Do not follow.
Feeling a little flushed from my body’s immediate response to the idea of punishment from Oliver, I clean up after dinner and go upstairs. I mean to read for a while or maybe watch a movie on my tablet, but by the time I shower and get in bed, I’m more worked up than ever. I make sure my door is locked, and then I quietly climb into bed. I reach into my panties and let my mind fill with everything Oliver—his ferocious hands and his wicked mouth and his cock so heavy and so thick with wanting me.
It doesn’t take long, the climax, because it’s been building all day. All day like a slow fire inside me, and at the first touch of my hand, my body is already quivering and tense, ready to snap like a rubber band. The orgasm is fast and furious and ultimately unsatisfying, and when I come down from it, I come down with an itchy feeling of disappointment.
Of unabated longing.
And then as I sigh and pull my hand away from myself, I hear it—the creak of a floorboard outside my room. I go completely still, flooded with embarrassment and something else that’s harder to name.
Anticipation?
Hope?
Do I want Oliver to kick down the door, pin me to the bed, and finally go all professor on me?
Yes. Yes, I do.
God, I want it more than anything.
The floorboard creaks again, and I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I’m ready for him to force his way in here and relieve the still-aching need deep in my core.
But he doesn’t.
Hushed silence fills the corners and crevices of the room, and I’m left alone. Empty. Unfulfilled.
Sleep takes a long time to find me after that.
A week goes by like this. During the day, Oliver is uncommunicative and distant. I work and he works, and I steal glimpses of him working, his light-brown hair burnished in a near-gold by the June sunlight and his jaw ticking in that particular way of his as he thinks. I feed him lunch, which he barely notices, and then at some point I tentatively bring up dinner, which is almost always some kind of carryout and also an excuse for him to jab angrily at his food until he finds a reason to leave the table.
And then I go up to my room and read or work until I can’t stand it anymore, and I rub myself to climax. I never do hear that floorboard again, but every single time I hope I do.
I hope Oliver comes in and claims me. I want it more than I want anything, even more than I wanted to stay. Or maybe I wanted to stay because I wanted him to claim me more than anything. So much for being sophisticated, Zandy.
By my seventh day, the air in the study is thick with tension.
The sun is hot through the window, and I’m a very dismayed American when I realize that a box fan is the closest thing Oliver has to air conditioning. We crack open the windows and angle the fan so it doesn’t blow century-old paper everywhere, but it barely helps. Even the cat escapes the house with a cantankerous meow, jumping out the open window and loping into the back garden in search of shade.
My sleeveless dress is too hot, and I’m tugging constantly at the neckline, feeling warm and flushed even with my hair fastened up on top of my head. I’m jealous of the cat, jealous of her shade, but all of my work is here in the study, and I can’t leave either my work or Professor Grouch, who is even grouchier than usual today.
The second time I trip over a stack of books, making a ton of mess and noise, Oliver slams his laptop shut. “You,” he says darkly.
Just that.
Just you.
And then he glares at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just messy and hot and…what is it?”
“Do you even care that you’re making it impossible for me to work?”
Normally, I find his arrogant coolness sexy or amusing, but not today. It’s too hot for one thing, and I’m eyeballs deep in fixing his mess, and so I snap back, “Not in the slightest.”
I know instantly that I’ve fucked up. Oliver is a man of little patience, and the kind of lippy insolence I just displayed is absolutely one of his pet peeves. I feel a quick dart of fear that I’ve just managed to get myself fired.
Get myself sent home.
Shit.
Oliver’s face could be cut from stone right now, and his words are made of ice when he finally speaks. “Come here.”
“Oliver—”
“You call me professor in here or nothing at all,” he interrupts coolly.
“Professor—”
“Come. Here.”
With some trepidation, I straighten my dress and walk toward him, bracing myself for the inevitable words. You’re fired. Get out of my sight. And I hate the way tears burn at the back of my eyes, the way my throat balls up, because it’s stupid that I have grown so attached in such a short amount of time. Not just to this beautiful cottage in this beautiful place but to him, the most beautiful thing of all. If I had to leave him, I wouldn’t be able to bear the disappointment.
Disappointment. What a stupid word.
I’d be heartbroken.
Oliver regards me from across his desk, his arms folded over his chest, his mouth pressed in a flat line. “Come here,” he repeats, and I realize what he wants. He wants me close to him, on the other side of his desk.
My heartbeat kicks up a thousand paces. My mouth goes dry. He wants me close so that there’s no mistaking his angry dismissal. He wants me close so that he can make it very, very clear that I have to leave. And maybe I deserve it. Not for knocking over books but because I haven’t been a very good girl at all this week, what with all the silent, pining looks I’ve been throwing his way and the equally silent masturbating in his guest bed.
Tears threaten to spill out of my eyes, and crazy promises threaten to spill out of my mouth: that I really will be good this time, that I’ll be the best assistant a professor could have, that I’ll happily endure all of his moods and cutting remarks if only he’d let me stay close to him.
But I swallow both the tears and the words. I need to keep my dignity, I know at least that much about myself. That when I’m back home in my tiny apartment, curled around an empty bottle of wine, I’ll be able to hold on to the memory of me being composed and resilient, to the knowledge that I didn’t humiliate myself.
