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“Amusing as it was for me to read, I truly think that’s for the best. If nothing else, I’m pretty sure the Dean will ask you do that anyway. I would if I’d asked for a puff piece and, instead, I received this. I hate to say it, but it’s not really on brief. Actually, it’s not on brief at all.”
I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay I get it. I know I said I could take whatever criticism you threw my way, but I get the message loud and clear now. No need to kick a girl when she’s down.”
“Oops! Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“No, no. Better to hear it from you here and fix it, than to have sent it to the Dean, or worse, published it, and made a spectacle of myself. Again. I guess sometimes we really are too close to things to view them objectively, which is why it’s so good to have someone around to help me take a step back and look at things from an outsider’s perspective. Thank you. You’ve possibly saved me from a very public humiliation.”
“You’re welcome. I just find it sad that a journalist as good as you is forced to put out a glorified PR release. It’s tough. It’s so not your style.”
“You’re right, it’s not my style, but it is the way of the world, and unfortunately so much of the ‘news’ put out there for the unsuspecting general public is actually just PR in some shape or form. I hope not to have to do this often in my career, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
Chapter 23
Honey
The article must have met the mark in the end—thanks no doubt, to Cally’s sage advice—as the Dean approved it with very few changes, so I ran it that week.
Not only that, but I also received an invite to the Dean’s prestigious and exclusive Hawthorn Reception the following week. I could only guess that someone had pulled out at the last minute, as it was my understanding that the invites were sent, and the guest list finalized months in advance. Either that, or the Dean kept a few tickets back to hand out as random bribes, as and when needed.
Ugh. I tried not to let that word invade my mind. “Bribe.” But I was finding it very hard not to think about the invite in those terms. Logically, it wasn’t a bribe—it had been given to me following me writing and publishing the article, not before. Not only that, but there had been no mention of it prior to completion, so it wasn’t like it had been a carrot dangling in front of me as I wrote.
Still, I felt like a sellout or something, as I prepared to rub shoulders with the college’s ‘great and good’.
The Hawthorn Reception was the jewel in the college’s social event crown, well known as essentially a glorified networking event of the type where empires were built, and lifelong alliances were forged.
Attended by captains of industry, politicians, and a range of other influential people, contacts made at the Hawthorn could lead to unrivaled job opportunities, contracts and other benefits for invited students. People were prepared to offer up kidneys, or their future unborn children, in order to get an invite.
All I’d had to do was make an asshole jock seem like less of an asshole, and somehow I’d unlocked a level of access and influence that otherwise would never have been within my grasp. I didn’t understand it. On the other hand, I didn’t understand most of the things the uber-rich did.
Not that I was poor, but my family was the level of comfortable where attending Heathcote was a reality facilitated only by careful and consistent planning and saving for years before the fact. Money wasn’t something we had our domestic staff pluck from trees in the yard, as seemed to be the case with so many of my fellow students. Sometimes they did and said things which boggled my mind.
If I’d felt guilty about being invited to the reception in the first place, it was one hundred times worse once I was actually standing in the room. Looking around at all the powerful, influential and obscenely wealthy people, not only did I feel like a red ant who’d accidentally stumbled into the black ants’ nest, but I was also quite sure that my presence there was the academic equivalent of hush money.
No matter how I looked at it, it seemed like I was being bought, one way or another. It gave me a horrible flash-forward to me as a fat-cat editor sitting somewhere in my ivory tower, writing “news” as dictated by other fat cats and being rewarded handsomely for it. The thought made me feel sick.
“You feeling okay? You’re looking a little off color.”
The voice came from behind, directly, and my body came alive with awareness as Bear’s warm breath gently danced across my ear, and his body pressed against almost every inch of mine.
I stepped forward a little, wanting to put some distance between us, for more reasons than one. He didn’t take the hint, stepping forward with me, though this time putting a possessive hand to my waist to keep me in place.
“Why so skittish, Honey Bee? Just relax.” He didn’t seem to be taking his own advice—he tilted his hips toward me as he spoke, making it clear that a certain part of his anatomy was anything but relaxed. Jesus.
He’d scared me half out of my skin with his approach. I hadn’t known he was going to be at the event, though, had I taken the time to think about it for a moment, I probably could have guessed that he might have been, given his connections and sports star status. He was pretty much a god among men at Heathcote.
“I’m not skittish. I just already feel like a fish out of water here as it is, without you making it worse by putting on a show for everyone. This is a professional environment, not a fucking booty call.” I kept my voice to a low hiss, in a bid to avoid unwanted attention.
Our contact of late had been restricted to just that—late-night screwing sessions where we’d barely speak a word to each other the entire time, yet we’d fuck six ways from Sunday in every position and on every surface possible. It was hot. It was angry. It was exactly what we wanted. It was exactly what we needed.
I quickly took a larger step forward and spun to face him, knowing that he’d have to let go of my waist or cause a commotion. He chose the former. Even still, I instantly regretted my decision. I’d turned firstly because it was weird AF for guests at an event like that to be squashed back-to-front with each other while they ‘networked’—we might just as well have waved a flag that said, “heads up, we’re fucking.”
Secondly, I found it disconcerting that other people in the room could see his face, and therefore probably guess what was going on with him, while, with my back to him, I was in the dark. I wanted to be able to read his facial expressions as he spoke.
Big mistake. Huge. I gasped, hopefully not loud enough for people around us to hear, but I knew right away that Bear had heard. Jesus. Fucking. Christ. He was beautiful.
“Like what you see?” He quirked his eyebrow, and graced me with his swarthiest smile.
Like was not the word I would have chosen. It was an understatement of epic magnitude. He was divine. As in sent from heaven. Well, maybe not heaven. Maybe from a version of hell that instead of fire and brimstone, was fitted out in black leather, and the souls of women who’d unwittingly fallen under the spell of entirely the wrong man. So wrong.
