In Bed With the Billionaire

by Jackie Ashenden

  It was an irritating room, mainly because it should have felt cold and uncomfortable with all that white, but it didn’t. The velvet of the chairs and the rose color gave the room warmth and a sensual feel that it otherwise wouldn’t have had.

  Temple moved slowly over to the couch, letting her fingers trail along the soft fabric. Like the biker jacket she was still wearing, it was an indulgence to let herself enjoy the feel of it, but what the hell, no one was watching. And it wasn’t like she had anything else to do.

  She frowned as she stroked over the back of the couch, turning some ideas over in her head. Getting to a phone was imperative, except she didn’t quite know how she was going to accomplish it. There were no landlines in the house, and the only cell phones she’d seen were the ones that the guards—

  A smile curved her mouth. Ah, yes. The guards.

  Glancing around the room, her gaze settled on a side table near the couch. On it was a delicate glass lamp. The floor was carpeted like the house in Paris, with plush white carpet, but that wasn’t a problem. She could smash that glass nicely.

  Temple walked over to the table and picked up the lamp, putting it on the floor. Then she brought one booted foot down hard on it. The glass shattered beautifully, but she didn’t waste any time admiring her handiwork. Tipping the table over with one hand so it fell heavily among the smashed glass, she then followed it down onto the floor, allowing herself to fall bonelessly as if in a faint.

  Sure enough, she only had to lie there a minute before the door to the lounge door bounced open and she felt the vibration of heavy footsteps approaching. She gave a little groan for effect, fluttering her eyelashes like she was coming to.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” A deep voice demanded. Yes, definitely one of the guards.

  Temple raised a hand to her forehead, murmuring an answer he wouldn’t be able to hear, cracking open one eye to check on where he was.

  A tall figure was standing there, his head bent, eyes narrowed as he stared down at her. She murmured again, and he cursed, finally crouching down beside her.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked again, belligerence lacing his tone.

  “I’m … not sure. I just…” She let the words trail off into inaudibility again, closing her eyes and turning her head to one side, giving him another glance from underneath her lashes. He was wearing jeans, his cell phone in his back pocket. Excellent.

  The guard muttered another curse, beginning to rise to his feet again. She gave a subtle twist, shifting one leg and tangling it between his, putting him off balance. Then she moaned and thrashed, her leg knocking his ankle out from under him, and he went down, giving a surprised shout as he did so.

  She could hear more footsteps coming down the hallway, no doubt wanting to investigate what was going on, which meant she’d have to move fast.

  The guard had landed on his front, as she’d hoped, his back to her, but was already twisting to get his legs underneath him again. Still he was an easy target. She’d pick-pocketed people for years after she’d escaped from her father’s house, before she’d found Jackson, using the money to buy herself food and clothes. And luckily the skills she’d learned hadn’t deserted her.

  Quickly she lifted the phone from his back pocket, tucking it into the waistband of her jeans and under the long-sleeved T-shirt she wore before he’d even managed to get back on his feet again.

  Ten seconds later, the room was full of guards, and she was feigning coming back to consciousness, muttering and opening her eyes, staring around her in surprise. Only to meet Dmitri’s dark eyes scowling back at her in suspicion.

  Great, that was the last thing she needed.

  She blinked at him, pretending to be a little dazed. “What happened?”

  “Apparently you passed out.” His voice made it clear he did not think that had actually happened.

  “Oh.” Levering herself up, she paused a moment as if she was a bit dizzy still. “Yeah, I have low blood pressure. That can happen sometimes.”

  “Can it?” The suspicious look on his face didn’t waver.

  Temple drew in a deep breath, climbing slowly to her feet then leaning not-so-surreptitiously against the couch. “Yeah, it can. Get a doctor if you’re so worried about it.”

  He didn’t respond, his dark gaze moving down her body, looking at her without heat or any trace of desire. As if she wasn’t a woman at all, but a building he was examining for structural defects. But obviously he didn’t find any because his brows lowered, his glower becoming even more intense. “Jericho shall hear of this,” he said flatly.

