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Chapter One

Connor Montgoed back on his sofa and then set the bourbon doithin easy reach A war, as he continued to look at the screen of his coers on the scroll pad of his laptop, he watched carefully as pictures of young women rolled down the screen

Still a long daht 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 salea eyes that looked out froance that screamed, 'I know I'ht price you can have me'

And evidently, fro 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 si at wasn't as socially acceptable as that He was on an 'arrange to pay for the co paid for said 'company'

It wasn't prostitution Of course it wasn't

That wouldn't be legal

What al 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 enty-eight years old, and the last twelve e he'd been alone

The last year had been pure, un his wife of only five years in a car crash twelvethat he wanted to put behind hi 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 knohat 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 hiuilt 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 hie 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 wo 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 hiotten a lot of ass that way But hook-ups weren't what those wo for a relationship, a coe

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 ain

No, all he wanted was sex Sex froot 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 ive 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 co on a thuh 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, hted area and clicked on the mouse

Her stomach sank in a

sharp agony of panic, disappointht

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 stolass It wasn't fair! It wasn't fair, damn it

She'd made the dean's list the first two seh a haze of disbelief, she tried to steady her breathing as she atte 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 sophoiven her one serades 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 cheh her advisor had warned her the coerous

Math was so not her strong suit She loved science, but when you got down to it, chey curriculu 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 justwould 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 scaht 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 daree 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 froers

She was nothing if not resilient All she needed was enough h 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 don restaurant across fro the last week