Lust - 1 by Robin Wasserman Page B

looking for it; but Miranda paid attention. She was an A plus, Phi Beta Kappa student of Kane Studies—and she was convinced that beneath the smirking curl of his lip and the chiseled abs and the perfect tan, there was something else.
    Something real.
    You just had to be wil ing to look.
    Long and hard.
    Looking for love was hard work.
    There was Ilana: al body, no brains.
    Shayna: al brains, no body (but a great sound system—and TiVo).
    Julia: al boobs, no ass.
    And, of course, Katie: al mouth. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. But even that got old.
    Sometimes Kane felt like Goldilocks (a tal , goodlooking, straight male version of Goldilocks, of course)—nothing he tried out ever quite measured up.
    Not that he didn’t love the variety—forget too hot, too cold, too tal , too short. It was al a beautiful rainbow of possibility as far as he was concerned, and he had no complaints.
    Okay, he had one: He was bored. Even more bored than usual.
    Whatever happened to the thril of the chase, the lust for victory? That was the problem, actual y. Most of these bimbos didn’t give chase—just head.
    Of course, there was one girl who might present quite the interesting chal enge. One girl he’d been waiting a long time to get a taste of.
    That blond hair, those blue eyes, al that innocence crying out for a little corruption.
    There were, of course, a few stumbling blocks in his path.
    His supposed best friend being a not inconsequential one.

    Her supposed love for said friend being another.
    So it wouldn’t be easy. Kane smiled. He was done with easy. Easy was boring.
    Difficult? Chal enging? Messy and emotional and violent and dirty?
    That was more his speed.
    That was fun .
    It’s al fun and games until someone gets hurt—and then, Kaia thought with a grin, that’s when the real fun starts. Now that things with Adam had been set in motion, it was real y only a matter of time—which meant it was time to start thinking about what would come next. Adam was, after al , just a diversion. He couldn’t be expected to hold her attention for long.
    No, she had her sights set on a much bigger fish.
    An older, more sophisticated, British fish.
    She glanced up at the front of the classroom where Jack Powel had stretched himself out in his chair. He looked bored out of his mind.
    She knew the feeling.
    And she decided that it was time to answer both their prayers.
    She knew every girl in the room was thinking the same thing, every girl wanted the same thing—she could see it in their hungry eyes, hear it in the way they tittered as he brushed past them on his way to the front of the room. But it didn’t matter what they wanted. Because of al of them, Kaia was the only one who had the nerve to act. These pathetic smal -
    town girls could fantasize about him, long for him, want him al they liked—but that’s al it would ever be. A sil y fantasy. As far as Kaia was concerned, fantasizing was a waste of her time
    —when you saw something you wanted, you took it.
    She looked down at the quiz in front of her. Stil blank. Subjonctif? She snorted. Give me a break, she thought. As if she hadn’t covered this stuff in tenth grade. This place was so backward.
    She grabbed her pen, thought for a moment, and then began to write: large, deliberate letters, the words spanning across the width of the page.
    VOULEZ-VOUS COUCHERAVECMOI?
    ( En anglais: “Would you like to sleep with me?”)
    A little hackneyed, perhaps, a little cliché—but he’d get the message.
    Kaia, after al , didn’t believe in being subtle.
    She believed in getting the job done.

chapter
7

    Harper picked up the phone on the second ring. Thanks to cal er ID, she knew it was him and—irrational y—felt the need to smooth down her hair and do a quick mirror check before saying hel o. As if he would be able to somehow hear her beauty through the phone. Ridiculous, she knew. But stil —every little bit helped.
    “Adam, what’s up?” she greeted him, lying