Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 104050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 520(@200wpm)___ 416(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Professor Liam Thomas is every girl’s dream in a bespoke suit—stern, dominant, and completely off-limits. He doesn't just teach; he commands the room with a precise, forbidding authority that makes every girl at Century College tremble.
Simone is a scholarship student one failing grade away from losing everything. Desperate and drowning, she makes a reckless a short skirt, a tight tee, and a private visit to Liam’s office.
She expected a lecture.
She didn't expect to be commanded to her knees.
Yet as the stacks of the library give way to the heat of his bedroom, the "tutoring" turns into a dark obsession. Liam isn't just grading Simone’s papers; he’s tracking her every move, her health, and her future.
The semester is ending, but her real education is just beginning because in Liam’s world … the only way to pass is to obey!
This steamy professor-student romance will make you squeal, sigh, and tear up with all the feels. This story is a follow-up to Cabin Fever, but like all of my books, can be read on its own. HEA guaranteed. 93k words
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
BAD GIRLS TAKE RISKS
SIMONE
I’m late to class—again—which means everyone’s already assembled when I slip in, and all heads are pointed at the front, watching Professor Thomas write MELVILLE in long, decisive strokes on the whiteboard. His broad back ripples beneath the blue button down, his ebony hair gleaming in the light. He caps the marker with a little pop, and I swear, the girl three rows down from me gasps audibly because Professor Thomas is that magnetic.
I drop into a seat in the back row, and immediately cross my legs. The pleated skirt creeps up; the hemline’s a little much, but I’m a scholarship kid and this is the best I could do at the Buffalo Exchange on 6th Street. The baby tee is tight enough to push my boobs up, which is exactly the point. Everyone here knows why you sign up for Thomas’s class, and it has nothing to do with 19th-century American literature.
It’s the professor himself—Liam Thomas, PhD, thirty-five, black hair swept back in waves, blue eyes like a North Sea murder mystery, and the kind of chest that makes you wonder if he played rugby professionally or if he just benches a lot of existential guilt. He paces, hands behind his back, reading off a thin stack of notecards while never really looking at them. I think: if I flunk this class, I lose my scholarship and get sent back to West Texas. But I also think: I want him to look at me the way he looks at that Melville book in his briefcase. Maybe it’s just a book, but I can feel the fire.
He sweeps the room with his eyes, speaking low and even, like the words are secret and he’s not sure who’s worthy of them. “Why is Moby Dick white?” he asks. Nobody says anything. The question hangs in the air, sticky and moist, the kind that makes people squirm in their seats. “McCall?” he asks with a pointed look my way.
I sit up straight, ponytail bouncing. “Um—” I realize I wasn’t listening, which is the story of my academic life. “Melville uses the color white as a symbol for ambiguity. Innocence, but also emptiness, blankness. It’s like a paradox. The whale is everything and nothing.”
Professor Thomas gives me a slow nod, just enough approval to keep me hooked. “Good. Melville’s ambiguity is part of the novel’s terror.” He walks down the aisle, voice growing softer as he nears the back row, where I sit alone. Everyone else is clustered up front. He stops right by my desk. I feel his presence like a hand around my throat, gentle but unyielding. “Do you agree, Miss McCall? Is terror a lack, or an abundance?”
My lips are dry. “Both, maybe.”
He stares at me for a second longer than necessary, and my cheeks catch fire. I swear he’s about to say something else, but then the girl in the front row—Victoria, or Veronica, or something with a V—leans over the table, her platinum extensions gleaming in the dusty sunlight, and raises her hand.
“Yes, Miss Vasquez?”
She blinks up at him, lashes like windshield wipers. “Isn’t Ahab’s obsession with the whale also a metaphor for sexual repression?”
The room titters. Thomas smiles—more with his eyes than his mouth—and perches on the edge of the desk, one arm braced on his knee. “That’s an interesting reading, Miss Vasquez. Melville’s language is famously charged, but whether it’s about sex is…debatable.”
Victoria/Veronica doesn’t blink; she’s in full attack mode. “But the language is so, like, penetrative. All the harpoons, the chase, the penetration of the whale’s body…”
He holds her gaze, then turns his face slowly back to me. “What do you think, McCall? Is the whale hunt about sex?”
My tongue tangles. For a second, the only thing I can think is: He’s talking to me. Only me. “I think it’s more about obsession. Like, the violence of wanting something you can never really have. The way it eats you up.”
Professor Thomas looks down at his notecards, but I catch the corner of his mouth curve upward. “Well put.”
I sink back in my seat, heart drilling. There’s a tremor in my hands as I doodle a sperm whale on the margin of my notes. The guy three rows in front of me, who smells faintly of bong water and deodorant even from afar, cranes his head and whispers, “You nailed it, Simone.”
I force a smile and twist my pencil between my fingers, resisting the urge to snap it in half. Why can’t I just pay attention for once? I should be absorbing every word, but all I can do is replay Professor Thomas’s voice in my head, the roughness in it, the way he savors certain syllables. I imagine him grading my essay, his big hands tearing the paper in two, and then my brain goes blank.