The Mistress Mistake (3 page)

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.

His eyes narrowed on her while she took deep
breaths, trying to calm herself down. She hadn't ever planned on
telling him any of that. But he'd given her no time to think up a
suitable excuse with his demand for an immediate answer.

While she tried to get herself under control,
she felt him watching her from across the table. She felt like an
insect under a microscope, he was watching her so intently.

The waiter came up and deposited their food
and this time, Jessica very meticulously kept her eyes away from
the young man until he'd finished delivering the meals and left.
She picked up her fork and began moving her food around on her
plate.

"You passed."

Jessica exhaled a pent up breath and looked
across the table at Connor.

"Where do you go to school?" he asked.

The coiled rope in her stomach loosened a
tiny bit. "UTD," she answered him. An expression crossed his face
that she couldn't identify, and thinking he didn't recognize the
acronym, she elaborated, "The University of Texas at Dallas."

After a prolonged moment, he answered her
tersely, "Yeah, I know what UTD stands for." His eyes released hers
and he picked up his napkin and looked down at his plate, still
with a frown on his face.

The knot in her stomach tightened again.
"Okay. Now what?" she managed to ask.

There was a long silence until finally he
answered her, "Now we eat. Then you prove your claim of no tattoos.
Then we negotiate."

Her eyes flared. "How do I prove I don't have
any tattoos?"

"You show me your body."

The oxygen snarled in Jessica's lungs as
panic infiltrated her. "Why won't you just believe me? Why would I
lie when you're going to find out anyway?"

"You'd be surprised at the depth that some
people will go to in this world."

"You've done this before? This isn't your
first time?"

He picked up his fork and began eating. He
swallowed, and answered her. "I haven't done this before, not
completely, anyway. You're the fourth woman I've met, but the only
one I've decided to go further with. I'm just saying that I've come
across a lot of people in my life who wouldn't hesitate to lie
about anything if it brought them financial gain or made things
easier for them."

"I'm not showing you my body tonight."

"Yes, you are."

She shook her head as her eyes clung to the
plate in front of her.

"Yes," he said unequivocally as he continued
to eat.

Her head lifted. "No. Where would we do it,
anyway? I can't just strip right here and now."

"We'll go to the hotel across the
street."

Jessica sucked in an alarmed breath. "No
effing way."

His stare was intent, hot on hers. "Jessica,
calm down and eat your food."

Jessica moved the food around on her plate
and managed to eat maybe three bites before she gave up
altogether.

Before she knew it and long before she could
get her nerves under control, he paid the bill and hustled her
across the street until they were sitting in the hotel bar in a
darkened corner. He ordered another round of drinks and the closer
it
came to becoming a reality in her life, the more she
began to tremble.

"You need to get a grip. Have a few sips of
my drink and we'll talk some more." He pushed his drink toward her
and she was just nervous enough to lift it to her mouth. She took a
large gulp and almost immediately began choking. It tasted like
crap, but there was no doubt the alcohol induced a slow-growing
warmth that spread through her veins and made her feel better. She
took another drink before he slid it away from her.

"You need to understand what I require from
this deal, okay?" he asked.

"Okay."

"All I want is sex." When he made that
statement, her eyes cut away from his, but he reached out and
pulled her chin back toward him until her eyes were focused on his
again. His fingers were rough and callused and she wondered what he
did for a living. "All I want is sex," he reiterated. "I'll never
want anything more. I want a female body, a vessel. And I'm willing
to pay for it. That's it."