And what if he still wants to have sex? Am I comfortable with that?
It’s a lot to digest, and so I’m still thinking over it as I fall asleep, and again as I wake up to Oliver stroking my flanks in a way that lets me know he’s thinking about spanking me.
We do a morning spanking and a morning fuck, and then it’s time for the day to get on, except there’s a little niggle of unease at the back of my mind.
No period yet.
I shower and go downstairs, and he gets in from his run and showers too, and we work together for most of the day, my sense of unease growing. But I have no idea how to vocalize it to him, no idea how to express my worries, because what if his first thought is of Rosie? What if he’s so triggered by his bad pregnancy experience with her that he gets angry with me?
Or worse, what if he thinks I’m the clingy girl who’s tried to trap him into something by getting pregnant?
Oh God. Just the thought itself is enough to make me nauseous…except, was I already nauseous? Am I truly nauseous now? No. I’m overreacting, I’m just queasy from nerves and worry, that’s all. Nothing to do with that.
Except the next morning when I wake up in Oliver’s arms, I am definitely nauseous. For real nauseous. I slide free of him and make my way to the bathroom, where I splash my face with cold water and force myself to get un-nauseous.
He said the condom broke that day by the river.
But that was just two days ago. I’ve done enough research to know that conception could have only happened two weeks or so ago, and that would have been in London, and I’d bought all of those condoms brand new. But…
We used one of his condoms in London.
Oh God.
No.
“No,” I say out loud, just to make extra certain my brain processed the word. “No. This is not happening.”
This can’t be happening.
I go downstairs in only my thin cotton robe and make my way down the flagged path to the river. It’s still very early morning, with only a faint-pink sun and river fog like a shroud over everything, and more than life itself, I want to go crawl back in bed with the handsome, snobby professor I’ve come to love.
Oh shit. Do I love him? Because this is a hell of a time to decide. But even with my lingering nausea and fear, I think I know the answer.
Yes.
Yes, of course, I love Professor Graeme. His dirty games and his sharp words and his brilliant intellect. His rare flashes of warmth and kindness, his hidden passion and fire just waiting for the right person to patiently uncover them…
I love him.
And I may be pregnant with his child, and somehow I just know he’d never forgive me if that were true, no matter how innocent of it I may be. No matter how accidental, no matter how not my fault, the one wound he bears is so deeply tied to a baby, and how can I, just a silly little student, ever hope to heal him of it?
First thing’s first, I order myself. No sense in worrying about something that might not even be true. I’ll get dressed and find a pharmacy and get a pregnancy test. And then I can decide what comes next and what it means for my professor and me.
I’m to the pharmacy and back to the cottage before Oliver is finished with his run, and I have a plan. I’ll go to the bathroom—the small water closet by the snug, the one we hardly ever use—and I’ll use the tests. Yes, tests plural, because I couldn’t decide on a brand, and despite having everything from the best nursing bras to the best infant formula, Consumer Reports doesn’t have a buying guide for pregnancy tests. So I bought three different brands of pregnancy tests, just to be safe.
But when I lock myself inside the bathroom, I’m gripped by a slow, creeping hesitation. Like I’m being gradually, gradually frozen in ice, until I’m sitting on the floor across from the sink with my head between my legs just staring at the tile. The nausea from the early morning has faded, leaving only a tingling kind of displacement in its place, like my stomach and my heart have traded places.
Just go pee on that stick. Just do it.
But even standing up right now feels like a herculean feat—like if I stand up, I’m accepting whatever happens next, and I’m not sure I can do that.
I’m not sure I’m strong enough to do that.
But as romantic as it would be to spend the rest of the day on the floor in a state of languishing gloom, I’m not immune to the ticking clock of Oliver’s run. And my ass is cold from the tile. And my own despair is getting a bit boring—it’s not like me to despond over a problem. It’s like me to tackle the problem head-on, with research and enthusiasm and a big Zandy Lynch grin, and dammit, that’s what I’m going to do now.
