The Mistress Mistake

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.