After Losing My Memory,the Billionaire's Son Chose Me

The heat came in waves.

A burning ache held deep in my lower abdomen, constant and insistent, and between my thighs I was already wet enough that my legs slid against each other with every small movement. My skin had gone hypersensitive — the air itself felt like fingers dragging across it.

I should never have taken the cocktail Julie Thorne handed me.

She was the golden girl of Kinsley College's architecture department — Thorne family heiress, the kind of woman who could end your academic career with a single conversation and enjoy doing it. She had always looked through people like me, the ones who worked three jobs to cover tuition and ate whatever was cheapest at the end of the week. A drink from her hand should have been the last thing I accepted. But I was exhausted, and exhaustion makes you stupid, and I paid for that stupidity with every cell in my body.

I didn't know how I had ended up in this room. There were gaps in my memory — I only remembered an arm around my waist, steering me through a door. Whatever was in that cocktail had stripped out every self-protective instinct I had. What was left was need, pure and animal, with nothing underneath it.

The room tilted. I grabbed the nearest solid thing and caught his forearm. The warmth of his skin made me want to tear his shirt open. His hands closed around my waist and held me upright.

The ache spread deeper, and my hips pressed into him before I made any decision to move them.

"I..." My voice came out wrecked. "I should go."

He didn't answer. His hand slid down from my waist and pressed directly against my clit, two fingers moving in slow, deliberate circles through the wet fabric. My thighs clamped around his hand. I was too sensitive for this — every point of friction was almost too much — and then one finger pushed inside me, and the fullness hit like relief. The burning in my belly eased by a fraction.

I didn't pull away. I wrapped my arms around his neck, rocked my hips, and clenched around his finger, trying to pull it deeper.

His breath was hot against my ear. He bent his head and closed his mouth around my nipple, sucking hard, and the sensation cracked through me like a live wire — my whole body shuddered at once. Heat flooded out of me, trapped around his finger, and my legs nearly buckled. I grabbed his lapel and held on.

He felt me shake. He gripped my hips, lifted me, and my thighs locked around his waist. I lost his fingers and found instead the hard line of his cock pressing against me through his trousers, the fabric between us soaked and getting wetter.

My back hit the bed. The cold sheets sent one sharp pulse of clarity through the fog.

"Don't—" I said. Barely a whisper. I wasn't entirely sure what I meant by it.

He paused and looked at me. His eyes were wide and unfocused, moving across my face with the same lost quality I recognized from inside myself. There was no conscious will in them. He was caught in the same thing I was.

Then he lowered himself over me. His cock rubbed against my clit, slid through the slickness, and drove all the way inside in one long stroke. The breath that left me was involuntary and loud — the release of something held too tight for too long.

Before I caught my breath he flipped me over, my back flush against his chest, his arm crossing my front to hold me there. His cock drove into me hard from behind, and I clenched around him — then a sharp crack landed across my ass. He'd spanked me.

The sting only sharpened everything. I pushed back against him and got another slap for it.

My mind gave up.

"Harder — give it to me harder—"

The words didn't sound like mine. His hips slammed forward one final time and he came inside me, the heat of it burning through whatever was left of my reason.

But the drug didn't let go. The burning came back almost immediately, low and insistent. He turned me to face him.

His fingers traced slowly from my jaw — down my throat, over my collarbone, across my nipple, past my navel — and settled on my clit, rolling it between his index finger and thumb. My hips jerked up reflexively. I couldn't get away from it.

He bent and took my breast into his mouth, his tongue working my nipple with slow, sustained heat. The ache built full and deep, and I heard myself say out loud: "It's so swollen — bite me." He did. The pressure of his teeth followed by a hard pull sent a current through me I'd never felt before. My arms wrapped around his head and I moaned against my will.

Fluid rushed out of me. Then he pushed inside again — past any pretense of reason — driving into me hard and relentless. I watched the overhead light sway with the movement of the bed, heard his breathing ragged against my ear, felt my pussy clench and flood around him in waves until there was nothing left.

At the end, his eyes were still lost. That was the last clear thing I remembered before the darkness came: those wide, unseeing eyes — belonging to someone just as wrecked as I was.

We were both victims of the same drug.

Morning light hit me like a slap.

I came awake all at once in an unfamiliar bed, the air thick with stale alcohol and the smell of a man. My entire body ached. Beneath the covers I was naked, my throat and chest marked in ways that would take days to fade.

I sat up. My heart was already pounding.

Fragments came back in pieces: Julie's cocktail. Burning skin. Those unfocused eyes.

I threw off the covers, dressed in under two minutes, and left without looking at whoever was still in the bed. I had worked shifts at this venue before and knew the staff corridors well enough to avoid the cameras on my way out.

For the next two months I worked and studied and didn't think about it. I buried the memory beneath double shifts and studio deadlines and kept it there — though some nights I'd sit down at my drafting table, pencil in hand, and realize I'd been staring at a blank sheet for twenty minutes without making a single mark. I would press the pencil down, draw the first line, and keep going. That was all there was to do.

Until the vomiting made it impossible to ignore any longer, and I had no choice but to go to the hospital.

The antiseptic smell of the corridor hit me before I even sat down. The doctor was a middle-aged woman with glasses and a steady voice.

"Your results show that you're pregnant. Approximately eight weeks."

Eight weeks. Two months ago. That night.

She kept talking. I heard none of it. The words eight weeks looped through my skull and crowded out everything else. I sat in the plastic chair with my paperwork on my lap and my hands completely still, and thought about my checking account with its few hundred dollars, and the rent due at the end of the month, and the fact that there was no one — not a single person — I could call.

My parents had died in an accident before I started college. There was no one. I could barely keep myself fed; keeping a child alive on top of that was an equation with no solution I could find.

"Do you want to continue the pregnancy?"

"I need more time to think." My voice came out dry and flat, unrecognizable even to me.

I collected my paperwork, walked out with my head down, and made my way back toward my apartment in a daze, turning the same impossible numbers over and over in my head.

A black sedan was parked directly in my path.

A woman stepped out — waved hair, black dress, sharp eyes that moved over me with cool, unhurried calculation.

"You're Lyra Vane?"

I stepped back and gripped my phone inside my pocket. "Who are you?"

"My name is Sera Sterling." Her voice was perfectly level. "I'd like to talk to you about the child."

My stomach dropped. How does she know?

"There's nothing to discuss." I turned to leave.

A hand closed around my arm from behind — iron-tight. One of two men in black suits I hadn't noticed until that moment.

"Don't be in such a hurry," Sera said from behind me, her tone unchanged. "There are things you can't walk away from just by walking away."

"Let go of me."

The second man moved around behind me. I caught a faint chemical smell a half-second before a palm sealed over my nose and mouth — rough fabric, sharp and immediate. Chloroform. I fought with everything I had, straining against the grip on my arm, trying to scream into the hand pressed against my face. Nothing came out.

"Take her." Sera's voice was calm in a way that was worse than anger.

My vision blurred at the edges.

I'm twenty years old. I still have a future. I still have that architecture assignment I haven't finished. I still have —

The car door slammed. The world outside disappeared.

Then there was only darkness.