The Mistress Mistake

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Can love come from a sinful beginning?

Jessica Conway is at the end of her rope. She
desperately needs a few things that her moral values can't buy:
food, shelter, a chance for a better life.

Connor Montgomery is tortured with guilt from
the past and wants only one thing from Jessica, something he's very
willing to pay her for. Setting her up as his mistress seems like
the perfect idea. But how long can a situation continue that was a
mistake from the very beginning?

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Smashwords Edition

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The Mistress Mistake

Copyright © 2013 by Lynda Chance

All rights reserved. This book or any portion
thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the author or publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or
reviews.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, places,
businesses, characters and incidents are either the product of the
author's imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any
resemblance to actual persons living or dead, actual events or
locales is purely coincidental.

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal
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of this author.

****

For everyone who wants a fairytale with a
happy ending, even if the road getting there is filled with bumps
and potholes.

And for Clayton, who took the insane walk
across the street with me. I'll thank you properly later. :)

****

Connor Montgomery took a drink from his
glass, lounged back on his sofa and then set the bourbon down
within easy reach. A warm glow from the alcohol desensitized him to
what he was doing, as he continued to look at the screen of his
computer. With two fingers on the scroll pad of his laptop, he
watched carefully as pictures of young women rolled down the
screen.

Still a long damn way from accepting that
this was the right way to find a woman, he discarded one picture
after the next. While he admitted that some of the women were
beautiful, and some were even stupendously beautiful, every picture
he saw contained the same common denominator. Greed. Greed came
from every set of gleaming eyes that looked out from the screen.
Rapacity and an arrogance that screamed
, 'I know I'm beautiful.
I know you want me, and for the right price you can have
me.'

And evidently, from what he'd read so far,
the right price,
the going price
, was about three thousand a
month.

Three thousand a month that he could very
well afford if he chose to do this.

It wasn't as if he was on a simple dating
site, no, the website he was looking at wasn't as socially
acceptable as that. He was on an 'arrangement' site. A site that
matched men who were more than willing to pay for the company of a
woman with the women who didn't mind getting paid for said
'company.'

It wasn't prostitution. Of course it
wasn't.

That wouldn't be legal.

What made this completely legal was the
'relationship' between the two parties.

The technicality was a load of shit but he
didn't care because it suited him.

He was sick and tired of having to go out and
find sex. He was twenty-eight years old, and the last twelve months
had been the first time since college he'd been alone.

The last year had been pure, unmitigated
hell. Losing his wife of only five years in a car crash twelve
months ago was something that he wanted to put behind him and never
think about. He'd been refusing to think about it since it
happened. He wasn't in denial. He knew Val was gone. But there was
nothing to be gained by wishing and thinking and trying to pray it
away. It had happened. Val was dead. He wasn't. He was alone now
and his life resembled a steamy bowl of shit. All that bullshit he
read about, 'better to have loved and lost than never to have loved
at all', was just that, bullshit. He would absolutely, no question
about, damn sure rather never have known what it was like for a
woman to have loved him so much and then
poof!
disappear in
a stroke of a second. It was as simple as that.

But the truth of the matter was that she
had
loved him, he knew she had, and now she was gone. And
guilt ate at his insides like corrosive battery acid, chewing away
and spitting out his guts. Why? Because she'd loved him more than
he'd loved her. Oh, he'd hidden it from her well and at least he
could be thankful for that. But it was always there in the
background of his psyche. The knowledge that he'd probably never
deserved her. He'd never cheated on her, but he continued to beat
himself up with the question of whether or not their marriage would
have lasted.

There was nothing he could do about it now
and he just wanted to forget.

Now all he wanted was sex. He had a very
active libido and needed sex on a regular basis. For the last year
he'd had to go out and troll for it every time he needed it. He'd
lost count of the number of women he'd slept with. Or rather, the
women he'd fucked. There hadn't been any sleeping involved. Not
once. Why would he want to fall asleep with a stranger? What
purpose would there be in that? All it would have done would have
been to cloud the issue and give the women false hope. The women
he'd hooked up with tended to want to put their hooks in him. They
didn't want to have sex and move on. Hell no. They wanted to keep
him. He'd tried the dating websites and he'd gotten a lot of ass
that way. But hook-ups weren't what those women were looking for.
They were looking for a relationship, a commitment, marriage.

And he'd never allow that again.

He'd had a wife. He'd been married. He'd been
faithful and he hoped like hell that he'd been a good husband. It
had been a decent situation, but that didn't mean he wanted to do
it again.

No, all he wanted was sex. Sex from a spigot.
Sex from a quiet, low-keyed spigot that he could turn on and off
and that didn't expect anything from him in return.

Nothing in return, that is, except money.

That was exactly the kind of 'relationship'
he was looking for. A mutual give and take. He'd give and then he'd
take. End of story.

Now he just needed to find the right woman
for the job.

He spent the next hour scrolling back and
forth until finally, he narrowed it down to three.

