by Cate Corvin
An emotion I’d thought I’d pushed aside years ago reared its ugly head and breached the surface: jealousy.
I’d always told myself there was no point in being jealous of what I didn’t have and couldn’t be; all you could really do was make the most of what you had and be happy with it.
But even the twisted side of me that reveled in the attention of being the Pet climbed back into her well and silently pulled the cover over it.
If Vincent had been married to that, then the word ‘beautiful’ no longer held any real meaning. It was just a slush of consonants and syllables, judiciously applied to make the mouse under his heel more pliable.
I felt like an utter fool for thinking for one second that maybe, just maybe, someone had actually meant it.
I was only ever easy meat for them. Easy to control, easy to blackmail, easy to manipulate. I was the meat that they’d devour and leave empty inside while they went to their homes and parties filled with women who belonged at their level, who were polished and perfect and nothing like a broke scholarship student.
Sean said something to Rachelle, but I couldn’t hear it over the roaring in my ears. Disgust rose in me that I’d been breathless at all over Vincent’s call, that I’d thought it might be remotely enjoyable to him that I’d tried.
Suddenly the thought of Monday afternoon made me want to throw up.
Rachelle’s voice had risen back to normal levels with the departure of Alyssa, and she was answering Sean. I took a deep breath and forced myself out the downward spiral of my thoughts. “I don’t know. They said she smashed up half the stuff in his office when he broke it off. He just manhandled her out while she was trying to scratch his face up. It was a whole big thing, they called the cops and everything.”
I flipped to a new, empty page in my notebook just to do something with my hands.
“She isn’t my type anyways,” Sean said. “Too snooty. You can tell just by looking at her that she thinks she shits roses. She’s probably a gold-digger like all the rest.”
Rachelle snorted into her mocha and I laid my pen down. The urge to write had left me.
What would they think if they knew what I was doing? Would Sean think I was a gold-digger who’d gotten myself into the situation? After all, before the blackmail, I’d been perfectly willing to fuck Rhett, a professor with a loaded family.
My second reaction was to bristle at what Sean said. There was a distinct aroma of white knight in the air.
He glanced at me when he said it, and I turned my gaze back down to my notebook.
So maybe Monday wasn’t worth looking forward to.
But that was okay. All they’d get from me was what they asked, and no more.
Sunday night I was curled up in my bed when a text lit up the room.
I reached for the phone with only the slightest tremble in my hands. There was no thrill of excitement, no twist of anticipation, just a deadened resignation.
The Dean of Students wanted something from his Pet. Funny. Who cared about the mouse when you’d once had Aphrodite?
Vincent: A picture, Pet
Despite myself, I felt that familiar coil of heat when I went to obey my owner’s command. Maybe it was because I could imagine those words spoken in that gravelly voice all too easily, or that it practically felt like he was looming over my shoulder even through a few words.
I pulled down my underwear and snapped a photo, sent it. There was no point in saying anything else. This wasn’t a flirtation. There could be no game on an uneven playing field.
Vincent: You’re so gorgeous, I can’t wait to eat you.
The coil became a fire. Heat spread through me and I basked in the glow of being wanted, even if it was all fake.
Jane: Thank you, sir
Several bubbles popped up as Vincent typed something, then abruptly disappeared. It happened again, and I flopped back on my pillow, gazing at the screen with confusion and apprehension.
Vincent: Tell me one thing you want, Jane. Anything at all
Now the confusion had really taken over. What did he care? The only business he had with me was to eat the mouse and let me skitter away when it was over without losing everything I had.
I thought about it for several minutes, and finally typed out my reply.
I could’ve told him I wanted the moon or a Ferrari or to be as beautiful as Aphrodite, but the things I really, truly wanted I could count on one hand, and I didn’t have it in me to be flippant. Besides, if there was one person I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, wasn’t going to ask me that question without expecting a serious answer, it was the Dean.
And he’d called me Jane, not Pet. He was asking me.
Jane: If I could have anything, I’d want my mother to be okay
He didn’t reply, even though I waited for another fifteen minutes.
I went to sleep wondering if he regretted asking, if my answer had made me too real to him. An actual human being with wants and desires and fears.
Not just a Pet.
Chapter Eleven
Dread filled me when I walked to Bourdillon on Monday morning, but by the time I reached the doors, it’d become a hard resolution.
Maybe Vincent regretted asking me that question, but I didn’t regret answering it honestly. Perhaps he’d see that I was a real person, that my family depended on this, and choose another Pet to torment.
Morning classes flashed by like the clocks were moving at hyper speed. When the chimes filled the halls, I glanced at the empty block on my schedule that would usually be reserved for studies and was now occupied by Vincent.
I slipped down the halls to his office, finding them all empty. Few of the Bourdillon students had remained on campus for the empty block, choosing to do their studying downtown in the coffee shops and vegan eateries, which meant no one would notice if I was in the Dean’s office.
I hesitated outside the doors, my fist raised to knock but not touching the wood. I steeled myself and forced a polite rat-a-tat that was barely audible.
“Come in.” A shiver went down my spine at the sound of his rough voice, and I opened the door and slipped inside, closing it behind me.
