A Prologue to Seduction (The Scarlet Diaries #1) Read online

  “Remember to smile, and stand up straight for goodness sakes! No one wants to buy my kind of books from someone who sulks. If my next book doesn’t do well, you can kiss your tuition and living expenses goodbye this year.”

  I cringed. “So what am I supposed to do? Live in a cardboard box?”

  “Loans, or get a part-time job. Or marry rich.” Mom rattled my choices off as if they were all on equal footing without sparing me a glance as she set up a pile of t-shirts with her motto on it. She said the last option with a laugh, but I knew her well enough not to chuckle along. She was serious. I’d caught her more than once sifting through her Facebook for friends with future lawyer or doctor sons to set me up with.

  So much for love being in God’s hands, right?

  Not that I could say that, so instead I mumbled, “Says the woman who makes a living writing books.”

  “I got lucky, darling, and who knows when that luck will run out,” Mom chided. “Look at your father, surviving the massacre of the great recession, only to be fired last month. Now get going, and if a nice man wants your number, don’t give him mine this time!”

  Some of the girls at the surrounding tables snorted. Clutching the box of bookmarks to my chest, I sped off down the aisle, trying to look everywhere but the covers splayed on the table. Boobs, butts, bare chests and now I had another B to add to the list—bulging groins. This was so not helping the little problem smoldering between my legs.

  Don’t think of groins, don’t think of groins!

  I’d spent this entire trip trying to forget what was on the line with Mom’s latest convention, but found it a better thought to cool myself off. Since Dad just lost his corporate job, the very job that paid my way through freshman year of college, we only had Mom’s writing income to support ourselves. While she did well, there weren’t enough royalties coming in to pay fifty grand a year for my private school.

  If marrying some professional and settling down was the plan mom thought God had in his hands for me, it might be time to take the proverbial wheel from Jesus and do a bit of my own steering.

  Checking over my shoulder to make sure Mom was distracted, I cruised to a stop at Kat Boot’s table. She raised a narrow, penciled brow at me before following my gaze to a stack of books to her right with a blindfolded woman arching towards an outstretched hand on the cover. I hoped she’d say something first, something like “get a move on” or “your mother’s watching” or whatever it took to get me to stop staring at the bounty of flesh spread out across the books on her table.

  But I couldn’t stop staring. And I couldn’t stop wondering what kind of lives the girls in her books led. Their lives had to be more exciting, more passionate than the one I muddled through right now. What did I have to do to live like that, and did I have the guts to do it?

  Who the heck was I kidding? Clearly, the answer to that last question was no. I was so very rooted in celibacy that I had no idea what I’d look like in bed, in the arms of a man, let alone what to do there.

  Of course, that didn’t keep me from wondering.

  I handed her a stack of bookmarks, swallowing thickly. “Do you mind putting these on your table?”

  That’s what I meant to say, anyway. What I really said was, “Which book do you recommend?”

  THREE

  August 10, 10:59 am

  A slow grin unfurled across Kat Boots’s face. She plucked a book from the back. Chained Love, featuring a nude couple writhing on silk sheets. When I reached for my purse, Kat Boots waved her bookmarks at me. “A fair exchange, don’t you think?”

  Not really, but I wasn’t going to argue with her about that. I slipped the book into the large pocket of my sweatshirt and darted into the crowd as it filed into the ballroom. The book sat there for two hours. I was so sure everyone suddenly had x-ray vision and could see the smut I hid. My pulse never stopped racing. I knew my voice was too shrill, too taunt, as I directed women to my mother’s table, and it was all because I couldn’t erase that cover image from my head. The desire from it sent every pore and hair on my body on high alert until I couldn’t take it anymore. I shoved the last batch of bookmarks into the tote of a random woman and strode from the convention hall.

