The Mistress Mistake (15 page)

While she considered what to do and how he
would react, she spent the rest of the day doing a quick clean on
the apartment, and by seven that evening she had only just finished
her bath and was a bundle of nerves as she waited for him to show
up.

By eight o'clock, Connor still wasn't there
and Jessica was getting worried and angry. He came at seven every
night, and when she began to really worry about him, it made her
angry at herself to realize she'd allowed herself to care that
deeply about him.

Pushing the disturbing thought from her mind,
she realized she needed to eat something, so she defrosted a piece
of pizza and ate it in front of the television. At ten o'clock, she
assumed he wasn't going to show, so she brushed her teeth and hair
and went to bed. She was beginning to get a headache, and she
tossed and turned for hours, trying to find the sleep that she
needed.

****

Connor had a late meeting that night, and
when he found himself having to grit his teeth to make it through
it, he became pissed at himself. After little more than a month,
his body was already accustomed to Jessica. His internal timing
knew when seven o'clock came and went, and when he got out of the
meeting at nine, all he could think about was driving straight to
the apartment and sinking inside her tight little body.

As he idled at a stoplight, the memory of her
scent both hardened him and alarmed him.

Why the hell would he remember her scent? Why
would it be going through his mind, messing with his insides and
fucking him up so badly? When exactly had he gotten it so bad for
her? The pull he felt coming from her direction was almost
magnetic. He received a charge from her positive energy he couldn't
fight against.

But he found himself trying to fight against
it now. He made a quick decision, and instead of continuing on to
her apartment, he turned left and drove to a downtown bar that he
used to frequent before he met her.

He attempted to rationalize with himself. He
was a grown man, and he was in control of his actions. There was no
fucking way in hell that he was going to allow himself to get hung
up on a tiny little virgin turned prostitute. But the
very
second
his brain came up with that description for her, his
stomach almost rebelled against him. He felt like he was going to
throw up. She wasn't a prostitute. At worst, she was his mistress.
But it still just wasn't going to fucking happen.
Goddamn it all
to fucking hell.
He'd been married for five fucking years and
he hadn't felt this way about his own wife. His wife had been in
love with him, madly, completely. And he knew, deep down in the
recesses of his doomed soul, he hadn't loved her back. At least,
not the same way that she'd loved him. And now what? He was going
to repay that love, that loyalty by falling for a twenty-year-old
he was paying to have sex with him? How the hell fucked-up was
that? All he'd wanted was an arrangement. A simple fucking
arrangement. He'd wanted an arrangement like this for the express
purpose of not having to seek out sex when he didn't want to.

Well, maybe tonight he wanted to. Maybe
tonight he wanted to forget about Jessica, forget about the guilt
cutting him in half.

Feeling searing nausea run through his gut,
he walked into the bar and ordered a drink. It was Friday night,
and as he glanced around from his seat on the barstool, he saw
several women eyeing him up. Not much more than thirty fucking days
ago, any one of them would have done just fine.

As he looked over the available merchandise,
he felt his cock twitch and swell in his pants. But before he could
even figure out which woman was making him hard, with a sinking
feeling he realized what lay just below the surface of his
consciousness. A tight little pussy with trimmed hair. Tan lines in
the shape of a triangle. The hem of a t-shirt covering up
everything above the perfect, vertical slice of her navel.

Just as he realized who the goddamn hell was
making him hard, a woman who was more confident and cocky than the
rest of them walked up to him and slid onto the empty barstool
beside him.

Her cloying scent enveloped him, and just as
smoothly as she laid her hand on his shoulder and swiveled to face
him, he rose from his seat, slammed his glass on the bar in front
of him, and stalked from the building.

Connor drove around for hours, fighting
himself. It was as if he were two people, two people who were in an
almighty battle.

He was pissed at himself for even thinking of
Jessica as a prostitute. He'd taken her virginity, goddamnit.
Virgins weren't prostitutes.

