Page 8 of The New Girl

Chapter Five

“This can’t be real. This is a joke, right? I don’t know anything about you. You don’t know anything about me.”

“Not a joke—the whole point of the exercise. No expectations. No demands. We’re voyaging into the dark. Doing the forbidden with each other for an entire month if we both want it. Most of the members spend only one night together.”

“Why is that?”

He stared so deeply into my eyes that I lost my balance and had to hold onto a chair. “They fear the risk of falling in love if they spend too much time together in bed having the best sex of their lives. Nobody here wants that.”

My thighs were sticky. I had to look away.

“Why did you stop me from going with Jake?”

“I wanted you for myself.”

I swallowed. “That sounds a bit possessive.”

“Or protective. Jake enjoys bondage. Do you enjoy being tied up, Miss Aire?”

My knees buckled. “I don’t know. I think it would depend on who was tying the knots. How do you know my last name?”

“I asked at the front desk as I was leaving the library. This is the last place I expected to run into you again. Why did you come?”

“I saw the notice. I thought it was a poetry slam.”

His lips quirked to a smile. Something he rarely did was my guess.

“That’s a relief. I worried you were a librarian who enjoys bondage and I spoiled your chance to have yourRape of Lucrecefantasies fulfilled. The head librarian told me you were a Shakespearean scholar. Shakespeare had a filthy mind.”

“He lived in filthy times.”

He came toward me, weaving between the chairs, his dark eyes glowing and fastened on mine. I stopped breathing.

“The times we live in are not much better. Come with me. I’ll give away all of their secrets on the walk.”

“I’ve had the tour.”

“What I know about this place, they don’t dare print up in the brochure.”

“Will you tell me what happened last May with the girl?”

He paused. Ran his tongue over his full lips and settled his hands on a narrow waist. He could have been a model, but I could tell he wasn’t posing. He genuinely didn’t care about impressing me or winning me over. He was being himself, but I sensed that I was the exception to Lysander Stark’s rules.

Still, he astonished me by answering my question with a quote.

“‘So buxom, blithe and full of face, as heaven had lent her all his grace; with whom the father liking took, and her to incest did provoke.’”

“Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Shakespeare’s tale of a king who beds his daughter. To keep her to himself, he presents her suitors with a riddle that they must solve or die. Pericles, aprince, solves the riddle, putting his life in danger. ‘Few love to hear the sins they love to act,’” I quoted from memory.

“You are a Shakespearean scholar after all. You didn’t buy your way in like the rest of them.”

I wasn’t going to let him distract me with his smoldering stare. “What hasPericlesto do with the girl last spring?”

“She was the daughter in the story. She arrived at the Club last fall. She and I were paired for her first adventure. That night, she told me everything. I knew her father. I confronted him. He responded by taking steps to shut the Club down. Fortunately, there are powerful alumni who are listed as past members and they didn’t want the scandal.”

“You are Prince Pericles, forced into exile. What happened to the girl?”

“She killed herself a few days after I confronted her father. She jumped from St. Swithins bell tower in the middle of the day while the rest of us were in class.”

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