Page 32 of Loving the Liar

He keeps reading. “Thankfully, I don’t need your authorization to make you mine.”

“You might not need my authorization to try, but you need my willingness to achieve it.”

He finally looks up. “Do I? Well, I can be very persuasive.”

“Not persuasive enough.”

He chuckles, enjoying this way too much. He spreads his legs open, one on either side of me, and before I know it, he’s grabbing my uniform tie, pulling me until I’m right between his thighs. My paper gets crunched in the same grip, and my eyes widen with panic.

He drags his red pen along my inner thigh, from my knee until it’s against my underwear.

I try to pull away, speechless, but a gasp leaves me when he presses the end of the pen against my clit. Not the writing side. The thicker side that feels torturously good as it sparks electricity through my stomach, all the way to my nipples.

I open my mouth to say something, to stop him, but he presses harder, and I clamp it back shut to stop a moan from escaping. Seeing my reaction, he pulls on my tie until I’m flush against him. I put my hand on his chest, my eyes almost rolling to the back of my head when I feel the hard, unrelenting muscles.

“Not persuasive enough, huh?”

Oh my god. What kind of game is he playing?

His eyes take in my teeth biting on my lower lip, my heavy-hooded eyes, and what I’m assuming must be a flush on my cheeks.

It’s hot in this room, and it’s making me do crazy things. Like rolling my hips forward to feel more of the pen through my damp underwear.

“Poor little Ella,” he purrs. “Isn’t it so hard to fight what you really want?”

Taking pity on me, he lets go, and I stumble back, feeling a resonating aftermath between my legs. He doesn’t even look bothered, while he just tilted my world on its axis in less than five minutes.

He reads some more of my essay like nothing happened and shakes his head. “Do you have your laptop?”

He adds something else about the case, but I’m struggling to listen as a strand of his caramel hair makes him blink, falling in his eye and bothering him. It’s practically begging me to run my hand through the silky waves.

“Ella?”

“What?” I drag my eyes away from his hair, licking my lips as I do so.

His mouth twists slightly, knowing exactly the state he just put me in. “You missed a lot of points.”

I feel the blood drain from my face. “What? No, I spent hours on this.” My hand goes to my chest, scratching at the skin showing under the open buttons of my uniform. “I don’t get it. I did a lot of research, and I had Reeves’s book open the whole time I worked on this.”

“His book is terrible,” Chris snorts, but then he catches the way I’m scratching my skin and his face drops. “Don’t scratch, Sweets. Give me your laptop. I can change some stuff for you.”

Somehow, my brain decides not to pick up on the fact that he calls me Sweets the second he goes into protective mode. Chris has so many flaws, but I can say with certainty he’s the person who always took care of me. He’s protective. Overprotective. But more often than not, it feels really good. And he knows how I feel about being stupid. How ashamed I am of it, even though he disagrees.

He grabs my laptop out of my bag, sitting back behind his desk.

“You don’t have to help me.” I attempt to sound like I know what I’m doing and what I want, but the fear of failing Reeves’s class is eating me from the inside. I don’t want to go through what I did last time to keep my spot.

“It’s just a case study you’ll look at again once you start law school. It’s not going to define the rest of your career.”

“I know, but…”

He looks up, stern eyes locking on my chest. “I told you to stop scratching, Ella.”

His domineering voice makes me stop right away, his authority spreading through my veins. This feels too much like the us from before. Him taking care of me and telling me what to do. Me…being helpless to his decisions and yet finding comfort in them.

My eyes stay glued to Reeves’s door for the few minutes Chris edits my essay. The second he prints it and gives it back to me, the door opens, and my heart nearly explodes from fear. I startle, but there’s nothing to see here anymore, and Chris is already back to grading the copies on his desk.

“Miss Baker, please come in.”

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