He was pissed he hadn't taken the slut in the
bar and fucked her blind. He was pissed he only wanted to have sex
with Jessica. And there was the difference, after all, right? The
slut in the bar had been just that, a slut.

And Jessica was anything but. She was a sweet
girl,
a good girl
, and he had a sudden and ferocious feeling
that if he hadn't been such a fucking dick and hadn't pushed her
into doing what she'd done, she'd have found another way to get the
money.

So maybe it was all his fault. He hadn't set
up her online profile, true. But he'd made it easy for her. It
wasn't conceit to acknowledge that he wasn't a bad-looking guy, he
was young, and always seemed to attract women. So wouldn't it
follow that she'd have caved under his demands and gone ahead and
done the damn thing she shouldn't have? He knew--he fucking knew in
his goddamned heart, that she wouldn't have done this with anybody
else. She wouldn't have opened her soft, sweet, virginal body to
one of those old, horny fucks on that fucking website.

He
hated
that website.

But worse than that, he hated knowing he'd
gone and done what he wasn't supposed to do.

He'd found a fucking woman that evidently, he
couldn't do without, and now the guilt from that was going to eat
him alive.

****

Around midnight, Connor gave up, if only for
the night, and let himself inside Jessica's apartment.

A light was shining from her bathroom door,
and she was asleep in the middle of the bed, the covers a tangled
mess around her where it looked liked she'd had a major struggle
with them.

He left the light on, but closed the door
until there was only a small wedge of light spilling into the
bedroom. Shucking out of his clothes as fast as he could, he
crawled into the bed as carefully as possible and took her into his
arms. He moved slowly; it was his intention to wake her, but he
didn't want to scare her out of her deep sleep.

She let out soft sigh and he nuzzled her neck
above her collarbone. Shit, there was that scent again. His cock
swelled immediately and as she began rousing from sleep, he slipped
her panties down her legs and pressed his palm against the place
he'd been aching for all fucking day and night.

At first, Jessica thought she was dreaming.
She thought she was having a sweet, sweet dream. Connor was there
with her; he'd finally gotten to the apartment. He hadn't had an
accident, nothing bad had happened to him. He touched her between
her legs, and she opened for him without hesitation, wrapping her
arms around his neck and sighing in contentment.

But then the dream turned dark, and from
nowhere at all, a bad feeling crept through her veins and landed in
a cold knot in her stomach. The dream downgraded from there, moving
swiftly into the realms of a full-blown nightmare.

Someone else was in the bed with them.
Another woman. Another woman was in their bed and it was sending
panic and fear down her spine like a river of ice water. Her
confused mind, somewhere halfway between sleep and consciousness,
tried to understand what was happening. Hadn't Connor told her that
he wouldn't sleep with anyone else? She'd thought he had. She
thought that's what he meant when he'd said she didn't need to
worry about not using condoms. What else could it have meant? She
was on birth control, at his instigation.

But now she was having a nightmare because
another woman was in bed with them. Surely not. He'd promised she
wouldn't have to do a threesome.

With that thought, Jessica's eyes flew open
and she came fully awake, as her circumstances and their agreement
came rushing back to her in a stream of guilt and pain.

But at least he was here. And it had been
just a bad dream. Nothing more. There certainly wasn't another
woman in bed with them. Thank God. He was okay, he hadn't been in
an accident or anything. He was holding her gently in his arms, and
he was kissing her softly, running his hand up and down her
thigh.

She was just about to fall into his kiss when
her brain became alert, and her faculties began working fully. She
took a deep breath, a haze of pain and agony coming over her as she
realized what it was that had made her think of another woman.
Before he could make a move to stop her, she slipped away from him,
slid off the bed, ran to the bathroom, and locked the door behind
her.

Her stomach heaved, and in seconds, she was
bent over and losing everything in her stomach to the toilet.
Almost immediately, Connor began pounding at the door.

