by Rachel Shane
I shook my head. “Not for this.” I kept telling myself that even though we were ruining lives tonight, we’d set everything right tomorrow. Well, for everyone except Layla. We’d even welcome any former Rho Sig girls back with open arms into the Rho Sigma/Out House conglomerate, which unfortunately would have to go by the name Out House in order to maintain residency in the old Rho Sig mansion.
Harrison tilted his head at me. “For something else then? Because if so, you don’t have to be nervous.”
A strangled no fled my lips ineffectively. Harrison had helped me even the score on my list of never-done items, but there was one thing we hadn’t crossed off, something I’d done before but never with him. Never out of choice.
Harrison bit back a smile. “I knew the leather pants would work.”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“Sure you haven’t.” His confidence was so damn sexy.
We reached the Goldberg center two minutes before our scheduled arrival. Harrison held the door open for me. I shrugged off my jacket and headed to the coat room, gasping at the array of jackets. “Wow, why so many?” I said in case anyone was eavesdropping. I tugged at one random jacket to show him.
“You’re overselling it,” he whispered. “Your voice rose, like, an entire octave. Try to be more natural. Watch.” He tugged at another jacket. “Jeez, are we missing a rager or something?” He kept his voice steady, sounding only mildly curious to my shocked tone.
I nodded, then sucked in a deep breath. Only one more set of stairs before we became the bad guys.
We both glanced at each other as though we were confused at the thumping music coming from the room. He furrowed his brow and twisted open the knob. I clasped my hand over my mouth at the scene in front of us. Loud music. Grinding. Underage drinking. Perfection.
He yanked the door shut and thundered down the hallway, raking his hand through his hair. We knew security may check the building’s surveillance feed, so we had to make this authentic. My eye caught on something, discarded at the edge of the hallway. We’d tasked Nate with dropping his invitation accidentally on the way to the room. I picked it up and studied it, then thrust the invite into Harrison’s hands with as much anger as possible.
He shook his head as if he were in shock, then lifted the phone to his ear and sucked in a breath. We had to make this part real as well because Genevieve would be surrounded by other newspaper staffers. “Hi, um, something strange is going on. Our newspaper party’s been hijacked by the Greek Organization.” He listened for a moment, nodding. A few beats later he hung up. “Okay, I suggest calling security and the Greek Org.”
We had to get here first so we could have Genevieve arrive alongside the officials. We worried if she had busted the party herself, everyone would flee before the cops could get a record of the attendees.
I bit my lip to keep from smiling and giving us away as we headed downstairs to wait for her.
We paced the foyer, doing our best to look seriously upset and not on the verge of dancing for joy. My heart thumped with every second that passed. A few party stragglers strolled in fashionably late and we sidestepped around them, letting them by. Genevieve arrived about two minutes after our call with a trail of newspaper staffers behind her. Her angry bitch face looked so severe, her cheeks could cut glass. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded.
Harrison wiped his brow, shaking his head. “I have no freaking clue. There’s like a bazillion people in that room.”
Genevieve whipped her head to me.
I stumbled backward, truly unnerved by her fake wrath. “I—I found this.” With shaking hands I presented her with the invite.
Genevieve snatched it out of my hands. “I called the Greek Org. They have no idea about this party. They’ll be here any second.”
“Should we bust it up then?” Charlie Culpepper strode toward the stairs.
“Wait for campus security,” Genevieve demanded, and we all froze in place.
A few minutes later, the door swung open with the head of the Greek Org, Mrs. Comstock, and a team of security guards in tow, including the big burly bouncer from the first Out House party.
“Upstairs,” Genevieve instructed as she thrust the invite into the organizers’ hands. “Can you please tell me what the fuck is going on and why my newspaper party seems to have been hijacked by an official Greek Organization shin dig? I booked this room. Bought all the food. And now my staffers won’t get a party they deserve.” She thrust her hand toward us, the innocent victims.
My stomach swirled with guilt, and I tried to look anguished.
