“Listen here,” he rumbled. “How ever you decide to fix this, you make certain Jesse Englund has no idea what’s really going on.”
“I don’t know if I can do this, Gav,” she said hoarsely.
His eyes narrowed. “You’d better know. Dry up those tears, little girl. I don’t even know why you’re crying.” His upper lip curled in a disgusted sneer. “Don’t even try to convince yourself you’ve got something going for that white man.”
“But I think I do.” Eden looked up to capture his eyes with hers. She shook her head and let out a low strangled moan. “It was just supposed to be some fun. Something happened…I don’t know…”
“It’s your decision to make. Go to jail because of a single phone call from me or let this guy’s business collapse around him.” He stood, pulled out his wallet, and then dropped a twenty dollar bill on the table. He didn’t look at her as he started to walk away. “Up to you.”
Chapter Eight
“I went back to your house, but you weren’t there.”
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Of course he wasn’t there. He was here. In his office. Where she was standing now. Duh.
He looked up from the newspaper spread over his desk and stared back at her blandly. As she stood transfixed at the doorway, her mind raced for something else to say.
“Why did you leave?” He sounded tired. Almost defeated.
He could have asked her how she broke into his offices again. He might have even asked her how she spent the hours since she last saw him. She would have even settled for him asking how she was.
Oh no. He had to get straight to the million dollar question. The one she didn’t want to answer yet.
“I—I…,” she stuttered.
His eyes narrowed and then the rage radiating from them struck her like a fist. Jesse stood rapidly, and she winced as his chair slammed into the wall. Like a hunter stalking his prey, he crossed the room and left a trail of menace in his wake.
His hands spread beside her shoulders, almost pinning her in place. He repeated his question. The smallest hint of huskiness raked over his words as his short-lived anger faded. “Why did you leave?”
Gavin had said to come up with something. No matter what she tried though, she couldn’t think of a way out of the damage she left behind. She just knew she had to fix it. She just couldn’t let him think he hadn’t touched her.
She shut her eyes. “I needed to think. I need to talk to you…”
“Look at me.”
A subtle hint of coffee aroma washed over her as he spoke. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know how close he was. No doubt, if either of them moved a fraction, their mouths would graze. She opened her eyes, but kept her gaze down.
“Jesse, I need to tell you…”
His mouth slanted over hers. His thumb tilted her chin up and she gave in to him. When he pulled away, flecks of gold sparkled in his eyes.
“Tell me you’re not leaving my side today,” he said. He captured her mouth again. “Tell me you’re coming back to my bed,” he continued before brushing her mouth with his. His hand slipped under the hem of her dress to cup her heated sex.
“Tell me that you’ll never leave me like that again. Not without talking to me first. Tell me that whatever is wrong, we’ll fix it together…”
The protest almost made it past her lips. She almost kept her resolve intact and confessed her sins to him. But then, his fingers pushed impatiently into her panties and slid over her clit.
Electric jolts sped through her as he tormented her body. His fingers curled inside of her and worked magic until she could no longer feel her legs. She remained upright only because she leaned heavily against him, crying out as the pleasure ebbed and flowed.
Somewhat stunned, she barely noticed when he walked her to his desk, his hand never leaving her body as he guided her. Eden draped forward and ignored the hard wood pressing against her abdomen and breasts. Jesse stopped manipulating her long enough to pull down her panties and push the dress over her hips. When he plunged his cock into her, she screamed.
Jesse rode through her sudden orgasm, his fingers gripping tightly to her hips. With long, sure strokes he pounded into her depths until his body tensed. With a final grunt of triumph, he released his essence into the woman who had managed to send his emotions on a dizzying tumult he’d never experienced before.
His thundering heart rate eased down, and the blinding lust backed down with it. Eden pulsed around him as she also struggled to regulate her breathing. The initial relief of seeing her standing there had given way to such disappointment and maybe, anger, over the way she’d left that morning. Looking down on the way he’d taken her, knocking aside the items on his desk, his pants pooled around his ankles, her dress hiked haphazardly over her waist, a flush of shame washed over him.
He pulled out, wincing at his insensitivity. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
“For what?” Eden flipped onto her back to watch him. Her eyes still blazed with molten passion. “For being a little rough? Babe, that was hot.”
His lips twitched before he could stop them and shook his head. “It wasn’t meant to be rough. That wasn’t my original intention. It was like, I took out my frustration with you in the end, and I’m sorry for that. You deserve better.”
“Not this time, I don’t.” The playful lilt to her voice vanished into something harder. “We need to talk.”
* * * *
The simultaneous ring of the phone and the chirrup of his BlackBerry broke the deadlocked silence. In between those sounds, he listened to the individual beats of his heart. He kept his focus there. Just listened to the rhythmic beating. He had to meditate on something soothing, calming right now. He needed to remain balanced or lose himself.
Idly, he realized that his hands hurt.
Releasing the clenched fists, he observed the color seep back into them. Since his jaw began to ache, too, he released the pressure on his clenched teeth.
His heart hurt too, but he didn’t know how to fix that.