  “I’m sure he’ll be interested.” She passed a hand over her forehead. “You got any Advil? I’ve got a headache.”

  He stared at her for one long moment more, then he snorted and turned away, ordering the other men to follow with a sharp gesture of his hand.

  A minute later, she was alone again, the door firmly locked behind them.

  She grinned, allowing herself a small measure of triumph, and reached down into the waistband of her jeans, pulling out the phone. It was pass-coded, but she’d learned a few hacks to get around that. In fact, before she’d found Jackson, selling hacked cell phones she’d stolen had earned her some good money.

  Gaining access to the phone, she stalked over to the windows, as far away from the door as she could get, then punched in the number Zac Rutherford had made her memorize over two weeks earlier.

  He answered almost instantly. “You’re late.”

  Temple steeled herself. “There have been difficulties.”

  “I don’t want to hear about your difficulties. I only want to hear that you’ve done what you were contracted to do.”

  Jesus. Why was the world full of asshole men? Okay, so Zac had reason to doubt her, especially since she was the one who’d delivered his friend and lover, Eva King, into the hands of their enemy just over a month earlier. But that had just been a job she’d done for Elijah Hunt. It hadn’t been personal.

  Zac didn’t see it that way naturally enough, and he wasn’t impressed that she’d worked for Elijah. Temple didn’t care what he thought. She’d met Elijah when she’d been scouting out a strip club down in Atlanta, one she’d heard rumors about as being a potential trafficking hotspot. Elijah had tried to warn her away, and she’d realized then that she wasn’t the only one interested in helping trafficked women.

  Jackson, with all his undercover crime contacts, had known who Elijah was too, and when he’d told Temple that the guy worked for the biggest and baddest names in the U.S. trafficking business, Temple had known she had to contact him in some way.

  She’d only been seventeen back then, too young and too untried. But a few years later, she’d tracked Elijah down and asked him to help her find Thalia. In return she’d do anything he wanted her to do. She’d been expecting him to ask for sex since that had been what most men had wanted from her, but he’d refused. He had told her to get close to a woman named Eva King instead, the head of one of the largest tech companies in the States. So she had. And had ended up delivering Eva into the hands of Evelyn Fitzgerald, her enemy.

  Elijah had promised her that Eva wouldn’t be harmed, and the information Elijah had given her in return had led her to Jericho, so as far as she was concerned, it was all good. Zac, however, was a man who didn’t forgive easily.

  “I’m with Jericho,” she said tersely. “In New York.”

  There was a silence. “And he’s still alive?”

  “Yes. But not for much longer.”

  “I’m disappointed to hear that, Miss Cross.”

  “You won’t be disappointed long. I’m only calling so you won’t hire anyone else. I’ll finish this mission, but you have to give me a little more time.”

  “Why should I give you anything of the sort? Two weeks is what we agreed.”

  “I realize that.” She paused, listening for any footsteps coming to investigate why she might be speaking out loud to herself. There was nothing. “But do y
ou realize that I’m in a prime position to get information about his networks? About his business? About his intentions?” She paused again, to let that sink in. “I’m here as his lover.” The words sounded raw in the silence, but she made no attempt to pretty them up or make them into something they weren’t. “I can find things out that might be useful to you.”

  There was a silence down the other end of the phone.

  Finally, Zac said, with some reluctance, “Any information we could pass on to the authorities would, indeed, be useful.”

  Something inside her eased a little. She could have told him about Thalia, could have told him why she wanted to keep Jericho alive a while longer, but that information she’d never told anyone. They were her secrets to keep. She was the one who’d caused Thalia to be taken. She would be the one to rescue her.

  If there’s anything left to rescue.

  Firmly, Temple pushed that thought out of her mind.

