Sleeping With My Boss: A Standalone Novel (An Alpha Billionaire Romance Love Story) (A Dirty Office Romance)

by Adams,Claire

  "Is someone going to tell me what the hell is going on?" Mando demanded.

  "We're on a mission," Cece said as she checked the van and gave her friend's workers a thumbs up before telling them to make themselves scarce. "We need to pick up a few things."

  "Are you going to tell me what this mission is about?" he said grabbing her arm and spinning her around.

  "No, I am not going to tell you, my brother," she said sweetly. "Because it's none of your fuckin' business."

  "Nice, you kiss your mother with that mouth?" he said wavering between irritated and worried. He looked to me, but all I did was shrug. Cece was running this part of the show and I wasn't about to alienate my only ally. "Cece, tell me what's going on or I'm coming with you."

  "You cannot come with us," she said starting at him. "Absolutely out of the question. What if Echo calls Nemo's and needs to get a message through? What then? You're my point person, stay alert and pay attention. That's what I need you to do. Got it?"

  "You're such a bossy bitch," Mando said shaking his head. "Fine, I'll be here, but you'd better text or call the minute you know something. I don't like being left in the dark."

  "Don't sweat it," I said slapping him on the back. "When Cece runs the show we're all a little bit in the dark."

  "You got that, bro!" Mando laughed as he grabbed his sister and hugged her tightly before she pulled away and shook it off.

  "Don't get all mushy on me," she said. "I'm gonna go find Echo and be back in time for breakfast. Got it?"

  "Vayan con Dios," Mando said as Cece motioned for me to get up into the passenger seat.

  "Oh please, give me a break," Cece said as she rolled her eyes, flipped her hair over her shoulder and then fired up the van. "I've got a SEAL with me, what the hell else could I possibly need?"

  Mando shook his head as she put the van into drive and headed down the alley toward the street. I looked at her and hoped that her faith in me wasn't misplaced.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Echo

  I had no idea how long I'd been laying on the cold metal surface trying to figure out how I could loosen the straps that held my arms down. Every time I wriggled, the guard cleared his throat as if to warn me against moving around. I had just shifted my attention to trying to figure where I was and how to escape when I heard the sound of a door opening. I listened carefully and heard the sound of footsteps coming toward me on the tile floor as I craned my neck to try and catch a glimpse of the person crossing the room. The person was dressed in all black from head to toe making it impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman. Ignoring me, the person went straight for the area behind me quickly moving out of my view.

  "Hello?" I called. "Excuse me, I think you've got the wrong person."

  "Shut the hell up, missy," the goon who'd been guarding me growled. "I'm not gonna tell you again."

  "This is all a mistake," I said trying to regulate my breathing so that I didn't sound as panicked as I felt. There was something that told me I might be able to appeal to the new guy by reasoning with him. "I didn't do anything, and I have no idea why I'm being held prisoner here. Can you at least tell me why I'm here?"

  "Lady, I'm not going to tell you again," came the response from the guard. "Shut your fuckin' mouth or I will shut it for you!"

  I weighed my options and decided that being quiet was probably the best choice at this point. So, I lay absolutely still and listened for any sounds coming from the two men behind me. I could hear low whispering, but I couldn't make out any distinct words. It was maddening not to understand what was going on or why they were holding me. And then, out of the low murmuring, I heard two things. Lab. Hard drive.

  I inhaled sharply and held my breath as I listened for more words, but they'd stopped talking. The man in the dark clothing walked toward me, then stopped somewhere behind me out of my sight line. I tried to tip my head and get a look at him, but he was smart enough to say out of my sight.

  "We want that hard drive," the voice whispered. It sounded vaguely familiar, but the whispering and something else masked the identifiers. "Give us the hard drive and we let you go."

  "I know what you're talking about," I replied recalling Dr. Powell's instance that the files find their way to the right people. Instinctively, I knew that these were definitely not the people he had mentioned. "I don't have anything! I was fired from my job, so I don't even have access to anything."

