Sweet Seduction Stripped (Sweet Seduction, Book 7)

by Nicola Claire

  I may not have liked what Jaxon was involved in, but not all of those working for him knew just what sort of man they called boss.

  "Thank God it happened when no one was there," I murmured and Ric grimaced.

  That sensation of dread multiplied. Got combined with fear and worry and confusion and a calmness that didn't belong in amongst such wretched apprehension.

  "What?" I whispered, voice barely audible above the tremor of my lips.

  "Harding didn't leave his office last night. We had him under surveillance through the bug you placed on the desk. He bedded down on the sofa there at four," Ric advised, reading off the tablet again. "Hadn't moved by the time the building blew up."

  He lifted wary eyes to my face.

  "Baby," he said, and for the first time I wasn't sure I wanted him to use that term. "I'm sorry. We think he died in the building collapse."

  I shook my head. Possibly because I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Probably because I wasn't sure how to react. Undoubtedly because I was more confused than ever.

  Not that hearing your former workplace has just been blown up and collapsed into a pile of rubble shouldn't elicit certain reactions. It did. Sudden relief I wasn't there. Immediate compassion for all my workmates. Dawning horror at what this could mean. I felt them all, but in amongst it was the sensation that I couldn't face Jaxon's death. Not when I'd just found out such terrible things about him. Not when I'd walked away, without a backward glance or word, and fallen into another man's arms.

  OK, that emotion I could identify. Guilt.

  "Amber, sweetheart," Ric said, drawing my attention away from the internal struggle I was having and back into the room. And him. The object of my guilt.

  He stilled, at whatever look he saw on my face, and then moved quickly. Hands cupping my cheeks, nose almost pressed to my nose, hot breath swiftly flowing over my lips in agitated waves.

  "Do not take this on your shoulders," he pleaded. "This has nothing to do with you and where you are now and why. This is a coincidence, nothing more. An unfortunate, tragic coincidence."

  "Do you really believe that?" I accused softly. "Unfortunate?"

  "What do you want me to say, Amber?" he shot back, his hold tightening with his rising anger. "I'm glad he's gone? Is that it? You want me to say it? OK. I will. He's gone. He can't hurt you. Manipulate you. Make you break down and cry." His voice lowered, "He can't hit you."

  It helped. Ric reciting all of Jaxon's flaws. Which made me a bad, bad woman to be thinking ill of the dead. But the confusion was so consuming, I needed clarity. Ric provided the light that illuminated the oncoming dark.

  "OK," I said, nodding my head in between his hands. "OK. You're right."

  "Sweetheart," he said, pain lacing the word. "I know you'll mourn him. And it's OK. But please, don't ever think things could have been different. The only difference is he could have won and you could be dead."

  I pulled back and blinked at him.

  "He would never have killed me," I argued, truly believing that fact.

  "Dancer," Ric said with infinite sadness and a type of anguished knowledge that made my chest hurt, "There are worse things than physical death."

  Oh, God. Just... God. What had this man suffered? What had he feared I would suffer if he hadn't rescued me from Jaxon?

  That ache in my chest expanded, until it was difficult to breathe. I hid the desperate need for air from him and offered a small smile.

  "I'm OK," I choked out, which belied my turmoil and upset, but somehow Ric let me have the illusion that I was.

  "Have a shower," he whispered. "I really need to get to control and sort out this mess."

  I nodded. He leaned forward and kissed me on the lips softly, tenderly, lingering there for a suspended moment, and then pulled back, swiped up the tablet from beside him and strode over to a dresser, placing the offending article on top. Well out of my reach. Or my vision.

  I watched as he dressed quickly. Nondescript black jeans and t-shirt. He was going commando, which I didn't comprehend until he walked back to his dirty clothes on the floor and started to extricate his weapons and essential PI stuff, discarding his used boxers in another pile on the floor.

  "There's spare clothes in the dresser, something will fit," he said, once fully dressed, fully armed, and holding the tablet again. "Take as long as you need and then come find me. There'll be people everywhere, ask them to take you to control."

