Read Dark Blue: Study in Seduction, Book 1 for Free Online Page A

what I like to hear. How’s the Jane Austen essay going? Any progress on amazing me yet?”
    Crap. No pressure, then. “It’s getting there.” She flashed him a confident smile. She had to judge this situation carefully, keep the conversation light and then lead into their encounter at the party.
    “Good to hear it.” The college clock chimed the quarter hour, and Alex glanced at his watch. “I’d better be going. I have a faculty lecture to deliver on the Cavalier poets. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ and so on.”
    He made to move away from her. This couldn’t go on. He might be her tutor and any relationship might be inappropriate, yet Carla had to know where she stood with him. Where they stood together.
    “Alex, wait. I need to talk to you.”
    “Is about the tutorial or your essay assignments? Is there something I haven’t made clear?”
    “No… It’s not strictly related to my work.”
    She could see him weighing up what to say and faltered again, but she couldn’t exist in this state of continually wondering what if… What if she’d gone home with him that night? What if they could forget they were tutor and student for a moment? What if he’d been thinking about her and longed to act on his desires?
    “If it’s a pastoral issue, then by all means you can talk to me about it and I’ll try to help. However, I think you might be better off speaking to Dr. Hanson,” he said patiently.
    “It’s not pastoral. It’s something else. I’m sure you’ve been waiting for the right moment to bring it up too.”
    His brow creased in puzzlement. “Are you worried about your course or exams?”
    Cold fingers crept up Carla’s spine. It was too late to back down now, so she called his bluff. “It’s nothing to do with home or work, but you know that, don’t you?” She smiled, to show that they shared a special secret. “It was you, wasn’t it? That night in London at the party?”
    There, it was out. She waited for him to throw her the smoky gaze that would prove he shared the bond too. She might as well have just asked him a question about some dry literary text for all the reaction she got.
    “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
    “You were at the fetish do. You fended off Dracula, and you called me a cab. You said, ‘Mistrust any enterprise that requires new clothes’, and I got it wrong. I thought it was Dr. Johnson, and you knew it was Thoreau. It was you…” Her words tailed off. His look of total incomprehension had completely thrown her. She’d been one hundred percent sure it was him. Of course, it was him, but what if she had, by some terrible coincidence, been mistaken? What if he’d got an identical twin?
    Lead had settled in the pit of her stomach before she came to her senses. No, that sort of thing only happened in crappy crime shows on the TV. Alex Lemaitre had been the man in the mask, and now she’d confronted him, she had to get him to admit it or be unable to face him ever again.
    “You took me under the stairs and said you’d…” Put me across your knee and tan my bare arse, rip my basque off, shag me senseless… Shit on a stick. This was excruciating, but she’d gone too far to stop now. She’d taken that leap of faith, and she was falling, probably to crash and burn. She tried one last-ditch attempt to stop herself from hitting the ground at a hundred miles an hour. “I wore my leather trousers, and you had a black mask and you…” She stopped. He clutched his iPad to his chest as if he wanted protection from her.
    Her throat was dry as she longed for the flagstones to open up and swallow her. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
    His expression was as calm and icy as a glacial lake. “Carla, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here. If I was ever at a fetish party, as you call it, and trying to conceal my real identity—and I assume that’s why you say this man you met was wearing a mask—then I’d