  "Don't lie to us," the voice rasped. "We know you have the hard drive. Give it to us."

  "You're asking for the impossible," I said as I twisted in my restraints as I tried to get a look at my captor. "I don't know what you want!"

  "Don't play stupid with me, little girl," the voice said in my ear the person wrapped a hand around my throat and squeezed hard enough to make my eyes bulge as he cut off my air supply. "I'm not kidding when I say that I want what it is you have. I know you have it, and unless you give it to me, I'm going to deny you air."

  I was thrashing in my restraints as I tried to get my hands loose so I could claw his fingers from my throat, but it was to no avail. He was demonstrating that he had all the power and I had none.

  "I...I...I..." I gasped trying to form words in the absence of air. Easing the grip on my throat, the captor allowed a small stream of oxygen trickled into my lungs before cutting it off again. I choked out, "I don't...have...drive...still...looking..."

  "You don't know where it is?" the voice whispered inches from my left ear while loosening the grip a bit. I struggled to draw air into my lungs and form words.

  "No," I gasped as I felt a tiny flow of air entering my lungs. Something about the voice was oddly familiar, but my primary goal was to ensure that I kept breathing, "Didn't locate it."

  "You are going to need to find it," the voice hissed. "What do you need to find it?'

  "Computer," I gasped as he suddenly let go of my throat and backed away. "I need a computer! And server access!"

  My brain was spinning from the lack of oxygen and the understanding that I was going to have to bluff my way out of the restraints if I had any hope of escaping these goons. I knew that the files were safely stored off the server on a hard drive I had tucked away in a safe place in my apartment, but they didn't. And since I had no idea where the hard drive that continued the rest of Dr. Powell's files was, I was going to have to figure out a way to fool them into thinking I was giving them what they wanted. I wasn't sure how I was going to do that, but I decided to take each thing step by step; first the restraints, then I'd worry about everything else as it came.

  There was still a small part of me that hoped Ryan or Cece would figure out where I was before things got really bad and that they would swoop in and rescue me at the eleventh hour. However, I also knew that counting on that to happen was pure foolishness, so I began formulating my backup plan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Ryan

  "Here, you're in charge of this until we get there," Cece said tossing me her phone as she headed toward TriCorp. "I can't afford to get pulled over, but I need to know what's going on."

  Her phone was buzzing like crazy with messages from people who wanted things and men who were offering things that she'd obviously indicated she needed. I shook my head as I watched the messages scroll by without stopping.

  "How in the hell do you keep up with this thing?" I asked as I tried to identify any messages that had to do with our mission.

  "It's not hard once you decide to let the technology work for you rather than you working for it," she said as she made a right onto Broadway. "There's a lot that I don't pay attention to, honestly."

  "It's overwhelming, but it looks like you have a lot of ardent admirers," I laughed as I read a message from someone who was offering to do things that made me look away. "Holy shit, Cece! This guy just..."

  "Yeah, ignore him," she said shaking her head. "He talks a great game, but there's no follow through."

  Her phone continued to vibrate as we drove through
the streets of Manhattan on our way to try and find what we needed to rescue Echo. Halfway there, Cece snapped her fingers and looked over at me with a gleam in her eyes.

  "Call Echo!" she shouted.

  "What?"

  "Call Echo!" she repeated. "Do it! Now!"

  I pulled up Echo's contact info in Cece's phone and punched the dial button. The number rang and rang until the call went to voice mail. I looked over at her confused until it dawned on me that it was possible that Echo still had her phone on her.

  "Holy shit! We can locate her phone!" I yelled as I pulled mine out and called Echo's number again. The phone rang many times before being dumped into voicemail again. This time I waited for the beep and said, "We're coming for you, Echo. Don't loose hope. We're going to find you and bring you home."

  "What the—," Cece started before a grin spread across her face. "Good thinking! Either she hears it and knows we're looking for her or the bastards who took her hear it and know we know she's being held."