"Jessica!
Open the door!"

She sat back on her haunches on the other
side of the door and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand as she
flushed the toilet. "Go away."

"I can't go away, you're sick."

She couldn't control it, rage colored her
tone. "I'm not sick. You're the sick one."

There was silence for an abbreviated second.
"You're mad at me? What the hell did I do?"

"Go the fuck away, Connor!"

His hand began a steady knock on the door.
Not loud. Not enough to bleed through the walls of the apartment
and wake the neighbors. But it was steady and relentless, and she
knew he wasn't going to give up.

All she had on was the t-shirt she usually
slept in. He'd already taken her panties away from her. She didn't
keep any clothes in the bathroom, and for once in her life, she was
mad at herself for being such a clean freak. She couldn't have one
damn pair of shorts lying around on the floor?

Taking a moment to brush her teeth as he
continued the knocking, she finished up by wrapping a towel around
her hips and walking out of the door. Amazingly, he let her pass,
and she didn't look at him as she pulled a clean pair of panties
and shorts out of the chest of drawers. She knew he'd never let her
go back in the bathroom now, so she turned her back to him and did
her best to slip her clothes on underneath the towel.

Within seconds she was dressed again, and she
walked to the living room, and flipped on all the lights.

Her brain was still in a state of shocked
confusion. For whatever reason, she really didn't think he'd go out
and get laid by someone else. She really hadn't thought he would.
And knowing that she'd been worried about him, worried he'd gotten
hurt when all he'd really been doing was drinking and getting laid
. . . she felt like an idiot on top of the annihilating pain she
was experiencing.

Purely for something to do, Jessica walked
over to the French doors and looked out at the swimming pool beyond
her courtyard. There were a few people milling about in the late
night, she recognized Eric and Travis. Several other people were
sitting around the patio tables, laughing softly and having fun.
Just like students on summer break. Why couldn't that be her? Why
couldn't she be one of them with nothing more pressing than a few
short hours spent with friends?

She continued to stand and look through the
glass doors. She didn't want to sit on the couch where Connor could
tower over her and invade her space. Maybe standing here wasn't all
that great an alternative, but it was the only one she had.

Connor followed her to the French doors and
stood behind her, his breath hot on the top of her hair as he sank
his hands into her shoulders, holding her in a punishing grip.
"I'm sick?
Where in the hell did that come from?"

She shrugged her shoulders and refused to
answer as her anger grew stronger with the scent that clung to his
body.

He swung her around to face him, impatience
etched on his features. "You're going to answer me."

Her shoulders stiffened, but she attempted to
keep any emotion from her voice. It was time to hide her pain
behind indifference. "No big deal, but you smell like a
whorehouse."

She didn't look directly at him, so she
couldn't see the confusion that held him for a couple of seconds,
but it became plain when he released her and stepped back from her
that he'd made the connection and understood. In her mind, the only
reason he would have stepped away from her was because she was
correct, he did smell like some slut's perfume, and he was trying
to take the evidence of it a few steps away from her.

Jessica turned away from him and began
walking toward the kitchen in jerky movements. "Get out, Connor.
Get out of my house," she said dejectedly. "You told me you
wouldn't sleep with anyone else. And you didn't even bother to wash
off her scent before coming h-here." Jessica was horrified when her
voice cracked.

He didn't answer her for a long time and she
leaned against the kitchen counter, pain cutting into her so deeply
that she needed the support to keep her from clutching her stomach
and sinking to the floor in a miserable heap.

He walked around the corner and came to the
edge of the kitchen linoleum. "I didn't sleep with anyone
else."

"No? You smell like you did." Jessica glared
daggers at him.

"You're right. I guess I do have an . . .
odor. I'll go grab a quick shower and then we'll talk."

"We don't have anything to talk about." She
stood rigidly and answered him in short, succinct syllables, not
believing his claim of innocence for even a moment.