by Lynda Chance
The Mistress Mistake
Lynda Chance
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Tags: possession, goodgirl, badboy, jealousy, heterosexual, virgin, monogamous, alphamale
Jessica Conway is at the end of her rope. She desperately needs a few things that her moral values can't buy: food, shelter, a chance for a better life. Connor Montgomery is tortured with guilt and wants only one thing from Jessica and he'swilling to pay her for it. Setting her up as his mistress seems like the perfect idea. But how long can it last when it was a mistake from the beginning?
The Mistress Mistake
By
Lynda Chance
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Can love come from a sinful beginning?
Jessica Conway is at the end of her rope. She desperately needs a few things that her moral values can't buy: food, shelter, a chance for a better life.
Connor Montgomery is tortured with guilt from the past and wants only one thing from Jessica, something he's very willing to pay her for. Setting her up as his mistress seems like the perfect idea. But how long can a situation continue that was a mistake from the very beginning?
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Smashwords Edition
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The Mistress Mistake
Copyright © 2013 by Lynda Chance
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author or publisher except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, businesses, characters and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, actual events or locales is purely coincidental.
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Dedication
For everyone who wants a fairytale with a happy ending, even if the road getting there is filled with bumps and potholes.
And for Clayton, who took the insane walk across the street with me. I'll thank you properly later. :)
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The Mistress Mistake
Chapter One
Connor Montgomery took a drink from his glass, lounged back on his sofa and then set the bourbon down within easy reach. A warm glow from the alcohol desensitized him to what he was doing, as he continued to look at the screen of his computer. With two fingers on the scroll pad of his laptop, he watched carefully as pictures of young women rolled down the screen.
Still a long damn way from accepting that this was the right way to find a woman, he discarded one picture after the next. While he admitted that some of the women were beautiful, and some were even stupendously beautiful, every picture he saw contained the same common denominator. Greed. Greed came from every set of gleaming eyes that looked out from the screen. Rapacity and an arrogance that screamed, 'I know I'm beautiful. I know you want me, and for the right price you can have me.'
And evidently, from what he'd read so far, the right price, the going price, was about three thousand a month.
Three thousand a month that he could very well afford if he chose to do this.
It wasn't as if he was on a simple dating site, no, the website he was looking at wasn't as socially acceptable as that. He was on an 'arrangement' site. A site that matched men who were more than willing to pay for the company of a woman with the women who didn't mind getting paid for said 'company.'
It wasn't prostitution. Of course it wasn't.
That wouldn't be legal.
What made this completely legal was the 'relationship' between the two parties.
The technicality was a load of shit but he didn't care because it suited him.
He was sick and tired of having to go out and find sex. He was twenty-eight years old, and the last twelve months had been the first time since college he'd been alone.
The last year had been pure, unmitigated hell. Losing his wife of only five years in a car crash twelve months ago was something that he wanted to put behind him and never think about. He'd been refusing to think about it since it happened. He wasn't in denial. He knew Val was gone. But there was nothing to be gained by wishing and thinking and trying to pray it away. It had happened. Val was dead. He wasn't. He was alone now and his life resembled a steamy bowl of shit. All that bullshit he read about, 'better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all', was just that, bullshit. He would absolutely, no question about, damn sure rather never have known what it was like for a woman to have loved him so much and then poof! disappear in a stroke of a second. It was as simple as that.
But the truth of the matter was that she had loved him, he knew she had, and now she was gone. And guilt ate at his insides like corrosive battery acid, chewing away and spitting out his guts. Why? Because she'd loved him more than he'd loved her. Oh, he'd hidden it from her well and at least he could be thankful for that. But it was always there in the background of his psyche. The knowledge that he'd probably never deserved her. He'd never cheated on her, but he continued to beat himself up with the question of whether or not their marriage would have lasted.
There was nothing he could do about it now and he just wanted to forget.
Now all he wanted was sex. He had a very active libido and needed sex on a regular basis. For the last year he'd had to go out and troll for it every time he needed it. He'd lost count of the number of women he'd slept with. Or rather, the women he'd fucked. There hadn't been any sleeping involved. Not once. Why would he want to fall asleep with a stranger? What purpose would there be in that? All it would have done would have been to cloud the issue and give the women false hope. The women he'd hooked up with tended to want to put their hooks in him. They didn't want to have sex and move on. Hell no. They wanted to keep him. He'd tried the dating websites and he'd gotten a lot of ass that way. But hook-ups weren't what those women were looking for. They were looking for a relationship, a commitment, marriage.
And he'd never allow that again.