So I get up and perform the oddly ignoble ritual of peeing on the different sticks and then lining them up according to size and waiting and watching.
It’s strange to think that my entire future is concentrated in these little plastic rectangles full of urine and chemical dyes. Strange to think that whatever these rectangles reveal in the next minute or two is going to completely redirect the course of my life for better or for worse, and oh my God, they’re finally starting to turn colors, they’re finally starting to stripe over with weak washes of blue and—
I sit back down on the floor, except this time I don’t stare at the tile, I stare at my hands, as if I expect them to be different. As if I expect my entire body to be different.
Nothing’s different.
But everything is. Everything has to be.
Because I’m pregnant, and I’m pregnant with a baby I know Oliver won’t want.
I set a timer on my phone and give myself five minutes. Five minutes to freak out—to scream or to cry or whatever I need to do—and then when the timer beeps, I wipe away my tears, sweep the tests with their condemning plus signs into the trash, and go find my laptop to make a plan.
Oliver comes into the study with shower-damp hair and rolled-up sleeves that show off the strong lines of his forearms and wrists. He’s scrubbing at the wet hair with his fingertips and frowning in that way that tells me he’s already several layers deep into some new insight of his, but he stops when he sees me at my desk and he smiles.
God, that smile.
It’s so wide, with lines bracketing those sculpted lips, and it changes his entire face from scornfully distant to sincere and boyish.
“Good morning, Miss Lynch,” he says, and I slam my laptop shut so he won’t see all the incriminating tabs I have open, and I smile back at him, hoping he won’t see how forced it is.
“Good morning, Professor,” I say, and then he bends in to kiss my neck. He didn’t shave this morning, and his stubble leaves the most delicious burn wherever his soft lips touch me. It’s the best kind of sting, and for a minute I let everything else fade away—the pregnancy, the panic, the plan—and just melt into the feeling of him. My professor. My Oliver.
He withdraws too soon, dropping a kiss on my head before he goes to his desk. “You’ve nearly finished with all the books, I see.”
“I still have a lot of the newer ones to do,” I say automatically, and then I stop myself because I don’t know that I’ll get to the newer books. I don’t know that I’ll be able to get to anything else at all, because I don’t know what’s going to happen after I tell Oliver I’m pregnant.
Unless you don’t tell him…
The idea is beyond tempting. It snakes around my thoughts and my heart until I feel tied up with it.
“Whenever you have time,” Oliver says, not noticing my inner struggle. “I’m already astounded at what you’ve accomplished in just a couple short weeks.”
Despite everything, I allow my gaze to follow his around the study, and I don’t bother to tamp down the bubble of pride I feel at the progress I’ve made. Instead of an unsteady maze made of piles of books and paper, I’ve got the study organized with new shelves and cabinets of glass-topped drawers for the rarer works. Aside from the books stacked under my desk still awaiting cataloguing, the floor in the study is now complet
ely clear—save for the cat bed I bought on a whim for Beatrix—and a person can actually walk around the room without tripping onto centuries-old manuscripts now.
I have done a good job here, and I’ll be able to take that with me no matter what. I look over to the unbearably handsome man already bent over his work, and I can’t help but think that’s possibly all I’ll get to take with me: the memory of well-shelved books and nothing else.
The thought punches through my chest with grief, and I have to turn away, lest I risk Oliver seeing all these wild emotions move across my face. No, it’s best I approach him as controlled and composed as possible. I need to be cold like him.
By the end of the afternoon, I’ve done all the surreptitious research I can. I’ve made a spreadsheet of options, along with their qualitative pros and their quantitative cons. I’ve found a flight home from Birmingham, and I’ve begun preparing a small speech to Oliver, with a few salient bullet points.
