The Professor's Pet (A BDSM Romance Novel)

The Professor’s Pet (A BDSM Romance Novel)

By Tara Crescent

Text copyright © 2013 Tara Crescent

All Rights Reserved

My eternal gratitude to Jim, who pre-read and edited this novel, and didn’t hesitate to tell me when I needed to rewrite. Thank you for ignoring my grumbling.

Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com
.

Emily:

Five years of class, teaching and research. Two solid months of writing my dissertation. Sixty minutes of cross-examination from my committee. Fifteen minutes of nervous waiting outside the room as they debated whether I’d done enough work to earn my PhD. And then, a few seconds of pure exhilaration as I learned I had indeed done enough to graduate.

I was finally done.

I thought I’d be ecstatic, but I was just weary. The happiness would come later; right now though, the adrenaline had drained from my body, and I just wanted a nap.

There was a Starbucks in my school building; I headed to it for a caffeine pickup. I had my Kindle and more than my fair share of bodice rippers; I was going to hang out and read in the lounge for a few hours, and then head home. Normally, we would have gone out for drinks to celebrate, but John
, my advisor’s other PhD candidate was defending his dissertation tomorrow, and we’d just agreed that we’d all go out for a combined celebration tomorrow night.

“A tall café latte, please, with skim milk,” I said as I wandered up to the
counter.

“Large coffee, please, room for milk,” I heard a deep voice say. I looked up through
my eyelashes, and gulped. Professor Jake Ballard. He taught Pure Mathematics, and was hotter than sin. Black hair; blue eyes; the lean strength of a long distance runner. I had seen him in the gym once; he’d just finished a game of basketball with some students. He’d been drenched with sweat; he’d taken his t-shirt off to towel down, and umm. The Abs of Steel people should have been begging him to endorse their products. I’d stayed in the shadows and shamelessly gawked, and I’d touched myself frantically in the bathroom stall after. His body was the stuff of epic fantasy.

It wasn’t just me.
Every single woman who saw him had a thing for him. His class actually had an equal number of women and men in it; and given that he taught Pure Math, that was entirely because of how good-looking he was. God knows I’d taken his class many years ago for the same reason.

He looked around, bored. He nodded when he saw me, smiled politely.

“Dr. McNamara. I hear congratulations are in order.”

I turned into a blithering idiot every time I saw Jake; this time was no exception. I blushed deep red, and mumbled my thanks, tongue-tied. Great.

The girl arrived with my coffee, and I started scrambling for change; juggling my backpack, my Kindle, and my smartphone, resting my Kindle on the counter as I tried to find some change to pay for my coffee. I could see the girl’s well-concealed irritation; could sense Professor Ballard rolling his eyes. His coffee arrived; he handed the girl at the counter his credit card.

“Put both of our coffees on this, please,” he drawled.

“Umm, I have change somewhere,” I said, red-faced.

“I’m sure you do, Dr. McNamara. I’m just as sure that the line behind you would prefer that you find your cash before you get to the counter next time.” He nodded to me, took his coffee, and left.

I looked at his retreating back, profoundly irritated. Superior jackass.

***

Deep breath, Emily, don’t let him get to you,
I said to myself. I wasn’t going to let Professor Ballard take today away from me. I had a few hours of uninterrupted reading time, and I was totally looking forward to it.

Right before the bulk of the writing had started, I had downloaded Ann
e Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. I’d been saving it as a treat, and I reached for my Kindle eagerly, anxious to lose myself in a world of erotic fantasy.

Tipping Point - Malcom Gladwell. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond. A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson. What the heck? I scrolled through the books, wondering what had happened to my books. A creeping dread hit the back of my neck as my mind slowly put the pieces together, and I scrolled back to the Home page.

Jake Ballard’s Kindle. I must have grabbed the wrong one when I was doing my crazy hunt for coffee change.

I was deeply, utterly fucked.

***

I would have given my first born child to just be able to melt away right then. But
no, I had Professor Ballard’s Kindle in my hand, and I reluctantly made my way to his office to give it back to him, to get mine back.

His door was
closed. I took a deep breath.
Come on, Emily, you can do this,
I muttered to myself, trying to give myself a pep talk. He probably wouldn’t have even had time to look at the Kindle in front of him; he must have had a class to prepare for, or some kind of brilliant research to do, or something. Anything except explore the contents of my smut-filled Kindle.

I lifted up my hand and knocked.

“Come in,” his voice called out. It sounded amused.

I pushed open the door. He was
leaning against his desk, coffee in his left hand, my Kindle in his right.

I winced inwardly. He’d seen the contents. I’d just need to brazen through this; I didn’t have anything to apologize for.

“I’m sorry, Professor Ballard, I must have grabbed the wrong Kindle at the Starbucks,” I said, holding out his Kindle in my hand. “Here’s yours.”

He eyed me with mocking eyes, but didn’t say anything; his fingers flipped through my Kindle. Finally, after many moments of silence, he looked up. “Interesting reading material, Dr. McNamara,” he said.
“But very predictable.”

“Excuse me?” I said in anger, before I could think. The instant I spoke, I regretted it. Why was I letting him get to me? I just needed to grab my Kindle and go.

“Predictable. You’ve undoubtedly convinced yourself that being spanked isn’t at odds with your feminist ideals. And then, you’ve asked your politically correct boyfriends to spank you, but then you control every bit of that interaction; telling them where to hit you and how hard and how much. Like I said, predictable, submissive posturing.”

White hot anger flew through me at his speech. He’d hit too close to the mark, and I wasn’t going to stand for this. “You don’t know anything about me,” I said tightly.

He raised a mocking eyebrow. “Really? Then if I told you to kneel right now, you’d actually do it, rather than give me a hundred excuses about open office doors?”