As I walk around the desk, Oliver pushes his chair back as if he’ll stand, but he stays seated, keeping his body angled to the front. I take a deep breath, willing myself to be as cool and untouchable as he is, waiting for him to say the words that will send me home.
But those aren’t the words he says.
“Red means stop,” he tells me, and then I’m seized and thrown over his lap.
Blood rushes to my head as my hands find the floor in pure instinct, and his hands easily catch and arrange me, one of his long legs hooking over mine when they kick up in the air.
And I’m wet.
Instantly, shamefully wet.
It’s like all the silent orgasms and all the daylight fantasies and muffled desire, they are all concentrated into longing for this one thing, this one act. I don’t need a kiss or a murmured compliment—I need this. To be bent over Oliver’s knee like a disobedient schoolgirl.
And he needs it too. That much is clear from the way his hands tremble as they shape over my backside, smoothing over the fabric of my dress with a slowness that feels very much like desperation in disguise. A thick shape nudges into my hip, solid and blunt, and the tangible proof that he wants me is enough to make me whimper.
The whole thing is enough to make me whimper.
He’s not going to be hearing any safe words out of my mouth. Not today.
“You make it impossible for me to work,” he breathes. “You make it impossible to concentrate. To eat. To sleep.”
“Because I made a mess?” I ask tremulously.
His hand slips under the hem of my dress and palms my backside. “Because you made a mess,” he says in a growl, squeezing my ass hard enough for me to yelp. “And because you distract me with your dresses and your fucking hair and you
r fucking watch.” He flips the skirt of the dress up over my waist, baring my ass and thighs to the warm air of the room.
“What are these?” he asks dangerously, a finger tracing along the lacy edge of my panties.
“Um, underwear,” I answer, my face burning and my core clenching. I want so very badly for him to stroke along my center, to slip a finger inside of the lace and rub me where I’m swollen and wet, but he doesn’t. He just continues with that maddening tease.
“These are the kinds of things bad girls wear,” he says sternly. “Are you a bad girl?”
“Yes,” I exhale. “Yes, I am.”
The first spank. I squeal, my body arching away from the force, but there’s nowhere to go, nowhere to be except against his hot, firm body.
“You know what else makes it impossible?” he asks.
“What?” I manage.
“Listening to you come on your own hand, night after night.”
I suck in a guilty breath, grateful he can’t see my face. “I—that’s not—I mean—”
“Don’t lie to me, Miss Lynch.”
Not Zandy.
Not even Amanda.
Miss Lynch, like I’m a misbehaving student of his. The thought turns me on beyond all belief, and I squirm in his lap. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You’re lying,” he accuses. “You think I don’t know what you do at night, dirty girl? You think I don’t know how you slip your fingers between your legs and wish it were my fingers? My mouth? My cock?”
I’m so far gone with lust at this point that all I can do is moan.
“Did you do it to drive me mad? Hmm?” Another spank. “Did you do it hoping I would break down the door and fuck you like your fingers couldn’t?”
“Yes,” I whisper as another spank lands hard. “Yes, I wanted that.”
“Naughty girl,” he admonishes. “Very naughty girl.” Several more rain down on my backside, and I am past struggling now, past anything but the need for friction against my clit, the need to be filled deep inside.
“Please,” I beg wildly. My hair is tumbling down around my face, and my nose is starting to run, and it feels like I’ve been spanked within an inch of my life, and I need something, something only he can give me. “Please, Oliver.”
He gives me an almighty spank. “Try again.”
“Please, Professor.”
“Much better,” he rumbles, and then his fingers are right where I need him, pressing against the fabric covering my pussy. He tugs the panties aside, studying his prize for a long moment before fingering me in rough exploration. He makes a noise of approval at what he finds.
“So wet,” he says with crude pleasure. “So wet for me.”
His hand grips my hair and turns my head so I can look at him—his other hand keeps working at my sopping-wet pussy, teasing my entrance and working inside my channel so slowly that my toes curl.
“What do you want, Miss Lynch?” he asks, and he’s as scornfully proud as ever, but there’s something in the way he asks and in the way his hand pauses inside me…
He’s waiting for me to carry this kinky game of his further. He’s waiting for me to choose. And it’s not even a choice. It hasn’t been a choice since I clung to him in the London rain.
I will never choose red.
“I want to be your good girl, Professor Graeme. Please let me be your good girl again.”
Chapter Eight
Oliver
I knew this morning that I was near my breaking point.
All week it’s been building, stoked by every fire imaginable. Her adorable and distracting habit of running the top of her pen over her lip as she worked. The thoughtful feeding and bringing of fresh mugs of tea, once she figured out the kettle. The unknowing way she flashed me her panties as she crawled on all fours around my office, shifting through stacks of research.
And at night…fuck.
It was purely an accident the first time. I was passing down the hallway to get a glass of water when I heard her. It was only a quiet mmm of feminine relief, but it went through me like an electric shock. I froze to the spot, instantly picking up on the rustle of sheets and the quickening of breath and—God have mercy on my soul—a sound that could be nothing other than a slender finger moving through a wet pussy.
