by Dawn Steele
And he made her lose the baby. It was because she wasn’t a tiger shifter. He didn’t want contamination between the shifter breeds. And he was furious with her. Furious because she tried to trap him.
Kate gripped the railing. She gazed out into the water, into the city beyond. Then she dipped into her tote bag and took out the box.
It was a box of oral contraceptives.
It was mostly full.
She had started out taking the pills. She took three, and then her mind bended in different directions. Every time she stared at those pills, she saw the murder of her baby. A baby that was yet to be.
Rust only lusted after her body, as strange as that might sound. He would soon tire of her and dump her by the wayside. She didn’t know if she could take that. She was sure she might die of heartbreak – of her actual heart ripping in two and bleeding, bleeding all over her cardiac cavity.
And so, in a moment of incoherence, she stopped taking the pills.
One day passed, and yet another. Rust used a condom for the requisite month before the pills would have taken effect.
And then –
She remembered the pounding she had received from his glorious, wonderful cock. The sperm flowing into her in a tide, swimming into her womb and up into her Fallopian tubes. She wondered if one of her eggs had been released into the tubes and was being impregnated by his sperm even as she pondered about such things at the embankment.
Had she made a mistake? Okay, that was beside the point. Of course she had made a mistake. She was making a mistake either way. Any which way she chose, as long as that path involved Rust O’Brien.
Trapping him.
Thinking that he would embrace her after she declared, “I’m pregnant. There must have been some flaw with the pills.”
How contrite. How stupid. How childish she was, playing at adult games. She was not the first woman who had tried to trap the man of her dreams in this manner, and she was not the first woman who had tried to trap Rust O’Brien.
Except that he wasn’t any ordinary male.
Their union would be an experiment.
God, what was she thinking? Stupid, stupid, stupid!
She wondered if it was too late to amend it.
Hurriedly, she eased a blister pack out of the box of oral contraceptives and took one pill out of it. Then she stuffed it into her mouth.
She wondered if it was too late.
14
“You know, Fiona, you could be attractive if you didn’t try so hard,” Carlo said.
He didn’t have a car, not on his partial scholarship and what he was making as a ‘waiter’, good money though that was. Most of it went into his college fund. And the rest of it went to his mother back at home to pave the way for the rest of his siblings to go to college. Not all shifters were rich like Rust O’Brien.
He was driving Fiona’s car – a second hand Mustang. Fiona wasn’t exactly Rust O’Brien rich but she was in a better position than he was.
Fiona’s hand was at his crotch, and she was groping his cock and balls, squeezing them. She took her hand away and pouted.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
They were driving to where he deemed ‘a surprise’. It was easy enough to get Fiona to tag along. She was always bored, looking for adventure.
He glanced at her quizzically. “Were you always the class slut?”
“I take offense to that word,” she said mildly.
“I reckon it isn’t the first time you’ve heard it thrown in your face.”
She stared out of the window, her expression somewhat wistful.
She said, “So many things you don’t know about me, Carlo. You don’t know the things I had to do – ”
She trailed off. He knew what she was going to say. You don’t know the things I had to do . . . to make me what I am.
“And there are so many things you don’t know about me.”
“That makes us two of a kind.”
“Not really.”
“I hear you’re pretty much the man slut himself. Only you don’t do campus girls. What – we’re not good enough for you? Or do you prefer older women with the means to pay you for fucking them?” She smiled.
He retorted, “You know, Fiona, you don’t have to be such a prick.”
“I don’t have a prick. You do. Where are you taking me . . . if not for fucking?”
He grimaced. “I know a place just outside town.”
“So early in the morning?”
“I figured we’d get a fresh start.”
*
It felt like a drive-by, only it wasn’t a drive-by. If they were in a TV show, he reckoned he would have rolled down the window, pulled out a gun and fired.
But as it was, this was just as effective. In another way.
Carlo’s blood was boiling in his veins. That was the trouble with being a shifter. You had a threshold, and when you crossed that threshold, it became pure, blinding rage. You would not take insults from another man. Or another shifter, for the matter.
There was only so much a wolf could take.
“This is a really nice neighborhood,” Fiona said. “Very far away from campus. Your sugar mommy lives here?”
“If you weren’t so busy talking out of your yap, you’d see what’s at three o’ clock.”
She turned her head. “But it’s only eight thirty in the morning.”
“What’s better than a full breakfast?”
The couple sat at the edge of the café. They had probably ordered, but the food had not arrived. They were nursing their coffee. They looked happy. In fact, Kate was positively glowing, the way she never glowed when she was having coffee with him.
The Professor seemed relaxed. More relaxed than Carlo had ever seen him, in fact. His hair was slightly tousled, indicating that he had just rolled out of bed. And why not? His penthouse was in the building just across the street in this ritzy neighborhood.
They were both a beautiful couple. More beautiful than anything he had ever seen, despite the gap between their ages.
