Living the Dream

by Lyla Payne

  “Oh my god, you scared me to death.” My roommate glares at me, sucking in deep breaths as all the emotions of the past hour bubble out of me in giggles.

  “I’m sorry, but all I did was come home. It wasn’t on purpose.”

  Blair calms down, her glare turning into her more typical probing curiosity. “Did you have sex?”

  The perceptive question hits me like a barb, targeting all the insecurities I’ve kept at bay on the drive home and coaxing them toward the surface. I battle them with a grimace. “No. I did not have sex.”

  “Your hair’s all mussed and you’re dressed like someone who went out to have sex. Plus you’re all splotchy looking, the way redheads get when they’re excited or mad.”

  “Maybe I’m mad.”

  She purses her lips, watching me sink onto the edge of my bed and pull the covers over my legs without changing clothes or taking off my makeup. “What happened?”

  It all spills out—the horrid dinner with my brothers, the excitement over making my own decisions, the rash choice to go seduce Sebastian. That part makes her eyes go wide and she scoots to the edge of the bed, rapt. Her expression changes to shock strong enough to satisfy me when I get to the part of the tale that includes Sebastian sending me away and insisting he’s not interested after stripping me half naked.

  “You know that’s bullshit. I see you naked and I can barely restrain myself.”

  I roll my eyes. “Thanks.”

  “Seriously, what do you think is going through his devious little mind? Because it’s something.”

  “I don’t know. He said something about not wanting to sleep with me because I feel like I have to, but I don’t know. He doesn’t believe I’d do that, I don’t think. There’s no ultimatum and it’s not part of our agreement.”

  She shakes her head, reaching up to yank out her askew ponytail and then redoing it. “Sleeping with him doesn’t do anything for you other than the obvious—scratching an itch. It doesn’t ingratiate you to him, and he already took down the site.”

  I chew on my lower lip, already shredded from the drive home, and Blair twirls her hair between her fingers, wheels turning inside her pretty head. Silence wraps around us for five minutes, then ten, and even though it’s after one in the morning I’m not the least bit sleepy. Sebastian has sparked my interest, my curiosity, in ways that have never occurred to me before now.

  There must be a reason he chose me to help him with his little scheme. Part of it is obviously that I came to him for assistance, which put me in the precarious position of being in his debt, but there are probably other girls he could have reeled in the same way. More believable girls, if all he needed was a relationship.

  “He needs you for some reason. Or someone like you. Nice. Respectable,” Blair muses, echoing my thoughts.

  “I was thinking the same thing. But why?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, and honestly I feel a little covered in slime just trying to put myself inside his mind. I love you, A, but I can’t believe you want to have sex with him. You need some condoms made from titanium.”

  The comment wriggles its way into my ears but stops there before getting anywhere near enough to change my mind. I’m attracted to him and I haven’t had sex in months, plus this will pretty much be my first experience with a “bad boy.” I want to do it, so I shrug. “I think he’s hot. I’m stuck with him for a couple of months and he made me agree not to sleep with anyone else. What’s the big deal?”

  “Hey, I’m certainly not going to judge you. Do what you have to—that’s always been my philosophy, and even though it got me into plenty of shit it eventually got me to Sam. We’re young. We’re supposed to make mistakes and sleep with sexy sociopaths in the name of finding ourselves.” She pauses. “But be careful. There’s a whole component to this situation that we don’t understand and that fact would bother me even if we weren’t dealing with Sebastian.”

  “I promise, but it looks as though it’s back to the public handholding only policy.” Frustration raises my temperature, forces me to kick off the covers and get up, intent on changing clothes.

  By the time I emerge from the closet in shorts and a cotton T-shirt my roommate has a thoughtful look on her face.

  “What? I know that scheming expression.”

  “It’s not scheming, necessarily. Just some information that you might be able to use to leverage your position. I mean, if you really want to sleep with him.”

  “Okay …”

  “It’s just that people have been talking, and you know I’m the kind of girl who likes to listen. Lots of gossip around the Greek world about the two of you. How it’s weird you don’t spend the night at the house.”

  “How do they know I don’t spend the night at the beach house? He stays there most of the time.”

  “Right, but you don’t have a secluded little hideaway, and everyone in the Kappa house knows you’ve spent every night here since you got back.” She shrugs. “I’m just saying, the two of you are going to have to do more than go to a swim meet and have coffee at the Grind if you want everyone to buy your coupledom. And that seems to be important to him.”

  “So I have a card.”

  “You have an ace.”

  The next day has me trying to track down my “boyfriend,” a task which proves harder than I thought possible on a campus of seven thousand students. In the end it’s running into Toby and Kennedy at the SEA house that solves the riddle, although the answer isn’t at all what I expected.

  Toby suggested Sebastian might be at work.

  That deflated my excitement, because walking into Rowland Communications and demanding to see the boss’s son wouldn’t be too fun, but then Toby clarified—Seb’s working on Congressman Schneider’s reelection campaign.