“Lock it.” Vincent Thayer sat behind his desk. This time there were no damning glossy photos spread across it like a crime scene. He took me in from head to toe, including the frayed hem of my dress. I wasn’t entirely sure frayed hems were even permitted inside Bourdillon, but if not, I’d be the first one to wear them with pride.
He patted the desk in front of him. I locked the door behind me, dropped my bag by the door, and came over obediently to perch on his desk, keeping my knees pressed together. His body heat touched me from inches away, and I tried without success to push away that familiar tingle of want.
I’d half-expected to be mauled or manhandled open, but Vincent managed to surprise me. “Tell me about your life, Jane.” His brown eyes were warm like chocolate, even with the rest of his patrician face as hard as ever, but he looked away at a file he had open on his desk. A quick glance at the name told me it wasn’t myself. “What goes on in that head of yours?”
I was momentarily at a loss for words. What could he want to know about me that he didn’t already have access to in the school’s files?
“Well…” I trailed off, very aware that only a few days ago I’d been annoyed with Sean for doing that exact thing, and decided honesty was the best policy. Fuck it. He already had me by the metaphorical balls. There wasn’t much else he could do short of kicking me out.
“I hate being the Pet. I hate being meat for you all to chew up and throw away. I’ve never been that kind of girl and I never will be. Honestly, no matter how much I’ve thought about it, I can’t fathom what was possibly good about it for the last poor girl you all used up and discarded, and I wonder how much her life sucks now because you did.”
Vincent’s pen stopped moving. He looked up at me without a single hint of emotion marring that beautiful, expressionless face.
I’d
probably put my foot in my mouth for good now.
“Her life doesn’t ‘suck’ at all.” He used slang like it was a foreign language to him. “She was quite pleased by the settlement we came to when her time was done, and now she’s the CEO of her own company, along with a handsome, vanilla husband and three adorable rugrats to show for it.”
It was my turn to stare back at him. “And you think you can credit that to yourself?”
A faint smile broke through his veneer. “Not at all. But being our Pet did nothing damaging to her. She enjoyed every second of it and walked away with the means to put her mark on this world.”
“You paid her.” My mouth was dry as cotton when I realized what he’d meant by settlement. She’d been the Pet, and she’d walked out with a fat stack of cash in the end.
“We settled on a reasonable agreement to ensure she’d be taken care of.”
“Like a hooker.”
He laid his pen down and steepled his fingers. “She had a whole future ahead of her and needed the capital to accomplish it. We made sure she’d have it.”
“Is that what this is going to be?” I waved at the empty air between us, my fingers shaking with anger. “I’m going to send videos and pictures of every part of myself, and fuck you all, and you’re going to pat me on my head and send me away with money for the privilege?”
For once I no longer felt like a mouse in his presence, or at the very least, I felt like a mouse that’d grown long fangs and sharp claws that it wanted to use.
“If money is what you want.” How could he look at me so calmly when I wanted to rage?
“Did she agree to this, or did you blackmail her into it, too?”
The Dean had the audacity to smile. His plush lips, surrounded by that salt-and-pepper stubble, were very distracting. I’d imagined them against my skin too many times to count. “Is it the method that bothers you? I know it’s not the result.”
I made sure my knees were still together. Somehow being angry with him just made me want him more, like he had a direct line to the primal urges that drove all human beings and knew how to tug on it. “What makes you think I like this result? I have no choice.”
Vincent stood up and leaned over me, firmly planting his palms on the desk on either side of my hips. My lungs slowed to a standstill while my heart picked up the tempo to a gallop.
“Because your eyes glitter when you strip for me,” he said, the genteel tones becoming the growl I loved so much. “Your skin flushes, here…” He raised one hand, stroked the column of my throat and moved down to my collarbone. “And here. You make the most beautiful music when you pant, and it only rises when you come.”
I was completely frozen in his thrall. None of those things I could explain away or lie about. Nobody was that good of an actress.
“However much you hate that sword hanging over your head, you love belonging to us and having all our attention to yourself.”
True. No matter how I’d gotten there, however inexplicably, being the Pet felt like having them wrapped around my finger. For once and the only time in my life, having three men who I was magnetically, powerlessly attracted to brought down by me.
That power was a heady feeling, and I’d let it carry me away.
“Why me? You couldn’t know any of that.” I could barely get the words out, afraid of what I would hear next.
Vincent leaned in, only inches away. Close enough to kiss, if I wanted.
“You learn the look,” he said. “The look of a woman who shrinks in on herself when she should be standing up tall, who doesn’t meet your eyes without looking away like she’s frightened by the contact. Those are the marks of prey, Jane. Pets.”
“So all I had to do was stand up straight?” I asked bitterly.
“You stand taller now, don’t you?” His lips moved against my ear. The brush of his beard against my cheek made me shiver. “You walk with sway in your step, you have awareness. You’ve woken up, Pet.”
Only days ago, I’d felt that awareness down to my bones, but it’d cooled in the face of knowing what he used to have and knowing I was a sad runner-up in that competition. Barely a consolation prize.