Namely, that this is not my fault—if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s his, for using old-ass condoms—and also, second bullet point, I’m keeping the baby. I’ve made a spreadsheet and I’ve made a decision, and a spreadsheet decision is a permanent one. Maybe it’s insane—maybe I’m insane—but when I sat there looking at all the different paths I could take, my hand kept drifting to my belly and my mind kept drifting to this fantasy of a baby with Oliver’s multicolored eyes.
Maybe…maybe he won’t be angry? Maybe he won’t be terrified? Maybe he’s healed enough from what happened with Rosie that he can imagine a little squishy baby with his eyes and my dimples and all will be well?
But what if he doesn’t? What if he can’t?
What if I tell him and confess to loving him, and he rejects both me and the baby in one fell swoop? What then?
Then you take the flight out of Birmingham and get started on your baby to-do list.
I curl over my desk, bracing my head against my hands, and try not to cry. I don’t want to be rejected. I don’t want to lose Oliver. And yet, even without the baby, I don’t know that he’d want me. He hasn’t mentioned anything about an us, about this being anything more than a convenient, kinky fling to while away the summer.
I want more than anything to be reasonable, to be logical, but maybe it’s the pregnancy hormones or maybe it’s the fact that Oliver stirs me up beyond reckoning, but suddenly, the tears are right there, ready to fall. Am I so unlovable? So unlikable? That even something longer than a summer with me is a detestable thought?
“Zandy.” A low voice comes from behind me, and I freeze as Oliver’s warm hands slide over my shoulders. “Are you okay?”
In my distress, I completely forgot that he could see and hear me. I hoped he was too absorbed in his work to notice my breakdown, but it appears I was wrong.
Like I’ve been wrong about so much else.
“I’m fine,” I say, pressing the heels of my palms against my eyes and swallowing back my emotions. I move my hands and look up at him, giving him my brightest smile. “Just tired.”
He frowns. “I’ve been working you too hard.”
“Not at all,” I say, grateful that no tears have actually spilled and now only wishing the tremble in my chin would settle. “Really, I’m fine. I probably just need a nap.”
And before I can protest—or indeed, even process what’s happening—Oliver’s scooping me up in his arms and carrying me up the stairs.
“Oliver!” I say, tugging pointlessly at the shirt fabric near his neck and kicking my legs weakly. “Put me down!”
“You’re having a nap,” he says firmly, carrying me into his bedroom and laying me on the bed. He stands over me, as if torn. Then he climbs onto the bed as well, not to cradle me in his arms but going lower, lower, until his wide shoulders are tucked between my legs.
“This—this isn’t a nap,” I say breathlessly as he pushes my skirt up to my waist and tugs my panties to the side.
“I’m tucking you in,” he says, a single eyebrow arching in mischief. “Making sure you can fall asleep easily.”
And I could cry as his mouth descends warm and wet on my intimate flesh, not because I was near to tears before but because I love him so much, because he’s made me fall in love with him, because I can hardly stand these rare glimpses of his open, happy soul and I’m terrified I’ll have to leave them behind with everything else. I’m terrified of sending him back into his emotionless, cruel shell once I tell him the truth. My mischievous, smiling professor will be gone, and all that will be left is a bitter husk in his place.
You can’t know that, I assure myself, although the assurance feels hollow. There’s every chance I’ll tell Oliver and things will go well. There’s every chance this has a happy ending.
But I can’t stop the tide of doubt that seeps in along with the tide of pleasure, and as his mouth gently works me toward climax, I find myself clinging on to every single sensation, every single slice of memory. His soft hair under my fingers and his hot mouth and teasing hands pressing and massaging and stroking at all of my most sensitive places, and then finally—sweetest of all—the tender expression on his face as I come undone, pleasure spiraling out from my belly in whorls of ecstasy. I arch and writhe under him, my toes digging at the blankets, my head rolling back, and when I slowly circle back to earth, I see him standing up and getting ready to pull the blankets over me—as if he really means to tuck me in.
“What about you?” I ask, reaching for him.
