James: A College Girl Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

if I believed the “official” announcement of their engagement. I knew full well that he had proposed more than three years ago, perhaps something Alex Reed hadn’t wanted to broadcast to her nearest and dearest at the tender age of eighteen.
    Despite his scandal, Bennett was not the devil incarnate, unlike my father. Papa McDevitt was, I knew firsthand, incapable of love, familial or otherwise. He existed to fuck people over. Hence, health insurance CEO.
    For anyone idealistic or ignorant enough to believe that new health insurance laws could protect the masses from the cannibalistic likes of him, dear old dad had armies of lawyers, politicians, and lobbyists in his pocket, all suing the government at every turn to protect his profit margins and the vomit-inducing bonuses his sociopathy has reaped. Screw the sick and bankrupt the middle class! That was my father’s motto.
    My phone buzzed, and I looked down, studying Irving’s prelim report. I was starting to believe in fate, kismet, providence. Cassia Flynn’s father, Patrick Flynn, had been remanded to federal lock-up for embezzlement, attempted bribery, and a laundry list of other white-collar crimes. Prior to her college education, young Cassia had been raised by her mother, who had remarried while the girl was in high school.
    Ms. Flynn was soon-to-be twenty-four. She also happened to be more than a year short on credits toward an undergraduate degree after being forced to drop classes at the university at the end of her junior year. Apparently, mommy and step-daddy had pulled all funding at the last possible moment while their stock portfolio happened to be doing quite well. Ah, and Mr. Agnew was still claiming her as a dependent on his tax returns— nice . And now this girl was working at a strip club off I-80.
    Well, well. Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Agnew on your parental decision-making .
    I made a mental note to have Irving dig deeper into the Agnews’ finances—because it was time for a little comeuppance of the McDevitt variety. Ryan Bennett had always believed any fuckery I brought down on other people was merely a symptom of my disregard for the human race. Not so. To be exact, I lived to fuck over only the people who truly deserved it—and those who thought they had purchased their way above the fray of everyday life. No one was immune.
    I didn’t see myself as superior in any way. I was a sinner like all the rest. If I hadn’t been, I would have handed the little cocktail waitress from earlier in the evening a check for her studies as my good deed for the day and then left her the fuck alone.
    I looked over my calendar and decided to clear any travel.
    Cassia Flynn was my project for the next week. My dick needed a good challenge. Besides, I was getting tired of wannabe porn stars and big, fake tits. Fuck it—no I wasn’t. But variety was the spice of life, wasn’t it?
     
     
    In the morning, I got up and jogged over to the student rec facility, which sold overpriced memberships to “members of the community” to subsidize student use. Bennett liked to think of me as a lazy bastard with no purpose, motivation, or drive. Again—he was a self-righteous prick who saw himself as superior because he had taken off a few years to get his doctorate in mathematics. Mathematics. Yet another example of him taking life far too seriously.
    For some reason he still believed that our being roommates freshman year of undergrad had provided him with some special access into my deranged mind. Bennett was a good guy, but no one knew me that well. In fact, it was to my distinct advantage if everyone—including my nearest and dearest , if there were any to speak of—believed me to be the ne’er-do-well dilettante with no conviction or purpose.
    People saw what they wanted to see. With me, they saw a drunken, selfish man-child. Judgment and critical thinking skills tended to be dulled by envy, and the image I projected was easy to accept for most