by Lynda Chance
Would that make her a whore or a slut? And if she was okay with it why the hell should she care anyway? She wasn't going to tell anyone. She wasn't going to broadcast it all over the university.
Maybe she'd get really lucky and find one man who was clean and nice and respectful and appreciative. A fairytale began to form in her mind, of a handsome, rich man, but before it could go any further, she shut it down, knowing she was only being crazy and ridiculous.
She bit her lip and quickly set up a profile before she could chicken out. She clicked a picture of herself from her phone, set up an anonymous email account, and posted a bare bones profile as quickly as she could.
Unease spread through her, but she tamped it down. After all, she didn't have to accept anything from this. It was just a lark. An experiment.
She walked away from the library feeling sick to her stomach.
****
Connor told himself he was only going to look one more time. He'd give the damn website one more chance, and then he was done.
If nothing came from this, he knew he'd be sitting in a bar in downtown this weekend.
He signed on and almost immediately was hit with a spiral of lust so hard it shocked him.
The girl was new. Her account had only been set up the night before, and from what he'd learned, new girls were always in high demand if they were pretty enough.
He couldn't tell how pretty she was, because she'd posted her picture in profile. But there was something about the delicate curve of her jawline that was making him ache to see the rest. Her hair was medium length and a medium color, but it was cut at an angle that framed the lines of her face. It looked silky and smooth, and he felt a powerful need to fist it tightly between his fingers.
He studied the side of her face, the slight upward curve of her small nose and wondered why she hadn't taken the full frontal picture. Of course, he had only posted a picture of himself in profile, but he knew his reason was a stab at anonymity. So her reason had to be one of two things. Either she wasn't beautiful enough to compete with all the other women on the site, or she was trying to do this incognito. She wanted to remain anonymous on the Internet in case someone she knew saw her picture.
So which was it? She looked pretty enough, from the small amount he could see, but in a young sort of way. He rolled the question of why she'd want to be secretive around in his head. It had to be the obvious answer. She was uncomfortable about doing this.
Hell, he was uncomfortable about doing this.
He slid the bar down the page and didn't see anyone else new or interesting.
He frowned and rolled the screen back up until it rested on her face again. He knew for a fact since she was new and interesting to him, that she would be interesting to hundreds of other men as well.
If he didn't act on this now, she might choose someone else.
He fired off an email.
There. It was done. Last chance he was going to give to this particular avenue of sexual exploration.
Now all he had to do was wait.
****
Late the very next evening, Jessica sat in the empty library in front of 'her' computer. The semester was over, all the students were boxing their belongings up and heading for home or internships in various cities. She was supposed to be going on a field dig with the geology department for a month, but she hadn't been able to come up with the four grand to cover it. It wasn't too late; she could still go next summer if she could come up with the cash.
She logged onto the new email account and took a major hit of shock to the system. She had twenty-four emails. Holy crap.
An emotion that resembled guilt slid through her as she clicked on the first email.
Her eyes fell to the first picture. The man was ancient, like fifty. The guilt in her stomach churned and turned into nausea.
She clicked to the next email without reading anything about the first guy. The second man was old, as well. Older than the first one, like freakin' sixty. She didn't stop to read their exact ages or anything about them, just took a guess from their profile pictures.
She swallowed bile and clicked again.
She ran through the emails in rapid succession. Old. Old. Old. Old. Old. Gross and old. Disgusting, gross, and old.
She got to the twentieth email, clicked on it and almost swallowed her tongue.
Holy shit, Batman.
He wasn't old, or gross . . . or disgusting.
For the first time, she actually read the information on his profile. It said he was twenty-eight and single. Okay, so he was a bit older than she was, but she had already known that was going to be the case going into this. And he wasn't nearly as ancient as the cave dwellers she'd already sifted through.
He had dark hair, cut fairly severely around the skull, and like her, he'd taken his picture in profile and she couldn't see him directly. His lips were full, though, and the one eyebrow she could see was a downward slashing slant over an eye that contained not even a hint of a smile. Just like the rest of his face. No smile.
Okay, then. A really good-looking guy, just not a happy one.
She read the line he'd attached to his profile. Companionship is all I'll ever want.
Jessica rolled that around in her brain. It was a warning. An advance warning in the form of a tag line.
She scrolled through the remaining emails and found all of the men to be old, disgusting, or gross. Or all three.
Clicking on the young guy's page again, she studied it more closely. That warning fairly blared out at her, and she wanted to know what the old geezers had put in as their headings. Everyone who had signed up had all had to key in a one liner when they set up their accounts, and she ran through them now, comparing them to the young guy's.
Love and affection to the right woman.
Companionship leads to . . .?
Will you be my princess for life?
Looking for the right woman to rock my world and complete me.
The tag lines went on in that same vein and Jessica analyzed them in her head.
It didn't take long to figure out that companionship meant sex. And handsome dude was saying that sex was all he'd ever want.
