Page 73 of Cinderella Is Faking It

“Don’t worry, my future children are safe.” I threw the tag out and switched off the overhead lights, crawling into bed next to her. “Come here, Del.”

I was not the kind of man you got into bed with to cuddle, but this was well underway to being the third night that Del spent in my bed just to sleep. She picked out her favorite pillow with deliberate fingers and wedged it between her head and the mattress, leaving ten inches of space between every part of her and every part of me.

“Are you alright?” I asked after a moment of watching her stare into space.

“No,” she huffed.

“Are you hurt?”

“What. The. Fuck.” She threw her arms out, slapping my chest involuntarily, but that was all the prompting she needed. “How fucking selfish has everyone in my life been to tell me that it was okay if I just enjoyed having sex for the companionship? This is what I’ve been missing all these years? Is this what it’s like to come every single time? Because if so, I demand my money back for all the nights I have just laid in bed while some asshole came inside me without caring about whether or not I was getting off. I’m not hurt, but my pride sure is. Although I guess I must have been a damn good actress for anyone thinking that my fake orgasms were close to the real thing. So, I guess I can take pride in knowing that I can, in fact, beat Meg Ryan in that Oscar category. What the fuck, Beck?”

She blinked at me, cheeks glowing red with anger. There she was. Little firecracker. “Oh, don’t look at me.” I turned to my side to face her. “I’ve been wanting to make you come since our first dinner together.”

“And we didn’t even have sex. I mean, it was sex, but it wasn’tsex. Why have I been wasting my time on penises when I just needed two fingers? Do you know how disgusting it is to have some guy pant and drool all over your neck while his dick goes limp inside of you? And you just have to lie there likeoh yes, that was so good, you rocked my fucking world?”

I chuckled. “I can’t say that I have personal experience with that.” Under different circumstances the idea of anyone’s dick inside her would have pulled a much different reaction from me, but not when she was yelling at me about how getting finger fucked in my limo was better than any cock she’d ever had.

She sucked in a deep breath, ready for the next cascade of words, but the tension rippled from her body in a whooshing exhale. “I need my notebook.”

“Your notebook?”

“I need to write down what happened tonight, what worked for me and what didn’t, while it’s still fresh in my mind.” She shot up in bed, but I grabbed her wrist before she could leave.

“I’ll remind you tomorrow. Come here.” I pulled her to me, tucking her against my side. Her leg fell over mine, her bare lower half pressing against me. My cock jerked in response, ready to claim her right then and there, but I resigned myself to running my thumb over the curve of her lower lip, full and warm. Even with the red lipstick washed off, it was still tempting as fuck. Her pulse hammered in her neck as she watched me, mouth slack, ready to let me claim it. Fuck, the things I wanted to do to that mouth. But I knew that if I kissed her, I’d be making a deal I couldn’t back out of, and she wasn’t ready for what that entailed. “You just had your first orgasm.”

“I did,” her voice trembled, a fraction of what it was ten seconds ago, realization flashing through her eyes.

“When I said that your first climax would only be the beginning of this, I meant it. We’re just getting started.”

She swallowed, lips closing around the tip of my thumb for merely a split second, but long enough to shoot another spark of heat straight to my hips.

“I trust you.”

Those were the wrong fucking words. Whatever tension had been building inside me deflated at the sight of those big ocean eyes and the sound of those three damn words. I leaned in to press a kiss to her forehead, schooling my face before it could betray me. “Get some sleep. It’ll be the last night you spend in this bed without begging me to fuck you.”

She snickered but just buried her face against my chest. Despite the tornado of emotions from before, her breathing evened out within two minutes. And for the first time since I rearranged the place cards at the Truman Academy charity dinner, so I could sit next to Cordelia Montgomery, I wondered what the fuck I was doing.

TWENTY-NINE

“How long haveyou been working for Cordelia?” I asked, watching Victor dice the bell pepper impossibly small.I’d sat next to Cordelia through enough dinners to know that she hated any trace of vegetable - except potatoes - in her food and would stop eating at even a hint of onion. How many vitamins did he smuggle into her diet like this?

“Five years,” Victor answered without looking up.

“And before that?” I asked, stealing a slice of cucumber from one of his cutting boards.

“I worked for my family.”

Getting information from him felt like squeezing the last bits of toothpaste from an already empty tube. Considering he’d probably run a full background check on me - or had at least read the results of one - this relationship was a little unbalanced. And for some reason, this morning seemed like the perfect opportunity to rectify that. Definitely not just to keep me from texting Beck. He had work to do. Important business-y work. And he had ordered me to take a day off studying - even though I’d told him one orgasm wasn’t going to prove anything, especially since we’d tried to practice in bed all Sunday and I hadn’t even gotten close. Taking a break was not the way to go if you asked me, but it was his apartment and if he didn’t want me coming over, I could hardly argue. We’d agreed to go to the annual fundraiser for the Museum of fine Arts together tonight though. I just had to kill a few hours until then.

So. I would study Victor instead of books. I narrowed my eyes at his perpetual scowl. Fine. Quick fire round it was. “How old are you again?”

“33.” Only four years older than Cordelia.

“Are you from Boston?”

“Yes.”

“Married?”

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