Novel Full Chapter 374: Disbelief
Chapter 374: Disbelief
The interior of the Audi was a tomb of high-end leather and suffocating silence.
Howard’s hands were clamped onto the steering wheel, his knuckles white enough to pop. His gaze was a laser, fixed entirely on the silver car swaying through the twilight ahead of them.
Logic dictated he should turn around. He had a beautiful, willing woman in the passenger seat and a suite at the city’s most discreet hotel already booked and waiting.
But the jealousy was a jagged glass shard in his gut, sharper than any desire he had for Siobhan.
He had to know. Was he merely paranoid, or had the untouchable Tisha Wells actually fallen into the hands of that bastard?
And then there was Heena. Was she truly just a convenient chauffeur, or was there another play here… a deeper betrayal brewing right under his nose? The uncertainty was a poison he couldn’t stop drinking.
Siobhan sat in the passenger seat, the perfectly prepared version of herself now feeling brittle and absurd. The fresh lipstick felt like a mask; the adjusted collar felt like a leash.
She glanced at Howard’s profile… the sharp, twitching muscle in his jaw and the hollow darkness in his eyes… and felt a cold prickle of genuine dread.
”Howard?” she ventured, her voice small, her hand reaching out to tentatively brush his sleeve. “Is everything… okay? You’re driving a bit… ”
”Be quiet, woman,” Howard snapped. He didn’t even look at her. The words weren’t a request; they were a strike.
Siobhan flinched, pulling her hand back as if the fabric of his suit had burned her. She immediately shut her mouth, the habit of obedience slamming her lips together, but internally, the silence began to boil.
’What the fuck is wrong with this man?’
Twenty minutes ago he’d been kissing her like she was the only woman on earth. Promising her wine, silk, a long night.
Now she was sitting here, being told to shut up while he chased a stranger’s car through the streets like a deranged taxi driver.
’Always like this. Always on the edge of something. One minute he’s Prince Charming, the next he’s acting like someone’s kidnapped his bloody wife.’
The thought made her snort… a quiet, private sound she buried behind her hand.
She looked at the silver car again. Whoever was in there, Sterling was following them with a single-mindedness she’d only ever seen him apply to two things: his career and his conquests.
She imagined the evening she’d been promised. The silk wrap folded in a box she’d been fantasising about since he mentioned it. A slow, indulgent night where she could pretend, for a few hours, that she was the only woman in Howard Sterling’s life.
Instead she was riding shotgun in a high-speed surveillance operation with no briefing and no explanation.
’Should I just abandon this bastard?’ she wondered, her eyes narrowing as she watched his rigid profile.
’I didn’t dress up to play sidekick to a stalker. If he’s this obsessed with whatever is in that car, maybe I should be looking for a man who actually knows what to do with me.’
The thought surfaced with a tired, familiar weight. She’d had it before… usually on mornings after he’d cancelled plans without explanation, or evenings when his phone buzzed with a name she wasn’t allowed to see.
But the thought never went anywhere. It just circled, landed, and folded its wings.
Because he was good. When he chose to be. When the mood struck him and the stars aligned and no other woman had scratched the itch he couldn’t seem to stop reaching for… he was attentive, generous, and devastatingly good in bed.
And the gifts didn’t hurt. The dinners. The weekends. The way he made her feel, in those carefully rationed moments of focus, like the most important woman in any room.
It was enough.
The car jolted as Sterling took a turn too fast, the tyres protesting against the asphalt.
“Jesus, Howard —” she started.
“Why the fuck are they going down this road?” Sterling hissed through clenched teeth, his eyes narrowing as the silver car’s indicator blinked and it turned left onto a smaller street.
Siobhan’s gaze followed the car as it disappeared around the corner. Her irritation curdled into something closer to unease.
’Who is in that car?’
She didn’t ask. She’d already been told to be quiet once, and Siobhan did not beg twice for the same scrap of attention.
Sterling wrenched the wheel left, following the silver car onto the side road.
The Audi’s suspension groaned as the smooth tarmac gave way to something rougher, the first pothole cracking beneath them like a warning shot.
