by Sheila Grace
She sucked in her breath. She was such a refreshing mixture of naiveté and attitude.
“Now, come here. I’d like to see my latest purchase.”
She looked down at the kimono and scowled.
“Could you have found anything more revealing?” she asked as she plucked at the hem.
“Absolutely.”
She swallowed.
“That’s not comforting.”
I walked to the table and took a sip of whisky. When I crooked my finger at her, she approached me cautiously before stopping a foot away. I set the glass on the night table and slowly reached out, watching as her tongue darted between her lips. One tug on the satin belt, and the robe fell open, exposing the enticingly sheer black lace cups followed by a Georgette baby doll dress that exposed the thong she was wearing beneath it.
I sat on the edge of the bed and snaked an arm around her waist, drawing her closer. Then I released her and simply watched as her breathing shuddered. Her nipples were like perfectly ripe raspberries pressing against the lace.
“Very nice.”
I dipped my thumb into the whisky before reaching out and taking hold of her hip. The moment my thumb touched the peak of her breast, she jerked against my grip. I tightened my hold on her and watched her face as I traced over her again. Her eyes drifted closed.
When I pinched her nipple between my thumb and index finger, she cried out and I braced her weight as her knees buckled. Then I slowly drew her into my lap. Her eyes opened, and she looked reproachfully at me. Her features were perfect and doll-like, her cheeks flushed and her lips a bright pink.
“You are so incredibly beautiful—and highly fuckable. How did you last so long without getting fucked?”
“Oh my god! Do you follow up every potential compliment with some crass commentary? What are you? Fourteen?” she squeaked.
She began to wriggle, attempting to extract herself from my lap without falling backward. Instead of letting her go, I gripped both her hips and drew her forward until she was flush with my increasingly painful hard-on. Her eyes flitted to mine, and she became completely still.
“Cassia Flynn, I can promise you that every man you’ve come into contact with has, at some point, thought about fucking you.”
If I were so inclined, I could make her come right now, but I didn’t want to push her over the edge. Not yet. I wanted to take my time. I released her and held out my hand to steady her as she scrambled from my lap.
“You’re so strange!” she squeaked. “Why do you want someone who’s only around for your money? It makes no sense!”
“People wanting material gain from me has been a fact of my life, so I would prefer to have an honest transaction, rather than pretending it’s something it’s not.”
She frowned.
“That’s really sad, James.”
The way she said my name felt different, even if I didn’t know why. She briefly studied me before walking out of the room. Scrubbing a hand across my face, I took a moment to re-examine my decision to seek out a challenge rather than a quick fuck.
On several occasions, individuals had called me out for being both stubborn and a bastard. They hadn’t been wrong.
Maybe Cassia Flynn was my form of self-punishment. Or not. She happened to be a better challenge than I’d enjoyed in a long time, and I knew her eventual surrender would be well worth the wait. I snagged the whisky from the nightstand before walking over to the desk and opening the laptop to look over Irving’s report.
Fuck me. Both of Cassia Flynn’s “parents” were real pieces of work. Cynthia Joanna Agnew, née Adler, was on husband number three, although one of those marriages had been scrubbed from most records via annulment. She and Cass apparently had been close once upon a time—the girl had served as the maid of honor at the wedding to the stepfather. However, the termination of financial support obviously had come as a big surprise.
According to university records, Ms. Flynn had attended the first week of the spring term before receiving a non-payment notice, which had forced her to drop her courses.
It appeared that stepdaddy had been on quite the gambling and spending spree and had tired of paying for his wife’s offspring to attain a higher education. A little two-week holiday in France with five-hundred dollars a night in wine alone had coincided with Cass finding out that she no longer had parental support. Nice. I had no issue with how the stepfather spent his money; it was the screwing over of his wife’s kid that pissed me off.
Students like her were the truest victims in the system. With families technically wealthy enough to afford to send them to a respectable public school, these students didn’t “qualify” for government-subsidized loans. If their families checked out on them, they either took out sketchy loans that would haunt them decades into adulthood—or apparently they worked at strip clubs off the interstate.
I made a few calls to contacts in New York and Europe—because people, like my business partner, always panicked when you said you were taking vacation, which was why I had aspired to make myself as irrelevant as possible, so that when I decided I wanted to do something more entertaining—I could do so without drama.
Money had never been an issue, but since the IPO, money had become inconsequential. I could never spend it all, so it was only time that had any real value to me. However, there was one meeting, tomorrow in San Francisco, that I didn’t want to miss.
When I was finished, I got up and walked down the hall to the guest bedroom. Cass was asleep on the mattress, which was still wrapped in plastic. She lay there with only a thin blanket from the sofa wrapped around her. Considering I’d set the air-conditioning to artic to set off the brutal summer temperatures, she must have been frozen.
I walked over, scooped her up, and carried her back to the master. She was still asleep when I laid her on the bed and covered her. What I had told her earlier was the truth, pure and simple. People, women in particular, generally saw two things when they looked at me: money and someone they wanted to fuck.