The blond woman’s face hardened into anger as she read the invitation. She squared her shoulders and marched upstairs. We all followed after, an army.
At the top of the stairs, Mrs. Comstock instructed the bouncers to stand guard, not to let anyone leave that room. One stood at the top of the stairs while the other blocked the doorway. Mrs. Comstock and Genevieve thrust open the door together and marched inside.
We joined the other newspaper staffers against the far wall, robbing our view of what was going on inside the room. The music switched off, igniting a ring of gasps and the sound of hundreds of cups hitting a table as their illegal drinkers backed away from them.
Mrs. Comstock’s voice boomed. “Who organized this party?”
Whispers flew. I held my breath just in case someone had found out and decided to throw us under bus. But no one spoke up.
“The organizer of this party has three seconds to come forward or else every single person in this room will get in trouble.”
But of course no one came forward.
“Then I have no choice but to report all of you.”
People begged and pleaded. A rush of footsteps blocked by a burly bouncer.
“I need you all to line up. Anyone under twenty one will be automatically placed on academic probation.” One of the security guards placed a kit on a table outside the door. “Any houses represented here will be suspended for the rest of the school year, effective immediately.”
Harrison turned to me with the biggest grin on his face, but I my stomach swirled with guilt. We destroyed the entire Throckmorton Greek System in one blow.
Today we were villains, but tomorrow we’d swoop in with a plan to get every house reinstated. Tomorrow, we’d be heroes.
“AND DONE!” HARRISON LIFTED his fingers off his keyboard. A whoosh-ding sound echoed from his computer, indicating the article had been sent to the layout team. He glanced at the clock, which read 10:25. “And with five minutes to spare.” He blew on his fingers as if cooling smoking guns.
“Impressive. Especially considering you already wrote the entire article before tonight and just had to switch the placeholder details with the real ones.” I leaned back in my own chair and delivered him one of his trademark smirks, a taste of his own medicine.
“Hey, now. I still had to revise it. Copy edit it. Read it back. And all while you were sitting here, distracting me with that dress.” He waved his hand over my outfit. He’d invited me back to The Daily Snowflake office after the party got busted. I had no real reason to go there, my role in the article had long been finished, but we both ignored that fact.
I stood up, my legs instantly wobbly, and crossed the two steps to where he sprawled out in his ergonomic chair, fingers laced behind his head.
“If the dress is so distracting…maybe I should take it off?” I fumbled with my zipper in the back.
He placed his hands on either side of my hips and tugged me onto his lap. “I like the way you think.” He swept a lock of hair behind my ear, and chills erupted all over at his touch. “Does that mean you’ve made up your mind about us?”
I pursed my lips. “Was my straddling your lap not clear enough?”
“A reporter always requires evidence.” He lifted my hand and kissed every one of my knuckles. “Verbal confirmation would be ideal.”
“Hmmm,” I murmured. “Then you’re going to have to
work harder to dig that info out of me.”
“That can be arranged.” His lips dropped to my neck and he sucked gently.
The heady scent of his cologne made it difficult to think. “How about we make that arrangement back in your room and break into that file cabinet of yours?” I rolled my hips over his crotch to give him an idea of my intentions.
“Good thing I also have a file cabinet here.” Keeping himself steady with a hand on my back, he leaned down and yanked open one of the drawers beneath his desk. He sifted through the folders until he held up two condoms with a big grin as if to say ta da!
I lifted a brow. “Only two?”
“You make an excellent point.” He dropped a quick peck on my lips before reaching in and grabbing a handful more.
The door swung wide, followed by a gasp.
We both whipped our heads to find Genevieve’s eyes bugging out at the site of me straddled on top of Harrison while he clutched fistfuls of condoms. One silver square fell out of the pile and dropped to the floor with a soft patter. Genevieve’s eyes followed it.
Redness slammed into my cheeks and I scrambled off Harrison’s lap. “Sorry,” I muttered.