Before he could back out of it, he fired off
three emails and waited to see what kind of responses he
received.

****

Jessica Conway sat at a bank of computers in
the university library, chewing on a thumbnail, tearing it up and
trying to get her nerve up enough to look at what she needed to
face. She said a short prayer before she bit her lip and opened her
account where she would learn her grades for the semester.

She took a deep breath, moved the cursor to
the highlighted area and clicked on the mouse.

Her stomach sank in a sharp agony of panic,
disappointment and sheer, unmitigated fright.

Two point nine eight seven.

She closed her eyes and dropped her head to
the table.

Gone.

Her scholarship and everything she'd worked
for her whole life were gone.

Panic settled in her stomach in sharp points
of jagged glass. It wasn't fair
! It wasn't fair, damn
it.

She'd made the dean's list the first two
semesters. This could
so
not be happening to her. As if
through a haze of disbelief, she tried to steady her breathing as
she attempted to come to grips with what she'd just knew was going
to happen. Even though her overall grade point average was still
just shy of three point five, she'd failed to miss the semester
requirements of at least an even three points. And she'd missed it
twice, two semesters in a row. After the fall semester of her
sophomore year, she'd been put on probation. The university had
given her one semester to bring her grades back up over the
required amount. And she could have. Easily. In normal
circumstances, in a normal semester. But her sophomore year wasn't
normal. She'd had no choice but to take chemistry and calculus
together, even though her advisor had warned her the combination
would be dangerous.

Math was so
not
her strong suit. She
loved science, but when you got down to it, chemistry was nothing
but math in disguise. However, the geology curriculum she was
working on required both chemistry and calculus as prerequisites
before she could move on with her major.

It wasn't fair. She'd passed both classes. If
she could just move on with her scholarship, next fall everything
would be okay. All she had left were geology classes and phys ed
and some electives. There was no doubt she could be back on the
dean's list next year.

But not now.

Now she no longer had a scholarship. She had
no lifeline at all.

It wasn't as if she could get loans like the
other students. No, her mother had seen to that. She'd ruined
Jessica's credit before she was fifteen years old. Her mother was
in federal prison for fraud now, but it wasn't defrauding her own
daughter that had put her there. It was all the other scams she'd
been running when it all caught up to her.

But that didn't help Jessica any. Nope. She'd
willingly signed the papers her mother had put in front of her.
What kid wouldn't when she trusted her only parent and was told it
was the only way to stay out of the social service system?

She took a shuddering breath and gathered her
stuff together. She wasn't beaten yet. She'd find another way. She
was too damn close to attaining her life goals. She
would
have that degree. Her overall GPA was still really good. If she had
to live for the next week between the scholarship office and the
academic advisory office, she would. There had to be other
scholarships besides the one from the university that had just
slipped through her fingers.

She was nothing if not resilient. All she
needed was enough money to see her through one semester at a time.
One semester. That's all she needed, all she would focus on.

Surely, she could find the money for one damn
semester.

****

Connor sat in a darkened corner of a popular
downtown restaurant across from the last of the three women he had
set up to meet during the last week.

The meetings were little more than
interviews. They were designed to be interviews between both
parties, but he knew that was a load of crap.

He was a fucking catch and he knew it. He
wasn't old, he wasn't ugly, and apparently, that's all it took to
make him the crème de la crème of the 'arrangement' website.

Before he'd set up the very first meeting,
he'd made a list of three questions he would ask. If any of the
women answered them to his satisfaction, and
got his motor
running,
he would then play the rest of the initial meeting by
ear, maybe move forward.

So far, it had been a bust.

All three women were shallow, vain, and so
hardened in both looks and speech that they resembled little more
than prostitutes. When he'd come to the question of why they were
doing this, the answers were varied.

One woman wanted a new set of boobs. One
looked at him blankly and told him that this was how she made her
living. The one sitting across from him now had told him she was
between modeling jobs and had proceeded to show him an array of
naked prints of herself.

He supposed that these were the types of
women he should actually be looking for. Cold women who knew what
they wanted and who would make it easy for him to just fuck them
and leave until the next time.

But there lay his problem.

Not a one of them so much as made his cock
twitch.

In fact, they fairly disgusted him.

The one in front of him now disgusted him as
she put her blood-red tipped fingers over his and stroked the back
of his hand.

Something shriveled and died within him and
he pulled his hand out from under hers and motioned for the waiter.
"Check, please."

****

Two days later, Jessica was at her wits end
as she packed boxes and prepared to move out of her on-campus
housing at least for the summer, and possibly forever. She had no
idea where she was going.

Her roommate, Allison, had been trying her
best to help, but Allison had it easy. She had parents who could be
depended on to write out a huge check for living expenses and
tuition every semester. Allison was in a sorority, and had begged
Jessica to rush with her this last year. But there was no way.
Jessica couldn't afford the dues, let alone the clothes and
everything else that would be expected of her.