Writing for Ben (RiverHart Book 4) Read online

  Writing for Ben

  by

  Adira August

  Based on characters from the novels

  desire for Touch

  and

  desire for Bliss

  Copyright © 2017 Adira August

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either wholly sprung from the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Fiction - short story - Romance - erotica

  September 2016

  “Why are they all billionaires?” Avia asked in disgust. “Multi-millionaires aren’t good enough to have hot, kinky sex with?”

  Janet “J.J.” Johnson, feature editor of national news magazine The Week (cyber-edition) sipped her morning coffee and didn’t bother to answer. She knew Avia, friend as well as award-winning writer, was just getting wound up. She hadn’t asked the question.

  “OH! Oh. Aaannnnnd …” Avia went on, “... the billionaires are ALL damaged by traumatic childhoods. How do so many emotionally screwed-up sex gods manage to build business empires? Who reads this stuff? You know the last time I read fiction was for a college class I was required to take. Why, oh why, would you give me this … assignment?”

  The question. Avia had spit out the last word, obviously repressing the urge to say -

  “This piece of shit assignment, you mean?” Janet asked equably. Avia shrugged.

  “As for who the women are who buy and read these books, the ones I gave you to read came out of my own library.”

  Avia’s mouth closed and her eyebrows lifted. Janet was one of the brightest, most powerful and self-confident women she’d ever met. Why would she seek out stories that invariably depicted submission to a Dominant male? Suddenly, the assignment was interesting.

  Janet put her coffee aside and sat forward. She needed to be Avia’s boss, now. Not always the easiest role to take with her strong-willed star reporter and friend.

  Janet swung her laptop around so Avia could see the screen. “Do you know who this is?”

  The image showed a man in a tuxedo entering what looked like the Performing Arts Center at night. Avia judged him to be in his early thirties, the natural wave of his dark, medium-length hair defeating whatever product he used to keep it in place. Errant curls drifted over a straight forehead above a strong profile.

  “No idea,” Avia responded.

  “His name is Ben Hart.” Janet looked for a sign of recognition, but Avia shook her head. “You have an appointment to interview him this morning. Which is the only time he had this week.”

  “You’re taking me off the erotica assignment?” Avia asked.

  “No.” Janet scrolled down to show the headline under the image: ‘Companion’ Sues Sex Toy Maker for Millions Claiming Deviant Sexual Assault.

  “Isn’t sexual assault deviant by definition?” Avia asked rhetorically scanning the story. “You want me to get his side of the story, this … sex toy guy?”

  “Sure, if he’ll give it to you, but I’m pretty confident he won’t.”

  Avia made a note. “Ben Hart … is that ‘Benjamin?’ ”

  “Benedict,” Janet corrected. “Ben’s doing me a favor.”

  Avia looked up from her pad at J.J.’s familiar use of the man’s nickname.

  “We met in college. I consider him a friend. When I called him this morning for a comment on the lawsuit, he demurred. But he did agree to an interview as deep background for your story.”

  Janet stood, motioning Avia to follow. “His publishing house markets a large selection of erotic romance titles. I also thought it would be an interesting angle to talk to a flesh and blood guy who represents the typical reader’s dream lover.”

  Avia eyed her friend suspiciously. “Hang on. 'Dream lover?' How well did you know this guy in college?"

  "Don't let your imagination run wild, Avia. He was one of my students," Janet replied.

  Which was not a lie. Not, really.

  September 2002

  When Ben Hart showed up in freshman Business Writing, Janet thought he might be fresh from military service, since he looked to be in his mid-twenties and carried himself with an abundance of confidence.

  Broad-shouldered and well over six feet, he sported a shadow of beard by the time he walked into her three o'clock class. A thick lock of rich brown hair curled over a wide forehead above bold wings of brows. Deep indigo irises framed by thick eyelashes ...

  You're thinking about eyelashes. You so need to find a boyfriend. Boy-friend? Man, she'd corrected herself. Eyelash-guy is a student, not a candidate for sexual congress.

  But after class, when he stopped by her desk to ask about something she could never recall afterward, the fact that she'd actually felt the heat radiating from his body had driven his student status from her mind.

  She'd been mesmerized by the graceful curve of his well-developed trapezius muscles and the shadowed hollows behind his collarbones. The neck of his t-shirt neck clung to the dip and rise along tight tanned skin that disappeared underneath the soft collar's edge.

  When it drifted into her consciousness that he'd stopped talking about whatever brought him to her desk, she'd tilted her head back to find him staring at her, assessing, in perfect awareness of his effect on her. He gave her a grin and turned away, grabbing his backpack from a desk he'd tossed it on.

  She'd flushed, humiliated. But then he made a quick movement with his back to her that she still knew unmistakably was him adjusting himself. So. He'd also needed a moment.

  Her feminine ego restored, Janet concentrated on packing her briefcase. "Do you have a major, Mr. Hart?"

  "Business," he answered.

  "Focus?" she asked.

  "Entrepreneurship." He seemed to be repressing a smirk. Slinging the backpack over one shoulder, he faced her. "Since I'm not much of a writer, I thought I'd get the English requirement out of the way first thing."