I changed tack swiftly, hanging on one of the worries that had sprouted up overnight. “Perhaps I enjoyed some of it, but I have no interest in getting involved in whatever trouble you’re going to bring.”
“Any trouble will stay between us.” Vincent’s tongue traced my earlobe and I held back a gasp.
One of my fears that had sprouted and flourished overnight was that Alyssa Pelletier wasn’t in town by sheer coincidence. It was because she was still seeing Vincent.
And even if I could convince myself that being the Pet wasn’t so terrible, that I took from them as much as they took from me, I refused to be the other woman. Knowing that he might have the redheaded beauty spread across his bed at home threw ice water over any heat I might’ve felt for a video call from him. No matter what they made me do, I wasn’t going to be anyone’s consolation prize.
“I’m not talking about trouble with this. I know you don’t care enough about me for my life to matter to you. But if you’re still seeing Alyssa Pelletier, I want nothing to do with you. I’m not some side piece for you to play with while you go home to fuck someone else. I might be the Pet, but I refuse to sleep with a man who's getting it elsewhere.”
Vincent became a statue of immovable muscle, still poised over me and trapping me on his desk. When he growled again, none of the sex appeal had gone, but there was a tone of danger in it. I was walking on a layer of very thin ice right now. “What does Alyssa Pelletier have to do with anything?”
He said her name like a dirty word, disgust coloring his tone. My irritation became inexplicable relief, because no man said the name of the woman he was sleeping with like that.
Still, I was pushing this to the bitter end, because I wanted answers and I deserved them if I was going to remain in this situation for any longer.
“She was in Mulholland this weekend. If she’s sleeping with you too, then I’m done with this.”
He abruptly got up, turning his back on me. I thought I heard several muttered swear words. “You’re sure of this?”
“That she was in Mulholland? I’m sure. I saw her myself.”
Vincent spun around to face me, his brown eyes snapping with fury. Seeing an emotion besides dispassionate, cool sternness on him was a little shocking. “I have absolutely nothing to do with that heinous bitch.”
For once, I was positive that I finally held the upper hand in the uneven divide between us. Whoever Alyssa was to Vincent, he clearly hated her with a venomous rage, and he’d assured me of the absolute nothingness between them. Why would he have bothered if he didn’t care about how I felt?
“I just want to be clear.” My hands clenched, nails digging into my palms. “As long as I’m the Pet, you touch only me. No other women or I’m out. I don’t care what you’ll do to me.”
His lips tightened as he took a step forward. “Are you setting ground rules now, Jane?”
“I am.” I tilted my chin up, refusing to look away. He wanted eye contact? He’d get eye contact.
A quick smirk flashed across his features, there and gone like it’d never existed. He prowled forward, only stopping when he just touched my knees. “There weren’t other women when you came along, Pet. There aren't any now. Only you.”
He kept my gaze, trapping me like a snake. I couldn’t look away now if I wanted to, not now that it was possible to pick out the tiny flecks of gold nestled in the brown of his eyes or the smooth curve of his lower lip.
The anger I’d stored up inside myself cooled and evaporated, but there was still a hint of trepidation. He stopped when he was three inches from my nose, his warm gaze flicking down to my lips, but as much as I wanted to taste him for myself, there were some parts of me I wasn’t going to give away unless the other person meant it.
I turned my head a fraction to the side, refusing the kiss.
<
br /> Vincent’s eyes darkened, but that wasn’t going to stop him from putting his mark on me. He gripped my chin, forcing me to look at him again before he released me. Instead, he kissed my cheekbone, worked his way down my jaw, the soft-scratchy feeling of his beard on my skin every bit as delicious as I’d hoped it would be.
“No other women, Pet. You don’t get to turn away; every part of you belongs to me.” He nipped my earlobe, grazed his teeth over my neck and sucked the tender skin there, then gripped my jaw and claimed my mouth.
Heat flared to life inside me, a volcanic explosion that burst through my nerves and filled my limbs with tingling. As much as I wanted to push him away and keep what weak upper hand I had, the feeling of those full lips roaming over me made it impossible. My hands rose of their own accord and ran through his hair, down his neck.
Vincent reached down and gripped the frayed hem of my dress, pushing it up over my thighs. I let out a surprised gasp when he picked me up with one arm around my back, sliding the rest of it out from under me with a rough groan.
He settled me back on the desk, the polished wood cool against my bare skin, and resumed peeling it away inch by inch. I shrugged it off when he reached my shoulders, revealing the entirety of my lacy burgundy bra and panties.
I didn’t have time to be embarrassed by my total lack of finesse or sophistication. Vincent looked at me like I was dessert, a tasty morsel he was going to devour whole, and he clearly didn’t a single fuck about secondhand clothes or cheap, scratchy lace.
“This color suits you.” His thumbs trailed over the straps of my bra down to the cups, just barely skimming against my skin. “I’d like to see you in it more often.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered automatically, feeling breathless this close to him and so exposed.
His hand slid around my back and expertly unsnapped the bra with one hand. I swallowed hard when he slid the straps over my shoulders and arms until I was just clutching the rest of it against my chest.