I listened, hard and throbbing, until the very end with her sweet gasp of pleasure, and then I stole back to my room to toss off fast and vicious, coming so quickly that I could barely catch my breath.
I’ve repeated the voyeurism every night since.
How could I not?
I burned with wanting her, I ached with being so near and yet holding myself back, and by today, I was near mad with it. Her lewd curves and even lewder mouth, both combined with those still-innocent eyes. And then she had to go and put her hair up, with only a few damp tendrils escaping, as if to taunt me by caressing all the places along her neck and shoulders that I could not.
I didn’t care that she knocked over a stack of books. I cared that she made me a madman. A wild thing, a beast, a hunter.
A monster.
I cared that I wanted her beyond all sense and propriety, and I cared that she was too fucking smart and helpful for me to find any fault with.
I cared, in other words, that she was perfect, and that by being perfect, she made me the most imperfect version of myself.
So as I hold her over my lap, one hand twisted in that luscious hair and the other still wet from her cunt, I ask her one last time. “Are you sure you want to be my good girl? It will take a lot of work.”
She pulls her plump lower lip between her teeth. “Red means stop, right? So I say red when I need a time-out?”
“That’s correct, Miss Lynch.”
She blinks up at me. “Then that’s all I need to know. Do what you like with me, Professor.”
Christ, but she’s dangerous. Some kind of siren sent to lure me off my path. I push her to her knees in front of me, spreading my legs on either side of her, enjoying the view of her big blue eyes all sultry as she looks up at me. I enjoy it almost as much as I enjoyed the glowing skin of her ass. Almost as much as examining the tight entrance to her body, all pink and wet, and remembering how unthinkably tight she’d been around my penis that night. How I had to wedge my way in.
Hell, I enjoy it all. I drink it all in like a man who hasn’t tasted a drop of water in years.
“You’ve made me hard, like a bad girl,” I drawl, loving how her eyes widen at the word hard. “And a good girl would fix it.”
“Fix…” she asks, and then her cheeks go very pink. “Oh.”
“Yes. Take it out, Miss Lynch. I’m getting impatient.”
Her hands are nervous and unpracticed as she works my belt open. “I’ve never…” Her voice comes out in a faltering murmur that’s unlike her usual confident alto. She clears her throat. “I’ve never done this.”
“Then just do as I say,” I inform her.
She nods, squaring her shoulders a bit, and sets her attention to the task, like any good student would. There’s something deeply erotic about her inexperience, something that makes it more than the playacting this kind of roleplay usually is.
A part of this is real—so real that it might be wrong—and I can’t bring myself to stop it. I let the wrongness of it wash over me, opening to it, letting it inside a cold, sleeping heart that’s been dead to real pleasure for far too long.
I hiss as her hands seek me out, drawing my naked and ruddy flesh into the air.
She stares at it with just as much awe and panic and excitement as she did that night in London—as if she can’t wait to have me inside her even as she knows I’ll be too big—and that makes me want to pound my chest like a caveman. Makes me want to pull her up onto the chair and thrust into her wet opening. I want her impaled on me. I want her writhing from the stretch of me. I want her coming so hard her body tries to curl into a ball because she can’t stand it, she just can’t stand it.
But for now, I se
ttle for this: “Put your mouth there, Miss Lynch.”
Her eyelashes flutter as she looks up at me. “But what if I’m not any good at it?”
Frankly, it’s a miracle I haven’t erupted all over her already, but I don’t break character to tell her that. “Then you’ll have to practice. Best to start now.”
The lower lip gets bitten, and one eyebrow arches slightly in a movement I know means she’s deep in thought. And then she leans forward and presses a chaste kiss to the underside of my cock.
“Like that?” she asks, peering up at me. Her mouth is still close enough to my flesh that I feel the sweet puffs of her breath.
My belly clenches. “Almost, Miss Lynch. Use your tongue. Lick me.”
“Lick,” she murmurs to herself. “I can do that.” And she does, setting that plush mouth to me once again, this time parting her lips, allowing her tongue to slip out.
The second it touches me, I let out a ragged breath; it’s heaven, pure heaven, and the look she gives me is nothing short of vixenish—which, despite everything, despite how lurid and depraved this moment is, almost makes me smile with a grudging kind of respect. I can say many things about Zandy Lynch, and most of them are grievances—that she’s too bold, too eager, too happy—but those are also the same things I can’t ever imagine changing about her. They are the same things that reassure me that, while I might be a monster, I’m still a monster with a conscience, because the girl between my legs knows exactly what she’s doing. She’ll survive this.
Even if I don’t.
She licks me again, less tentative this time and more certain, a long steady motion that has my blood heating and freezing in fitful starts. And then her natural eagerness spills over and she starts licking at my crown as if it’s a lollipop, like she can’t get enough of it. I thread my hands through her hair, but I don’t push her down. Not yet. I simply flex and twist my fingers in the silky strands and guide her mouth to where I need it. From my taut, swollen tip to the turgid base, from the root to the velvety underside, rewarding her with my groans whenever she does well.
Misadventures with a Professor Page 7