He leaned back, not bothering to hide his bulging erection. “I swear the story’s finished. We were just, uh…”
Genevieve raised a brow. “Heading to a bedroom, I hope?”
We glanced at each other guiltily. Once he’d procured the condoms, I hadn’t planned on leaving the room.
Genevieve crossed her arms. “Look, I don’t care what you do, but don’t do it on the furniture.” She eyed the other chair as if it, too, had been tainted. “Anyway, I came here to congratulate you two on a job well done and to say that I’ve forwarded the article to my former colleague at the New York Times.” She winked, but I wasn’t sure if her wink meant she was cool with the two of us or that Harrison had the internship secured again. She backed out of the room before I could ask anymore.
Harrison slid off the chair and stuffed the condoms into his pockets.
I shrugged on my jacket. “So…your room?”
He tugged my jacket right off. “Nope.”
I glanced at the chair again and then the doorway. “But…”
Harrison brushed his lips against my ear. “I’ve fingered you in the ocean. Went down on you in the middle of a fancy party. Do you really think I’d take you to someplace as boring as a bed to make love for the first time?”
Heat spread in waves all through my body.
“In case that wasn’t clear…” He placed both palms on my shoulders and gazed directly in my eyes. “I love you.”
He loved me.
And I loved him. I pulled him close and whispered those three little words into his ear, earning a growl. His lips found mine, kissing fierce, as his fingers interlocked with mine. He towed me to the door.
“Where are we going?” I whispered into the empty hallways.
“I’ve been racking my brain for the most interesting place on campus.” We flew down one flight of stairs, pausing after each step to steal a kiss. His palm clung to mine for dear life. When I turned toward the first floor doorway, he yanked me back down to the basement level.
“What’s down here?”
“The most interesting place on campus.” We bypassed a few darkened offices plus a computer lab where some of the graphics people worked. The hum of the heat system echoed the thrumming in my veins. He flourished his hand toward the door at the end of the hallway.
I read the sign. “A dark room?”
His fingers trailed up my arm, circling my goosebumps. “They say darkness heightens the senses.”
“But Genevieve said not on the furniture.”
He grinned. “Good thing I’ve found a loophole to that predicament.”
We squeezed into the tight space of the revolving door, my knee sliding between his, his arms gripping me tight. Warmth radiated off his body, in league with the temperature rising beneath my breastbone. When he swiveled the revolving door shut, the block of light receded into a sliver before it vanished completely. Darkness engulfed us, oppressive and all consuming.
His warm lips pressed into the scoop of my neck. My eyelashes fluttered at his touch before another kiss dropped onto my ear. Each time he moved away brought on the thrill of surprise as to where his lips would land next. The puff of his breath was the only thing to guide me toward his next move, and I braced myself for more more more. But all that came was a scraping sound of the revolving door and a tug of my hand into an open space.
Every sound and scent heightened in the darkness. The bump of his knee against a counter and the scrape of his soles as he yanked me out of arm’s reach. The scent of chemicals lingered in the air and tangled with the unmistakable spray of lavender air freshener that reminded me of the wake and bake, back when we were still enemies rather than partners. Hands cupped either side of my chin and his mouth descended upon mine. My lips moved against his, hard and fierce. God, I wanted him so bad.
He pulled away abruptly, and I moaned at the loss of him. His voice was a whisper in the dark, close but also too far. “I’m not sure if you know this, but I’m an Investigative Journalist.”
I laughed. “I have heard that about you, actually.”
“Good. That means you know how thorough I am when it comes to an investigation.” Delicate fingers traced the contour of my shoulders, and I shivered. “And so I’m making it my mission to examine every inch of your body until I find all the hidden spots that drive you insane.” His hands studied me in the dark with the slow precision of a surgeon determining where to cut first.
I unbuttoned his shirt, taking on the same challenge and sliding my palm along his abs. “You missed a really good opportunity to use the word probe as a synonym for examine.”
A soft chuckle filtered in the dark and my dress pooled to a pile of fabric at my feet. “Grammar jokes. You get me.”