  It seems like the sort of thing a girlfriend would know, a fact that was supported by the look that passed back and forth between Toby and Kennedy, but there’s nothing I can do about it now. Toby will just have to wonder why he seems to be the only person alive who knows where Seb is spending his free time.

  All the way downtown, questions peck at me like beaks of little birds intent on finding dinner. Why is Sebastian working for someone other than his father, and why did he lie to me about it the other night? Why is it a secret? Could it have something to do with why he needs me to pretend to be his girlfriend?

  There’s no way to get answers without talking to him, and to do that I’m going to have to get him to trust me. To let me far enough into his life to convince everyone we’re a real live couple.

  The congressman’s headquarters are in what must have been an abandoned storefront in the cute, touristy part of downtown where they had the engagement party the other night. It’s near the beach and even on this gray, blustery day the sound of the distant waves sucking at the shore calms me. It’s one of the only things I prefer about Florida. Our home in Scotland isn’t coastal.

  A flurry of activity greets me inside the offices, which are bare-bones sheetrock and concrete, phones ringing on cheap Ikea desks and a few cubicles set apart by glass partitions in the back. schneider for congress posters decorate the walls in a typical red, white, and blue motif. Being more than a tad bit obsessed with politics myself, the place skeeves me out. Schneider is a right-wing nut job who would scare me if he was the night manager at Whole Foods, never mind part of one of the bodies that rules a country.

  “Audra?”

  Sebastian’s voice interrupts the shudder wracking my spine and stops me from turning tail and getting the heck out of here. I look to my right and find him sitting behind a decade-old computer, surprise turning his handsome features almost comical. It’s an oddly honest look on him. He doesn’t have time to calculate it.

  “Hey.” I find a smile, despite being perched inside the lion’s den. Despite the fact that a few hours ago his hands were on my boobs, my tongue was in his mouth, and he claimed to be not interested.

  I swallow the embarrassment, trying to remembe
r Blair agrees with me about something else going on. It’s time for me to find out what exactly that is. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  He glances toward the offices at the back of the room and I follow his gaze to find the man whose engagement we celebrated the other night, a cell phone pressed to his ear.

  Sebastian glances at the clock on the wall, which shows ten minutes until five, then back at me. “Of course. Can I meet you at the little ice cream place down the street at five?”

  I nod, all too willing to beat it. “Sure.”

  It’s too cold for ice cream and the place is deserted. Sebastian shows up by the time I get them to make me a hot chocolate instead, pulling out a decorative wrought-iron chair and sinking down across from me.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “I’m your girlfriend. Why shouldn’t I know where you work?”

  “Volunteer, really.”

  “Fine, where you volunteer.” I grimace. “Why on earth are you helping that scumbag get reelected?”

  Surprise again, this time lifting his thick eyebrows. “You know enough about Schneider to call him a scumbag? You’re not even American.”

  “It’s not actually a prerequisite for using Google, you know.” That earns me a small smile. “I took a class freshman year called Congress and the Presidents and have been fascinated with your democracy ever since. It’s a sickness, really. And Schneider is scary bad.”

  “I know. I mean, I’m no liberal, but the guy is dirty as fuck. He’s also, sadly, the only local campaign that was hiring this early. Probably because he knows he’s going to have a hell of a time getting elected again after people uncover the number of times he didn’t bother to show up for work over the past two years.”

  “And you wanted to work on a campaign so badly you’ll compromise your ethics?”

  “It’s adorable that you assume I have ethics.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He sighs, peering at me from under his bangs, which need a trim. “I wanted the experience working on a large-scale campaign, yes. I’d like to pursue politics as a career after graduation—not in the forefront, before you bring up how poorly suited I’d be to the limelight. The background. Behind the scenes.”

  “Puppetmaster.” It amuses me for some reason, that he’s found a way to parlay his, let’s say, expertise into a way to make money.

  “They say if you do what you love you’ll never work a day in your life.”

  “They do say that, don’t they.” For some reason we’re both grinning at each other like idiots. I think we’re flirting, although it’s atypical and weird.

  Like our whole situation, I suppose.

  “Now you know my dirty little secret. Well, one of them.” He winks. “What was so important that you had to come all the way down here instead of calling?”

  “First off, I should tell you that Toby’s the one who spilled about your job, and he and Kennedy seem pretty confused about why I wouldn’t know to begin with, so that’s an issue.” He stops smiling, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “But, they’re only two among many skeptics, according to Blair. She interrogated me again when I came home last night. Said I could tell her if anything’s going on, because no one buys that we’re dating because we never spend the night together.”

  My cheeks feel warm again at the reminder of last night, at the possibility that he’s going to think I’m making all this up in order to get into his bed. As though I couldn’t find my way into pretty much any guy’s bed if I went to a frat party tonight in the right frame of mind.

  I square my shoulders. Sebastian’s not the only attractive person at this table.

  “Why are you blushing?” His gaze narrows. “Is this about last night?”

  “You mean when you stripped me and then lied to my face? No, actually. It’s about you helping me live up to my end of this bargain.”

  “I don’t remember that being part of said bargain.”