Jesus. She attacked the one place he was vulnerable. The one God damned place. She could have set fire to his home. Run a steamroller over his car. Hell, posted a billboard announcing to the world he had a small penis. Anything—anything at all—but come after his fucking business.
And she did it while he was falling in love with her.
“Jesse, please. Turn around and look at me. I’m so, so sorry.”
He couldn’t look at her now. He remained focused on the view of the skyline. Funny, as many hours as he spent in the office, he never noticed it before now. If he came here at just the right time in the evening, it would make for one hell of a romantic view.
“Jesse, yell at me. Tell me to get out. Tell me you’re going to press charges. Just say something, please!”
The phone had stopped ringing again. It must have gone off three or four times already, but always ended after two rings. The same for the BlackBerry. Now, the clock ticked to fill the silence. He never noticed that before either. It was like each day when he arrived here, the tasks, the meetings, the phone calls consumed him. The mundane sights and sounds of the day filtered past him without a second notice.
His business was his singular obsession to the exclusion of everything else.
At least it had been.
For a single day, his thoughts centered on her. Smiles that crossed his lips came suddenly and unexpectedly just by thinking of her. He looked forward not to the next meeting where they discussed how they could trump the competition, but to after work when he could spend more time with her. That he would spend an entire weekend away from the office, but in her arms, hadn’t bothered him the way it would have before.
He swiveled his chair around and planted his hands on his desk. With an unflinching gaze, she raised her chin in the air, probably waiting to hear his sentence.
“Why?”
That brought a frown and a flitter of surprise across her face. “Why?” she repeated.
Eden opened her mouth to speak, but a sudden crash outside caught their attention. He glanced at her as he stood to face whoever was heading their way.
Kevin Carmichael walked through the door, sweating profusely, his face bunched in a ball of explosive red. He stalked straight to Jesse who sat back down upon recognizing his friend. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all morning! Have you seen it?”
“Are you okay, Kev? Seen what?”
“For Christ's sake, I can’t believe you of all people don’t know yet.” He walked past Eden to the other side of the desk without acknowledging her presence. His eyes went wide at Jesse’s blackened monitor. “When’s the last time you’ve been online, man?”
“Kevin. Slow down…”
“I want you to see this for yourself,” he muttered while pressing the power button. “And it’s a damn good thing you’re here too. Maybe you can help us fix this mess.”
His acknowledgement of Eden at last appeared to startle her. “Me?”
“Jesse, check your damned BlackBerry. We’ve been ringing and texting you for almost an hour now. Is it not working or something?”
“Or something…Why not just save us some time and tell me what’s going on? You’re starting to worry me.”
“If worried is the only reaction you have, I’d be worried about that. We have been screwed, Jess. Royally screwed. Something’s gone horribly wrong.” The fine tremor in his voice added weight to his words. “All of a sudden, our numbers make no sense whatsoever… It started with a transfer of funds. Two and half million.”
Jesse traded a glance with Eden, but didn’t acknowledge the ‘mishap.’
“Thank God, whatever happened there corrected itself because by the end of last night, it was back. But the money has been siphoning out of our account since then. What started as a slow trickle has been ramping up in speed. I called the bank, but no one is answering on a Saturday. If we wait until Monday…God, I don’t even want to think about it…”
“Where’s Scott in all of this?” The chief financial officer should have been the one to inform Jesse of the goings on.
“Trying to get a hold of someone at the bank and put a temporary hold on the account until we can figure out where the money is going and why.”
“Do you know anything about this?” Jesse asked. He saw Kevin startle at the question, but then follow his stare. Although it should have been impossible, his eyes widened even further.
Eden shook her head. “Absolutely not. Just the two point five, which I’ve corrected. And you already know that I will correct the rest of what I’ve done.”
“The two point five million? You had something to do with that?”
Jesse said dryly, “She tested our security by seeing if she could remove it.”
Kevin whirled to face Jesse. His face reddened further and Jesse had the irrational, although probably not impossible, fear that the man would stroke out. “That goes way beyond what I hired her to do. She was not authorized to do any such thing!” He sat down hard in the remaining chair. “Christ. When I found out her brother was Gavin Kingsley, I thought…Jesus. Stupidly, I was just waiting until Monday to withdraw the contract. I had no idea. None.”
“Wait a minute,” Jesse barked. “Gavin Kingsley as in my competition Gavin Kingsley? The CEO of GL Kingsley, Inc, Gavin Kingsley?”
With her silence, everything clicked into place. He now knew the why of what she had done.
Jesse suddenly felt the burden of the world’s biggest con because his greatest rival’s sister held the reins of his business in her hands.
Chapter Nine
“Why do you have different last names?” Of the hundreds of thoughts racing through his mind and churning the acid in his stomach, this proved to be the only one he could voice.
A fatigued sigh escaped her. “Our mother divorced his father. We’re half-siblings really.”
“You didn’t say a single word about the conflict of interest when I hired you to analyze our information security. Not a whisper when you signed the confidentiality agreement. I had no idea, Jesse.” Kevin shook his head angrily, and then said through clenched teeth, “Goddamned bitch!”
