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PROLOGUE
SHE SITS IN the third row of students, as usual. Her enormous eyes stare at me with the kind of intensity that makes my blood pound and my cock hard. She stares at me with eyes that are mentally stripping my body of clothes, imagining what’s underneath.
I should know.
It’s how I want to look at her, but I can’t because she is forbidden to me.
Olivia.
Olivia Amorelli.
Even her name is a turn-on.
She’s wearing the pale green dress again, the one she wore last week. It comes to her knees and has tiny white swallows detailed in the fabric. There are buttons down the front, and I have spent way too long fantasising about pulling them apart using only my teeth, stripping her, slowly. Unwrapping her like a Christmas gift, a present just for me.
What the hell is happening to me?
I don’t think I’ve ever fantasised about a woman like this, and never one like Olivia. She is all that is sweet and innocent. She is my opposite in every way. I have made a career defending the indefensible. I am renowned—notorious?—for my defence of the unscrupulous. Men like Donovan. Thoughts of that particular case needle my sides and I push them away, not wanting to think of that man now. Not wanting to think about the fact he is free because of me. But he is. Free, because of me. I can’t ignore it.
Where I am darkness, Olivia Amorelli is not. In the few weeks I’ve been her professor, I’ve discovered she thinks differently to me. She is purity and passion, sweet and good. Her smile practically glows with sunbeams.
What would it be like to have someone like her in my bed? In my life?
Would that be enough to lay this demon to rest? If someone like Olivia could want me, could forgive me my sins, would I make my peace with what I’ve done?
All sins are deserving of forgiveness, Connor. Father O’Sullivan said that to me a lot after my parents’ murder. He believed my hatred for the terrorists responsible for their deaths would consume me one day, and perhaps he was right. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The quote from James spins around my head often; I hear it in Father O’Sullivan’s hoarse, throaty whisper, cracked by that gentle smile of his.
I came to pray for my parents’ murderers, to understand that in forgiveness lay my own refuge from grief and despair. It worked, for a time. I don’t think anyone is praying for me right now. I don’t think I deserve it, either.
I run my eyes over the room, pretending to scan the other students when it’s really just a ruse to return my focus to her. She’s toying with her blonde hair, flicking the ends of her ponytail between her fingers. Her nails are red today, just like her lips, and I want them on my body more than I can say. Her nails, her lips. All of her.
It’s been four weeks. Four weeks of watching her and wanting her, knowing that I can’t act on it. The school’s guidelines prohibit it.
That wouldn’t usually stop me from taking what I want but, the thing is, she’d get suspended. Possibly expelled.
Just because I want to run my tongue down her body and taste every inch of her. Just because I want to see if her innocence can be drawn to my guilt; to see if she can absolve me with her body’s delights.
It would be selfish to indulge this. Selfish to make her wait after class just so I can be alone with her. Selfish to lift her dress up and take her against the whiteboard, making her cry out into this very classroom.
Fuck. I’m hard as granite. I stand, keeping my body behind the desk. ‘Right.’ I look right at her and she sits a little straighter, pressing her knees together beneath the table. My cock jerks. ‘Let’s get started, shall we?’
CHAPTER ONE
CONNOR HUGHES MIGHT be one of the most successful defence barristers in the country, famous the world over for his inspired interpretation of the law to ensure justice is done, even when that means defending some of the most undeserving members of society.