I had learned this lesson early. Freshman year of undergrad, to be exact. Anastasia Carmichael. She had been the TA of my sociology class. Twenty-five and hot as hell, she had sucked me off under her desk during office hours. Her story had been: ‘If anyone found out about us, I would lose my stipend and be kicked out of the doctoral program’.
The truth had been: she’d had a fiancé—and she had been fucking her graduate advisor on the side. When I had shown up at her apartment with a two-carat stone to propose, she had dropped me like the stupid kid I had been at the time.
For years, I had kept that ring on a chain around my neck. Of course, I had told Bennett and anyone else that bothered asking that it was a tactic for getting women into bed—me playing the poor, jilted fiancé. Seeing as I had been fucked over by my very own TA, maybe that was another facet to my overall dickishness about Bennett’s little conquest a few years back—I had felt some sympathy for his little freshman co-ed.
Oddly enough, Cass Flynn and Alex Reed were roughly the same age now. The difference was that Bennett had met Alex when she had been an eighteen-year-old freshman. Cass was twenty-three, almost twenty-four. She was an adult, not a girl still in her teens. There was a world of difference.
Unlike Bennett, I had learned my lesson freshman year of college—no emotional attachments. Being emotionally invested was an unnecessary complication to a simple, pleasurable transaction. That wasn’t to say I frequented prostitutes. I merely stripped away the artifice that came with sex, and I didn’t ask for anything I couldn’t reciprocate.
It was funny. Back in the day, I had gotten a call from Gretchen Mueller, Bennett’s ex, not long after he had hooked up with his little freshman. She had told me that she had feelings for me. Unfortunately for her, I had always known the truth—that bitch didn’t have feelings for anyone but herself.
She was the classic gold-digging harpy. I was more than willing to be generous with a fortune I had come to, admittedly by luck o
f the draw. But I had retained said fortune by not being a fool. Anyone who thought I was going to be screwed over by a pretty face or a shoddy deal was sorely mistaken.
When I woke in the morning, my hand slid over soft skin, causing my dick to stiffen against round ass cheeks. Now this was the right way to wake up. I reached around and grabbed a firm breast as the fingers of my other hand trailed down to lace panties. One soft moan from her lips and reality came rushing back.
Fuck. I had taken home the little cocktail waitress from the club off I-80.
What the fuck had I been thinking? Oh right—I had been letting my dick do my thinking for me. I pulled my hands away from the warm, soft skin and rolled away.
I focused my thoughts on anything but her as I changed into basketball shorts and dragged a shirt over my head. By the time I made it out the front door, I had slightly better control over the driving urge to walk back into the bedroom and make Cass Flynn come until she begged me to fuck her.
I ran toward the campus, enjoying the empty streets and cool temperature of early morning. The trees lining the fraternity row were just starting to show the slightest change in color. Soon enough all the students would be back, stumbling their way home from frat parties, and it would be time for me to get the fuck out. For now, though, I was enjoying my little vacation out in the sticks.
By the time I got back to my comfortable little country cottage, I found my redheaded version of Sleeping Beauty still asleep, with her long hair spilling around her like flames. Her small pink lips were parted, and there was a slight furrow between her brows. Again, my dick sprang to life—like I was some hard-up teenager.
It was the image of pushing into that tight, wet heat that got me off in the shower. As soon as I finished, I got out and dressed as quickly as possible, trying to fool myself into thinking I wasn’t going to go out of my mind.
In the kitchen, I started the coffee, since there wasn’t a place that had decent coffee within seventy miles of this town. College kids—and maybe some of the professors—could survive on shit coffee, but I wasn’t about to.
I started taking out ingredients for breakfast. This scenario had a very morning-after feeling about it—and I didn’t do the morning after. However, I didn’t see myself as a cliché; I saw myself as a pragmatist. I had simply never wanted any one woman enough to invest in the before or after sex. Unfortunately, the girl in my bed right now happened to be the perfect storm.
I wanted to fuck her.
I liked her.
She needed something I could give her.
The thought of her working in that club bothered me more than I wanted to admit to myself.
And most importantly, I wanted to see her coming in my arms. Fuck, I craved it.
There were too many dickheads out there who wouldn’t give a shit if she came or not. They wouldn’t give a shit if they became the reason she hated sex. Me? When I fucked her, I would make sure she was addicted to sex. Not because I was a magician, but because I would take the time to know exactly what made her come undone.
I had known douchebags back in undergrad who had specifically targeted virgins because, “They didn’t know the difference.” My thought had always been, “Really? You want to be the guy who can’t make a woman come?” I could almost guarantee that there was a segment of the female population—definitely from a certain Ivy League university—that had spent years following college thinking that sex was some sort of cruel punishment from the universe.
To this day, I couldn’t understand guys who didn’t give a shit if their partners got off. It had nothing to do with love, just basic respect. Besides, more than half the fun—for me at least—was hearing a woman scream, “Yes, God, YES!” as her pussy tightened around my dick.
My buddy Ryan Bennett, no doubt, had always assumed I was one of those pricks who didn’t give a flying fuck about his sexual partners’ gratification, and I felt no obligation to set him straight. I just hoped he was doing right by Alex Reed, seeing as once upon a time ago, he had called me to a luxury hotel on the California coast in the middle of the night to pick her up—shortly after he had deflowered her.