  "So you are an incoming freshman?" Janet finally looked at him. He nodded, maintaining a carefully neutral expression. Good. We're going to act as if nothing happened.

  "Not so much a winning attitude toward classwork, is it?" she asked.

  "Winning in the classroom is an A for the class. I need to know what I have to do to get it," he replied. "If all I have to do is follow rules and produce text, I'm good."

  She picked up her briefcase and he followed her out. "That's a B," she said. "To excel, you need to learn what good, effective writing is and how to use that to accomplish your goals. How to communicate what you want to whom you choose. Vendors, customers, contractors."

  "I thought I'd hire people to do that."

  She'd looked up at the determined, intelligent and - frankly - gorgeous eyes. Her chest felt suddenly hollow and her throat tight - studentstudentstudent ...

  "I imagine you will. But how will you know, when they submit their writing samples, which one you should hire?" He looked almost startled at the idea that he'd have to judge the worth of another's writing.

  "Words are power, Mr. Hart. You need to learn how they work. That's an A." She'd pushed through the door leading to the stairwell and left him with a thoughtful look on his face, and eyes that appeared to be drifting over her backside.

  Later, when she found out he was only seventeen, she'd been beyond mortified. Her thoughts about him had definitely been ... inappropriate was accurate, if euphemistic.

  Still, he looked like he'd been getting served in bars since before he could drive. And the way he handled their encounter after the first day of class bespoke a social-sexual maturity far beyond his years. So did the way he'd comported himself toward
her with respectful distance, since.

  Janet didn't understand why she'd had such a strong, immediate response to him. Why he continued to haunt her idle thoughts and late night imaginings. But she was sure she wasn't the first adult woman to spend a restless night after an encounter with the teenaged Benedict Hart.

  September 2005

  "What precisely do you think you're doing?" Janet Julia Johnson demanded, as outrage vied with humiliation and the winner was every blown-wide-open capillary north of her nipples.

  Ben Hart lounged back in Janet's desk chair behind some pages he'd been reading. Her pages. Her latest short story. Her erotic short story - not intended for anyone's eyes but her own. He fixed his gaze on hers over the top of the manuscript.

  She waited for the smarmy comment, the suggestive innuendo or outright proposition. She should be snatching her pages from his hands and throwing him out of her office.

  But Ben Hart's eyes on hers, unflinching, unblinking, speculative, appreciative - generated a heat not born of anger, in an entirely private part of her body. Rats. After having had Ben in several of her classes in the last few years, she thought she'd be immune to his ... presence.

  Ignoring her body's response to him, above and below, she thrust out a hand for the pages. "Well?" she snapped.

  "What I was doing," he said, in his testosterone-drenched bass rumble, "was reading a really excellent writer. And confirming an hypothesis of mine." He gave her the pages and got out of her chair, turning it so she could sit down.

  She pointed him into the visitor's chair and locked the papers in a drawer. She'd been an instructor at the university, teaching introductory writing classes for four years. But she'd never had a student invade her privacy as this one had. Despite her initial reaction, she wouldn't back off due to embarrassment. Folding her hands on the desk, she determined to confront him. Firmly.

  "Mr. Hart, I imagine it would surprise you to know I have little interest in either your opinions or hypotheses as they concern me. Explain how you came to be in my office, sitting in my chair, invading my privacy." She fixed him with a narrow gaze. "I have students' work in my possession, as you must know. They rely on my discretion."

  He nodded. "True," he said. "But that was your story. You wrote it." He flashed his easy grin at her, the one that made him dimple. "You're the one who taught me what 'voice' is. Yours is distinctive. It's part of why I'm here."

  He stood suddenly with the easy grace of the natural athlete that he was, pacing in front of her desk. Watching him on the pitcher's mound was one of Janet's secret pleasures.

  "I came to be in your office because you left it unlocked. And I am sorry if I offended you, really. I wasn't intentionally rifling around through your work," he said and leaned back against the low bookshelves under the window along the wall opposite her desk.

  Legs crossed at the ankles. Thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans. Fingers splayed over his hip bones, pointing toward an inviting bulge at his crotch. Broad chest stretching a Radiohead t-shirt. He was an ad for sex.

  Sheet-clenching, toe-curling, screaming-his-name, multi-orgasmic sex.

  He added a heart-melting, eye-crinkling smile to the picture. "Let me explain."

  The past three years saw the already confident young man turn into a powerhouse Alpha male. Now, at the start of his senior year, the twenty-year-old honors student and captain of the baseball team still looked twenty-five, just as he had at seventeen. It was too easy to forget she was seven years his senior.

  Far hotter than he'd been as a freshman, Ben Hart was sexual dynamite and he knew it. But Janet, after having him in several classes over those years, was familiar with his moves.

  "Before you explain anything, how about you knock that off," she said.

  "What?" He frowned.

  She flicked an index finger up and down at him. "The sex pose. Sit down in the chair, stop your manipulative crap, and tell me what you're doing here. You don't have a class with me, so why are you sneaking around my office?"

