Substitute Boyfriend Read online

  Substitute Boyfriend

  A Novella

  Jade C. Jamison

  Substitute Boyfriend

  Elizabeth Slade, a college English instructor, has experienced success as a romance writer, but she has a dirty little secret: She can’t write sex scenes without a little help from Ridley, a gorgeous guy who plays her pretend boyfriend and makes a booty call whenever her imagination is flailing.

  She’d like for Ridley to commit to be her permanent and real boyfriend, and she thinks that’s where they’re headed until she finds him getting way too cozy with another woman in a bar.

  At that point, she enlists the help of her friend, fellow college instructor Roman Decker, who offers to temporarily take Ridley’s place while she sorts through her emotions. She grows confused when she realizes she’s also attracted to Roman. When Ridley comes back to her on bended knee, does she take the bad boy who broke her heart or try to convince her friend to make a real go of it?

  “I guess I’ll just do what I did before Ridley was in the picture—I’ll write strictly from my imagination.”

  Roman was containing another smile when he said, “So let me get this straight. You would set up a scenario and then act it out, and whatever happened, you would just kind of transcribe?”

  “Well, no, it wasn’t exactly like that. I would plot out the whole book. It was just the sex scenes…that we would act out.” My cheeks flamed again. “Sometimes it’s hard to imagine exactly how something feels or works until you try it.”

  Oh, he was enjoying this way too much. “Can you give me an example?”

  I sneered. “Not without another drink.” I grabbed the bottle and snatched my shot glass back from him, pouring the amber liquid to the rim. I drank it down fast. That one made me shudder, because I’d been sobering up quite nicely. Then I looked him square in the eyes. I wanted him to wipe the amused look off his face, because it made it harder for me to talk about it. “Okay, so, for example, I had been picturing this scene in my head where the hero and heroine are in the front seat of a car and he’s going to…” I looked down at the table. I really couldn’t look him in the eyes to tell him this. “…go down on her, but they’re still in the front seat, right? So I needed to work out if they could actually do it. You know, if you slide the seat back all the way and then lean it back too and the woman leans against the dash.”

  “And?”

  I couldn’t help myself. I smiled. “It can be done.” Roman started chuckling. “But I wouldn’t have known it if I hadn’t tried it. And I’d often wondered if a guy could fuck me while holding me—without a wall to support me. You know, stuff like that.” Damn, that alcohol wasn’t working. I poured another shot.

  But Roman touched my hand before I could drink more of the liquor. That forced me to look at him. “So your pretend boyfriend is gone.” He cleared his throat. “What if you had a substitute? You know, like a stand in?”

  I blinked several times. Okay, maybe I had had enough liquor, more than enough, in fact, because I was being pretty thick. “You mean a substitute Ridley?”

  “Yeah…a substitute boyfriend.”

  “I guess that could work…but I don’t know if I’d be able to find another guy willing to do it.”

  He laughed then, long and hard. “I could find plenty of guys willing to help you out.”

  “Really? Name one.”

  He moved his hand so that he could take mine in his. I swallowed as the implications washed over me, but he didn’t say anything until my eyes locked with his. “Me.”

  BOOKS BY JADE C. JAMISON

  Substitute Boyfriend

  Finger Bang

  Quickies: Sexy Short Stories and Other Stuff

  Old House

  Then Kiss Me

  MADversary

  Worst Mother

  Fabric of Night

  Stating His Case

  TANGLED WEB SERIES

  1 Tangled Web: A Steamy Heavy Metal Novella

  2 Everything But

  BULLET SERIES

  1 Bullet: An Epic Rock Star Novel

  2 Rock Bottom

  3 Feverish

  4 Fully Automatic

  NICKI SOSEBEE SERIES

  1 Got the Life

  2 Dead

  3 No Place to Hide

  4 Right Now

  5 One More Time

  6 Lost

  7 Innocent Bystander

  8 Blind

  9 Fake

  WISHES SERIES

  1 Be Careful What You Wish For

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2014 by Jade C. Jamison

  Image Copyright 2010 Anastasia Pelikh, iStock

  All rights reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author. Characters and names of real persons who appear in the book are used fictitiously.

  Visit Jade’s website:

  http://www.jadecjamison.com

  Follow Jade on Twitter:

  http://twitter.com/@JadeCJamison

  Send Jade an email:

  [email protected]

  Like Jade on Facebook:

  http://facebook.com/JadeCJamison

  Huge thank you to my extended Street Team, Jade’s Bullet Babes, who seem to be everywhere at once because I cannot be.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Also by Jade C. Jamison

  Chapter One

  “DUDE, JUST A second.” Ridley whips his cell phone out of his back pocket. Oh, yes, those faded blue jeans hug his ass, and it’s more apparent when he’s pulling something out of a pocket. The ring tone that plays is either Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” or something super nasty like Mӧtley Crüe’s “Ten Seconds to Love.” He brings the phone up to his ear after swiping the green Answer button on the screen and says, “Yeah, babe?” His full lips almost touch the phone but not quite, almost as though the phone screen is her lips and he is teasing her.