He pauses, obviously torn. “I don’t need—shit, Zandy. Holy shit…”
My hands have found him under his trousers, and I’m giving him a teasing squeeze. He’s as hard as a spike.
“I’ll just take a minute,” I promise, and he growls, already mounting the bed and unfastening his pants.
“The hell you will,” he says darkly, and then my lips are being parted by the plump, swollen head of his cock as he feeds it into my mouth.
“Fuck,” he hisses as I instinctively suck around him. “Yes, girl, just like that, just like that.” And after I’ve sucked him to his satisfaction, he pulls himself from my mouth and straddles my stomach, yanking down my dress and my bra to expose my tits. I love seeing him like this, feral and quaking with unfiltered lust, and there’s something so primal about seeing a man normally as refined as Oliver do something as crude as mark me with his come. But that’s what he does, his one hand braced on the headboard above me, and his other hand fucking his cock as if he’ll die if he doesn’t empty himself immediately. I watch the dusky head disappear and reappear in the ferocious circle of his grip, and then I moan in fascinated lust as his orgasm leaves him in thick, white ropes all over my bare tits.
It’s so fucking erotic that I’ve nearly forgotten about everything that’s come before, and I beg him to rub me again, to fix the new empty ache he’s made inside me, and by the time we come again and clean up, we’re both ready for a nap.
Tomorrow, I think drowsily as I fall asleep. I’ll tell him tomorrow.
Chapter Fourteen
Oliver
Zandy’s been acting strange.
I noticed it yesterday before I whisked her up to my bed, and I’m seeing it again today as we start our work for the morning. And I think I know what it’s about, which means I’m currently sitting at my desk ruminating not over a photographic illustration of the courtship process, as I should be doing, but over what I should do next.
I mean, it’s obvious what I should do next. I should talk to her. But I’m a gelded coward, because even the mere thought of saying what I need to say out loud has me retreating.
A small sigh sifts over to me from Zandy’s desk, and I look up to see her running the top of a pen along her mouth, along the seam of those sinful lips. She’s got one hand spread low on her belly, and her eyes are distant. She’s beautiful. Beautiful and smart, and she’s pried open locks inside me that I thought were sealed shut for eternity.
What am I doing with her? Why can’t I be as brave and reckless as she ca
n, and why can’t I just admit how I feel? Admit that I want her and love her and need her for longer than the summer?
Because that’s what she needs, isn’t it? That’s what this new distance of hers is about? She’s finally realized that I’ve given her nothing more substantial than my cock and the palm of my hand, and even though we promised nothing more between each other, it’s catching up with her. She’s adjusting her feelings and expectations, and….and I don’t want her to. I don’t want another morning like the one in London when I woke up alone. I don’t want there to be any reason she thinks she has to leave me.
I want her to know how I feel.
“Zandy,” I say softly. “Come here.”
I’ve summoned her to my desk countless times since she’s arrived at my home, but this is the first time I feel nervous as she approaches, the first time I have no idea what happens next. But despite that, my cock hardens as she walks toward me in her little tweed skirt and schoolgirl-ish blouse—exactly the kind of outfit that tempts me to distraction. I’m going to fuck her after we talk, I decide, to reward her for being so perfect.
She’s ready to kneel or to bend over my desk, and her eyes flare with pleased surprise as I pull her down into my lap.
“Miss Lynch,” I murmur, brushing some of that coffee-dark hair away from her face.
“Professor,” she says, the word as always staining her cheeks with an adorable pink. I kiss those cheeks now, then her plush mouth, sliding my tongue against her lips until she opens for me and I can kiss her the way I want. Deep and devouring. Claiming and hungry.
“I love you,” I say against her mouth, and the words leave me like my own breath, like water from a spring. As natural as anything, as easy as being alive. And at the sound of them in the gentle summer air of the office, I feel a surge of happiness so real that I can’t believe I’ve waited so long to say them. I should have told her the minute I realized. I should have told her and then told her nothing else for the rest of my life.
Misadventures with a Professor Page 12