  My lips press together, patience wearing thin even as our sparring spreads tingles between my thighs. Something about engaging with him stimulates me, drives me crazy in more ways than one. As though I’m coming alive in his presence, a thought which is not only silly but dangerous as hell.

  I don’t need another person to drag me into the light. Or in this case, into the deep, deep darkness.

  “I can’t do this alone, Sebastian. Just like a real relationship, it takes two to tango. We’re going to have to start spending real time together—overnight time—if you want people to believe us.” I pause. “That seems to be important to you for some reason. How about you tell me why so I can be an even better team member here.”

  He shakes his head, glancing over his shoulder as though maybe the paparazzi are hanging out snapping photos of us not being lovey-dovey. “We’re not a team, kitten. We have an arrangement and you’ve made some very good points as to how to improve it. From now until we’re on solid footing you and I are joined at the hip. Which means I guess I have a date for Matt and Wes’s wedding.”

  “I love weddings!”

  “Of course you do.”

  There’s a sadness around the edges of him that makes me reach out, covering his hand with mine. “Why did you lie the other night about the reason we were at their engagement party? Are you ashamed of working?”

  The sadness crinkles the tiniest bit, as though my repeated attempts to get information either amuse or frustrate him. “I’m not ashamed of working, I’m just a private person.”

  “Which is also why you don’t want to tell me why you need me to be your girlfriend?”

  “Exactly right. You don’t need to know why to get the job done.” His gaze is so dark, so deep, that I wonder whether staring into his eyes for long enough would expose every single answer. It almost seems like he wants me to try. “But thank you for being so thorough.”

  He has no idea how thorough I want to be with him, but it looks as though he’s starting to suspect. Lust darkens his eyes further, letting me know that he wants to explore at least as much as I do, which coats my insides with determination. We’re going to take the next step in our fake relationship whether he wants to tell me the whole truth or not.

  When he agrees to let me come back to the frat house with him so we can hang out for the night where plenty of people will see us, I’m starting to think maybe he’s inching his way toward interested after all.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sebastian

  Conflict is not an internal issue in my life. Not normally. I’m used to it flowing around me like I’m a rock in a stream, interrupting other lives and relationships and plans as they brush past, but me? I know what I want.

  Except there are two things I want at the moment. And they’re in direct conflict with each other.

  I told Audra we could spend the evening together at the frat house because she’s right about us needing to be seen together more regularly. But that’s not the only reason.

  I actually want to spend the evening with her.

  I also want Toby to think I’m a changed man, and if things go south with Audra—if I piss her off, which I most certainly will, or if the scheme comes out—everything’s going to blow up in my face. This is exactly why working with other people is always a last option for me. Quinn’s the only one it worked with for a short time and only because at the time he was pretty much as depraved as me.

  Other people can’t be trusted. They lie, they freak out and spill their guts, they let things like feelings and ethics and right and wrong govern their decisions as opposed to always going with the most advantageous outcome.

  None of this is new information to me, yet here I am strolling through the front door of the SEA house right after dinner, with Audra Stuart in tow.

  Lies are well and good for other people and even work on myself from time to time, but there’s no amount of bluster that will change the fact that if the two of us get in a bed together we’re going to have sex. With the chem
istry between us it’s inevitable, as crazy as the idea would have seemed a few days ago when we made this deal. My body is hyperaware of her anytime she’s close, and when she’s not, my mind takes up the cause. The fact that I’ve seen her compromised and now have touched her myself only makes it harder.

  My dick and resisting.

  Other than the way our hormones are synced up, her reasons for being so adamantly for it aren’t totally clear to me, which is worrying, but I suspect it’s mostly the excitement of slumming it.

  A girl thinks she’s slumming it with me instead of the other way around.

  The thought touches my lips with a smile as I usher her past 80 percent of the pledge class cleaning up the dining hall and up the stairs. A glance at my companion—her fiery hair, creamy skin, emerald eyes—makes me reconsider dismissing the idea. Her straight spine and tailored clothes speak of breeding, and until this whole thing with Logan happened not a person on campus could have or would have said a single syllable against her character.

  Me? I’m not bad-looking and I’ve got money, which isn’t the same as centuries of breeding. Just ask Ruby Cotton. And I could stand anywhere on campus, toss a penny, and hit someone willing to tell a tale of my horrendous, black soul.

  Her gaze is a mixture of trepidation, eagerness, and merriment as we enter my attic bedroom and she turns in my direction. “Well, we’ve got a few hours to kill. What do you want to do?”

  She doesn’t make another move like last night’s. No sultry advances or gentle, tugging touches, no skin. But she’s sexy anyway, wearing jeans and a clingy cardigan with her trench coat hanging open, unbuttoned. I embarrassed her last night, turning her down. If the roles were reversed I’d be content to wait for the other party to make a move so that the favor could be returned in a delightfully humiliating manner, but something tells me that’s not Audra’s style.

  Revenge is for lowlifes like me. Living well is for people like her.

  She is going to wait on me to make the move, but only because she feels confident that I will. And she’s not wrong. Just being alone with her, smelling her, stirs hot desire in my blood, so I clear my throat and hang up my coat in the closet. “Can I take yours?”