When the swimmer ascends the pool steps and rises from the water, I stop dead in my tracks.
It’s like porn. There’s no other way to properly describe it. It would only be more perfect if I were watching it in slow-mo and there were a cheesy soundtrack playing in the background.
The swimmer is very muscular, broad through the shoulders and back, but with narrow hips that highlight the bulk of his upper body and thighs. On anyone less well-proportioned, his substantial muscle mass would make him look thick and ungainly, but with his height and that tapered waist, the overall effect is one of balance. Power, perfectly aligned with grace.
Water runs in rivulets over acres of tanned skin, streaming down his back and legs. His wet black swim trunks cling to his spectacularly perfect ass. Even his bare feet are perfect, masculine and brown as a nut against the pale concrete coping.
He reaches for a towel tossed casually on one of the chaise longues that line the pool and proceeds to dry himself, supple as a cat. I watch in fascination. He has no tattoos, no scars, no visible body hair. His virgin skin is completely unblemished, gleaming like rubbed wood in the morning light.
My brain and my ovaries are in total agreement: This man is stunning.
Then he turns around, catches me staring through the wrought iron fence that surrounds the pool, and calls out, “Morning, sweet cheeks. You’re up early.”
Of course. Of course it’s Connor. The universe has decided it would be amusing to watch me grapple with a sexual attraction to a man I want to slap most of the time. When I’m not wanting to roll my eyes in disgust or douse myself in antibacterial spray so I don’t catch one of the virulent strains of STD he’s probably carrying.
The way the blood rushes to flood my face is actually a relief, because it’s diverting some of the blood that was throbbing between my legs.
“Good morning, Marine,” I say coolly. “Just getting in from the strip clubs? Needed some chlorine to get rid of all that rainbow glitter and dime store perfume?”
He grins, slings the towel over his shoulders, and ambles closer to the fence. The light catches the silver chain around his neck, glinting off his dog tags. I try not to look at his abdomen, because I’m pretty sure he’s got an eight-pack—not that it’s even physically possible—and I don’t want to stare.
Any more than I already have.
Don’t notice his hard nipples, don’t look at how perfect and brown they are or how there isn’t a single stray hair on his entire gorgeous chest.
There’s a border of low shrubs planted on the inside of the fence. Connor stops just in front of it. He runs a hand through his wet hair, pushing the dark mass of it off his forehead. I stifle the urge to laugh because I find the simple motion completely erotic and I’m the biggest idiot to ever walk the face of the earth.
His gaze flicks over the length of my body, my sweat-drenched T-shirt and little nylon jogging shorts. His grin dies. A muscle in his jaw flexes. In a different tone than moments before, he says, “We should be on the road within the hour. I’ve spoken to Miranda. She’s expecting us by—”
“I’ll be ready,” I say indifferently. “Meet you at the car in thirty.” I turn and walk away, trying to convince myself I really can’t feel the weight of his stare on my back as I go.
I wake up with a start sometime in the late afternoon with a crick in my neck and my heart pounding. I’d been having a dream that I was falling from a great height, freezing wind tearing at my clothes and snapping through my hair, the air so thin it swallowed my screams the moment they left my lips.
From the driver’s seat, Connor says, “You twitch in your sleep like a dog.”
I mutter, “I was having a nightmare. I dreamt I was you.”
He chuckles. “Aw. Am I annoying you already? You just opened your eyes.”
“You only annoy me when you’re breathing. Where are we?”
“Close to Albuquerque.”
I’m surprised. “New Mexico already? We’re making good time.”
I regret that instantly when Connor smiles. He says, “Of course we are. I’m driving.”
“God. It’s too bad arrogance isn’t painful.”
Another mistake, because it causes Connor to laugh. Loudly.
I sit up straighter, scrub my hands over my face, and take a swig of water from the plastic bottle in the holder between the seats. Right after swallowing, I realize this bottle wasn’t there when I fell asleep however long ago. Connor must have put it there.
For me?
He says, “Sorry there’s no ice or lemon in it.”
He remembered I ordered ice and lemon with my water at the bar in DC. Unsure what to make of that, or that he anticipated I might be thirsty when I awoke, I return the bottle to the cup holder with no comment.
After another few miles of driving in silence, I ask, “So what’s the plan?”
Connor’s dark brows lift. He glances over at me. “Oh, now the Abominable Snow Queen wants to talk plans?”
I exhale a long, pained sigh. “Did your parents ever ask you to run away from home?”
He laughs again. It’s a big, unselfconscious laugh, deep and natural. In spite of myself, I smile.
“No,” he says, “although I gave them plenty of reason to.”
I’m intrigued. “Really? The strong, smart, courageous, popular hero who’s the star of his own fairy tale wasn’t a perfect little boy?”
“You forgot handsome,” he says with a straight face.
I shoot back, “Handsome? You look like a before picture.”
He pretends outrage. “Are you getting smart with me?”
“How would you know? If you had another brain, it would be lonely.”
From there, it rapidly devolves, and although both of us stay absolutely poker-faced, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
“Yeah, well your head is so big, you have to step into your shirts.”