And he got me too with the way his fingertips danced over my skin, skidding along the curve of my shoulder, over my bare breasts, along the stretch of skin just below my belly button. Soft ricochets shuddered through me. His lips traced a contrasting path, eliciting a gasp when he sucked the back of my neck just below my hairline and found exactly what he had been searching for. Every sensation was heightened in the darkness, and he twisted up the plot to keep me on my toes and also make my toes curl. I never knew where his lips would land until I let out a moan from the gentle way he nipped me in a new spot.
My own hands were greedy, grappling at all the skin I could find in the dark. I dragged my nails along the contours of his chest and earned ragged breaths. His stomach pumped from the way my tongue circled over his belly button and then lower, sweeping kisses all along his legs as I went. My knees pressed into a soft blanket instead of cold linoleum. “A blanket?”
He dropped down to my level, scooped me in his arms, and lowered me onto the silky comforter. “I may have gotten presumptuous.” The loophole…the floor.
The weight of his body sunk into mine, grounding me. My back arched as I braced for him to fill me.
Instead he slid down my body. His hands and lips charted maps across the landscape of my skin, trailing fire over every inch. I’d waited so long to be with him and now each second he made me wait further was excruciating. I scrambled for him, begging. “Please.”
“Not yet. There are places I haven’t explored.” He knocked my knees open and his fingers slipped inside me.
I let out a gasp. Pressure built in an instant as his fingers curved in the exact right spot, going straight for the kill. My chest heaved against his and his lips found mine again. The passionate kisses juxtaposed the hard surge of his fingers. I broke away enough to make my one last comment before I shuddered out of existence, “I think you found your evidence.”
He growled and pulled out of me gently. The rip of a condom and the snap of rubber gave me just enough time to catch my breath before his body weight descended on mine. It felt amazing for him to be
pressed on top of me, every inch of our skin touching, gliding against each other, slick with sweat. I wrapped my arms and legs around him as he pushed himself inside me.
A low breath escaped my lungs, juxtaposed by his sucked in sharp one. He plunged into me and sensation flooded my entire body. My nails dug into his back in a desperate attempt to hold on. Our lips fumbled against each other as his hips rocked in sync with mine. He tested out different rhythms, fast and shallow, slow and deep, until he found the one that made me gasp, using powerful movements that filled me to the core. Every pulse of his hips rocketed waves of pleasure throughout my body.
Our lips stayed connected, sliding over each other the entire time. In my pageant days, kissing had always been a means to an end, to get something started. During sex, I never kissed the guys, just jammed my eyes shut and prayed for it to end. With Harrison, I would choose kissing over breathing, if it came down to a choice.
“This was worth waiting for,” I cried out against his lips as pleasure whirled in my abdomen, ratcheting in intensity.
His head dipped to the crook of my neck and his hips pumped faster, harder. “You were worth waiting for.”
His words were enough to push me over the edge. I spasmed, shoulders jerking, hips throbbing, as a wave of intense pleasure exploded within me. Pulses skittered from my torso to my feet, making my toes curl. I screamed out and his arms tightened while I rode out the euphoria with him as my steed. He let out a series of groans and then collapsed on top of me, heavy, sweaty, happy.
Together.
I MARCHED UP THE steps of the Greek Organization with twenty other presidents in tow, including the one that matched my footsteps, stride for stride. Each swing of our arms brushed our fingers against each other, and electricity crackled with every touch. I itched to clasp my fingers in his, the way we’d done for hours last night after the first three rounds at the rodeo. My bloodshot eyes and sore lady parts (worth it!) were my main souvenirs, along with a new, permanent moniker: Harrison’s girlfriend.
But this was not the time or place to announce that, not when we had the president of every house on campus following our lead. Even Layla trailed behind me, her arms crossed, her chin lifted in defiance. The other presidents still thought I was in charge, so Erin and I had decided this would be my last act before Harrison and I officially handed over the reins to her.