  The recycled air in the hallway hit me as I burst through the doors, and I gasped it in, letting it cool my face. A bathroom. I had to find bathroom, and quick, because that was the only place I could think to go if I needed a moment of peace and quiet from the crowds. But a restroom that wasn’t overrun with bookworms would be hard to find. I kept going until the crowds thinned to a trickle, and that’s when I ducked into the first restroom I found, making a beeline for the last stall. The clatter of the flimsy door latch falling into place sounded as loud as a gunshot in the night. I leaned against the door and clutched Chained Love to my chest, gasping in mouthfuls of air.

  You probably think I’m crazy, but all my life I’ve been trained to be a Good Girl by my parents. Good Girls stay in line, keep their heads down and noses clean, and they certainly, under no circumstances, read erotic books—ever. And if a girl like me were going to do it, they’d find some other place than in a random bathroom somewhere, because reading porn in public is dangerously close to sexual perversion.

  Well, this is the most private place I’d find. In the minutes I’d been standing in the stall, no one came inside. No way is this book getting into my suitcase and on a plane with me. I’m not willing to risk the eternal mortification or punishment from my parents if they found that book, but I wanted to read it.

  So I put down the toilet lid, sat on it, and cracked open the book’s spine.

  From almost the first page, the heat was on. A princess, bored with her marriage to her husband, turned to the prisons beneath her castle to find the passion missing from her life. She found her man while touring the prisons as part of her royal duties, and would not have come up with such a scheme if he had not drawn his penis from his trousers the moment she stopped outside of his cell. As guards scrambled to pull her away, she couldn’t rip her gaze from him as he started stroking his member with a grimy, thick fist.

  I pulled my legs up, clenching my thighs together in a desperate attempt to cut off the growing dampness and the raging pulse pounding there in time with my heart. It wasn’t working, because the princess found the prisoner’s wild display just as arousing as I did, and retreated to her chambers under the guise of recovering from her shock. In reality, she tore off her gown as she raced to her bed. There, the princess rucked up her skirts and pressed her palm against the curls between her legs. And then she flicked herself until she was forced to swallow her moans so that her husband in the bedroom next door would not hear.

  My heart missed a beat. Saliva flooded my mouth. I tiled my head back as I swallowed, and then shifted the book from my right hand to my left. I palmed away the sweat on my forehead before running it across my neck. Tacky skin turned my palm sweaty, and I wiped the moisture off on the chest of my sweatshirt.

  Bad idea. The arousal had spread from between my legs and sunk in my breasts. They were small, but that didn’t stop my nipples from reacting, straining against the confines of my bra.

  These were not new sensations—I’m a nineteen-year-old virgin, not a saint. All those other times, I’d made the conscious decision to walk back from the point where I needed relief from the heat that plagued me. Taking a visual stroll through the Bible helps. Cold showers. Leaving my room to join Mom and Dad in their ritual Jeopardy viewing sessions always did the trick, too.

  Except something was different about this time. This time, I didn’t want to stop myself from having these feelings. I was only a week away from starting college again. My freshman year had been a dud, where I did nothing but go to class and then go back to my dorm. I went to Bible study on Sundays. I had a couple of friends, like my roommate Summer, but never joined them in the typical college escapades in the evening. I was sick of being the secret virgin who everyone probably assumed was a prude. And maybe this
wasn’t the perfect time or perfect place to decide to change my life, but I was like a train without breaks.

  Suddenly, it was too warm in the stall. I dragged the sweatshirt off with one hand. The friction of rough fabric against my skin only tightened my nipples more. They begged for relief, standing erect against the meager fabric of my shabby bra.

  Did I dare?

  I couldn’t help it. I ran one trembling hand over my right breast. A moan, long and throaty, burst from my lips.

  Just as the restroom door squealed open.

  My moan choked and died over the sound of heavy boots meeting the tile floor. I reached up to cover my mouth with both hands as I gasped, forgetting I had a book. It tumbled from my grip. I could only watch in wide-eyed horror as it hit the floor and tumbled end over end. The book’s path came to an end just outside the stall where it rested with its cover face up.