  I nodded. It was all I was capable of right then. Ric paused at the doorway, indecision and pain obvious on his face, then just when I thought he'd leave without doing anything else, he spun on his heel and stormed to the bed hauling me back to my feet and crushing me to his chest.

  "I love you," he whispered, and I knew, I knew, he was only saying it because he was scared he was losing me to my grief. To Jaxon, even though the man was presumed dead.

  "It's all right," I managed, running a hand up his back and threading my fingers in his still damp hair. "I'm fine. I'm not going anywhere."

  A hitched breath left him, he tensed, pulling me closer still, and then murmured, "I think you've already gone."

  Then he was out the door, leaving me standing there naked, and feeling like the rug had been pulled from beneath my feet all over again.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the now closed door without seeing it and tried to decide if I wanted to cry from frustration or from loss. Then realised none of those tears would be for Jaxon.

  Huh.

  Shaking my head I stood up and returned to the bathroom, determined to face what may come dressed, alert and... maybe not clear headed, but I'd settled for not so confused.

  The water was set to steaming and for a while I just let it roll over my skin making me feel, taking all of my concentration to focus on that sensation and no others. But it was inevitable, left on my own, that my mind would play tricks. Not falsities, because to remember is to recall exactly what I've seen. But the fact that my brain decided to provide me with detailed images of all the nice things Jaxon had done for me in the past, right at that moment, was truly cruel.

  And as much as I told myself that they were memories from a past that no longer existed, I still felt the soft caress of his hands, the dazzling smile he offered when he looked down at me, the way he'd stop everything when I walked in the room. Of course, I forced myself to acknowledge, he also got phone calls in the middle of the night, tearing him away from our bed. And he also laid a trap, set me up, and threatened my dad when I passed his test.

  My fists clenched and with a howl of anger I smashed it into the tiles on the bathroom wall. Stupid. Reckless. But I was infuriated. With Jaxon's mind games. With him being dead.

  With the fact that I felt sorrow at all for a man who had, in the end, treated me bad.

  The tears were probably for the blinding pain in my knuckles, but they were possibly also for the lost life of a man I had lived with for twenty months. A man who I may not have truly loved, but I had felt something for. A man who had managed to trick my perfect picture recall enough to fool me into believing he was not who he really was.

  Was I actually angry with myself for being duped? Not many people can do it. If I pay attention, and bother to close my eyes and think things through - in other words recall - then fooling me so cleverly is a hard ask. But Jaxon had done it. He'd fooled me.

  He'd made me into a fool.

  And so the next lot of tears were possibly all pity, laced with frustration and doused in shame. But then, they could have also been because Jaxon had denied me a chance to say, "Fuck you."

  Yeah, that's what they were for.

  "Fuck you, Jaxon," I said in a growl. "Fuck you for getting killed before I could do to you what you did to me."

  Oh, and didn't that turn me into someone I couldn't look straight in the eyes. I'd never considered myself vindictive. But there you go. I wanted to send that money back into his bank account, get him accused of robbing those PaP Holdings people, inst
ead of ASI. I wanted to uncover the truth, hand it over to the cops, have him arrested and put away for life, knowing the woman he'd fooled had done it. I wanted to break down the security on C&C's system, play with it, like a cat would a mouse before they pounced and sank their claws in. What exactly my end game would be, I hadn't thought through yet. But it would have been big. And clever. And unforeseen.

  And now he'd taken away that chance. Denied me my revenge. Left me hanging in limbo with limited moves available and no answers to the questions that still doggedly teased my brain.

  Who was he?

  I just didn't know and would now never find out.

  I exited the shower, feeling no better than before I went in. In fact, I felt worse. My hand throbbed, but I could move the fingers so not broken, although the knuckles were grazed and the skin cut, making me drip blood on the floor. I must have cracked one of the tiles. I hadn't noticed. Or maybe my skin is just so thin there that any trauma, even blunt, would split it.