He'd had a wife. He'd been married. He'd been faithful and he hoped like hell that he'd been a good husband. It had been a decent situation, but that didn't mean he wanted to do it again.
No, all he wanted was sex. Sex from a spigot. Sex from a quiet, low-keyed spigot that he could turn on and off and that didn't expect anything from him in return.
Nothing in return, that is, except money.
That was exactly the kind of 'relationship' he was looking for. A mutual give and take. He'd give and then he'd take. End of story.
Now he just needed to find the right woman for the job.
He spent the next hour scrolling back and forth until finally, he narrowed it down to three.
Before he could back out of it, he fired off three emails and waited to see what kind of responses he received.
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Jessica Conway sat at a bank of computers in the university library, chewing on a thumbnail, tearing it up and trying to get her nerve up enough to look at what she needed to face. She said a short prayer before she bit her lip and opened her account where she would learn her grades for the semester.
She took a deep breath, moved the cursor to the highlighted area and clicked on the mouse.
Her stomach sank in a
sharp agony of panic, disappointment and sheer, unmitigated fright.
Two point nine eight seven.
She closed her eyes and dropped her head to the table.
Gone.
Her scholarship and everything she'd worked for her whole life were gone.
Panic settled in her stomach in sharp points of jagged glass. It wasn't fair! It wasn't fair, damn it.
She'd made the dean's list the first two semesters. This could so not be happening to her. As if through a haze of disbelief, she tried to steady her breathing as she attempted to come to grips with what she'd just knew was going to happen. Even though her overall grade point average was still just shy of three point five, she'd failed to miss the semester requirements of at least an even three points. And she'd missed it twice, two semesters in a row. After the fall semester of her sophomore year, she'd been put on probation. The university had given her one semester to bring her grades back up over the required amount. And she could have. Easily. In normal circumstances, in a normal semester. But her sophomore year wasn't normal. She'd had no choice but to take chemistry and calculus together, even though her advisor had warned her the combination would be dangerous.
Math was so not her strong suit. She loved science, but when you got down to it, chemistry was nothing but math in disguise. However, the geology curriculum she was working on required both chemistry and calculus as prerequisites before she could move on with her major.
It wasn't fair. She'd passed both classes. If she could just move on with her scholarship, next fall everything would be okay. All she had left were geology classes and phys ed and some electives. There was no doubt she could be back on the dean's list next year.
But not now.
Now she no longer had a scholarship. She had no lifeline at all.
It wasn't as if she could get loans like the other students. No, her mother had seen to that. She'd ruined Jessica's credit before she was fifteen years old. Her mother was in federal prison for fraud now, but it wasn't defrauding her own daughter that had put her there. It was all the other scams she'd been running when it all caught up to her.
But that didn't help Jessica any. Nope. She'd willingly signed the papers her mother had put in front of her. What kid wouldn't when she trusted her only parent and was told it was the only way to stay out of the social service system?
She took a shuddering breath and gathered her stuff together. She wasn't beaten yet. She'd find another way. She was too damn close to attaining her life goals. She would have that degree. Her overall GPA was still really good. If she had to live for the next week between the scholarship office and the academic advisory office, she would. There had to be other scholarships besides the one from the university that had just slipped through her fingers.
She was nothing if not resilient. All she needed was enough money to see her through one semester at a time. One semester. That's all she needed, all she would focus on.
Surely, she could find the money for one damn semester.
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Connor sat in a darkened corner of a popular downtown restaurant across from the last of the three women he had set up to meet during the last week.
The meetings were little more than interviews. They were designed to be interviews between both parties, but he knew that was a load of crap.
He was a fucking catch and he knew it. He wasn't old, he wasn't ugly, and apparently, that's all it took to make him the crème de la crème of the 'arrangement' website.
Before he'd set up the very first meeting, he'd made a list of three questions he would ask. If any of the women answered them to his satisfaction, and got his motor running, he would then play the rest of the initial meeting by ear, maybe move forward.
So far, it had been a bust.
All three women were shallow, vain, and so hardened in both looks and speech that they resembled little more than prostitutes. When he'd come to the question of why they were doing this, the answers were varied.
One woman wanted a new set of boobs. One looked at him blankly and told him that this was how she made her living. The one sitting across from him now had told him she was between modeling jobs and had proceeded to show him an array of naked prints of herself.
He supposed that these were the types of women he should actually be looking for. Cold women who knew what they wanted and who would make it easy for him to just fuck them and leave until the next time.
But there lay his problem.
Not a one of them so much as made his cock twitch.
In fact, they fairly disgusted him.