  The boots paused. Then the footsteps picked up again, stopping only when twin steel toes met the edge of the book. A hand—a large one, dusted with wiry hairs and kissed by sun—scooped Chained Love from the floor.

  As if it wasn’t bad enough that someone burst in on me right then.

  My guest was a man.

  FOUR

  August 10, 11:22 am

  If I had been looking for a solution to kill my horniness, I wouldn’t find any better buzz kill than getting caught by a stranger while I weighted the positives and negatives of masturbating in a public restroom.

  I froze, barely daring to breathe. If this guy was a cop, I was toast. I’d be excommunicated from the Conway family, forced to register as a sex offender, and be doomed to a lifetime of unyielding embarrassment. The only solution was to act as if I wasn’t there in hopes that he’d eventually go away.

  So when a rich male voice asked, “Is this yours?”, I sucked on my tongue instead of answering. Oh, god, that flooding, sinking feeling was returning to my stomach, courtesy of my guest’s throaty delivery. He spoke his words with an accent, something European and refined, and each word ratcheted up the pressure between my legs.

  He just had to have a voice like pure sex, didn’t he? I was in half a mind to put myself out of my misery by flushing my own head down the toilet bowl when the hand thrust the book beneath the stall door. The accompanying voice asked again, this time with more edge,“I said, is this yours?”

  Nope. Nothing to see here. Move right on.

  Of course, it wasn’t that easy. The only moving he did was closer to my stall to lean against it. One steel toe of his boot bounced off the other. Pages ruffled. Short, light huffs of amusement punctuated the tense silence. Even with the door between us, and even though I had no idea what he looked like, I felt an aura from him that was as foreign to me as his accent was. He radiated confidence, oozed a sense of ease, nothing like the boys in high school or even the freshmen in college who always acted like they had something to prove. It told me that I was the only one of us looking for a quick escape from this very awkward moment.

  “Ah, I get it now,” he drawled. He toyed with the words as if I were the mouse to his cat. “This is quite the scandalous book you have here. I think I interrupted your…private time. I did, didn’t I?”

  Go away. Go away! This really isn’t the time to make small talk!

  “Don’t let me stop you. You must’ve been quite desperate for some…relief if you ducked into a men’s toilet to wank.”

  The naked mocking in his voice pressed one nerve too many with his last comment. “This isn’t the men’s restroom!”

  I pressed my hand to my mouth again—too late. Any pretense that I wasn’t here was now gone. I’d walked right into that one, and by the sound of his raspy chuckle, that had been his plan all along. What a pervert! Is this how he went around picking up women, by strolling into women’s restrooms and chatting them up?

  Humiliation kept me from outright asking. There was still a chance that he’d bore of this strange game of his, and when the door creaked as he pushed off of it, I thought that moment had come. His footsteps rang out again, and then something wooden groaned. I peered through the slit between the stall door and the lock to catch a figure sitting on the sink counter, swinging his legs clad in black denim. A gray t-shirt did little to hide his taunt form from my view. I can’t see his face, and I don’t need to. My imagination, already clocking in overtime, filled in what my eyes couldn’t. He would be as handsome and rough as his voice—a finely cut jaw, rugged with a dusting of stubble, and dark locks of hair draping over hooded, blue eyes. By the way he dressed and the ballsy, flirtatious lit to his voice, I pegged him at around my age. That’s when the reality of the situation crashed over my head.

  Intimate moments with guys didn’t happen to me. Heck, completely platonic moments with guys only happened when I was forced to work with them in school. So I fell into that mode I always locked myself into when hot guys were around, one of not quite off and not quite on. A smarter girl would’ve learned to emulate her mother’s effervescent personality. Instead, I grew stunted in her shadow. That was why guys like him didn’t notice girls like me.

  Unless she was trapped in a bathroom stall, reading porn, and touching herself.