  “I need you. Now.”

  The corner of his mouth turns up in half a smile. God, he is cocky. “At your service.” He blinks, the long dark lashes that frame his blue eyes almost touching the inside lens of the sunglasses. He ends the call, sliding the phone back in his pocket, and saunters over to his Harley. He turns back to his friend. “Sorry, man, but duty calls. The girlfriend needs me…bad.” He smirks as he pulls a helmet over his dark blonde hair, pulling the strap snugly over his chin, avoiding the hair from his goatee that he’s growing out…just a bit.

  * * *

  I shook my head, trying to listen to what Ridley really said. I’d always imagined that kind of at your service response when I called, but, truthfully, I could sometimes hear the exasperation in his voice. I was pretty sure that the words in his head were bad timing, bitch, but who could resist a no-strings-attached booty call? Certainly not Ridley.

  Still….I needed him and I needed him right this second. “Look…can you come or not?”

  I could hear the smile in his voice, damn him. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, little Lizzie.” Oh, God, I hated when he called me that. But now was not the time to quibble. “I’ll be there in a sec. What are we doing this time?”

  Oh…I suppose I should let you know what was going on. I was an English instructor at the local community co
llege. It wasn’t a bad gig, especially since I couldn’t get a tenured position at a university to save my soul. I tried when I’d first earned my fancy MFA in Creative Writing. I should have listened to my advisor in my undergrad days. She’d told me the MFA was one of those dime-a-dozen degrees, and I’d be lucky to get a job teaching contemporary poetry at a soup kitchen in exchange for a slice of bread. At the time, though, I’d been sure the coursework would make me a much better writer than I’d been when I’d started and that the degree would pay for itself.

  Yeah. And five years after getting said degree, I was working my ass off paying through the nose for student loans that seemed to never dwindle in size. In all fairness, the community college was paying the bills and I had decent benefits, but I wanted more. Much more. That’s where the MFA really did come in handy. See, after spending a good ten years—spanning part of high school, college, grad school, and life thereafter—trying to break into the world of fiction publishing, I found it damned near impossible. Why? Because it’s not how good you are, it’s who you know (or who you blow). Sure, I’d had a modicum of success publishing poetry (but, sorry, a copy of the journal your poem appears in won’t pay the bills—hell, it won’t even buy a goddamned cup of coffee, but it’s nice to see your name in print) and also a few academic articles, but my heart wasn’t in either.

  No…I had stories swirling in my head, stories that had to be told. Big stories.

  Oh, did I mention? They were what mild-mannered audiences might consider naughty.

  That’s where Ridley came into play, so to speak. For some reason, I was compelled to write steamy scenes, but I often wondered how believable they were. I was also afraid they’d start to sound the same—you know, limited by my imagination (or lack thereof, because I didn’t get out much). I was lamenting my lack of sex life one night and had gone downtown and sat in a local bar…and there appeared Ridley. The man was like manna from heaven…and he was actually hitting on me. Me. Little ol’ me. Well, not so little. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to sound like one of those women who bitches about her weight when there’s really nothing to complain about, but I’ve always been small breasted. Well, small considering I carry an extra ten (okay, okay, ten-ish) pounds around as well. I’m not heavy, but I’m self-conscious, and I’ve often imagined that my additional padding is unattractive.

  It couldn’t be that I don’t click with men because I seem standoffish. Of course not. Don’t be absurd.

  That night when I met Ridley, though, I’d been feeling particularly sorry for myself and decided to give in to the pity party that had been brewing inside. I was going to have a couple drinks, damn it, and no one was going to stop me. I was on the second one when Ridley sat on the stool next to me. Oh, my God. I felt his eyes on me. That was weird because guys just didn’t check me out as a rule. Oh, sure, they’d steal a glance at my boobs, but that was it. They stopped there. I think it was because I valued my mind. I was intimidating to most guys.

  Not that night, though—not with a little liquor in me. I’m afraid I was probably a little more forward than usual too. So…Ridley sat next to me, and his arms were full of tattoos. You should probably know right now—tattoos make me weak in the knees. Holy crap. And the more, the merrier. I have no idea why, but human skin as a canvas really does it for me. Seriously.

  I didn’t know at the time that several of them were prison tats.

  Okay…so I’m book smart. Not always street smart. But I can be trained.

  So he hit on me, or I hit on him, or it was a combination—I’m not sure now. But one thing led to another and he came to my place.

  Let me preface this by saying I hadn’t been with a man in a long time…so we fucked all night long. My God, was he good. No, he hadn’t just gotten out of prison…although, I suppose, that would have explained his crazy libido. No, we just had some weird chemistry that night.

  Or maybe it was just the alcohol.