“We all sprang from apes, jarhead, but you didn’t spring far enough.”
“Just remember Jesus loves you, sweet cheeks, but everyone else thinks you’re a pain in the ass.”
“If brains were dynamite, you wouldn’t have enough to blow your nose.”
“Ha! Maybe if you ate some of that makeup you’re wearing, you’d be pretty on the inside.”
“Do you ever wonder what life would be like if you’d had enough oxygen at birth?”
“No, but I bet whatever your problem is, it’s really hard to pronounce.”
“The village called. They said they were missing their idiot.”
“Tabby, if your heart was made of chocolate, it wouldn’t fill an M&M.”
“Connor, if I wanted to kill myself, I’d climb your ego and jump to your IQ.”
“I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers to let you know how I feel about you.”
Trying desperately not to laugh, I say, “A hundred thousand sperm, and you were the fastest?”
Connor looks over at me. A brilliant grin spreads over his face. Behind him, the setting sun flares into a golden nimbus around his head, and he looks so heart-stoppingly handsome, it takes my breath away.
He says, “Earth is full. Go home.”
Our eyes lock, we stare at each other, and I can’t look away. Slowly, his smile fades. With the sensation that we’ve just driven off a literal and figurative cliff, my stomach drops.
I finally break eye contact and stare out the windshield, blinking hard into the distance.
I don’t like him. I don’t. I refuse to. He’s everything I detest in a man.
And yet…
“Let’s talk about Miranda,” I say abruptly, gazing at the range of blue-purple mountains we’re headed toward. Their tips are lit fiery red by the setting sun as if they’ve been dipped in blood.
“Fine.” His voice is low, slightly rough, all the teasing gone.
“When did she first contact you about her situation?”
He clears his throat. “I’ve been on retainer with her for years—”
“For security?”
“As a technical advisor,” he says, gripping the steering wheel so hard, I think it’s in danger of breaking. “Stunts, fight scene coordination, training actors in weapons handling, anything military related that needs an expert to add realism to a movie.”
“Oh.” I’m impressed. “That sounds cool.”
“It is.”
He says it flatly. I resist the urge to glance at his face to see what it’s doing.
“So what happened?”
He’s quiet for a moment, tapping a thumb against the steering wheel in a restless, staccato rhythm. “She received an email a few weeks ago. It said she was to deposit ten million dollars into an account in the Cayman Islands or there would be a serious data breach on her company’s network. One that would make the Sony hack in 2014 look like child’s play.”
“Blackmail.”
Connor nods. “What was unusual is that serious blackmailers already have the information they want to extort money for. In this case, it was simply a threat of a breach. One hadn’t actually occurred.”
“That fucking colossal ego,” I murmur, watching the craggy mountain tops fade from red to purple.
“Pardon?”
Feeling the beginnings of a headache, I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose. “Søren. He wanted to give Miranda a heads-up that her system was going to be attacked so she’d close any holes there might have been in the network.”
“Why would he do that? It makes no sense to forewarn your enemy that you’re on the march.”
I smile, but it’s humorless. “Because he doesn’t want it to be easy. He wants it to be as difficult as possible, so that when he beats you after giving you fair warning, it will hurt twice as much.”
Silence as Connor digests that. I open my eyes and glance at him.
I say, “So let me guess how this went. You couldn’t trace the source of the email because an anonymous proxy server was used to hide the IP address. You didn’t think it was a credible threat because not only did he forewarn his intentions, his alias isn’t identifiable with any known hacker collective or has been associated with any prior hacks, high level or otherwise. How am I doing so far?”
“Pretty fuckin’ spot-on.” He sounds lethally mad.
“Right. Then, after you checked to confirm there were no network breaches and made the system tighter than a virgin’s asshole, you told Miranda she was probably dealing with an amateur and not to worry about it. And then he raped her network. And then the price doubled.”
Connor’s murderous expression tells me I’m right again.
“How long ago was that?”
“Four days.”
“How are you stalling him?”
“She’s saying she has to put together the money, she isn’t that liquid.”
“Has he given her another deadline?”
“Not yet.”
“Has any of the data he stole been leaked?”
“No.”
Good. So we still have some time. I pause, reflecting. “What did he get?”
“Emails. Everyone’s, right down to the interns’. Executive salary information. Copies of unreleased films. Copies of scripts on future projects. And the source code for Miranda’s proprietary algorithm software, InSight. We think that was the main target.”
I snort.
Frowning, Connor looks at me. “What?”
“He’s not interested in her software. If anything, he probably looked at it and had a good laugh.”
“Why would he take it, then?”
I shrug. “To piss her off. To make it even more personal. She didn’t do as he asked, so she got her hand slapped. Big-time. So what happened next? Did you bring in the feds?”
“Yes—”
“And did you confirm that the people who arrived at the studio with FBI badges were, in fact, FBI agents?”
“Yes.”
He looks uncomfortable with my question. I suspect I’m echoing some of his worst fears about who he’s dealing with. “How?”
“I’ve got contacts inside the agency.”
“Let’s hope those contacts are who they say they are.”
He growls, “I’ve known them for over twenty years, Tabby!”