  "I'm going to see if she's got the Find My Phone app set up," I said as I reached in back and pulled out Echo's computer. I turned it on and began typing in the information. "Are we almost there?"

  "Just a few blocks," Cece replied as she turned left on to 16th and hung a right on 6th Avenue. "We're almost there. You ready?"

  "As ready as I'll ever be," I said a holding out my hand. "Keys, Echo, lab, cypher."

  "Keys, Echo, lab, cypher," she repeated and slapped my palm. "Let's roll, Seal!"

  We exited the van and quickly walked up 19th and headed down the back alley to a door that led to the building's generator. Cece stopped and aimed her spray paint can at the camera pointed out into the alley and quickly covered it with silver paint before picking the lock on the door. I pushed through and led the way to the back stairs. Cece hit each camera with a shot of paint as we made our way up to the fifth floor where we snuck into the records offices and hit the elevator up button.

  "So far, so good," she whispered after painting the cameras. "I don't think anyone's seen us yet."

  "Don't count on it," I warned. "It's possible that they've seen us and are just waiting to see what we're going to do."

  "Keys," she whispered as the elevator doors whooshed open and we stepped in. Cece hit the button for the sixteenth floor and quickly headed for my father's office once we reached it. She picked the lock on the door and we made a beeline for the door to my father's office.

  "Where sentient beings display emotion," she whispered. "Where the hell is that? I've already torn most of this office apart."

  "Shhh, let me think a minute," I said holding up a hand. Cece went silent as I thought about what that line meant. Where did sentient beings display emotion? Feelings? When it came to me, I let out a laugh before covering my mouth and heading out to the closet in the outer office. I thought of my mother and smiled as I remembered her trying to give me insight into my father on her deathbed. I yanked open the door and started rummaging through the clothing hanging in the closet running my hands over every inch of every coat and jacket. I finally found what I was looking for in an old windbreaker that had been shoved to one side of the closet. I pulled it out and unzipped the pocket on the sleeve. Inside were two keys on a small heart shaped key ring.

  "What the hell?" Cece said.

  "Wearing your heart on your sleeve," I whispered. "It was one of those things my mom told me about my dad. She said he might not wear his heart on his sleeve, but he cared just the same."

  "Um, okay," Cece shook her head. "If we're done playing emotional family trivia, can we please find Echo?"

  "You're such a hard ass," I said as I shoved the keys in my pocket and pulled out Echo's laptop. I opened the cloud program on her desktop, typed in her password and hit enter.

  "Seal, I don't have the luxury of being anything but a hard ass," she said as we held our breath and waited for the program to tell us where Echo was. The compass swung wildly on the screen as it waited for a signal. When it finally pinpointed her location on the map, Cece and I both gasped.

  "She's here," Cece said gripping my arm. "She's in this building."

  "Hold on. Are we sure it's her?" I asked as my heart pounded wildly in my chest. "What if they stole her phone and are holding her somewhere else?"

  "That's a really good mystery twist, Seal," Cece said. "But we don't have the luxury of spending a lot of time trying to calculate the odds. We need to go big or go home."

  "That's good," I said with a wry grin. "What movie did that come from?

  "I cobbled it together from a variety of sources," she grinned as she tapped a few keys on the laptop and got the map to magnify the location of Echo's phone. Cece turned and looked at me, "It's on the upper floors of this building. What do you want to bet that it's on the seventeenth floor?"

  "That would be way too easy," I said shaking my head. "It's a trap."

  "What if it's not?" she asked. "What if the kidnappers didn't know we were planning to break in and get the hard drive? What if they thought that Echo already had the drive and now they're trying to recover it?"

  "It sounds like a whole lot of what ifs," I replied as I started at the computer screen.

  "When have you SEALs ever been about playing it safe?" Cece asked.

  "Lady, we're all about safe," I said. "We never go in unless we know we've done everything we could to ensure the safety of our team members and the people we're rescuing."

