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Chapter 83
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Miss Goody Two Shoes Chapter 84
Cole shoved through the front door of Hart & Associates — which didn't go as well as she might have hoped because it was revolving, and she had a hard enough time getting through those things when she was completely compos mentis — and then went plunging across the foyer. Everything was a haze of glass and steel and marble. Beautiful in a way, a godless cathedral, full of echoes and refracted light, but it was also the kind of space designed to make one feel shabby and small. Which, if you asked her, was an architectural dick move.She kept catching glimpses of herself in too many gleaming surfaces. Wildly out of place in Hart's Temple of Mammon in scruffy jeans and a T-shirt, and her favorite jacket — the velvet one she'd worn to the dinner, with holes in the elbows and all the nap worn away, her rainbow pride bracelets disappearing under the fraying sleeve. She hadn't even taken the time to engineer her hair so it was multidirectional and ridiculous. Basically, she looked
Miss Goody Two Shoes Chapter 85
Cole tried to laugh, but it clogged in her throat. “You don’t know me, and prostitute blackmailer is where you went straight out of the gate? Is your glass half empty or what?” “Why else would you come here?” “God, because”—the truth exploded out of her—“I liked you, and...and you made me feel really cheap, okay?” “I know.” He rose to his feet, and then he was off again, toward the window. It was weird—compelling, in one way, painful in another—how much stillness there was in him. And how much restlessness at the same time. It made every room feel like a cage. “My behavior...it was inappropriate.” He was silent a moment. “It was wrong.” Was that what passed for a sorry in Aiden Crux Land? Except he seemed to be almost-sorry for completely the wrong thing. The one bit of this whole hideously humiliating business she definitely didn’t regret. “Wait. Are you talking about the blow job?” “It’s not my usual practice.”
Miss Goody Two Shoes Chapter 86
Cole had always been kind of take it or leave it on kissing. She enjoyed it, of course, but in the way one enjoys canapés at a posh party. Very nice and everything, artful even, but wouldn’t some real food be better? It was hot on the dance floor—kissing, not canapés—tongues grinding like bodies, somebody’s fingers tangled in her hair, before they stumbled to their place, or hers, to finish things off. But mainly it was prelude to the good stuff. Not with Aiden Crux though. It was a no-mercy kiss. A brutal claiming, full of teeth and desperate hunger, forcing her surrender to his will and his passion.She strained toward him, opened to him, as if they were at the end of the journey, not the beginning. More than that, he made her forget there was a journey. There was only his mouth on hers, his hands holding her, his body pinning her. And just like that, everything she’d felt—listening to his voice on the phone, seeing those icy predator eyes of hi
Miss Goody Two Shoes Chapter 87
He stepped away from the desk and crossed the room towards her. His shadow engulfed her but she wasn't threatened by it. Up close, like this, with nothing sexual between them, the difference in their heights seemed more than usually ludicrous. He put his hands on her shoulders. She didn't exactly feel infantilized by it, just physically small, which she didn't mind. But she also had a sense he was trying to be fraternal, which she, well, did. People who fucked her mouth didn't have the right to pretend they hadn't. “I think,” he murmured, “you underestimate my wickedness.”And, just like that, her irritation was gone. She grinned up at him. “Oh, I really hope I don’t.” “You don’t know me.” “Then let me.” Yeah. That was deliberate. Cole was hoping he would remember the last time she’d said that to him. For a moment, he seemed to soften, his touch turning almost into a caress. It wouldn’t have taken much, just a hint of pressure, to sen
Miss Goody Two Shoes Chapter 88
Cole suddenly couldn’t breathe. She scrambled over her bed and threw open the window. It was right on the turn: that moment between evening and night, suspended in a golden haze. The air moved sluggishly. Tasted sticky. She rested her head against the edge of the casement. Too hot. Too cold. Too fucked. People were moving to and fro across the quad like incidentals in a T. S. Eliot poem. Friends and lovers scattered under the trees in the fading light. And she’d never felt so fucking alone. Rationally she could just about locate a non-panic-saturated part of her brain that believed she would definitely maybe sort of be okay. Yes, the next few weeks weren’t going to be very pleasant, and she wasn’t likely to do brilliantly, but it probably wasn’t going to be a complete disaster either. She was relatively clever, though not half as clever as she’d thought she was before she’d come to Oxford. She’d read quite a lot of books. And she’d been dashing off
Miss Goody Two Shoes Chapter 89
It was the last thing she ever could have imagined. Far more shocking than depravity. Far more powerful. She made an embarrassing sound into the phone. A shocked, wanton, needy little moan. God, to be wanted in that way by Aiden Crux. To be claimed, protected, cherished. So that, for a little while at least, she didn’t have to be scared or small or lonely or failing. She could be his. Until she could be her own again. She briefly thought about telling him he’d got it wrong. That she wasn’t extraordinary at all. But, honestly, she’d rather he kept his flattering delusions. Even if they made her feel like a con man. Like she was leprechaun gold and he was going to see her clearly at any moment: just a handful of pebbles. “Can we”—she asked—“c-can we pretend I’m yours?” He let out a long, not-quite-steady breath and she thought he was going to refuse. She wouldn’t have blamed him. She didn’t think she could have come across as more stupid or pathetic if
Miss Goody Two Shoes Chapter 90
“You are, oh you are.” Cole clenched her hands in her sheets to stop them acting without his direction. She could feel traces of drying moisture as sharply as if they were grains of sand. A deep, helpless shiver rolled through her. “Please touch me again.” “Yes. Softly though. Tease.” Maybe Cole should have been more aware of just how fucking weird it was, tormenting herself for a voice on the phone, but self-consciousness was dissolving, leaving only this dazed and desperate arousal. The same desire to please she’d felt kneeling at his feet. She had never really paid much attention to her own nipples. Well, who did? Her overs had sometimes. Sort of in the fashion you swing into a motorway service station: very much a waypoint on a journey. But, right then, they were tight and aching, magically transformed beneath the lightest caresses of her own fingers and wired directly to her pussy, all the places she wanted to feel him and be possessed by him.
Miss Goody Two Shoes Chapter 91
Cole probably hadn’t failed her exams. She had written the required number of essays, and while they weren’t likely to be of the first quality, they weren’t terrible either. It had been an epically unfun experience—a grim ritual of formal wear and frantic scribbling enacted beneath vaulted ceilings—but she had survived. And it was a relief to realize she'd never have to do anything like it ever again as long as she lived. Her final final was the worst final. It crawled by. Such a vast room and it was still stifling. Full of identi-kit people in black and white, heads bowed over papers, hands moving in jerky lines. Silence broken only by the occasional rustle. The scratchscratch of nearby pens. She let out a long, deep sigh, realizing it was her own. As she scrawled out a few more desultory sentences, her concentration wasn’t so much flagging as flagged. Post-flagged. Beyond the reach of even the most determined flags. She shifted in her chair, sweatin
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