Eager to Learn (Complicity Cycle) (4 page)

“Excuse me?” I said, knowing I must have misheard.

He continued looking at me with those hard blue eyes.
He spoke very clearly. “Stand up, and take off all of your clothes.”

I froze, processing this sudden turn.

A horrified thrill rushed through me, and for a moment I could only gape at him. On the one hand, it was completely inappropriate. It violated all social codes and years of ingrained modesty and decency. It would be
wrong
to strip naked in a professor’s office, to be laid bare in front of someone who I had only met that afternoon. Of course it would. Not only wrong, but heinous! Absurd, even.

But on the other hand, I found—with a weird sense of dawning revelation—that it was something I was completely capable of doing.
That it was something that I even
wanted
to do on some dark, primal level. It was as if I had lifted a cold and heavy stone deep in the woods of my own mind, and when I looked beneath it, what I found was lust: dirty, wriggling, and wet.

“I… I have a boyfriend,” I said.

He looked at me thoughtfully and tapped a pen against his chin. “Interesting,” he said. “Very interesting. However, you don’t really care about that right now, do you?”

And bizarrely, he was right.

I stood, pushing the leather chair back slightly as I rose.

I glanced at the closed door—not even locked—and then looked back into Dr. Giacomo’s unrelenting eyes, locked with mine.

Was I really going to do this?
It didn’t make any sense.

“Are you sure?” I asked, my voice somehow fragile.

“Yes,” he said.

I bit the inside of my lip, hesitating for just a moment.
Then I reached down, gripped the bottom seam of my shirt, and pulled it over my head.

My heart raced.
I stood in my jeans and bra in my professor’s office, and I knew I wasn’t going to stop there. I’d already crossed the line. No point in stopping now.

Giacomo said nothing.
His eyes didn’t change.

This was so foreign.
So beyond my realm of usual experience. I felt myself moving on with dream-like inevitability.

I dropped my shirt on the billiard-green carpet and
kicked off my shoes. I pulled my socks off with my toes, which was a trick I’d perfected since high school. Then I unclipped my bra, freeing my breasts. My nipples stood out, already hard as the cool office air spread goosebumps across my body.

Still, Giacomo’s expression stayed the same.
He rocked back in his chair a bit and motioned toward my jeans with his pen.

I couldn’t believe what I was doing, but part of that incredulity made pushing forward even easier.
Because my own disbelief felt forced. Like disbelief was something I knew I was supposed to feel, something that I
should
feel, but it didn’t have an ounce of truth to it. I wanted this. I wasn’t under any kind of sway, no hypnotic spell from those crazy deep eyes of his. It seemed as though he’d somehow tapped into the exact thing that I’d been wanting to do ever since I stepped into that office—read it in my eyes, perhaps—but the idea had been too unthinkable for me to even properly consider it. I was acting out one of Ashley’s inconceivable fantasies. This was something she would joke about doing, and here I was doing it for real.

M
y heart pounded and breath slipped in and out of my lungs in shallow slivers. I unbuttoned my jeans and slid them down my legs. Then I stepped free of them and kicked them aside.

I wore only pale green boy shorts now, which were Jeffery’s favorite
. My stomach muscles tightened in self-conscious nervousness, but Giacomo’s eyes weren’t judging. Appraising maybe, but they hardly flickered from my own. I found it hard to look away.

“And…” he said, prompting.

I tightened my jaw and glanced at the door again. My thumbs slipped under the elastic band and hesitated.

Giacomo raised his eyebrows expectantly.

I slipped the boy shorts down, and then it was just me and Giacomo. I felt like I was holding my eyes too wide, and my skin felt tingly and alive. I had never felt so extremely naked in my entire life.

He stood, and I watched him walk around the desk to meet me, his stride smooth and confident.
I stepped the last few feet to him, and my breath came quick and desperate. I stood in his shadow.

He wrapped his hands around the small of my back, his fingers warm.
He pulled me close against his jacket, into the heart of his whisky-leather scent. He tipped my chin up with a finger, and my timid mouth found his bold and confident.

The kiss passed through me like electricity, and I gave myself over to it.

When we separated, his voice was soft and low. “Lie down,” he said, motioning toward the couch. “Face up”

I left my clothes on the floor and crossed the room completely naked.
I didn’t feel brazen. I felt… almost panicked. Not that I’d get caught, mind you—although that fear rattled around somewhere in the back of my head. Rather, I had started wanting many things, and I worried they wouldn’t come to fruition. I could taste him on my lips.

He caught me and lowered me to the couch, his mouth never left mine even as I lay all the way down, the back of my head against the armrest.
The leather was ice against my back, and the goosebumps redoubled on my body. I gasped lightly as I settled into the couch, my head against one armrest and my heels on the other. My hands ran through his hair and wrapped around the back of his neck as I kissed him, but my knees pulled up defensively. I felt very small and exposed.

I was naked, but he was still fully dressed
. He leaned over me and kissed me down into the cushion, the physical weight of him strangely pleasant. He caressed the back of my head and ran his fingers through my hair.

When his free h
and found the bare skin of my waist, my knees pulled up even higher in defense. But his fingers drifted—they glided—an artist’s touch across my prickled and sensitive skin. And as his hand slid down past my navel, I felt my legs part.

He cupped his hand over me.
Barely touching, but not quite.