Okay, then. Noted.
She wasn't interested in a relationship, either. She had school to get through and a career to build after that. She hadn't chosen geology as a major simply off the cuff. She'd chosen it because she loved science, it was a highly lucrative career choice, and depending on how she wanted to use her degree, she'd probably get to travel all over the world when she got a job.
'Companionship' was fine with her. In fact, she didn't want to have to make this any worse by lying to an old buzzard and telling him she loved him or some such bullcrap. Not that she could ever even contemplate doing this with one of those other men. In fact, she knew she wouldn't. She'd flip burgers the rest of her life if those were her only choices.
She studied his picture a while longer. This guy wanted sex. She wanted an education and the hope of a decent future.
Now the only question was, did she have enough nerve to take the meeting he was asking her for?
Chapter Two
Jessica rode the rail into downtown and followed the map she'd printed out to the restaurant where she was meeting him. It would be simpler if she had Internet on her phone, but that was a luxury she couldn't afford. His name was Connor and she supposed she needed to start thinking about him as being a human being and not just a computer profile.
She was wearing her nicest pair of jeans, with flat silver sandals and a red slinky shirt she'd borrowed from Allison. A strand of beads hung around her neck. They were cheap, from the dollar jewelry store. Again, it was all she could afford, and she was damn glad that she and Allison had found the small store in Addison, only a short drive away from campus.
Jessica had wanted to wear heels, for the bit of confidence they would give her, but commuting through DFW, having to catch buses and the rail and walking everywhere in between, were things
she'd learned long ago needed to be done in flat shoes, if not in tennis shoes.
She couldn't bring herself to wear tennis shoes tonight, so she'd compromised with the sandals.
Refusing to think too deeply about what she was doing, she pushed it to the back of her brain and decided that she was only going to think of Connor as someone who needed a favor from her. Because not thinking about it was absolutely the only way she'd be able to survive even this initial meeting.
After all, she didn't have to do this. She could still walk away if she wanted to.
She found the restaurant and her steps slowed as she walked inside. The place was casual-chic, and she was relieved to note that the clothes she'd worn were more than acceptable.
Jessica had already thought about what she'd say when she walked inside, so she told the hostess she was on a blind date and her date's name was Connor.
The girl looked her in the eye and nodded. "Lucky you."
Okay, then. So far, so good. That remark sounded more than optimistic and Jessica followed the girl on legs that she refused to allow to tremble. She had to stay strong, no matter the surge of trepidation coursing through her bloodstream.
Thirty seconds later, the hostess was showing her to a table and the man sitting there stood to his feet.
The first thing she noticed was his courteous, respectful action, and then Jessica swallowed deeply as she looked up at him. The impression she'd gotten from his picture was the correct one. He was good-looking, extremely so. And he still wasn't smiling.
She didn't smile at him, either. She clenched her mouth in a determined line, nodded her head once at him, and then took her seat.
The hostess handed them both a menu and with one last look at the man sitting opposite her, walked away from the table. Jessica didn't feel comfortable looking directly at Connor, as she needed to start thinking of him, she was still too shaky on the inside, so she opened her menu and partially hid behind it, pretending to peruse the selections. In reality, the words she saw were a complete blur and only the knowledge that the man across the table in all probability wanted to have sex with her blasted through her brain.
She could feel his dark eyes on her.
After a few seconds, he spoke. "Are you a cop?"
She jerked her head up with a further trickle of uneasiness and found him watching her intently. "No. Are you?"
"No."
She watched him watching her for a moment and then lowered her eyes back to the menu. She was going to let him take the lead in this because she had absolutely no freaking idea in the world what the hell she was doing here.
"What would you like to drink?" His voice was deep and sent a clamoring quake through her system.
She didn't look up. "Diet Coke, please."
She felt a moment of uncomfortable silence and then he spoke again. "This will be easier if you have something stronger."
Again, she didn't look up from her menu. "I'm sorry. I don't like the taste of alcohol and I'm not twenty-one."
"How old are you?" he asked with a sharp voice.
"Twenty."
"When will you be twenty-one?"
"In six months."
The waiter walked up and Jessica found it a relief to focus on something other than the menu. She smiled at the young man who didn't appear to be much older than she as she gave him her drink order. His eyes stalled on hers and he cleared his throat as he gave her his full attention.
She heard a hissing noise from the other side of the table and looked across at her companion to find him crossing his arms over his chest and frowning severely at the waiter, his expression glacial.
"My date would like a Diet Coke," he repeated the request, "And I'll have a Crown and Coke. That will be all for now."
"Yes, sir," the waiter said as he turned to go. Jessica was left alone again with her scowling date and once more, she hid her eyes from his under the excuse of reading the menu.
"Do you flirt with every man you see?"
Her heart stopped and then started again. She lifted her eyes to his. Whoa. Where the hell had that come from? Wherever it had come from, she didn't care for it. She narrowed her eyes and sent him a fake little smile. "I'm not flirting with you, am I?"
