, keeping me so tight against him that I can feel every flat, hard plane of his chest and stomach. I can feel the heavy ridge in his pants that tells me how much he meant his words from earlier in the rain.

  Everything about your body reminds a man of fucking.

  It’s the first time I’ve ever thought of my body that way—of sexy instead of heavy, of desirable instead of softly messy. And I like it. I like how his eyes burned over my curves, as if he were already planning things that would take him straight to hell.

  I want it to be him.

  And almost like he reads my mind, he turns us and starts walking me backward into the elevator, pausing only to duck down and grab my shoes. Once we go through the elevator doors, he reaches for my thighs and lifts me up as if I weigh nothing, still kissing me with those soft, minty lips all the while.

  Well, not kiss, really. Devour is more like it, as if he hasn’t kissed a woman in years—as if he hasn’t even touched anyone in years. He seems that hungry for it. But new to sex as I am, I know you don’t kiss like him without vast experience, so surely he’s not that hard up for it? Surely someone like him, handsome and mysterious and captivating, has someone in his bed every night?

  Funny how the observation makes me jealous, given that I don’t even know him. I don’t even know his name. But even as I’m jealous of all the experience belied by his capable handling of me, I’m also grateful for it.

  Grateful for the easy, knowledgeable way his hands work my body, pinning me between his leanly muscled frame and the wall of the elevator.

  Grateful for the expert way he matches our bodies together, sliding me so that my lace-covered pussy grinds over the thick part of him that throbs for me.

  Grateful for the smooth way he deepens our kiss, exploring my mouth, biting at my lips and my jaw, and leaving me a wriggling, wet mess.

  “Which floor?” he growls into my mouth.

  “Wh-What?”

  “We’re doing this in your room,” he says, and it was always my plan to bring someone to my room for safety reasons, so I tell him.

  “Nine.”

  He slams a fist against the wall of buttons, and then he’s back to plundering my mouth, not so much coaxing me open as taking what he wants, and God, it’s like nothing I ever could have dreamed. I’ve known lust myself. I’ve known what it feels like to have my body aching with the need for friction and fullness, but I’ve never, ever imagined this. The rush of power and pure biological frenzy of feeling someone else’s lust. The way it threads through my own desire like a hot copper wire. The way it makes me want more, more, more.

  And more.

  I have almost no control over myself in this moment, grinding my needy core against him, rubbing my breasts against his chest, yanking everywhere at his sweater and his firm arms and shoulders and at the wet lengths of his hair—too short to be long but too long to be anything other than unkempt.

  He lets me pluck and paw at him, and it seems to drive him madder and madder—his kisses growing more savage, his grip more merciless, until the elevator doors open and he drops me to my feet, yanking me into the hallway before I can find my balance.

  “Nine thirteen,” I manage, fumbling with my purse for my phone as I’m pulled down the hallway and then surfacing with it right before I’m crushed against my door and kissed within an inch of my life.

  “Take a picture of me,” he says breathlessly against my lips.

  “I— What?”

  He pulls back just enough so I can see he’s serious. Those blue-green-brown eyes swirl with something stormy and pain
ed. “Take a picture of me and send it to someone you trust.” And then he rattles off a string of numbers. His birthday.

  “Why?” I ask again, even though I suspect why.

  “Surely,” he says, raising one warm hand to grip my jaw and hold me close for another hard kiss, “with all your research, you know why.”

  “So someone knows I’m with you.”

  “So you’ll be safe,” he corrects gently, nipping at my neck and then meeting my gaze. “I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for being so careless with yourself.”

  I laugh—half from his bossy words and half from the new flicker of his tongue along the shell of my ear. “My body is my own to be careless with.”

  “Not tonight, it isn’t,” he whispers. “Tonight it’s mine.”

  I text his picture to a friend of mine, along with his birthday and name—Oliver Markham—and then I use the hotel app on my phone to unlock the door.

  “What’s your name?” he asks as we kiss our way into the room. I left a light on when I went out earlier, so I reach to turn it off because sex happens in the dark, I know that much, but he catches my wrist before I can do it. “Lights stay on,” he rasps. “And I want your name. I told you mine.”

  That he did, and hell if Oliver Markham doesn’t sound so fancy and English-y that I can hardly stand it. Suddenly I’m embarrassed of my own name, which seems to make me all the younger than the ten years I now know separate us.

  “Amanda,” I say, telling him my real name. No one calls me that—I’ve been Zandy since basically the moment I was born—but I file taxes as Amanda, and it does sound a lot more grown-up. Like the kind of name an Oliver would be paired with.

  Oliver and Amanda sounds perfect.

  Oliver and Zandy sounds like a joke.

  “Amanda,” he murmurs as his hands cup my face, his thumbs tracing soft lines along the rises of my cheekbones. “What do you want tonight?”

  “I want you to have sex with me.”

  And that’s all he needs.

  His hands drop to my skirt, and they ruck up the wet fabric easily, hitching it all to my waist, and then he cups my pussy with one elegant hand. “You need to be fucked here? Hmm?”