  I'd never thrown a punch before, how would I know what would happen to my hand.

  Dressing was a challenge. One bandaged hand from the glass shard that had cut it at Champagne & Chandeliers. One wrapped up in a hand towel and throbbing from the acute injury I'd just self inflicted. I pulled on Katie's jeans again, because they thankfully fit pretty well and a new t-shirt from the dresser door. It was baggy, men's size, covering me up and hiding me as best I could.

  I hadn't been able to manage with my bra, so embarrassingly I went free. Not an experience I was hoping to have when inside a PI firm filled to the rafters with sexy bad-ass men. But I didn't have a choice now, my hands ached. Both of them.

  With a sigh I opened the door and headed out into the unending twists and turns of ASI HQ.

  I met Adam first. Tearing down the hallway too quickly to offer anything other than, "Hey, gorgeous! Glad you could join us." And then he was gone with a mischievous grin and sexy wink.

  Briefly closing my eyes and sucking in air to centre myself, knowing Adam's haste was all due to what had happened at C&C, I used the moment to recall the correct pathway back to the staffroom. Thinking that was my best bet in finding directions to control, like Ric had suggested.

  The room was buzzing when I arrived. Loud chatter, the clack of utensils on crockery, the kettle boiling in the corner.

  "Do they have any idea how it happened?" someone was asking.

  "Not yet," another voice replied. "But HEAT have moved in to the wreckage, the Fire Service still damping down hotspots here and there. It's like the CTV building all over again."

  The CTV building was an iconic symbol of the devastation and destruction Christchurch received in the 2011 earthquake. The building collapsed and caught on fire, trapping hundreds of people. It burned for several days. It was not an image I needed to recall right now.

  My hand trembled as I ran it through my hair, realising I hadn't even combed it since I'd stepped out of the shower. I glanced down at my feet, shocked to see them bare. Then realised I was standing in the doorway to the kitchen and the room had gone silent.

  I couldn't lift my head and tears had started to threaten. I didn't want to cry. I wasn't sure Jaxon deserved it. And I didn't want to show that weakness in front of these people who already had enough ammunition to judge me from here to eternity and back.

  "Darling," a soft voice said to my side. "Let me help you." Then she ordered someone to make a cup of coffee and grab some food and meet us back in safe room one.

  I let Katie guide me back down the hall I'd just traversed and back into the room I'd shared with Ric.

  "Right," she said. "First things first, darling. You simply cannot wear that."

  I blinked back at her as she fumbled through the dresser, then with hands on disgruntled designer skirt covered hips, glared around the room. She perked up, and rushed over to the tote bag I'd used yesterday, pulling out a soft violet camisole top I'd decided was actually underwear, and waving it at me.

  "This will do nicely with your complexion. Your hair colour is similar to mine, so I should know," she declared.

  "What will I wear over it?" I asked, dumbly.

  "Darling," she replied, walking towards me with a sensual - and I was guessing natural - swing to her hips. She could have been a pole dancer, her body flowed sinuously. "Panache," she added. "You'll wear panache."

  I wasn't sure I had any panache left.

  "But first," she announced, "we'll deal with your hair."

  The door opened and the second blonde from Sweet Seduction walked in carrying a plate of croissants and a cup of coffee.

  "I swear they all think because I work in a café I'm the only one suitable to make the freaking coffee," she complained, setting both items down on top of the dresser. "Gen's holding Ollie, so she got off scot-free."

  "What about Lucas, darling?" Katie asked.

  The woman snorted. "He's arm wrestling Drew, and placing bets with Finn and Dom on who will win."

  "Drew will," Katie declared.

  "Of course he will," the blonde replied matter of factly. "Have you seen his biceps lately? Fan-fucking-tastic. That man just curls my toes when he gets the dumbbells out."

  "Is that all it takes, Kelly?" Katie asked. "Dumbbells?"

  "Sweetie," Kelly replied, placing a hand on her cocked hip. "He just has to look at me and I'm gone."

