The Mistress Mistake

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.