Her Guilty Secret - Clare Connelly

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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.

      He might be everyone else’s idea of some kind of hero.

      But not mine.

      People like him are everything that’s wrong with the law. Smooth tongue, smart, beguiling, charming. No wonder his win-to-loss ratio is one of the best in the business. How many criminals are wandering the streets because of his egomaniacal need to win? His obsession with being the best at what he does, even when what he does is exonerate those who should never again see the light of day?

      Yeah. He’s everything that’s wrong with the law.

      But that doesn’t change how much I want him. It doesn’t change the fact that when our eyes meet I feel like I’ve been injected with live voltage. It doesn’t change the fact that he looks at me a little longer than he should, that there’s an invisible current electrifying the air between us all the time.

      I stare at him as he writes something on the whiteboard. I don’t see the words, though. I see his fingers. Long, lean, darkly tanned like the rest of his body would be. At least, it is in my imaginings. Tanned to match his swarthy face, his stubbled, square jaw and bright green eyes that have captivated me, and stolen my breath, from the first moment I saw him, standing like this at the front of the classroom, speaking to all one hundred of us, but reaching into my body and stirring everything up, swishing me around in a way that was instantly new and addictive.

      Frankly, I’m glad I don’t like him. I’m glad I don’t like the work he does. I’m probably the only person in here who doesn’t admire his meteoric trajectory to the top of the field. Sure, he started his own firm at twenty-six and grew it into one of the UK’s largest within five years. Sure, he’s worked on some of the most high-profile cases. But what good is being smart if you don’t use those powers for good?

      My derision of his professional accomplishments is so important to remember, because it’s the only thing standing between me and a crazed impulse to act on the desire that has taken over my body. Desire that makes my thighs tremble and my breasts ache. Desire that has turned Connor Hughes into the star of all my dirtiest dreams—dreams that I have no control over, because they fill my mind when I’m asleep and I can’t control that, can I?

      ‘Who wants to tell me why the chain of evidence is so important?’ He runs his eyes over the class and I wonder if he’s forgotten we’re in our final year, not first.

      It’s his ‘thing’, though. On the first day in class, he spelled it out for us. I’m going to act like you know nothing, because in the real world you don’t. I’m going to teach you how to follow the law and win cases.

      And he is very good at winning cases—cases that should have been open and shut.

      ‘Miss Amorelli?’

      Holy hell.

      It’s the first time he’s called on me directly. His tongue rolls over my name as though he’s kissing it down my body. My shiver is involuntary.

      Our eyes lock and the atmosphere charges with the force of a hurricane. Lightning dances between us, thunder rolls. His expression is a challenge and, despite the simplicity of the question, my mouth is dryer than desert sand. I feel like I’ve chewed on a box of chalk. I can’t find my tongue.

      ‘The chain of evidence,’ he prompts, lifting one brow with a hint of sarcastic mockery that makes me want to reach for his shirt and bunch it in my fist.

      ‘Obviously,’ I say, quietly, so that he leans forward a little, to catch my softly spoken word, ‘to ensure the authenticity of the evidence.’

      ‘Wrong.’

      My eyes flare wide and I feel heat in my cheeks. I don’t like being told I’m wrong. I’m not wrong. ‘Why?’

      His eyes lock onto mine. It’s just the two of us here now. Us and our major electrical storm, humming and buzzing through the room. ‘It doesn’t matter if the

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