“Oh my God,” Fiona gasped.
It was too late to take it back now.
“Yes. ‘Oh my God’ is right.”
He felt sick. And yet good. Sick and good in a complex psychological way that he didn’t fully comprehend.
15
Fiona wasn’t always a slut.
But she did like sex. She liked it when Tommy Garmond stuck his cock into her in ninth grade. She liked it so much that she did it again and again. That didn’t make her a slut, right? She only did it with Tommy, not his friends, who wanted to do her too.
But then, her stepfather, Jerry, found out. She was afraid he would tell her mother, but he didn’t. In fact, he had been looking at her kind of funny lately. She was one of those girls who developed fast physically. Her boobs were already outgrowing any girly bra her mother had bought her.
She had learned the power of those boobs and that body.
“Let’s say you and me . . . we cut a deal,” Jerry said to her.
“What deal?” she had asked innocently.
Oh boy, she had been innocent then.
Unfortunately, when Jerry held her down and raped her, her beauty was a power she didn’t want to have.
He threatened to tell her mother if she didn’t do what he wanted. And so she let him fuck her, Repeatedly. Until she was well into the eleventh grade. It was amazing how she kept her grades in school. But she had always been smart. She had a photographic memory. And a pussy boys wanted to climb into in more ways than one.
After a while, it was just about having sex and orgasms. Or maybe it was all about pain management. The orgasms helped to keep the pain at bay – to keep her from slitting her wrists.
And then Jerry died of a heart attack. It wasn’t even when he was fucking her. No. It happened when he was walking the dog. Funny how he managed to keep the veneer of the friendly neighborhood stepfather when their house was so full of secrets.
She was free.
Or was she really?
It didn’t matter, really, she told herself. She was young, she was smart and she had the world at her feet. Her beauty and body became weapons she honed to lure men in, especially when she didn’t really care for any of them. They used her as a tool. So, fine. She would use them as tools as well. She would let them fuck her until they could fuck Jerry out of her system.
Somehow, they never did.
There was some part of her which longed for closure. But there was a wound on her spirit that couldn’t be healed, no matter how many men she had and how hard she fucked them.
So life went on.
So she survived. She was a survivor. Wasn’t that what a psychologist like Rust O’Brien would have told her?
Fiona never really had a guy she couldn’t seduce. Even if she was damaged inside, at least she had her beauty and the power of her body. Imagine being fat like Michaela and her blushing cow of her best friend, Kate, the wallflower who could only make moon eyes in class at the Professor. Kate was a non-entity, unlike Carlo – who was smart and handsome and funny and someone to be reckoned with.
But Carlo wasn’t interested in girls his age. Besides, she had her sights set on a bigger prize – the Professor himself.
Rust O’Brien intrigued Fiona enormously, as he did everyone else. He had a face a movie star would die for and a body every bit as fit and trim as an athlete’s. And yet, he was a mystery where everyone was concerned. He had no wife or girlfriend or boyfriend that anyone knew about, and he didn’t speak about himself or hung photos of his family in his office.
He was obviously brilliant. Rumors abounded of old money, of him having a penthouse uptown. There were even rumors of him having been a psychiatrist in Bellevue once, when he was starting out – of having seen horrors no man had seen outside of an insane asylum. There were rumors that what he saw and experienced there had changed him so much that he was no longer the same man. And hence here was – aloof and an enigma.
Undecipherable.
The Bellevue rumors always struck a chord in Fiona. Maybe it was because she had come close to being criminally insane once. Hence, Rust O’Brien – and the things he had seen – always struck a chord with her.
So when she saw Rust O’Brien with Kate Penney, she was stupefied.
At first, she blinked her eyes to make sure she wasn’t seeing things. She had had a period of hallucination once when she was in the eleventh grade. Hallucinations of her killing her stepfather and her mother as well for being so fucking oblivious. But that period passed, and she didn’t go mad. She survived, and here she was.
And then. when it became very clear that was what Carlo drove her all this way to see, she went through the emotions a scorned woman went through.
Incredulity.
Denial.
Jealousy.
Anger.
Coldness.
Seething acceptance.
“So what do you think?” Carlo said.
Her throat locked. “What do you think I should think? You brought me here to see this . . . obviously.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
Across the street, Rust lifted a hand and tucked a tendril of hair behind Kate’s ear. The gesture was so loving, so tender that Fiona’s heart hardened and became ice.
He chose this . . . this fat cow over me?
The truth was Kate had always been kind of pretty, even though she was overweight. And now she was positively luscious. Kate had always hidden her body away in shapeless Target kind of clothes – cheap and awful.
But now she was dressed in a simple yellow sundress which showed off her deep cleavage. Fiona could see that she had quite a body. Plump and curvy, like one of those Renoir Impressionist paintings. Fiona could see how a man could be taken in by those curves. And Rust – surprise, surprise – seemed to prefer the plump types, in which case.