I kissed him harder, my fingertips pressing into the back of his skull, his hair between my fingers.
My legs fell open completely, but still he didn’t touch. He hovered, flexing his fingers lightly, teasing me.

“
Please,” I gasped.

In response, his mouth left mine.
I felt his breath travel down my neck, and his nose brushed my nipple. He kissed the skin beneath my breasts and began working his way down.

My arms dropped back against the couch.
I was an exposed nerve, shivering and gasping.

He got all the way down to the
delicate skin beneath my panty line, kissing me tantalizingly before he raised up and came all the way back to my neck.

“
No,” I said. My face pressed against the leather arm of the chair as I arched, trying to close the gap between myself and his gliding, agile hand. But he moved with me, staying always just a fraction of an inch away. Just far enough that we could feel the heat of each other. And I had to be practically radiating.

He kissed my neck, sending static all throughout my body.
He kissed along my jaw and then under my sky-pointed chin.

I had never needed anything so badly in my life.
I realized that, for all of Jeffery’s prowess, he was still a boy. For all of his snares, Jeffery couldn’t deny himself long enough to really make me
need
him. His cock was always a prodding, needy thing, demanding like a little tyrant.

Dr. Giacomo was a
man
. A man who knew himself and knew a woman’s body. A man with patience and sensual cruelty. A man who already had me dangling at the end of a string. And I sucked in every desperate breath in hopes of staying that way.

And then—finally—he touched me.
Just one fingertip.

I rocked back against the couch and gasped.
I grabbed his shoulders, and for a moment our eyes met. Then he kissed me, and ran a single finger knuckle-deep inside me.

I shuddered and dug my fingers into his back.
I pulled my chest to his, and our ears brushed. Every inch of my body tingled and surged and yearned. I rocked my hips forward, taking in first one finger and then another. His thumb found the sensitive spot with too much pressure, and roots of awful ecstasy dug through my entire lower body. I clawed and scratched at the back of his jacket, but he didn’t relent. He moved the pad of his thumb in a slow, hard circle, and I buckled and jerked against him.

His hand left me, and I strained after it with my body, my mouth locking with his and my fingers desperate in his hair.

Fingers returned, light and gliding and wet with me.
He traced around the threshold of my sex, up the exposed and shivering interior of first one leg, then the other, always back down to tease and flicker, but never to touch.

By then I wanted more than mere touching.
I wanted him to
gouge
me, to fill me, to leave me spent and ragged and crumpled. But he wouldn’t even offer a touch.

“Please,” I said into his lips, still pressed against mine.
“Please, please.”

“Don’t come,” he said.

“I won’t,” I said.

He kissed me firmly one last time, then ran his free hand through my hair.
The other continued to work its horrible play, barely there.

He rose and towered over me, and I lay alone on the leather couch, now sweating and shivering, my legs parted and my hips arched up on their own, begging him to do more.

“Don’t come,” he said again, and he touched me.

One finger.

Just. The right. Spot.

I buried my face in the back of the couch, my teeth squeaking against the leather in a silent scream.

“Don’t,” he said, not even moving—just applying simple pressure.

I tried to grind against him, but he anticipated my movements, and the pressure never altered.

“Wait for it,” he said.

I bit the leather, not caring if I damaged it. I wanted to kick and buck, and my whole body was a quivering wreck.

“Come,” he said.

And I did. The back half of my mind dissolved into liquid as white-hot pleasure coursed through my every nerve. With unprecedented firmness and alacrity, he powered me through it with his whole hand, riding and circling as I shuddered through every wave of the most intense orgasm I had ever experienced.

It took my very last ounce of self-control to keep from screaming.

I shouted it all out in an airy, silent roar before I collapsed into the leather, and he once more cupped his hand protectively against my sex.

He looked down on me, his eyes unreadable.

“What just happened,” I breathed.

“Everything you wanted,” he said, his voice like warm honey to my sex-drunk ears.
“Well, almost.”

“No kidding
,” I said, almost gasping. “How… how did you know?”

But he didn’t answer.
He just smiled with subtle carnivorousness.

With what small fragment of my brain still functioned, I realized this was going to be a very interesting year.

And I wasn’t wrong.

Lynn’s story continues in
Eager to Love: Volume II of the Complicity Cycle

Sadie K. Romero
lives in the southern United States. She attended Louisiana State University where she majored in Theater, which her mother insisted was like majoring in unemployment. When her mother turned out to be right—as mothers often are—Sadie began writing freelance to pay the bills. She wound up being rather better at this than acting, and at the encouragement of her friends, she’s recently begun writing romantic fiction. This is her first story (that she’s willing to claim).

Although
Sadie draws from some of her own experiences, names and places have been changed to protect the less-than-innocent.

a note from Sadie

Dear reader,

Thank you so much for tasting the storytelling of a new author! This is all strange, new territory for me, but I’ve planned nine volumes for this series, and I’m determined to continue writing it regardless of its financial viability. Call it a labor of love. I’ve got lots of exciting (and sexy) twists and turns planned, so if you like what you’ve read so far, I hope you’ll follow me along for the rest of Lynn’s journey! There are many mysteries waiting to be uncovered…

If you want to contact me or let me know what you thought, please feel free to shoot me an email at
[email protected]
. I haven’t left an email un-replied-to yet!

Thanks again!

Yours truly,

Sadie K.