Ahead, the silver car’s brake lights flared red in the dark… then vanished around another bend.
Sterling pressed harder on the accelerator.
***
Heena’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel, her eyes fixed on the uneven road ahead as Garrison Avenue did its best to shake the car apart.
Then she heard it.
A whisper from the back seat, thin and urgent, that cut through the engine noise and the rattling suspension like a blade through silk.
Tisha’s voice, but stripped of every layer of professional composure Heena had ever associated with it.
“Alex… I’m so horny right now. I can’t… I can’t think.”
Heena’s ears pricked. Her breath stopped mid-inhale.
For one disorienting second she was certain she’d misheard… certain that the potholes and the engine and her own overheated imagination had conspired to turn an innocent murmur into something obscene.
Her eyes went to the mirror. Reflex. Instinct. The kind of glance you can’t stop even when every rational part of your brain is screaming not to look.
Tisha’s face was inches from Alex’s. Her hand was fisted in the fabric of his shirt. Her eyes were closed, her lips parted, her entire body curved into him like a woman in freefall who’d found the only solid thing left in the world.
And then the deepest pothole yet cracked beneath the tyres… and Tisha’s mouth found his.
It wasn’t tentative. It wasn’t accidental. It was the desperate, starving kiss of a woman who had stopped pretending five minutes ago and was now paying the full, reckless price of her own desire.
Heena’s hands froze on the wheel.
Her eyes went wide… not the polite, performative surprise of a woman catching a colleague in an awkward moment. This was the raw, full-pupil shock of a woman watching her entire understanding of another person collapse in real time.
The car drifted. A full foot across the lane. The tyres kissed the gravel shoulder before Heena’s survival instinct kicked in and wrenched the wheel back.
Her heart was slamming against her ribs. Her face was burning.
The road blurred and sharpened and blurred again as her brain tried to process two things simultaneously… keeping the car on the road, and the fact that Tisha Wells, the untouchable Ice Queen was kissing a student in the back seat of his own car with a hunger that made Heena’s novels look like children’s books.
“Eyes on the road, Heena,” Tisha’s voice floated from the back seat… breathless, wrecked, and carrying absolutely no shame. “If you’re done with the show.”
Heena’s jaw clenched so hard her teeth ached.
She didn’t say a word.
She couldn’t.
She gripped the wheel, stared at the road, and drove… while the sound of Tisha’s breathing filled the cabin like a confession she was never meant to hear.
***
In the back seat, the world had shrunk to two people and the dark.
Tisha pulled him back the moment the car steadied, her fingers hooking into his collar, dragging his mouth to hers with a desperation that had stopped pretending to be anything else.
The kiss was messy, open, graceless… the kind that only happened when a woman had been wound so tight for so long that technique was the first casualty of surrender.
Alex’s hand slid down her thigh… slow, deliberate, his fingers tracing the hem of her skirt before pushing beneath it. His hand traveled higher, meeting nothing but bare, slick skin.
He broke the kiss just enough to speak against her mouth.
“No panties.” His voice was low, darkly amused. “Already prepared. Such a dirty professor.”
His finger slid inside her without warning.
“Ahh—” Tisha’s head snapped back, her spine arching off the seat, her moan escaping before she could catch it. Her hand flew to his wrist… not to stop him, but to anchor herself to something solid as the sensation tore through her.
“I’m always ready for my dear student,” she breathed, her voice fractured, her eyes glazed. “Whenever he needs me.”
In the driver’s seat, Heena’s thighs pressed together so hard her knees ached.
She kept her eyes forward. Fixed on the road. On the lane markings. On anything… that wasn’t the mirror and the sounds pouring from the back seat like something ripped from the pages she kept on her bottom shelf.
’Shameless. Adulterous. Disgusting.’
The words cycled through her head like a prayer she was reciting to drown out the sermon her body was delivering.
Her nipples strained against the fabric of her bra, hard and aching. A liquid heat had pooled low in her belly… heavier, more urgent than anything those novels had ever produced.
The books had been safe. Contained. Words on a page she could close.
This was three feet behind her. Real. Wet. Alive.
And her body didn’t care what her mind thought about it.