Chapter One
Jeannie
If there was one thing I couldn’t stand it was tardiness. I get it—early classes were the worst and anyone in my eight a.m. class either didn’t know better or waited too long to register for afternoon classes.
But if those two stumbled into my class late one more time...
“Sorry Professor Webb, sorry Jeannie,” the Mercer twins said in unison, nodding to the professor and me.
Okay, so it wasn’t my class per se. Technically it was Jeffery Webb’s class and I was his T.A. But still. Those arrogant little shits were late every single day.
I crossed my legs under the desk and pretended not to hear them. Easy to do with a pile of poorly written essays to grade.
I also pretended not to notice when one of them approached my desk. “Really, Jeannie we are sorry,” he said.
Don’t look up. Don’t look up!
Fuck. I looked up. Right into those sparkling, dark green eyes and the cocky, rich-boy smile that showed off his unnaturally white teeth. “Go sit down, Nick,” I said.
He smirked at me, half his mouth twisting upward in an arrogant, maddening lilt. “I’m not Nick. I’m Noah, Jeannie.”
I looked him dead in his painfully gorgeous eyes. “You still need to sit down.” I stared at him until he finally walked away, taking a seat in the middle of the lecture hall with his brother.
God, I couldn’t stand those two. They walked around campus like they owned it and were perpetually late. They irked me the way few people could.
And yet...
I caught myself wondering if their bodies were as beautiful as their faces. Or what it might be like if we...
I never let the thoughts go on for long. Nick and Noah Mercer were the laziest, most arrogant people I’d ever met but somehow that didn’t keep me from wanting them.
Both of them.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I shifted the stack of essays around revealing the e-reader I’d tucked between them and sighed. That was the problem, my voracious reading habit.
I read everything from space opera to high fantasy and anything in between. But recently, I’d started dipping my toe into the world of romance novels. The dirty kind. The kind with Fabio on the cover. Well, he would have been if they were published thirty years ago. Extra sappy, extra sexy, no real plot to speak of, romance novels.
I loved them. They were my guiltiest pleasure. I could knock out two or three short ones in a day. They didn’t require a lot of thought. I didn’t have to wonder about the subtext or what the author was trying to get at with a particular theme. They were pure and simple fun. And with a doctoral presentation due in a few months and several hundred undergraduate students wanting their papers graded or a study session or to know what was on on the next exam, I could use the mental break.
Besides, they were fun and I liked them.
But they may have warped my sense of what a realistic relationship should be. I mean, really. Who daydreams about banging two guys at once? I stuffed the e-reader back in my bag and got back to grading papers.
Or I tried to at least. My thoughts kept wandering back to the Mercer twins and their beautiful faces and I’d have to remind myself of everything I hated about them. Because it wasn’t just that they were always late. It was that they seemed so comfortable doing so.
They walked around with privilege that only old money bestowed. Why they were at NYU and not a fancier, more expensive school was beyond me. Maybe this was the only school their parents had any sway with. Maybe they were only here because their parents or grandparents or hell, a great-grand-aunt donated a wing or a library or something. Maybe that’s why they were here torturing me.
I grew up around money. A lot of it and it never quite felt right to me. That my family should have so much while others had so little seemed so wrong—like we’d taken too much of the pie and there wasn’t enough for anyone else. So when people like the Mercers flaunted their privilege so obviously, when they showed up late knowing nothing would happen because parents would call board members who’d call department heads who’d talk to Professor Webb who’d tell me to let it go, it really irked me.
And yet I still daydreamed about them worshiping me. About them on their knees, begging to be the first brother to touch me. And when I finally picked which one I’d have first, I fantasized about being devoured and consumed, being completely ravaged until I was spent and satisfied.
I hated them and wanted them in equal measure.
It was fucking torture.