James: A College Girl Romance Read online

  Electronic edition

  Copyright © 2016 by C. J. Valles (writing as Sheila Grace). All rights reserved.

  http://www.cjvalles.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permissions of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical review and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, e-mail [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Reader discretion is advised.

  This book may contain triggers for some readers. It is NOT appropriate for individuals under the age of 18 or those who are easily offended. It contains strong profanity throughout, graphic sexual descriptions, violence (including attempted sexual assault), and other themes not intended for sensitive readers.

  Books by Sheila Grace

  College Girl (A College Girl Romance)

  James (A College Girl Romance)

  Author’s Note: These full-length, HEA books may be read as standalones; however, the main characters from College Girl do make a cameo in James. If you want the full story, starting from the beginning you can buy College Girl here (it also is available through Kindle Unlimited).

  Dedicated to my husband, without whom I might never have set fingers to keyboard.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Cass

  Chapter 2: James

  Chapter 3: Cass

  Chapter 4: James

  Chapter 5: Cass

  Chapter 6: James

  Chapter 7: Cass

  Chapter 8: James

  Chapter 9: Cass

  Chapter 10: James

  Chapter 11: Cass

  Chapter 12: James

  Chapter 13: Cass

  Chapter 14: James

  Chapter 15: Cass

  Chapter 16: James

  Chapter 17: Cass

  Chapter 18: James

  Chapter 19: Cass

  Chapter 20: James

  Chapter 21: Cass

  Chapter 22: James

  Chapter 23: Cass

  Chapter 24: James

  Chapter 25: Cass

  Chapter 26: James

  Three Years After the Events of

  College Girl

  Chapter 1: Cass

  Fuck! Well, there went my second drink of the night. Yet another order coming out of my paycheck. I bent over with a bar mop to soak up the cheap liquor. What I was more worried about was that Bob was finally going to fire me—and then there wouldn’t be a chance in hell of me going back in the fall to finish my degree.

  When I looked up, my eyes automatically traveled to the table in back. He was staring again, and it was creeping me out. I couldn’t even see his face, but I knew he was watching me—and had been all night. Sure, my “job” was to get ogled by sleazy fuckwads, but that didn’t mean I was required to either A) like it, or B) go home with any of them.

  Technically, I wasn’t a stripper, but close enough. I was about a click away from the cliché—college student/stripper. More accurately, I was serving alcoholic libations in a strip club, but I still tried not to tell people what I was doing to save up money for books, rent, groceries, and the other necessities of college life.

  I might have been wait staff, but that didn’t mean much when you wore a naughty-schoolgirl outfit to your place of employment. When people found out you worked in a strip club, they assumed you took your clothes off for money—because for most people, working in a strip club was essentially synonymous with stripping. People who found out about my last-ditch effort to make enough cash for school fell into two groups: A) the ones who didn’t want to hear about shit that didn’t fit into their rosy perception of the world and B) voyeurs.

  The people in group A were the ones who didn’t want to hear about real life because it made them uncomfortable. They were usually disgusted or delusional. Those people said things like: what’s wrong with working at a fast food restaurant? Please. People who said shit like that had never fucking worked in the service sector.

  Like I was going to make enough money to finish my degree without tips.

  The voyeurs, though, were worse. If you gave them one little nugget of information, they would pump you for information because they got off on it, they liked telling other people about it, or they generally liked feeling like they were better than you.

  By definition, guys visiting a strip club in the wasteland that was the space between my college town and the state capital fell into the voyeur category. Obviously. They liked to watch. And they liked to touch. I had learned that lightning fast on my second night of wearing pigtails and a naughty-schoolgirl outfit.

  While I had been standing at the bar, hoping I wouldn’t spill my latest drink order, some lecherous, balding, sweating, and probably sociopathic sleazeball had thrust his meaty hand under my obnoxiously short plaid skirt.

  “Does the carpet match the curtains, girlie?”

  He hadn’t been completely off. I was probably the only female in Fantasy Land who wasn’t waxed from the neck down. Plus, my dark-red hair was natural, a recessive gift from my grandmother on my mom’s side. My father’s side? Who the fuck knew? I had met him all of once at the age of five.

  Mom generally kept her stories about dear old dad to the “Your father was a fucken asshole” variety. They had divorced before my first birthday, and he had been too busy paying alimony and child support to his first wife to bother with my mom or me. Then he had gotten thrown into prison, but that was another long story.

  Yeah. Dad was a real charmer. I had a picture of him from not long after I was born, and apart from one ill-fated childhood meeting, that was pretty much the extent of my relationship with him.