  “Actually,” he said, “this is the men’s toilet, or did you not notice the urinals when you came in? Perhaps not. After all, you were probably too consumed in getting started with your wanking. I notice you didn’t deny that bit, by the way.”

  My face flamed. I reached for a wad of toilet paper—to chuck at him or to choke myself with, I wasn’t really sure—and that’s when I noticed something. The women’s restrooms always had those metal boxes to toss sanitary items into.

  This stall didn’t.

  As if on cue, two male voices floated into the restroom as the door groaned open. Brief tinkling noises followed, and then water splashing in a sink, before the voices retreated.

  I was really in the men’s restroom.

  “Oh, my god,” I shrieked, reaching for the stall door to make a run for the exit, but the stranger got there before me. He leaned against it again, trapping me inside. Shocked by his nerve, I had to break my vow of silence. “What are you, a pervert?”

  “Says the girl who came to the men’s toilets for a—”

  “Moment of peace and quiet! To read! That’s all!”

  “And as I said, don’t let me get in the way. You’re free to carry on with your so-called reading.”

  “Assuming I was doing what you think I was doing, I’d need my book back. Give it to me.”

  I caught a glimpse of his fingers toying with the edge of the pages of Chained Love, as if he was caught in the middle of an internal debate and didn’t know yet which choice he’d make. And then he paused mid-flip to run one finger across the lines printed on the page.

  “I have an idea,” he drawled. “Maybe we could help each other out.”

  Losing my v-card sounded great, but even a desperate virgin had her limits. “I’m not doing a stranger in a public restroom.”

  “That’s not exactly what I had in mind. The popularity of this book is relevant to my completely legitimate, non-prurient interests. It’s well known that the vast majority of video and photographic pornography is aimed to please the male gaze. That women turn to other mediums of erotic entertainment is no surprise to me,” he said, “but I do wonder if women use these books the same way men use pornography.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “For self-gratification. As in, do women use books like these because they need something to read, or because they need to get off?” He paused, and so did my heartbeat, but I was still unprepared for what he said next.

  “Maybe you can help me figure this out, and I can help you come.”

  Please, someone kill me now.

  “Men are very visual creatures,” he continued. “The curve of a breast, the peak of a nipple pressing against a thin shirt, a firmly curved ass in a tight pair of jeans—for most of us, simple description isn’t enough to evoke a strong arousal
or, more importantly, a climax. We need to see, to hear, to taste, but women…they say merely reading words is enough. I’d like to empirically test that theory. How does that sound?”

  Wrong, wildly inappropriate, and slightly creepy were the first thing that leapt to mind. But lurking in the shadows of my mind was also the thought that his proposition was something a more daring Magdalena Grace Conway might try, if she were an actual person.

  And what’s stopping her from being real?

  A single word: yes.

  Could I let that syllable leave my lips?

  Yes.

  I mean, what was the risk? He hadn’t seen my face, and there was nothing remarkable about my voice. Plus, he really could be from Europe somewhere, only in America to participate in one of the conventions being held in the center today. After this moment, I’d probably never see him again, and I’d just become a nameless, faceless player in a crazy American story he’d tell to his friends over a pint of beer in a bar in Belgium or Switzerland or wherever he was from. And I could bury this indiscretion in the back of my head as a lifelong secret, brought to the surface only in the privacy of my own bed.

  What was there to lose?

  “No?” he said. “That’s unfortunate. Given the circumstances of our meeting, I really didn’t think I’d need to work this hard to convince you.”

  “What if someone comes in?”

  His boot clattered against the floor. The bathroom door opened, shut and a few minutes later, it opened again. The guy’s heavy footfalls echoes against tile. “I’ve put a sign in front of the door. No one will bother us. Now, should we begin?”

  I swallowed. One word was all it took. If I said no, I could walk out of this stall as the Magdalena I’ve always been, the Magdalena everyone expected me to be, which was…no one remarkable, really.

  Or I could say yes, and who knew what kind of girl I’d be then? Thrill rushed across my skin like a whisper.