  He had the grace to look embarrassed. "Sorry," he mumbled and sat down. "I came to ask if I could take you to lunch later. I have a proposition for you," he said. "I was looking for paper to leave you a note and saw the story. It was just lying there."

  "Under my keyboard. Sideways," she corrected him.

  "The first graph was readable and that was all it took. You are damned good, you know, and that's not bullshit. And besides, it's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about."

  Janet's mouth went dry. "You came in here to take me to lunch and offer me a proposition involving sex?"

  "No! … Well, yes, but - " He ran his hands through his hair, disarranging it. Artfully, of course. "This is not how I planned this," he muttered, apparently to himself.

  "Planned what?" Who did he think she was?

  "To ask you to work for me," he said. "Before you say anything - look - you usually have a paperback in your purse. I saw one of the titles. Lady Hatterly's Glover." He laughed a little. "I'll never forget it. I had to go look it up, I thought it would be some smart satire. It wasn't. Well, not exactly."

  Janet said nothing. Okay, so she read romance. Smutty BDSM romance, her too-honest subconscious reminded her. Still, it wasn't his business.

  "When I read your stuff in the uni's literary mag and I knew I wanted you to work for me. My hypothesis was if you liked to read sexy romance, you'd like writing sexy romance. I thought I might have to convince you, but, " he nodded at the drawer she'd locked her story in, "you're way ahead of me."

  "Always," Janet said.

  He stood, "C'mon, we need some privacy."

  She glanced around her small office. "This is private."

  "Not enough for this discussion."

  They stopped on a wooden footbridge over a stream in the wildflower garden. There weren't many wildflowers left, and the trees were taking on color. It would be spectacular there in a two more weeks. While they'd meandered along the mostly empty paths of the campus' botanic gardens, he'd explained his plan.

  "Okay," Janet said. "I understand you have to do a senior project and that's starting some kind of business. On a $200 budget. Total. And your grade is literally based on your profits?" He nodded. "That, I don't understand, considering most small businesses fail to profit at all for the first few years."

  "Most people's grades won't be based on profits," Ben said. "For that reason. But, if there is a profit, especially substantial profit, no other factors will matter. I'm going to make substantial profits."

  "And your idea is to sell pornography."

  "Erotic romance," he said, watching the stream, forearms on the rail, idly stripping a slender willow branch of leaves. "Pornography is aimed at men. This is sex, but within a relationship. And a story. It's what you already do."

  "My point is, you're proposing selling dirty books to female students," she said. "I'd lose my job."

  "They won't all be students. And you'd have a pen name. The only person who would know, would be me."

  "I won't risk my career for a student's senior project," she told him.

  "You risked your career going to the bathroom and leaving your work on your desk today," he said. "Plenty of these kids would have already posted it online with your real name."

  Janet rubbed her arms. It gave her a chill to realize how right he was.

  "I brought you out here so we could discuss it privately," he said. "I know what discretion is, okay? This is not a 'school project.' This is the start of a publishing business I'll expand after graduation," he said. "Online publishing is going to take over the market."

  "And you think the key to success is selling explicit sex to women?"

  "Exactly." He smiled at her as if pleased she understood.

  She crossed her arms, and shook her head. "You're a smart guy and a Big Man on Campus jock. But you're still twenty. Most romance readers are in their thirties and older. You can't possibly know enough about women to judge what would sell."

&n
bsp; He froze for a moment and then straightened. He had the branch in his hand-leafless, smooth, supple. With a flick of his wrist, it whistled through the air before cracking sharply across his thigh. Once. Twice. He spun it in his fingers, a blur of pale green catching the sun while he fixed her with an icy stare.

  All the muscles in her lower abdomen tightened. And Benedict Hart - shifted. He morphed from charming student to compelling adult male - powerful, implacable. The planes of his face sharpened, his gaze penetrated and burned, travelling up and down her body as if he were planning a route for his … hands? Mouth?

  Janet couldn't breathe. Think. Her clit throbbed and her vulva clenched.

  "Come here," he ordered quietly.

  Suddenly she was only a step away, enveloped in his heat. She couldn't remember moving. Her lips parted. Her stomach hollowed. The ache between her legs spread and intensified.

  He slid one foot forward between hers and pushed sideways until she opened her stance.

  Oh, God. A high sound escaped her throat. She felt a drift of cool air under her skirt, against her wet panties. Her hands clenched into fists against her need to touch him.

  He bent his head and spoke close to her ear. With each word she felt his warm breath move tendrils of her hair.

  "If I run one finger along your pussy you'll come, right here."

  Her knees went weak; she leaned back against the railing.

  His lips skated lightly over her cheek and mouth, seeking her other ear. "You've thought about me," he said - his deep bass whisper, a throaty feline purr. A very large feline.

  "You thought about me and touched yourself. That's very naughty of you, Ms. Johnson. Maybe you need to bend over the railing for me and I'll lay this switch across your bare bottom a few times."

  He flicked his wrist and she heard the whine and muted whap against his leg. She jumped and moaned. Her pelvis rocked and her legs tried to close. His foot was still in her way. He moved against her. The wood rail pressed into the small of her back and his hard fullness into her belly.