  “Do you have anything else I could use?” she asked. “Any other information that might come in handy in the meantime?”

  Another silence echoed.

  The folder Zac had given her when he’d hired her hadn’t contained much in the way of information. Only a few clues as to where she could find Jericho’s networks, that Berlin club being the main lead. She’d gone there straight away, acting the part of the poor American exchange student who’d run out of money and who’d had to take on a stripping job to make ends meet. Soon enough, after she’d put it around that she had no family or much in the way of friends, she’d been picked up by the traffickers.

  Investigating Jericho himself hadn’t amounted to much, which was frustrating, especially when she’d drawn blanks at every turn. Then again, she did have one thing she was beginning to suspect no one else did: his real name.

  The sound of faint cursing could be heard from outside the door. Dammit. Had they discovered the guard’s missing phone?

  “What about his identity?” she asked. “We know who he is. Isn’t that valuable?”

  “I don’t like your tone, Miss Cross.”

  “And I don’t like you holding out on me with information.”

  Yet another pause while more curses and raised voices could be heard in the hallway.

  “Zac. Fucking tell me.”

  He let out an audible breath. “Jericho’s identity is a closely-guarded secret. No one knows who he is.”

  “No one at all?”

  “No. No one except us.”

  Temple went still as implications she hadn’t really considered before sunk in. “Which means we could use that.”

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside the lounge. Christ, she had no time.

  “You could,” Zac said. “There’s a reason he kept his identity hidden. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s Evelyn Fitzgerald’s son.”

  Holy shit. Of course not. His real name and details had all been in the file Zac had given her initially, and she’d been planning on using the info when she’d finally gotten close to him. Except in the whirlwind of sex and adrenaline in the days after meeting him, it had slipped her mind.

  So here was her leverage, and she really needed leverage.

  At that moment, the door banged open for the second time that day, and Dmitri was coming through the doorway, murder in his eyes.

  Temple wasted no time with good-byes. She threw the phone onto the floor and stepped on it hard, shattering the screen and crushing the delicate technology inside. Now there was no way anyone could track the call.

  “Bitch,” Dmitri growled. “Tell me what the fuck you were doing with that phone.”

  And he drew his handgun from the holster under his arm and pointed it straight at her.

  * * *

  Jericho stopped dead in the doorway of the lounge. In front of him was Dmitri, a gun in his hand and pointing it directly at Temple, who was standing by the windows, the crushed remains of a cell phone on the carpet near her feet. She’d put her hands up, her stance tense, as if she was preparing to launch herself at the bodyguard.

  He hadn’t seen her dressed before, not in actual clothes. But now she wore close-fitting jeans and a turquoise long-sleeved T-shirt, a black leather jacket over the top, the clothes he’d had brought for her. And she looked … normal. Like one of the hundreds of fashionable, lovely young women who walked the streets of Manhattan or Paris or London every day.

  And a peculiar feeling went through him, an unfamiliar feeling. The need to go and put himself between her and Dmitri’s gun. To protect her somehow. Which was the most patently stupid urge in the history of the world considering what Temple was capable of.

  She was a fucking assassin for God’s sake. She could protect herself.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he demanded instead. “Dmitri? Put that goddamn gun down.”

  His bodyguard didn’t move. “She stole a cellphone, and she called someone with it. I heard her talking.”

  Temple had relaxed for some reason, her tense stance easing. She flicked him a look, her mouth curving into that sexy little smile he found so erotic and yet so maddening at the same time. “Hello, Jericho,” she said. “I was wondering where you’d gotten to.”

  There was something different about her, and that smile said it all. Whatever she’d been doing with that phone had pleased her very much.

  He cursed under his breath.

  Relax. She doesn’t know where in Manhattan she is. There’s no way she could have called for back-up or for help.

  Still, there were ways and means. People could track cellphone signals, and no security system was perfect. There was always a way out or a back door somewhere.

  He shouldn’t have absented himself for the past two days, but he’d had little choice.