The one in front of him now disgusted him as she put her blood-red tipped fingers over his and stroked the back of his hand.
Something shriveled and died within him and he pulled his hand out from under hers and motioned for the waiter. "Check, please."
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Two days later, Jessica was at her wits end as she packed boxes and prepared to move out of her on-campus housing at least for the summer, and possibly forever. She had no idea where she was going.
Her roommate, Allison, had been trying her best to help, but Allison had it easy. She had parents who could be depended on to write out a huge check for living expenses and tuition every semester. Allison was in a sorority, and had begged Jessica to rush with her this last year. But there was no way. Jessica couldn't afford the dues, let alone the clothes and everything else that would be expected of her.
"You need to quit worrying so much and just chill a while. Everything will work out, it always does. I don't know anyone as smart as you, Jess. And you know you can come home with me for a while. There's a frat party tonight. I want you to come with me this time."
"What for?" Jessica's voice was resigned as she slipped a pair of ragged tennis shoes into a cardboard box. Although she appreciated Allison's offer, she knew it couldn't be permanent and it horrified her to be a burden on her friend's family.
"Just because. You need to get out."
"I don't have a place to live. I've got shit I need to figure out. I don't even have money for supper tonight and I'm out of ramen noodles. I have no choice but to eat at the cafeteria." Another jolt of distress hit Jessica when she thought about how close she was to not having a meal plan anymore. The food in the cafeteria wasn't great, but it was nutritious and just one more thing that would disappear in a few days now that her scholarship was gone.
"No, you don't. The guys are grilling hamburgers. And even though you never go with me, you know the drill." Allison's voice perked up and a glint of excitement glimmered in her eyes. "There's only one rule, if you're female, you get in free."
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Five hours later, Jessica leaned against a wall in the corner of a huge living room and nursed a beer that had long ago gone warm. Her face and her eyes looked in one direction, but her stomach was tied in knots and her mind was in shock as she concentrated on eavesdropping on two sorority girls who stood only a couple of feet away from her in whispered conversation.
"I'm telling you, Melanie knows a girl who's done it. The dude paid for her tuition."
"Are you serious?"
"Yeah. There's this whole new industry popping up on the Internet. Evidently, there are several websites. They match sugar daddies with sugar babies."
"That's prostitution."
"Not technically. Morally, yeah, maybe. But it's not against the law."
"How do they get away with it?"
"I don't have a clue."
"So is Melanie's friend a slut or something?"
"Girl, no, she's not. She's pre-med and as classy as shit."
Jessica strained her ears to hear more but the girls had turned and walked out onto the patio together, leaving her reeling as she sagged against the wall.
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Later that night, Jessica sat in the library at her favorite computer with her heart beating loudly in her ears. It hadn't taken her very long to do a search on the subject the sorority girls had been discussing and now she sat almost hype
rventilating at what she was reading and at what she was considering doing.
Could she do it? Could she sleep with some guy in exchange for financial restitution?
She didn't care what she'd heard earlier in the evening.
It sounded like prostitution. Could she prostitute herself in exchange for her college degree?
She wanted to say no, she was better than that, but insidious pictures slammed through her head like a camera roll. Vague images of her future with no college degree, no family support system, and no credit line available to her to even buy a car. Working in a fast food restaurant her whole life and having to live close enough that she'd have to walk back and forth everywhere she went. Then another set of pictures came to her mind. Memories of what she'd seen that very night at the frat party. Drunken girls walking off into darkened corners with guys from the party. Inebriated couples hooking up and pairing off. She and Allison had arrived early enough in the evening for Jessica to see who came and went. Most of the girls had arrived with other girls, and weren't in any type of long-term relationship with the frat guys that she could see.
What she witnessed were just hook-ups.
Each couple had walked away, until the bedrooms upstairs were filled and every corner in the house had people making out in a heated rush. Alcohol flowed freely, and it was not only because of the fact that Jessica detested beer and alcohol of any kind that she'd stayed completely sober.
Sober enough to hear and remember that conversation and to now be sitting in the library fighting her conscience.
So, most of the other girls hooked up with guys all the time. Even Allison did it. And Jessica tried her best not to judge her for it. When Jessica had met Allison, the other girl had had a boyfriend. But that hadn't lasted long. And now, Jessica knew that Allison kept a count of the guys she'd hooked up with. Nine so far. And Allison acted as if she were almost virginal compared to the other girls she ran around with.
Jessica hadn't hooked-up with a single guy during her entire time in college.
Now her mind was filling up with reasons that would justify what she was contemplating doing. If Allison could sleep with nine guys and Jessica only one, then that wasn't so bad, was it?