  Yeah, it was the alcohol, because the next morning was awkward as hell. But he saw my books, the ones that have me listed as Eliza Brennan…and maybe if that had been all he’d seen, I could have just pretended that she was my favorite author. But no…I had a six-foot banner on the desk next to them, one I’d used at a book signing the week before and just hadn’t stuck back in the closet yet. Oh, and all the bookmarks I’d signed so I could mail them off. Those were a dead giveaway too. So, while I was making us some breakfast (because, by then, the ice had not only been broken, it had shattered), he was skimming through some of my books.

  He didn’t seem to be the type to read, but he was amused by the first F-bomb he found…and then he read a sex scene. “Holy shit, woman. You write this stuff?”

  Biting my lip, I turned around from the eggs I was cooking and met his eyes. I felt a little abashed, but the look on his face was priceless. He was impressed.

  And he was also re-invigorated, shall we say. I wrote my books to warm up bored housewives, but apparently they had the same effect on men as well, and he just couldn’t wait. We fucked up against the counter, and then he ate warm eggs over the stove.

  The thing about Ridley? He made me feel desirable in a way I never had before, and that made my writing better than it had ever been. I think Ridley loved the novelty of it all. We probably never would have spent time together again, but I made a proposition to him before he finished the last piece of bacon. I explained to him my dilemma, that of worrying if my sex scenes were fresh and interesting—or even believable at times…and he promised to help out. Oh, it was exciting at first. It was amazing. Yeah, I’ll admit I called him once or twice with the excuse that I needed inspiration, when really all I’d needed was a good fucking. And Ridley wasn’t too bad at it, not at first anyway, not to mention that he had a rock hard body. He was nice to look at and awesome to curl up next to.

  The shine wore off the apple after a few months. I’m pretty sure it’s fair to say that was for both of us. As I said earlier, sometimes it seemed like Ridley felt put out by my calls, but he always came through. And I’ll also admit that, while I really liked the way Ridley made me feel, he was about as intellectually stimulating as the doorknob to my bedroom. He wasn’t exactly a nice guy, either. But we had an arrangement.

  So I answered his question, the one about what we’d be doing this time. He didn’t need a detailed plot nor, like an actor, did he need a sense of motivation. All I needed to tell him was when, where, and how. “Just get your ass over here and start fucking me the second you come in the door. I need it hard and I need it fast.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I heard him moving as though he were hustling over to my apartment on foot. “Condom?”

  I hated that stupid question. I had never not had him wear a condom—he’d been in prison, after all, and I had no clue where his dick had been—but sometimes he would pretend he wasn’t wearing one, just to add to the fantasy. I kept him well-stocked in prophylactics and anything else my writing fantasies required, and I also honored his request that we didn’t do any M/M/F threesomes—or any M/F/M ones, for that matter. He did tell me, though, a sly grin on his face, that he’d be happy to take care of an additional woman any time I liked.

  Uh, yeah…no. Nice try, pal.

  “Not at first. Just have one on you.” I didn’t want to get him all excited, but today’s fantasy might involve a little oral. I hadn’t quite worked that out in my head yet, but I had a little time before he arrived to make my final decision. So, after we hung up, I sat at my desk and continued writing the scene while waiting for my pretend boyfriend to arrive.

  Chapter Two

  ONE THING I’LL say about Ridley—he tried. He really tried. Well, he did at first, anyway. I got the feeling that he’d been with women in the past who hadn’t been very demanding. I guess, because he really was a treat to look at, that they didn’t care if he got them off, as long as he was pounding inside them. Not me. Once I’m going, anything will keep me there, but I need to get there first, and nine times out of ten, t
hat means one thing.

  Direct clitoral stimulation.

  Yeah. When Ridley and I first started fucking around, I did a lot of his work for him. But then I thought, No way. No fair. Granted, it was easier for me to make him come, especially if he was pumping his cock inside my pussy—really, what did I have to do other than bite his shoulder, talk dirty, and squeeze? Well, yeah…I gave him plenty more than that, but it’s not like his dick was hard (pardon the pun) to find. In all fairness, guys weren’t always taught about the clit and what playing with it can do for a woman. So I educated the man, made him a better lover, and maybe that was the ultimate trade off for him. He would be worth a lot more to another woman someday.

  In the meantime, though, he was mine. All mine.

  I bit my lip as I stared at the computer screen. That goddamned thin black bar on the blank white page was blinking at me. Patiently. And that was pissing me off.

  I wanted Ridley now. Needed him.

  Now!

  I had written the build up to the sex scene. The couple was at last going to join for the first time. They’d entered the heroine’s apartment and they’d foregone talking and drinks for some intimacy…and that was where I was stuck. I couldn’t decide if she wanted to give him a blowjob first or if they would just tear each other’s clothes off in desperation. I needed Ridley to help me play it out.

  The problem? Well…the problem was that, perhaps, the newness of Ridley and me had worn off. I was sitting at my computer, and instead of thinking about my heroine’s horniness—or even mine, for God’s sake—I was wondering how to recapture that feeling of newness…and failing miserably. I worried if I would be able to convey that feeling in writing if I couldn’t experience it in real life.