  As he’d left Paris, word had come through that shit was currently hitting the fan with the American market. Elijah Hunt beginning to dismantle the networks Evelyn Fitzgerald had built was starting to have repercussions in the form of competition, and Jericho had spent the past two days in New York making sure that competition was taken out.

  It had been messy trying to keep it all hidden and make sure Hunt himself didn’t catch a whiff of it since Jericho didn’t want to spook the guy until he was ready to confront him himself.

  He’d even just been to Hunt’s apartment in the West Village to check on him, though he’d tried to tell himself that had nothing to do with wanting to see if Violet was okay and everything to do with wanting to check out Hunt’s routines.

  As it turned out, he’d managed to spot Violet coming out of the building, all dressed in black leather with her short golden hair in artfully styled spikes. She looked determined, tough, very different from the shocked, desperate woman he’d kidnapped a month earlier in order to get her out of the country and away from the chaos left by their father’s death.

  As he’d watched her, he’d been almost tempted to step out from the shadows of a nearby doorway, just to say hello. To see her smile at him the way she’d used to, back when she’d been his adoring little sister. But he’d held back, because of course she’d never smile at him that way again. Not when all she knew of him was that he was a trafficker, a pimp, a drug dealer, and murderer just like their father.

  He could never tell her the truth, not if he wanted to keep her safe. Besides, all of those accusations were true. So he stayed where he was, watching as she went by, a grief he shouldn’t have felt twisting sharply inside him.

  Then someone had called her name, and she’d turned around, and he’d seen her smile like the sun coming up, a joy crossing her face that made the grief even sharper.

  A man had joined her, tall and dark and scarred. A familiar man. Hunt.

  Violet had reached out a hand to him and he’d taken it, the smile on his face an exact mirror of hers. They’d walked together past Jericho, each of them so caught up in the other that they hadn’t noticed him standing there. They probably wouldn’t have noticed a bomb going off either.

  So he’
d stayed there and watched them walk to the apartment, his insides twisting with emotions he’d thought long dead as Hunt paused by the open door and kissed her before they both went inside. Jealousy. Anger. Envy.

  He’d made a mistake to come, he’d known that straight away. And he’d made a mistake to stay and watch her. Seeing her like that brought back too many memories and too many feelings he couldn’t afford.

  It wouldn’t happen again.

  “Get the fuck out of here, Dmitri,” he ordered flatly, his mood already shitty. “I’ll deal with this myself.”

  There was a moment when Dmitri didn’t move and Jericho wondered if the Russian was actually going to obey him. And what the hell he would do if Dmitri didn’t. Then the bodyguard abruptly lowered his gun and put it away. He turned, giving Jericho a dark look loaded with recriminations, before moving past him and out of the room.

  Jericho ignored Dmitri and kicked the door shut behind him, his attention on the small, slender woman by the windows.

  She’d pulled her hair back in a ponytail, the black leather jacket giving her a tough edge. But the blue-green of the T-shirt made her skin glow and set her red curls blazing, and all he could think about was how it had been two days since he’d had her. Two days since he’d been inside her.

  Two days too many.

  Slowly, he walked toward her, watching as her chin came up and she folded her arms, that irritating smile still playing around her mouth. Yeah, she looked confident and pleased with herself. As if she’d discovered a big and very satisfying secret.

  He stopped in front of her, looking down into her eyes, close enough to catch the scent of what smelled like roses. It was sweet, yet underlying it was a definite edge of feminine musk that grabbed onto his cock and refused to let go. Soap or body wash probably, mixed with Temple’s intoxicating personal scent. God, he was so hungry for it.

  “I suppose there’s no point asking who you were talking to,” he murmured. “Especially when you’re not going to tell me, are you?”

  She lifted a shoulder, supremely unconcerned. “I wouldn’t worry your pretty little head about it. You know why I’m still here and what I want. If I was going to get away I would have by now.”