Penalty Clause by Lori Ryan Page B

hungrily this time. He took his time bringing her to orgasm, first with his hands, then his mouth, before finally entering her. He brought her to a final lazy, long orgasm that he joined her in before they collapsed in a tangled mess in the middle of Jill’s large bed.

Chapter Eighteen
    As Andrew and Jill lay wrapped in one another’s arms with nothing between them but the occasional tangle of sheets from the bed, Andrew found himself wanting to explain about Blair. He had never told another woman about Blair and never thought he could bring himself to tell the story, to repeat what Blair and his parents had done. As with everything with Jill, things he thought he could never do simply happened.
    “Her name was Blair.” Andrew felt Jill’s breath catch and he knew that Jill understood immediately who he was talking about. Andrew felt Jill’s hand run up and down his back in slow, steady strokes but she made no move to pressure him for the story or try to lure details out of him.
    “We met when I was at Yale Business School. She worked on campus at one of the coffee stands. She was so beautiful and she had me convinced that I was in love, that we were in love before I knew what hit me. Somehow, I never saw her for what she really was. She was conniving and manipulative, but I didn’t see any of that until it was too late. Later I learned Blair had me targeted from the beginning, knew my family had money.” Andrew let out a rough burst of laughter but there was no humor in it.  
    “I thought we were attracted to each other from day one. I liked the joking and flirting every morning when I picked u p my coffee, but it was all setup. She told me she was on the pill, but I found out later that was a lie. In the beginning we used condoms anyway but as soon as I told her I loved her, she told me we shouldn’t use them anymore because we were in love and would only be with each other. I can’t believe what an idiot I was. I was in business school for God’s sake. It’s not like I was in high school or even college.
    I was an adult. I should have been able to read her better. To see the lies for what they truly were.” Andrew was surprised at how dead and flat his voice sounded as he talked about Blair.
    “As soon as Blair got pregnant, she went to my parents. She never even told me she was pregnant. My parents told me two days later that they had ‘fixed my problem’ for me. They paid her $500,000 to abort the baby and leave town. They knew I would want to marry her if she was going to have my child and they never considered Blair to be good enough to be a Weston. Blair never wanted a child. She wanted leverage.”
    Andrew didn’t tell Jill about the nightmares. He didn’t have them very often anymore but for a long time after Blair’s abortion, Andrew woke in a cold sweat. He remembered flashes of the dream, his baby crying as he ran from room to room looking for it but he could never find it. He didn’t even know if the baby was a boy or a girl.
    “I was a wreck for a week. Jack and Chad came and managed to get me out of my drunken stupor and brought me here to Nora’s. Neither Nora nor I have had any contact with my parents since then.”
    Andrew finally chanced a glance at Jill’s face and saw tears.
    “Don’t cry sweetheart, don’t.” Andrew wiped the tears from Jill’s cheeks as he held her in his arms.
    Andrew had always known what happened with Blair was only partially his fault, but on some level, he supposed he always felt like a fool for letting Blair string him along that way. For not seeing how manipulative and cold she really was. Now, as Andrew told Jill, he didn’t feel that way at all. For the first time since news of the abortion, he felt free of it. Free of the guilt and even the anger. He simply didn’t care about Blair anymore.
    He would always feel the pain of losing his child and not knowing what could’ve been, what it would have felt like to hold his baby. To raise his son or