  At one time, my relationship with my mom had been great. She had been my closest friend, maybe because I had always been a quiet, shy, kinda weird little kid. Then, during my junior year of high school, she had remarried, and in another fantastic fucking cliché, my stepdad had turned out to be a real dick.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Michael wasn’t a complete dick. He just treated me like some unfortunate add-on to his marriage to my mom that he wished would disappear. And my mom, like some quintessential 1950s housewife, bent over backwards to make sure Michael was happy at all times.

  It was kind of nauseating to be in the house with them, my mom running around catering to his every need and. After seventeen years of her telling me “It’s you and me against the world, kiddo!”—suddenly I had turned into a burden.

  I knew things could have been worse. After all, how many fucking movies have been made about the evil stepparent? Still, my mom’s compromise with Michael had been: if they paid my rent and tuition to the public university I had been accepted to, then I was on my own for everything else.

  That had lasted up until the last term of my junior year. Beginning of spring quarter, they had announced that I would be on my own for my last year of school. Not only that—but the payment for my spring term had never made it to the university’s Bursar’s office, forcing me to drop classes and beg my summertime boss at the fairgrounds to give me some hours at the ticket office to keep me afloat while I survived on a credit card I had applied for freshman year.

  I had worked other jobs in the past six years—all of them low-paying—but Fantasy Land was my ticket to finishing u
ndergrad. Even though I wasn’t getting jack shit from Mom or Michael now, their joint income had repeatedly disqualified me from being awarded any federal grants. Basically, the government had assumed my nearest and dearest would give me money for school, even though they had cut me off. When I had found out that Michael was still claiming me as a “dependent” on their taxes, I had nearly lost it.

  Nothing I could do about it now, though.

  The only saving grace for me was the Affordable Care Act, which was subsidizing my health insurance payments. Without that, I would have gone broke by now trying to afford both rent and groceries. As it was, I was pretty damn close to flat-out broke, depending on what week of the month it was.

  By the time I got back to the bar, there was a lowball filled with an amber liquid and sitting on top of a Fantasy Land paper napkin. Charmingly, the napkins came complete with a cartoon caricature of a stripper with enormous tits.

  And that was another thing—well, two—that separated me from the rest of the females working at this establishment: stripper tits. In other words: I didn’t have two spray-tanned round orbs of gravity-defying perfection. Mine were B-cup, snow white—not stripper material.

  I frowned when I realized that my name—Cass—was written in red marker on the napkin. My full name was Cassia, but nobody but Mom and Michael ever called me that.

  “Jerry!” I yelled at the bartender over the ear-bleeding stripper rock.

  He turned around.

  “Are you giving me free drinks?” I smiled.

  “You wish,” he grinned back at me. “You don’t even want to know how expensive that glass of hooch is.”

  My stomach twisted, and I started to get a bad feeling.

  “Then why’s my name on it?”

  He pointed.

  “Table ten asked for you.”

  I frowned.

  “That’s not my area,” I said stubbornly as I shook my head. “I switched with Jenna.”

  “Doesn’t matter, sweetie.”

  He actually looked sympathetic, maybe because he knew I wasn’t cut out for serving drinks—given my atrocious memory and horrid balance. That was actually my biggest problem with the job: I sucked at it. But I needed the money more than I needed my pride.

  My next biggest problem with the job was the fact that no matter how clear I was—I’m not a fucking stripper—it didn’t stop people from assuming things about me that weren’t remotely true.

  They assumed I was eager to do lap dances.

  They assumed I was eager for some “work” on the side.

  They assumed I would trade sex for drugs.

  They assumed I wouldn’t mind having my ass squeezed when the bouncer wasn’t looking.

  I had been working at Fantasy Land since my highly lucrative summer-time stint of working cash control at the fairgrounds had ended. Since freshman year, that job alone had paid for most of the stuff Mom and Michael wouldn’t cover—like car insurance. Three weeks of sixteen-hour days counting and recording cash and receipts in a stuffy basement room surrounded by a bunch of retired cops serving as security—it had been the best job I’d had in college.

  One of the women I had worked with in cash control had mentioned Fantasy Land. She had been a single mom living and working in the capital until her ex-husband had stopped paying child support. To make ends meet, she had worked at the club for a few months.

  I had held out for as long as I could—almost two years—before realizing I would never be able to afford going back to school working a couple of minimum-wage jobs. Fantasy Land was my chance to make the money that would let me finish out undergrad debt-free. Admittedly, I was pissed that what should have been four years of undergrad had turned into six years, if I accounted for the past two years of working shit jobs just to pay rent.

  As a result, I would be twenty-four soon, with no degree and no real job prospects until I finished school.

  It bothered me, even though it seemed like it had taken half my freshman class five years to finish school. Now, though, all my good friends except Vicki had already graduated and moved on to professional jobs that didn’t involve naughty-schoolgirl outfits and booze. The difference between me and most of the people I knew who had taken an extra year or two to finish undergrad was that their parents were financing them, whereas mine had bailed just short of three years into my college education—without telling me.

