A Night of Desire-Chapter 54: Any Man Will Do
After a two-second pause, Clara Grant turned, bent down, and stared at Seth Quinn in the car. "What’s there for me to be bitter about? Just because my first man was a rapist, am I supposed to be stupid enough to insist on marrying him? My first time might be important, but it’s more important to stay away from a beast!"
With that, she straightened up and—SLAM!—viciously slammed the car door shut. Then, she strode quickly toward her electric moped.
Clara Grant walked away without a single backward glance. Seth Quinn stared, unblinking, at her retreating back. Neither of them noticed that from the moment Clara had stepped out of the car, someone had been watching them from a red Audi. The Audi, blocked on the road by a black sedan a short distance behind them, had a passenger inside, phone aimed and snapping one picture after another.
...
Clara Grant quickly reached her electric moped, unlocked it, and hopped on. Cranking the throttle to its maximum, she sped onto campus.
Seth Quinn silently watched her back until she disappeared into the crowd of students. Then, he started his car, turned the wheel, and drove off.
At the same time, the path cleared for the red Audi. But the other car was too fast. The person in the back seat of the Audi craned their neck, trying to get a clear look at the driver, but they sped away before she could.
"Chloe, there’s no doubt that woman is Clara Grant," said a young woman in the passenger seat as she scrolled through the photos on her phone. "But who do you think the man is?"
The phone’s camera is high-resolution, and the pictures are pretty clear, but we only got a good shot of Clara Grant’s face. The man was in the car, so we couldn’t see him.
Chloe Grant held out her hand, taking the phone from her assistant. She scrolled through the pictures, and a triumphant smile spread across her face. "We might not have gotten his face, but we got his build. Anyone can see it’s a man. And as long as it’s a man, that’s all that matters."
Chloe Grant tossed the phone back to her assistant and leaned against the seatback. "Clara Grant," she said languidly, "getting out of a man’s luxury car, this early in the morning. If I told you there was nothing shady going on between them, would you believe it?"
"Of course not," her assistant, Ivy Vance, agreed as she caught the phone.
"Now that Clara Grant has fallen right into my hands, I’m going to take full advantage. I won’t just expose her true colors to Miles and shatter that pure image she’s always maintained, making things between them completely impossible. I’m also going to ruin her in front of everyone, turn her into a whore and a slut that everyone loves to hate! She’ll never be able to recover, never have a chance to enter the entertainment industry, much less ever make something of herself!"
As she finished, a sinister and ruthless expression twisted Chloe Grant’s face.
"But, Chloe," Ivy ventured, "just based on a few photos, will people really believe that Clara Grant is being kept by some man, or that she’s a prostitute? It doesn’t seem very convincing, does it?"
After all, practically every student at The Nymphaea knew Clara Grant as a virtuous girl who supported herself by running errands.
"Hmph," Chloe Grant scoffed. "Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. If it’s just us saying it, people might not believe it. But if enough people are saying it, won’t it become real?"
...
Clara Grant rode her moped at top speed, heading straight for her classroom building. But before she was halfway there, she spotted a familiar figure up ahead, surrounded by a crowd of girls.
The man was so tall that he was impossible to miss, even in the center of the crowd.
Clara Grant’s heart lurched violently. A tremor shot through her hands, and the handlebars of her moped suddenly swerved.
In her panic, Clara Grant slammed on the brakes. The moped screeched to a halt, but she had forgotten to put her foot down to stabilize it.
And in the next instant, both she and the moped crashed to the ground!
