Chapter 2

She ran her fingers over her lover’s backside, drawing rivers of sweat on the landscape of delectable muscles, and plying his chest, shoulders, and neck with fevered kisses. Laughter eventually spilled from her mouth as prurient memories of the morning’s fuck session filled her head. She hadn’t lied earlier—the threat of being discovered had indeed added to the fun. Babette had always enjoyed being naughty, daring, brazen—a combination of traits that drove her parents to distraction as well as the bottle. Those traits only intensified once she had met Vinnie and discovered the joys of sex.

But a part of her wondered what her parents would think should this secret affair ever come to their attention. After all, it was one thing to have wild sexual escapades with a fellow student; it was quite another to have them with Gordon High’s assistant track coach and hottest English teacher—hottest “any” teacher, for that matter—Mr. Vincent Scapuletti.

Then again, Babette reminded herself, crushing Mr. Scapuletti’s muscular, furry body against hers and imprisoning his fat cock in her tingling, grasping hole, that was indeed half the fun… 1

“Don’t stop reading now!” vehemently protested a middle-aged woman from her seat in the classroom. Her whitish-blonde hair looked like a tangle of brittle straw, thanks to what had probably been a lifetime of over-bleaching—and probably with Clorox, at that.

“Yes, what happens next?” chimed in another woman, heavily rouged and breathlessly clutching her bosom as if the excerpt from Confessions of a High School Seductressheld some life-altering significance. The would-be author was obviously new to the world of erotica and had known very little on the subject of writing it, let alone her teacher’s first successful novel. “Do they get caught in the locker room? Do they marry after she graduates? What happens to them?”

“Read the damned book and find out, Sylvia,” answered the woman’s friend, elbowing her and winking. “And don’t let Henry deter you from reading the fun stuff at home. Just tell him you’re doing personalresearch.”

Laughter and other questions soon cluttered the air, growing in greater volume than many of the “hair-dos and don’ts” meeting Paige Gillette’s eyes. She set down the hardcover book from which she had been reading and squinted at the packed classroom.

Even after writing a string of fun and adventurous yet hardly literary novels, all of which had remarkably ridden the wacky roller-coaster up and down the N.Y. TimesBestseller List, Paige still felt uncomfortable with her success. She probably always would, she decided, yearning for the day when she could return to writing the serious historical epics she loved most of all. The same painstakingly researched and cherished prose that, unfortunately, still languished on her office shelf as “unmarketable gems,” according to her agent, and wouldn’t have even come close to paying the bills.

Paige crinkled her lips in a wry smile that usually hid her frustration with the publishing industry. She gestured to the classroom’s wall clock, where the large red needle jerked upward toward the final seconds of the latest “Erotica Writing for Women” class, an adult continuing education course held in one of Richmond, Virginia’s, more progressive community colleges several times each year. “As you can see, ladies, we’re out of time for the evening, otherwise I would have loved to read more.”

She had lied just then. Paige truly detested reading her work—or her “smut,” as she secretly deemed it—in public. But since this was the last night of the eight-week course, and she’d finished the final lesson early, her audience had respectfully and enthusiastically demanded to hear some of what had made her a literary star.

Or rather, what had meteorically launched Antionette Pope—Paige’s nom de plume—into fame, making “her” a household name throughout America and most of the free world within a two-year period.

Happily, no one in this class or even in her “adopted Virginia” knew “Antionette’s” true name—hardly anyone aside from her publisher and agent did either—and for that, Paige thanked the heavens.

So with her fans’ wishes in mind, she had reluctantly surrendered to the verbal arm-twisting, swallowing her chagrin and hoping to please them, knowing they dangled on every four-letter word that poured from her mouth.

Not that a part of Paige wasn’t proud of her achievements in the erotica world, or thrilled that her agent had sold her books to Blistering Press, an imprint of the monolithic New York publishing house, Chesterfield, or ecstatic with the foreign language rights signed, sealed, and recently delivered. And the e-book sales?—holy crap. Although a few critics had labeled “Antionette Pope” nothing short of “a porn peddler” and “an amoral hack,” the majority had touted her “the X-Rated Danielle Steel” and “the most exciting new talent in twenty years.” Madison Avenue had deemed her “a money-maker” and “a female gold mine,” erotica fans had called her “utterly brilliant” and “a breath of fresh air in a stale genre,” and that, Paige supposed, was all that truly mattered. Not only had Confessions of a High School Seductressjust gone into its tenth printing—with the two sequels not far behind—but was currently being developed for an adult soap opera to eventually air on HBO. Certainly, Paige had every right to be proud, and she counted her blessings at every opportunity.