Though her new austere living conditions would make most of her classmates crazy, Penelope thrived. She excelled with the tutor, especially enjoying working at her own pace: advanced. She liked to learn—would do it as a hobby, in fact—so not being distracted by the loneliness that had been her companion since she’d been handed over to her father’s care gave her the freedom to throw herself into her studies.
Not that she was being held back from a rocking social life anyway. She was the same homebody she’d always been, but somehow, being at Sullivan Manor and feeling like she had a place to belong, rather than feeling stashed somewhere, made all the difference. She and Bishop lived like cats, generally ignoring each other when they weren’t curled up on opposite couches in the library, exchanging occasional silent stares as they read together in the evenings.
Sometimes getting to know a person changed your assessment of their attractiveness for the worse. But as handsome as Bishop was, time only made him better. He hadn’t done much more than scowl at her or curtly ask her to pass something at the dinner table, but when they were reading together, he often quietly asked about her book and what she thought of it.
One evening he gave her a rare smile and told her a conversation with her was better than any he had with students or faculty. “You’re an old soul, Penelope,” he’d said, and she’d repeated it back in her head a thousand times as she’d floated to bed that night, her feet not touching the floor.
Sometimes he’d talk about what he was reading, using such reverent language that she could tell he loved literature. She wished he’d talk about her with that same kind of keen interest, but she was patient, and her birthday was coming in only a couple of weeks.
Since she’d met her hot, off-limits guardian, her reading tastes had begun to skew toward steamy romance. The panty-melting, beg-me-for-it kind. Sure, she’d wanted to come home all along, but the fact that her eighteenth birthday was fast approaching had caused her to invoke the nuclear option at school and get kicked out entirely.
She was a virgin mainly because she was a loner, not because she didn’t think about sex every five minutes. She thought about sex with Bishop so much—rough, desperate, clothes-ripping sex—that she couldn’t be in the same room with him without getting wet, her sex swelling and sensitive to her constant squirming. Romance had taught her all about that.
Thank god for his vision issues. She squirmed so much around Bishop that if he could see better, he’d think she must have very ill-fitting underwear.
She loved the added taboo that he was her adult guardian. It was wrong and naughty, and that turned her on as much as anything. Her fantasies of Bishop taking her in so many different ways were so frequent and vivid, she couldn’t imagine how her hymen was still intact.
He always seemed uncomfortable around her, but that was okay. She wasn’t looking for him to fall in love with her. She wanted adventure, excitement. Sex. And she wanted to start with him. Surely, she could convince him to play.
She had a plan.
She’d taken to wearing things to catch his attention. Knowing his vision impairment, she made a point to brush as closely to him as possible, as often as possible. She moved near him when they were talking, shifting to sit on his couch instead of the one opposite his in the library.
Anything she owned that was filmy, tight, small or generally tempting, she put on and pranced shamelessly through the halls of her father’s home.
She’d seen Ann more than once take in her appearance and frown, shaking her head, a reproachful look on her face. Penelope didn’t care. She didn’t need anyone’s approval.
Bishop was harder to read, though. When he made no indication that he’d noticed any of this, Pen went further, dropping things around him and bending over to pick them up right in front of him. If he didn’t have a vision issue, he’d probably have kicked her out of the house by now, but as it was, she couldn’t even tell if he had noticed her efforts.
It was killing her. She’d moved beyond wanting to hate him and now acknowledged her massive crush on him. Pen was a bulldog—always had been. When she set her sights on something, her competitive nature kicked in and she had a hard time letting go. This close proximity to the hot man she was living with had her especially obsessed.
Seducing the man her father had left her in the custody of—her new father figure—felt so deliciously wrong. And if there was anything Pen had discovered she liked in this world, it was anything deliciously wrong.
Her eighteenth birthday was approaching fast, and Pen didn’t intend on being denied.