  "I know the feeling," Katie replied, running a brush through my hair, having forced me to sit at the edge of the bed before I collapse onto it. "Jason just has to walk through the door and look at me and I'm ready."

  "Panty-dripping delicious, that's our hot-rush-hottie boys," Kelly added on a growl that did all sex-kittens proud.

  Katie laughed. It was light and carefree and happy. "Where would be without them," she said wistfully, the brush stilling in her hand on the last two words.

  Kelly's eyes flicked from where Katie stood down to my face. For a second tension hung in the silence, and then Kelly smiled. What could only be called a naughty smile, and said, "So, you dress her, I'll go grab some make-up."

  "Oh, bingo!" Katie exclaimed, offering one final brush and pat with her hand of my now silken locks. "This is going to be so much fun."

  Despite everything, I smiled back at Kelly. How could I not? Katie was so enthusiastic. Bubbly in the way that makes it impossible not to be affected by her effervescent fervour. It was a small smile, but considering where I'd just been, it felt huge.

  Kelly winked back at me, flicked her hair over her shoulder, and sauntered from the room.

  Then with Katie's help I redressed, this time getting into my demi-cup bra and slipping into the figure hugging camisole. I even let her wrap a bandage around my newly injured hand. But I felt more exposed, when we were done, than if I had been dancing on stage in nothing but golden glitter and an itty-bitty thong.

  "There," Katie said, leaning back and surveying the final ensemble. "Never let it be said that what can break us can never make us shine. He didn't deserve you, but you deserve your tears. And once they're gone, you rise from those ashes, you hold your head high, and you show the world that you're a woman. Strong. Fierce. Capable. Confident. And hot."

  I held her gaze for a moment, then felt compelled to say, "You guys are all a little intense."

  She blinked back and then started to laugh. Before too much longer I found myself laughing with her.

  Feeling strong. Fierce. Capable. Confident. And yes, hot in a violet camisole covered with panache.

  Chapter 31

  In The End, It's Quite Simple

  Eric

  Fuck! I didn't want to leave her. She looked so fragile, scared even. Swamped in confusion and heartache and no small amount of guilt. She didn't know what to feel, she just knew she was feeling too much. But I left her. Because I had to trust that she'd come back once she'd sorted through that shit. Come back stronger, braver.

  And, God please, certain of her place in my heart. A place I will treasure, will nurture, and will never let it go
to ruin like that fucktard Harding did.

  Who currently was taking up the better part of the largest screen in the control room, while he slumbered on his too short couch. Seconds before detonation.

  "Have we heard from Pierce?" Nick barked.

  "Nothing," Koki offered from my chair. I still hadn't taken a step further into the room from the door. The need to escape was thrumming through my veins like a drug; cloying, eager, too tempting by far.

  I wanted back in that room with Amber. I wanted in that shower that I knew she'd be having by now. I wanted to pretend this fucked in the head shit hadn't happened. But life just kept on piling up the crap, didn't it?

  Nick turned steely eyes on my face.

  "You with us?" he asked, and every man in that room heard the subtext. My gaze skittered over the guys, landing on Abi, and I was forced to change that thought.

  Every person in that room heard the subtext.

  I didn't want to be here. I had somewhere else I'd rather be. But until this shit got sorted, Amber would be suffering. I nodded back at Nick and took the necessary steps to reach Koki's side. He was up and vacating my chair in an instant. Eager to hand over the reins and get the fuck out of there.

  Some guys handled the monotony well. Some guys even thrived off the technological aspect. The change of pace giving them respite. The different tension that swirled in this room when a job was on, compared to out there on the front, offering a high.

  Koki had never been one of those guys. Too twitchy by far. With an extremely short fuse to boot.

  You needed patience and concentration, and an ability to distance yourself when the shit hit the fan, to get the job done.

  I worked on doing that right now, but it was fucking hard. What with Harding's sleeping form plastered all over the screen.

  "I'll try and get into their system, see if we can find recordings of earlier security footage before the explosion went off," I said, fingers already flying.