Playing With Trouble
Falling For Danger
About the Book
Welcome to Washington, D.C., city of scandal, where no secret stays hidden for long …
Blair Reynolds was going to be the ultimate politician’s wife – until she caught her fiancé cheating on their wedding day. Vowing to make a fresh start Blair enrols in Law School, ready to buckle down. Unless a hot professor gets in the way …
Graydon Canter had it all. A flying career, a fortune, and a spot on all the ‘Thirty under Thirty’ lists – until his rocky personal life threatened everything. Teaching law is a chance to get his life back on track. As long as nothing – and no one – trips him up.
When Blair and Gray are thrown together in the classroom, their electric attraction is impossible to ignore. Gray needs to stay away from scandal, and Blair’s never been a rule breaker. They’re playing with trouble – but maybe such passion is worth the risk?
Don’t miss Book One in the Capital Confessions series, Flirting With Scandal, and look out for the next tantalising instalment, Falling For Danger.
To my “Section One” peeps:
Thanks for the memories. I couldn’t have survived three years of law school without you.
Chapter One
Jilted at the altar for the best man, and reeling from the revelation that her father has a secret daughter, rumor has it Blair Reynolds has enrolled at Hannover School of Law here in D.C. Is America’s Princess trading in her tiara for a briefcase?
—Capital Confessions blog
Blair
I never hated law school more than I did at ten thirty in the morning, Monday through Wednesday. There were plenty of reasons to hate law school—hundreds of pages of nightly reading, endless debates over a mythical property annoyingly referred to as “Blackacre,” the constant urge to vomit each time a professor called on me. The biggest one stood in front of me—tailored Canali suit, dark hair, dark eyes, darker soul.
“Ms. Reynolds.”
Oh god, he said my name.
I spent an hour, three times a week, mentally bartering with God to keep that man, that sadist, from saying my name. Each week God ignored me.
A collective sigh seemed to ripple through the room as my classmates realized they were spared the guillotine. Seventy-four pairs of eyes bored into me, waiting to see how badly I’d fail.
I rose from my seat awkwardly, my legs wet noodles as I pulled down the hem of my Burberry skirt, struggling to keep the flush on my cheeks from spreading all over my face. Forcing us to stand when we answered a question was an old-school technique, one all of my other professors had abandoned, even for first-year students—1Ls—like me.
“Brief the case.”
Shit.
I’d read. I always read. But law school was the one place where that didn’t matter. No matter how prepared you were, they always pushed you for more than you knew, more than you had, until you were left feeling like your clothes had been stripped from your body, exposing your every naked imperfection to seventy-four peers.
Crying after class wasn’t uncommon; some students even broke down in class. We all sat on the precipice of an utter nervous breakdown, no more so than in our first-year torts class.
Your first year of law school was a hazing of sorts, an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’d heard all of the rumors and figured they were exaggerated; after all, I was the daughter of one of the fiercest U.S. Senators. I’d grown up around scary. But there was scary, and there was scary, and unfortunately for me, law school was in the latter category.
If statistics were to be believed, about 20 percent of my classmates would drop out by the end of the first year. They’d be the lucky ones. The rest of us would push through, surviving on alcohol, junk food, and Valium. Just kidding about the Valium. The drug of choice here was Adderall, used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder and to get 1Ls through three hundred pages of nightly reading. And not interesting reading with a large font, but less-interesting-than-watching-paint-dry, need-a-microscope-to-see-the-text reading. I’d never tried any kind of recreational drug in my life, but if anything pushed me to it, it would be law school.
The sadist stared back at me, an expectant smirk on his face. Fuck.
My language had considerably deteriorated since the first day of classes last month. My mother would have a coronary if she knew what went through my head now. This was what happened when perfect cracked and splintered. This was what happened when your life fell apart.
I started running through the facts, struggling to remember this one case out of the ten I’d read for his class alone. My hands itched to turn the page in my textbook so I could use it for reference, but our gazes caught across the large classroom, and the look in his eyes kept my fingers still.
Weakness was his crack, and there was still enough of the old Blair Reynolds inside me to refuse to cede any more self-respect beyond that which he took against my will.
I stood for fifteen minutes, an eternity, going through the facts of the case, the issue, the law, the conclusion. Stood while he fired questions at me in that voice of his—hard, cold, unflinching. Questions that led me farther down the rabbit hole into an abyss of confusion. Each time I floundered, his smile deepened, as if he got off on my nerves.
He probably did.
When it was over I sank down into my seat like it was a life raft and I’d been adrift at sea for months. My legs never wanted to stand again.
“Nice job,” my friend Adam whispered from the seat next to me.
“Thanks,” I whispered back, twenty-three years of manners warring with terror over being caught talking in class.
“Ms. Reynolds?”
My heart stopped.
Fuck me, why? Not again.
“Yes?”
His eyebrow arched expectantly. Like a puppet, my body automatically rose to a standing position. He had us well trained, me more than anyone. I was little more than a poodle under his command. There were seventy-five people in our torts class, and we’d all done the math, on average we should be called on three times per semester.
He called on me every fucking week without fail.
“Why don’t you brief the next case as well?”
His gaze drifted to Adam sitting next to me, lingering there for a moment as if to say, You got yourself into this mess when you dared to speak during class. Technically, he should have called on Adam since he spoke first. I was only being polite by answering. That would have been fair. But the irony was, law school had little concern with what was fair or just. Ego ruled here, and none was bigger than Professor Graydon Canter’s.
So many words ran through my head. So far I’d learned nothing about torts. My class time was typically divided into four activities which consumed me for an hour: begging and pleading with God for Professor Canter not to call on me, creating inventive and filthy names I hurled at him in my head, and imagining elaborate fantasies where I told him exactly what he could do with his questions. But the absolute worst, the moments I hated in every corner of my preppy little heart, were the moments when I fantasized about that voice saying other things to me . . . those eyes undressing me, those hands on my body.