  Now I was so close to finishing that I could almost taste it.

  So far, during my month-and-a-half tenure at Fantasy Land, I had made great money in tips—at least compared to what I had been pulling in with the two other jobs I had been working. Bob, the club’s sleazy manager, helpfully pointed out at least every other night that I would have been making way more if I would “just take it off, honey,” as he put it.

  I had my doubts, but I’d definitely gotten my fair share of “table requests.” Basically some scummy asshole who had been watching me all night would request I be sent to “service” his table. To be honest, I couldn’t understand it. Or maybe I could, and I didn’t want to.

  Why else would some guy who’s literally up to his eyeballs in D-cups and G-strings request the presence of a server with relatively smallish breasts wearing pigtails and a schoolgirl uniform?

  Oh, yeah—a fucking pedophile. Shifty-eyed, sweating, and offering to slip me a few extra bills for a private lap dance in the back.

  Part of me was actually relieved—thankful even—that these pricks were in this club on an awful stretch of I-80 instead of out defiling little kids. The other part of me that had to deal with them sizing up my schoolgirl uniform wanted to take a belt-sander to their nuts.

  Of course, by now I had realized why Bob had hired me—for the perverts. It was the only explanation for why he would hire a clumsy twenty-three-year-old aspiring college student with no experience waiting tables.

  Gritting my teeth, I picked up the glass of “expensive hooch” and began walking toward table ten. It took me all of five steps to realize where I was headed.

  Seriously?

  Table ten was the guy in the suit sitting alone in the very back. Why did I always have to get the creepy ones? Scratch that. I already knew the answer. Because I had always been a magnet for weirdoes, even before the club. It was like I sent off a signal to the mentally deranged segment of the male population.

  I walked very carefully. The last thing I needed was to have my wages docked, again. Seeing as I sucked at waiting tables, I had spilled more than my fair share of drinks in the past six weeks. On multiple occasions, Bob had said—in the most chivalrous way possible—that he should have fired me for being such a lousy server, but he got asked too often when I was going to get up on stage.

  “You’ll be up on stage by month three, I promise you, sugar,” he had said.

  Feeling surly, one morning at the end of my shift, I had asked him why he thought featuring a dancer with small tits who couldn’t dance seemed like a wise business decision.

  “Different strokes,” he had said with his hand placed firmly over his junk.

  I had been to my fair share of frat parties in college. Crude was not shocking to me, which meant that Bob’s bullshit never really fazed me. On that particular morning, I had simply smiled at Mr. Sleaze, grabbed the stuff from my locker, and walked outside—hoping there wasn’t a fog-induced fifty-car pileup on the interstate.

  Tonight, as I walked away from the main stage and approached table ten, I realized that I hadn’t actually seen this creeper’s face. Didn’t matter, though. I knew he had been staring all night. How? I felt it. I could literally feel his eyes on me like a beam of heat from across the room, which was why I had switched areas with Jenna—to avoid the night’s requisite psycho.

  Fantasy Land happened to be one of the more upscale “exotic dancing” locations, due to its location between two universities and the state capital. I had heard some of the servers and dancers talking about big tips from politicians and rich frat boys. Rich frat boys atte
nding the same university I had before my life had taken its detour into living paycheck to paycheck.

  The difference between the drunken frat boys at my university and me? A whole lotta money. Their parents had sent them off to attain degrees—usually in enology and viticulture—before these dicks trotted back home to run the family winery.

  Typically, the frat boys were up front and center—loud, drunk, and waving more cash than advisable just off a lonely stretch of interstate. The politicians from the capital tended to favor spots like table ten. Empty, way in back, away from the lights. According to the girls I had talked to, if you were looking to “score” a lot of money, the back was where to find it.

  I had heard at least one girl—who was and not looking to make a career change any time soon—had gotten her apartment paid for by a certain assemblyman. I wasn’t going to judge her for it. I had been late on my rent for the past several months before taking this job. At the same time, becoming a sex slave to some cheating politician didn’t appeal to me.

  There was always a shudder and gag factor whenever I saw something on the Internet about some ageing Hollywood icon marrying a girl a quarter of his age. Then again, both parties were getting something out of the deal. But geriatric narcissists? Not my type. Of course, any guy I happened to notice never noticed me. It was my curse. The normal guys saw right through me, while the perverts and weirdoes flocked to me.

  It was part of the reason I hadn’t slept with anyone by the ripe old age of twenty-three. Given the choice between perverts or psychos, I had chosen option three—celibacy. My theory was: you can’t miss what you’ve never had.

  In all honestly, though, I had been so fucking wrong. Why else would I end up watching old DVDs of True Blood at three in the morning for the Eric and Sookie scenes? That was the problem. In this place, I was more likely to run into a goddamn vampire than I was to run into a guy I actually wanted to sleep with.