Granted, he had just found out that the Bennett family patriarch had gone into the hospital with lung cancer. At the time, I had been a grade A asshole and had fucked with her head. Admittedly not one of my better moments.
I poured a cup of coffee stronger than most humans could stand—or black blood of the earth, as I liked to call it. I took out eggs, some fresh chives, and crème fraîche. Then I began slicing the mushrooms—shitake—before grating some Irish cheddar.
“You? You can cook?”
I turned around and saw Cass standing in the doorway with a shocked and mildly amused expression. She was wearing one of my dress shirts, which came halfway down to her knees. With her hair wound up in a messy bun, all she needed to complete the schoolteacher-porno was an apple, a pair of glasses, and the platform heels she’d been wearing the night before.
“Don’t look so surprised,” I chided her. “Coffee?”
“Definitely.”
I reached into the cabinet, took out a mug, and poured a cup. When she walked over and took it, I realized that without her Mary Janes, she didn’t even come up to my shoulder. She took a sip and made a face. I pointed to the refrigerator.
“Cream?” I asked wryly.
“Hell yes.”
She walked over to the refrigerator, took out the cream, and poured a generous portion.
“How did you sleep?” I asked.
She blushed and raised an eyebrow.
“Considering I fell asleep in your guest room and woke up in your bed? Your bed is amazing, by the way. … Not that you spend much time in it. I woke up at six and you were gone.”
“I make it a policy not to stay in bed too long when all I want is to fuck the girl sleeping next to me. Remember—I’m not into necrophilia or anything less than enthusiastic partners.”
What I failed to mention was the fact that I very much expected Ms. Flynn to be extremely willing given the proper preview to sexual relations. I took out a basket of strawberries.
“Do you want me to slice those?” she asked.
I set the basket on the counter and took out a paring knife and a cutting board. While she set to work rinsing and slicing the strawberries, I whisked the eggs and let butter sizzle in the sauté pan. As soon as the strawberries were neatly sliced in small glass bowls, Cass found the flatware and table linens, which she set on the counter with our coffees.
As soon as the omelet was done, I split it onto two plates, spooned out the crème fraiche, and sprinkled chives over each before placing a plate in front of Cass. I took the seat next to her just as she took a bite of omelet and moaned. Fuck. Here I was at thirty-two years old—a walking erection.
“Oh, wow. You really can cook.”
“Fancy scrambled eggs.”
She turned and stared at me.
“Modesty? Humility? Self-deprecation?” she gasped dramatically.
“I wouldn’t get used to it, lovely. A momentary lapse. I really am quite the bastard.”
She grinned and took another bite of omelet.
“A bastard who can cook.”
When we finished eating, Cass began taking the dishes to the kitchen.
“I can’t believe you use real china,” she laughed. “I mean, I’ve got some chipped bowls and plates and a set of silverware from Target.”
I watched as she filled the sink a quarter of the way with soapy water. Not wanting her to get the wrong idea—that I was some kind of benevolent fool or a monk—I walked over behind her, stopping less than an inch from her. When I brought my hand around to the front of the shirt she was wearing, she stiffened, her breathing hitching as my fingers undid the first button. I dropped my mouth to her ear.
“You knew I was watching you at the club, didn’t you, Cass?”
She nodded slightly as my hand slipped under the shirt, my thumb slowly circling her breast, teasing
closer and closer to the taut nipple. Her head fell back against my chest, and she shivered. I reached around with my other arm and pulled her against me until she could feel the full length of me pressed against her. As I imagined bending her over the counter and slipping slowly inside her, a small whimper escaped her lips.
When I released her, she turned and looked up at me, her chest rising and falling with uneven breaths. Goddamn. I wanted to push together those creamy little tits of hers and bury my face in them. Instead, I stepped away from her.
How this girl made asceticism seem worthwhile was beyond my understanding, because I was not someone who practiced self-denial. Yet here I was.
“Shower,” I said. “Get dressed. We leave in an hour.”
She frowned.
“To go where? I don’t have any clothes, remember?”
I smiled.
“It’s a surprise, and you can borrow one of my shirts. There are more panties in the bag I gave you last night, and I’m afraid you’re stuck with that alluring little skirt until we get where we’re going.”
I took out my phone and texted Irving so that he could arrange her final paycheck from the club. That, and move her belongings to storage.
“Oh, and lovely, come here.”
I walked over to the laptop and opened the digital transaction management software.
“I need your signature.”
“For what?” she asked from behind me. “Our contract?”
I looked over my shoulder at her as she began buttoning the shirt.
“Power of attorney.”
She frowned.
“That would be a big hell no. I’m not giving you or anyone else written authorization to represent me. How the hell do I know you’re not just going to sell me off to some Mexican cartel if I don’t please you?”
I laughed.
“I’ll add a clause that says you can rescind it at any time. This allows Irving to quit the club in your behalf, collect your final paycheck, and get into your apartment to move your belongings.”