  "Uh huh," she nodded telling me that she was completely unconvinced. "Well, I'm not a SEAL, so I vote for taking a risk and going in."

  "Cece, this is not a fucking movie!" I exploded. "We're talking about someone's life! You can't play fast and loose like you're in some gangster video! What if the kidnappers are holding her somewhere else and we go bursting into whatever it is they're doing and they decide to kill her? Have you thought about that? Or what if they decide to kill us? Did you think about that?"

  "I did not," she admitted. "Then what do we do?"

  "We plan out our attack," I said as I visually measured the distance between the stairway and the door to the office where the signal appeared to be coming from.

  "And then what?"

  "And then we slip in and take them by surprise," I said looking up at her grinning, "And if things don't go our way, then we go out guns blazing."

  "You're crazy, Seal," she laughed.

  "No, just determined," I said as I clenched my jaw and explained the plan to her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Echo

  "You guys are going to have to untie my hands and let me sit up, if you want me to find the drive for you," I said in as calm a voice as I could muster. I could feel my phone buzzing in my back pocket ever few minutes, and I knew that Ryan and Cece knew that I was missing. I just hoped that they were smart enough to figure out that I had set my phone up so that they could track it on my computer.

  "Nice try," said the sinister voice. "But you're not getting loose."

  "Then you're going to have to take a crash course in computer programming," I said. "Because one of us has to type in the program codes."

  I listened as the two kidnappers whispered quietly for a few minutes, and then the goon said, "Okay, I'll type. Tell me what you want me to do."

  I quickly began reeling off the most complicated programming language I could remember from my senior thesis seminar just to test their level of computer knowledge. Thirty-seconds into my instructions, the goon yelled, "What the hell are you even talking about?"

  "You guys do understand that programming if far more complicated than doing a simple Google search, don't you?" I replied in as condescending a manner as I could muster.

  "Yeah, but I don't even understand what language your speaking," the goon said. "Is that English?"

  "No, it's coding language," I sighed. "It's akin to being fluent in a foreign language."

  "Well, I'm definitely not fluent," the goon said.

  "Then we're going to have to figure out another way to do t
his," I replied. "Either you're going to have to learn the language quickly or you're going to have to let me get up and program the computer to access the files. Your call, gentlemen."

  Again, they whispered, and as their voices rose and fell, I knew I'd hit a nerve. They were going to be forced to let me up if they wanted to locate the drive. If they didn't let me up, they were going to be hampered by the fact that neither one of them were coders. I threw up a little prayer that they would not call in someone who did know how to code because then I'd be screwed.

  "Fine," the sinister voice said in a clipped tone. "We'll let you up, but you're going to be tied to this chair while you do your job."

  "Fine," I said as waited for them to loosen the straps that were holding me down. I was expecting the sinister one to undo me, but it was the goon who did it.

  "Don't try and be sneaky," he warned as he loosened the ties around my shoulders. "I'm going to have my gun on you the whole time, so one wrong move and you're toast."

  "Gee, thanks," I said as he undid the strap around my waist and I sat up. "It's so reassuring to know that one wrong move and I'll be shot."

  "You know what I'm saying," he said as he pulled off the strap that held my legs firmly to the table. "Don't pull anything."

  "I wouldn't dream of it," I replied in a saccharine tone. "Where's the computer?"

  "Over here," he said lifting me off of the table. My legs were a bit weak and I felt light headed as the blood in my body flowed back where it belonged. I stumbled as I walked toward the desk and the goon caught me tightly by the arm and yanked me back to a standing position. "Ouch!"

  "Walk straight," he ordered.

  "I'm a little dizzy from being tied to that table for four days," I said overdramatizing the time.

  "Four days? Hardly. More like twelve hours," he laughed. I nodded as I rubbed my arms and did a few knee bends. Now I knew how long I'd been missing. Surely, Ryan and Cece were looking for me. "Sit here."