“Oh, please. You’re not that naïve.”
Connor’s face flushes. He turns to me with a glint of steel in his dark eyes. “I was in the corps with those men. I’d trust them with my life. They are who they say they are.”
After a quick mental calculation, I switch gears because my curiosity is getting the better of me. “Exactly how old are you?”
He turns his glower back to the road. “Older than you.”
“By how many years, precisely?”
“More than ten. Now back to the subject.”
Obviously he’s not going to divulge his precise age, but “more than ten” puts him at least at thirty-seven or thirty-eight, depending on the month he was born. I look closely at the skin around his eyes, his jaw, the backs of his hands. It’s all unwrinkled and tight, just as perfect as it looked in the pool. I wonder if he uses special cream, or if he’s just genetically blessed, because to have skin that gorgeous at his advanced age—
“Jesus Christ, princess, cut a guy a break, will you?” he snaps, bristling under my microscopic inspection.
Perversely pleased I’ve been upgraded from “sweet cheeks” to “princess,” I smile. In a teasing tone, I say, “Look at you, Mr. Senior Badass Hot Guy, still gettin’ out there with the young whippersnappers to fight cybercrime! Impressive! But I’ll understand if you need to be in bed by seven tonight. Gotta rest those creaky old bones. We don’t want you breaking a hip.”
Slowly, Connor turns and looks at me, only now the aggravation is gone, replaced by a sly gotcha! smugness.
He drawls, “Hot?”
Oh shit.
I attempt an attitude of nonchalance. “It’s good manners to be polite to your elders.” When his look of smugness only deepens, I hastily add, “Actually, I think your hearing aid is malfunctioning. I didn’t say ‘hot,’ I said…um…something else.”
Nonchalance = epic fail.
“Oh, I must have misheard!” says Connor, all wide-eyed, blinking innocence. “This pesky hearing aid is always malfunctioning on me. Let’s see, what rhymes with ‘hot’? ‘Trot’? No, that doesn’t work. ‘Cot’? Hmm. ‘Badass Cot Guy.’ Unlikely. What could it be, what could it be?”
He pretends to think hard, while I slide lower in the seat, trying to make myself invisible.
He keeps guessing all the way into Albuquerque, gleefully torturing me with words that rhyme with “hot” while I keep trying to steer the conversation back to Miranda, until finally I give up and sit with my arms crossed over my chest and my eyes closed he as proceeds to shove a giant fistful of crow down my throat, and all I can do is swallow.
Bastard.
Eight
Connor
So getting my dick on board with my “strictly professional” plan with Tabby is a spectacular failure, evidenced by the way it reacted when I saw her at the pool in her running outfit, and in the car on the way to Albuquerque when her voice was breathless with stifled laughter and she looked at me as if she actually liked me.
In the second case, not only did my cock get hard, my chest went tight and my throat felt like I’d swallowed a rock. All from a look.
Imagine what might happen if she looked at me like that while she was naked. I could spontaneously combust.
And then she said I was hot, and my dick got so excited, I was worried I’d make a mess in my pants if I drove over a stray bump in the road. It’s like I’m a teenager again, all boner and no brains.
I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop thinking about her. I’ve already jacked off twice since we checked into the hotel, and if I don’t figure out a way to manage this soon, I’m in big trouble.
Unfortunately, I know of only one way to satisfy an itch.
Scratch i
t.
Nine
Tabby
The Hotel Andaluz is a vast improvement over the Best Western in Tulsa. I appreciate the Spanish-inspired décor, the russet pavers underfoot, the dark wood ceilings and bisque stucco walls. My room is lovely, spacious and quiet with a claw-foot bathtub big enough for two that keeps leering at me. I wonder if it’s coincidence the room is called the Romance Suite.
Connor was the one who arranged the rooms with the front desk, and hell if I’m about to ask him.
I take a shower, change into a pair of black leggings and my favorite travel top—a body-skimming, tie-dyed, one-shouldered number in brilliant blues made of some kind of space-age knit that folds to the size of a hankie and never wrinkles—and slip on my casual shoes, the ones with only a four-inch heel.
Then I get a text from Juanita: Hey. Can I use ur shower? Water is out at my house.
“Oh God,” I mutter. “Did your mother forget to pay the water bill again?”
I answer: Yes, of course. I’m on a job for a few days. Clean up after yourself, plz.
She responds: Suck a bag of dicks. With a minion emoji flipping me the bird at the end.
I reply: Charming. I’m sure Sister Mary Claire is so proud of you.
Two seconds later: Sister Mary Claire can suck a bag of dicks.
I chuckle. We really need to get Juanita a new catchphrase.
I’m starving, so I decide to go up to the rooftop bar, order some tapas, and enjoy the view of the mountains.
Unfortunately, my travel companion has had the same idea.
Connor spots me the second I walk out onto the patio. He’s sitting across the bar at a long, raised stone table with a fire glowing in a low trough down its center. He lifts a hand as if he’s been expecting me.
Which he shouldn’t be, because we left each other in the lobby with a “See you at six a.m.”
Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games Series Book 2) Page 6