Envy, one of the deadliest of Dante’s seven deadly sins, filled her chest and expanded it.
I can get any man. But not Rust O’Brien, it seemed. Because he preferred milk cows like Kate Penney.
She was beyond shocked. She thought it was Rust’s principles which forbade him to have relations with his students. That, and the principles and regulations of the university board about the teaching staff fraternizing with the students.
But apparently Kate Penney had her clutches into the Professor. Clutches which made him defy all rules and throw caution to the wind.
He thought he was safe here, ensconced in his rich little neighborhood ivory tower, far away from the madding campus crowd.
But he wasn’t safe from her.
She would see to that.
They were all the same, she thought sadly. Men. They only wanted one thing from women like Kate and herself.
16
Fiona Montgomery strode into the cluster of offices in the staff’s block. Stacey, the personal assistant, looked up.
“Yes?”
“I want to see Rust O’Brien.”
“The Professor doesn’t see students in his office. You know the rule.”
“Oh yes, I know the rules. I know plenty of rules,” Fiona said significantly. “But does the Professor know them?”
Stacey was confused. Fiona could see it in her eyes.
“I want to see the Professor,” Fiona repeated. “It’s very important.”
Stacey deliberated this, and then decided she wouldn’t want to be the one to handle it. So she picked up the phone and punched in an extension.
“Professor O’Brien? There’s a student out here who says that it’s important that she sees you. Yes, I told her the rules, but she insisted. She says it’s important.”
Pause.
Fiona closed her hand over the mouthpiece and said to Fiona, “What’s your name?”
“Fiona Montgomery.”
Stacey repeated this over the phone. Then she added, “Are you sure? OK.”
She placed down the receiver.
“The Professor says you have three minutes.”
“Oh, I’m willing to bet he’ll take more than three minutes to hear my case,” Fiona said.
She walked through his door and shut it firmly behind her.
Professor O’Brien was seated in front of his laptop. He looked up as she entered. He was as handsome as ever, and his eyebrows were raised inquiringly.
“Yes?” he said.
Fiona went right to the edge of his desk. Then she held up her cellphone and pressed the ‘Play’ button. The video recording of the scene at the café spun.
Rust O’Brien did not say anything.
When the video finished, Fiona said, “So . . . what do you have to say for yourself, Professor?”
“Is this leading to something, Ms Montgomery?” he said politely.
“Isn’t fraternizing with students against the faculty handbook?”
“You tell me. Aren’t you always trying to get me to break the rules?”
A delicious rush coursed through her.
“I could show this video to the board. You could get fired.”
“So why don’t you show it to them?” His vivid green eyes arrested hers. “Did you . . . want something, Ms Montgomery?”
Her pulse fluttered at her throat.
Be brave, she told herself. You have come for exactly what you came for.
Her hands went to the zipper of her dress. She unzipped it from behind and let the dress fall. Underneath, she was wearing nothing.
She said, “Yes. I want something all right.”
His eyes roamed over her gorgeous breasts, her shaven pussy. Could he tell that it had been overused and tainted by so many?
She stepped out of the dress, piled in a heap on the floor, and moved towards him on the chair. He still did not move.
She placed both her hands on his shoulders.
“You can have me, you know,” she said in a husky voice. “Why settle for her when you can have someone like me?”
Rust said, “I’
d rather have one night with her than a thousand nights with you, Fiona Montgomery. Now put your clothes back on and get the hell out of my office.”
A hot flush crept into her cheeks.
“I could break you,” she said with a choke.
“Do whatever you have to do. But I won’t be blackmailed. Not by you or by anyone.” He stared pointedly at the door.
She gathered up her clothes hastily and put her dress on.
I will survive this. But I’ll make sure he won’t.
“You’ll be sorry,” she said, aware that she was sounding like a cliché.
He just gazed at her sadly.
“Maybe I will,” he said, “but at least I have my integrity intact, unlike yours.”
She stalked out of the office and slammed the door.
Stacey outside was curious as hell.
“Everything all right with the Professor?” she asked.
Fiona pursed her lips.
“Not at all, Stacey. Not at all. Watch this space. It will be interesting.”
She left, head held high.
17
Inside his office, Rust stared out of the window.
He believed in everything he just said. And part of him deep down inside knew that he deserved it. He couldn’t slake his lust for Kate’s innocence, and now he had to pay the price.
Even though he was both a psychiatrist and a psychologist, he believed in karma. He believed in things which came full circle. If you did bad things in life, one day, they came back to hit you in a roundabout way, even though they were not connected. Bad things engendered bad karma, and bad karma – like a domino effect – came right round to hit you in the face again.
He knew he deserved this. He deserved this because he was turning into a monster, the very monster his father said he would turn into. He deserved it because of all those things he and his father did in Bellevue – to all those insane people.
But if that was his bane, then let the fallout begin.
He could take it.
And he hoped Kate could take it too.
Dear Reader, thank you so much for reading this story.