“Hey!” Jesse shot to his feet. He ignored Kevin’s startled reaction and dropped his voice down low. “You’ll want to be careful of what you say to her in my presence. There are things going on here of which you have zero knowledge. Instead of hurling insults, I would suggest that you get the other officers in here for a meeting, so we can figure out what needs to be done.”
He didn’t know who was more surprised by the speech, him or Kevin.
“Are you seriously protecting her? After this?”
“I had nothing to do with it, Jesse,” Eden snapped.
“And how do we know that? It’s called corporate espionage, not to mention outright theft…”
“Enough! Kevin—assemble the officers. Now.”
Kevin cut steely eyes at him. “It’s your funeral, my man.”
“That’s right. It is…The sign says Englund Multimedia. When that changes, you’ll be the first to know.”
Without waiting for a response, Jesse dropped to his chair and began typing so that he could review the damage firsthand. Before he could even log on, his COO barked commands at whomever had been unfortunate enough to be the first person he called. Kevin’s voice drifted out of the room and into the corridor.
The two men butted heads often, but that was why he liked him. Kevin instinctively knew when to challenge his boss and never did it in front of subordinates. He kept Jesse balanced.
Eden’s soft voice distracted him from the screen when she said, “I should go.”
“You,” he said, stabbing a finger at her, “will sit right there. When you were confessing, you could have mentioned Gavin, but you decided to keep that gem to yourself. Anything else you’re keeping from me? Anything else I should know?”
He released a sigh so sorrowful, she hurt just by hearing it. He slid a hand over the stubble already forming on his jaw, wiping away the trace of emotion from his face. “Jesus, Eden…What am I supposed to think about this? I’m going to have a devil of a time convincing my team not to press charges. Probably the only thing saving you is the fact that you returned the money you stole in the first place.”
Eden’s eyebrows shot into the air. Of course, he had a point or two, but that last little bit stung. The only thing?
She stood to her full height, stalked to his desk, and planted her feet firmly on the carpet. Opening her mouth to speak, she paused before a sound could escape. What was she going to say, really?
She couldn’t have destroyed her chances for a future with Jesse any further than if she had planned it this way from the get-go. If only for what could have been, she had to fix this. She may have lost the man—she was resigned to that already, no matter how painful—but she wouldn’t let him lose the one thing that mattered to him.
Her brother may be blood, but it didn’t make him right in this. He didn’t care if he hurt Eden by dragging her into a world of dishonesty by forcing her to sabotage Jesse. Why had she lost sight of what he was really doing to her? Why did she let him scare her with his threats?
Eden blew out forcefully. She’d earned whatever she had coming to her. She didn’t have to drag Jesse down with her. This fiasco needed to end.
“I know you have no reason to trust me, but with your permission, I’d like to log in and see what I can figure out," she finally said.
For a moment, he said nothing, just studied her face. Anxiety tied her stomach into knots. She needed this one last chance to right the way she’d wronged him. To prove to him that she knew how important this was to him.
“Can I really trust you Eden? From this point forward, can I trust you?”
Hope surged into her chest with his questions. “I promise you that you can. Give me a chance to redeem myself, and I’ll show you.”
“I don’t have a family. I can count
the number of true friends I have on one hand, and I barely keep in touch with most of them. It’s just me and this business. Do you understand?”
She nodded. The underlying message was clear. Letting her in would mean trusting her with his entire universe.
“I’ll ask Kevin to set the meeting with the others for an hour from now. If you find something useful before then, let me know.”
Eden nodded again and turned to leave. When she got to the door, she paused. Keeping her attention on the floor, she said softly, “I won’t let you down, Jesse.”
With that, she hurried to the nearest office. She wouldn’t let him down. Not again.
* * * *
“God, please tell me that smile is because you’ve got some good news.”
All eyes turned to Eden as she walked into the conference room. She dropped the grin quickly. It wasn’t good news necessarily, but she was on a roll. She only pulled away from the computer so she could update Jesse. After a hasty briefing, she wanted to get back to work.
Jesse stood and held out an empty chair near him. She ignored Kevin’s narrowed eyes as he watched her take the seat. With a casual glance around the room, she surveyed the men comprising the company’s officers. Four very tense men scrutinized her with less finesse. She noted all of them were older than Jesse, a fact that didn’t surprise her. Her observations were interrupted when Jesse started speaking to her again.
“Eden, meet Scott, Lawrence, and Nick. Respectively, CFO, CIO and legal counsel. Gentlemen, Eden Simmons is consulting with regards to information security.” He brought his gaze back to her. “You have something?”
She switched on her presentation mode. “As I cautioned yesterday Jesse, your system is full of holes. Whoever provided the initial security for your company either meant to undermine you or simply didn’t know what they were doing. Fortunately, what you have is a virus. Unfortunately, what you have is a virus.”
Lawrence interrupted. “A software virus? We’re protected against that sort of thing.”
The Price of Pleasure Page 5