My blood was still boiling. I was not going to let him dismiss me like this; his contempt and boredom stung. I got to my knees; spreading my legs apart, placing my palms on my thighs, and met his eyes.

“What next, Professor Ballard?”

He moved to stand in front of me, dangerously close; his crotch almost at my mouth. I didn’t flinch, though it was a struggle not to; didn’t pull back. I just stayed exactly where I was; focusing on the hardening cock near my mouth; tried not to think about the open office door; the way it would look if someone passing by glanced inside.

A minute passed; I stayed where I was. My emotions were changing. I’d been angry, and nervous about the open door. As the seconds ticked by though, all of that receded. What remained was a simple thought. I was kneeling because Jake told me to. That was it. Nothing else mattered. Not the open door and the risk of being discovered; not even the seeping wetness in my pussy, the hardening tips of my nipples.

Finally,
Jake moved back and laughed. “9pm tonight. My house. Be there.” He paused, looked me up and down. I was dressed for my dissertation; black slacks and a button-down shirt. “Wear something sexier than this,” he said dryly.

He
wrote something down on a piece of paper, put it on his desk, along with my Kindle. And then, he strode past me as if I was not there at all, and left, shutting the door behind him.

***

I have a superpower, and it’s a useful one. I am the consummate asshole detector. I’m famous for this; none of my friends will seriously date someone unless they’ve passed the Emily McNamara asshole screening process.

So, as I look at the piece of paper Jake Ballard has left on his desk, with his address and phone number scribbled on it, I applied my asshole radar to Jake.

Magic 8-ball,
I muttered to myself,
Is Jake Ballard an asshole?

Signs point to yes,
I replied, and laughed.

***

8pm, and I still hadn’t decided if I was going.

The smart, sensible Emily McNamara would have thrown the piece of paper with his address and phone number on it away, taken a long shower to
try to cool off the raging hormones, and gone to bed. She would have read something smutty on her Kindle, and masturbated, and then gone to sleep.

She would not have been shaving her pussy to please a man who looked at her with mocking eyes and told her to kneel.

She would not have rubbed lotion into her freshly shaven mound, while fantasizing about what he might do to her.

She would not have wriggled a red thong that covered next to nothing over her hips, and she would have definitely not added a red lace bra, and finally, a red dress that clung to every single curve of her body.

On autopilot, I did all those things, got into a cab, and headed over to Jake’s.

***

9pm precisely. He could not accuse me of being late. I rang the doorbell and waited. I was strangely not nervous. I had no reason to trust Jake Ballard, but I also knew no serious harm would befall me; Jake had tenure and world-recognition; he wasn’t about to throw it all away on impulse.

The scars would be emotional, not physical. Tonight, I would either confirm that I was indeed submissive; willing to do anything the right man commanded me to do. Or I would find out that
, as he’d accused me, I was playing at submissive posturing. I wasn’t sure what I was going to discover about myself tonight, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to discover anything about myself.

He opened the door. He had changed into a plain black t-shirt
and faded jeans. The black brought out the colour in his eyes; a vivid, startling blue, as blue as the sea and as wild.

He looked at me. “Here’s how tonight’s going to work, Emily,” he said, his voice level. “I won’t draw blood. Any mark I leave on you will fade in a couple of days. And I’ll give you a safeword you can invoke, if it all gets too much.”

He paused, and then continued, his voice implacable. “But if you use your safeword, we are done, and you leave. This isn’t about your pleasure. It’s about mine. Stay, and you play by my rules.

My nipples had tightened and pebbled as he spoke; erect under my dress. I nodded silently, unable to form words. This is what I’d come for, wasn’t it? An opportunity to walk on the dark side; a way to plumb depths I couldn’t explore with the men I typically dated.

“Walk through the house,” he said. “There’s a screen door in the kitchen, opening out to the back yard. Go outside. Strip. Put your clothes on the patio table. Kneel and wait for me.”

I looked at him in shock. He had neighbours; it was summer, and I could hear the sounds of laughter and talk; smell the aroma of the grill from where I stood in his doorway. It was dusk; the last vestiges of daylight were fading, but there was still light in the air; the sky would not darken fully for another thirty minutes.

He held my gaze, a mocking smile playing on his lips. It was the smile that decided it; he was so smug; he clearly expected me to safeword and run for my life. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Not yet.

I marched through the house; pulled open the screen door and stepped outside. There, I took a quick breath with relief. His backyard was fenced in; nobody would be able to see me. But
his neighbours were in their backyard; their laughter and the hiss of their grill were dangerously close; I would definitely be heard out here, if not seen.

It didn’t matter; I had my orders.

I took my clothes off; placed them neatly on the table. It was summer; the day had been humid and hot, but the night air was cool on my body. I knelt on the patio stones, sitting on my haunches, knees spread slightly apart, hands on my thighs, palm up, my eyes lowered. I could feel my arousal grow as I realized how submissive I was being; how much his orders were turning me on.

I finally heard him; I didn’t look up; I kept my eyes lowered. I could feel him look at me, walk around me, rake my naked body with his eyes, and I’d never felt more exposed. His silence was unnerving; the fact that he didn’t touch me rankled.

He flicked a switch, and music filled the night air. Not too loud, but it would provide some white noise to disguise soft moans. Was that reassuring? I wasn’t thinking. I just knelt; waiting for Jake to give me my next order.

“Look at me.” His voice was low and calm.

I obeyed.

“When I say jump, what do you say?”

“How high,” I whispered. 

“How high, Professor Ballard,” he corrected me.

I hated the way he made me feel, like nothing more than an object for his pleasure, yet I was soaking wet, and I was still on my knees. He could see the conflict in my eyes. He laughed at me mockingly. “Do you like the way I treat you, pet?”

“Not even a little bit, Professor Ballard.”