His eyes stayed steady on her for a few seconds before finally, the tension in his face relaxed somewhat and then his expression became probing as he studied her intently. "Why is that?"
She dropped her gaze from the searching, smoldering look in his eyes. "I'm not a flirt and I'm not exactly comfortable with the situation."
"I have three questions you'll need to answer for me before this goes any further, Jessica. I can call you Jessica?"
"Only if I can call you Connor."
"Yes, you can. Question one: Have you had sex within the last week?" His voice had taken on a brusqueness that seemed to rattle from his lungs and the question he asked sent a spiral of panic running through her veins. Not that she'd had sex. The question was just too probing, too soon.
But she answered him anyway, reminding herself that nobody was holding a gun to her head and she could get up at any moment and walk out the door. "No," she said quietly and then added, "Have you?"
He was silent a moment and during that time, the waiter dropped off their drinks and they placed their orders. Although she'd been staring at the menu almost non-stop since she'd arrived, she had no idea of what she'd read there, and chose the first thing she saw.
The waiter took the menus and turned to go. Jessica felt the loss of the camouflage almost immediately as she picked up the straw in her drink and began to swirl it around her ice just to give her hands something to do.
Connor ignored the drink in front of him and got back to their conversation. "I haven't had sex in the last week, but this isn't about me. I'm asking the questions here."
"Why are you asking the questions? I thought this was a getting-to-know-you kind of meeting. To see if we both were okay with doing this."
The obdurate glimmer in his eyes became more pronounced as he leaned forward toward her. "Let's don't kid ourselves here. You're one of a crap ton of beautiful girls interested in doing this. I, however, am the only man younger than forty. Don't kid yourself that I don't know that I get my choice of woman. I would have to be really stupid not to know that I'm the pick of the crop. I'm young, I've got money, and I'm not bad looking. Trust me when I say that I took a look at my competition."
Everything he was saying was completely true. But he didn't need to know how desperate she was. And no matter what, she wasn't going to have sex with a disgusting degenerate of an old man. So no matter if he chose someone else, that didn't mean she had to take someone else. She'd waited tables before. She could wait tables again. She'd lose her chance at a degree and never get to be a geologist, but she damn sure knew how to wait tables.
But why not let him have his way for a while? He was good looking and seemed to be intelligent. In a clinical sense, she could certainly see herself having sex with him. He was actually very, very handsome. And very tall from what she could remember when he'd been standing up.
If it wasn't him then she wasn't going to do this. So she'd attempt to humor him for now to see if anything could possibly come of this. She gave him a bland smile. "Okay, then. Fire away."
"You haven't had sex within the last week?"
"No, I haven't."
"Do you have any tattoos or body piercings?"
"No."
"Good. Third question--"
"Wait."
"What?"
Jessica lifted her hands from where they'd fallen to her lap and pushed the hair back from her face to display her ears. She calmly waited for him to study her.
"What?" His voice was confused.
"I wear earrings. My ears are pierced. They have been since I was about ten, I think." She never thought about her ears being pierced. She wore gold studs and only took them out every few days to sanitize them.
She watched him from across the table as his eyes
narrowed on first one ear and then the other.
"Okay. That's fine. That's not what I was talking about."
She tightened her lips nervously and let her hands fall back down to her lap.
He continued along the same course he'd been on before she had interrupted him. "I'm going to ask you the third question now. But you need to understand that before I do, I expect you to answer within two seconds. I want an honest answer, not something you think up out of your imagination. If you can't answer me immediately and honestly, without even so much as a pause, I'm out of here and this is over."
Trepidation landed in the pit of her stomach. She had no idea how bad this question was going to be, but she believed him when he said he'd leave and that would be that. She wasn't ready for that to happen yet, so she steeled herself and prepared to answer him quickly.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
She took a deep breath. "Yes, go ahead."
"Why are you doing this? Why are you willing to seek an arrangement like this one?"
With his two-second rule blaring through her brain, Jessica didn't even stop to think. She just started rattling. "I lost my scholarship. I'm supposed to start my third year of school and I lost my scholarship." She licked her dry lips. "I'm so mad at myself." She sucked in one hard, quick breath and kept going, as if she was talking to a friend or a mentor, or a benefactor who could help, and not someone who wanted to have indiscriminate sex with her. "I'm not a partier, you know? I've studied so hard, but I suck at math. I couldn't afford a tutor and I had to take chemistry and calculus at the same time and now everything I've worked so hard for is about to explode in my face. I swear, I'm not lazy or anything. I made the dean's list the first two semesters and--"
"Jessica. Stop."
She swallowed hard and was horrified when her eyes filled with tears, and she felt again the churning, gut-wrenching emotions she'd been experiencing since finding out that she'd blown her scholarship. The tears dismayed her and she struggled to blink them away.
