My Secret Life

The professor frowned. ‘You can’t climax?’ The question prompted his curiosity, and he bent closer to watch the toy fuck her. ‘Oh, I see. You have no stimulus on your clitoris.’

His thumb settled against her clit, and her hips surged. Her hands clamped down on the straps, and the stirrups bit into her feet. Electricity swept through her body, and she cried out as she crested. The orgasm held her for a long time. Her body strained to enjoy every last second of it before collapsing onto the table.

Eyes closed, she sank into sated oblivion. Her body lay motionless as the professor removed the toy from her tired pussy.

‘That was a most successful case study. I will certainly enjoy analysing the results.’

Tressa flinched when she felt a cool rag settle between her legs, but she was too exhausted to shy away. The professor cleaned the stickiness from her mound and thighs before helping her sit up. ‘So what is your conclusion, Ms Lang?’

Her conclusion? God, she couldn’t think, much less conclude. Her mind was still reeling.

‘About the funding.’

Oh, that. The real world came back in bits and pieces until she realised she was a vice president at Catharsis Pharmaceuticals – and she was sitting stark naked in front of a man she didn’t even know. She swallowed hard. ‘Your funding is secure.’

He was right. Women’s sexuality was just as important as men’s, and she’d been ignoring her own for too long.

Walton handed her her clothes and she dressed, but he was already entering data into his computer when she slipped on her shoes.

Tressa licked her lips nervously. ‘Should I let myself out?’

The professor glanced up and adjusted his glasses on his nose. ‘Can I expect you back next week?’

She stopped in her tracks. ‘Oh, I don’t know. In my position …’

He looked anxiously at his computer. ‘I really need to replicate the results in order for them to have any significance at all.’

Tressa vacillated. ‘My schedule is very busy.’

‘Twice monthly then.’

She bit her lip. It was tempting to continue. ‘You can assure me confidentiality?’

‘None of my test subjects has ever been revealed.’

She glanced at the stirrups and felt a tremor run through her. Not even she had been able to find details of these studies, and her never-ending stress had been lifted. She felt relaxed, fulfilled, and sexy as hell.

Marco would never know the better.

That sealed the deal. ‘Have the confidentiality agreement written up. I’ll be here the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month.’

Walton smiled. ‘Your data could mean the difference to countless women struggling with frigidity.’

And it would mean the difference to her in a life that had become too intent on work and so devoid of pleasure. A secret little interlude. Tressa smiled softly. She couldn’t risk her job by having an affair with her driver – not yet – but she could be a test subject for one of the country’s leading sex researchers.

She just had to make sure Marco drove her every week.

Mr Wrong

Justine Elyot

He’s a dangerous person. He’s bad for me. Everybody hates him. He’s arrogant and faithless, self-absorbed and cruel.

When he dumped me, three years ago, by publicly feeling up another woman at my twenty-fifth birthday party, all my friends practically haemorrhaged with relief.

‘I didn’t like to say anything at the time but …’

‘I know you were really loved-up but …’

‘I was dreading the wedding invitation because …’

Followed by the chorus: ‘I’ve never liked him.’

I couldn’t possibly blame them. I don’t like him either, for all the reasons outlined above.

So why am I meeting him, in secret, every chance I get?

My dictionary defines addiction as: ‘the condition of being enslaved to a habit or practice to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma’. It’s as good an explanation as any. I’m not sure I experienced severe trauma when we split, but there were a lot of wet pillows on my bed for months afterwards. And even when the pillows were dry again, the bed felt so empty, so bleak. I couldn’t envisage a replacement for him there, even if I did go to the pictures or eat out with the occasional nice guy. The occasional nice guy never made it up the stairs. He just seemed to have the wrong pheromones. He wasn’t Luke.

He didn’t size me up and strip me with his eyes within a second of looking at me. He didn’t do that slow burn over the table linen that had me gagging for it by the time the dessert menu arrived. There wasn’t that constant low-level possibility of being thrown up against a wall, whenever and wherever, and taken.

Those things were part and parcel of Luke. If only they didn’t come with the cruelty and the self-absorption and the rest of it.

It helped that we didn’t live in the same town, and I thought I was over it until he walked into my estate agency, looking for details of executive one-bed apartments by the harbour.

I was in the back office at the time, so I didn’t see him come in. I walked out with a sheaf of mailing lists to put into envelopes and almost dropped them all over the floor. I thought perhaps I’d been shot. That face, that hair, that tall athletic body. The shock of the initial bullet through my heart spread to infect my crotch with unwanted waves of sense-memory. The things he’d done to me … wicked, delicious things that nobody had done since. I couldn’t look at his fingers without recalling their explorations, nor hear his soft-spoken voice without the words mutating into the hot-breathed obscenities he used to whisper into my ear.

He looked up and I gripped the mailshots harder, determined to look unflustered and indifferent.

‘Ruthie.’ That smile. Why was it having the same effect on me it used to have? I looked for hatred and bitterness, found only lust. ‘I was just asking after you. I hoped you’d still be here. Do you mind?’

He dismissed my colleague, who vacated his chair for me and disappeared, taking over my envelope-stuffing task.

‘Of all the estate agents in all the world …’ I said, trying to keep control of my wobbly voice, keep it calm. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I got a promotion to the local office.’

‘You aren’t moving here?’

‘On the contrary. So I need your finest selection of bachelor pads. You’re looking well.’

The change of tack steered me off course. I think, to my horror, I might have blushed.

‘Bachelor pads,’ I said, studiedly ignoring the compliment, clicking my mouse ostentatiously and scrolling through pages of listings.

‘I’m just grateful you didn’t knock my block off,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Can’t really ask for more than that.’

‘What’s your upper price limit?’