SeductiveIntent

by Angela Claire

  Seductive Intent

  Angela Claire

  Set in the same world as Executive Perks.

  It’s not unusual for playboy Brendan Beckett to wake up with a girl in his bed. One holding a gun to his head, though, does give him pause. In the dark, he can’t see the female burglar grilling him about some safe, but he has to admit he likes the feel of her straddling him to keep him still.

  Sophia may not know her last name or her real age, but she knows the life of crime, usually as bait for the rich men she cons. But now she’s looking for a mysterious puzzle-box that her mentor urgently needs. When she can’t get any information out of Brendan during her midnight foray into his apartment, she crashes his sister’s wedding to meet him and hopefully spark his interest.

  The stacked beauty sparks something, all right—his suspicion. At his house in the Cayman Islands, Brendan’s determined to get the truth out of her. Or seduce her. Actually, he’s kind of good either way.

  Seductive Intent

  Angela Claire

  Chapter One

  The sound of a gun cocking was not something Brendan Beckett was used to hearing. Even in his dreams. It made an impression, as did the woman leaning over him in the dark with that very dangerous weapon pointed at his temple.

  “I know this sounds trite, but if you move a muscle, you’re dead.”

  Trite or not, that kind of statement never got old.

  “Uh, okay.”

  “Tell me where the safe is.”

  He was so going to get his money back on that expensive security system the building had sold him when he bought this penthouse. How the hell did this woman just waltz right in here in the middle of the night and hold a gun to his head? He knew it was a woman only from her soft voice and the feel of her straddling him. Too light to be a man. But it was so fucking dark, he could barely see the black garbed figure sitting on his stomach.

  Sitting on his stomach? What the fuck? It wasn’t bad enough he was being robbed by a woman—which was only bound to put a damper on the high regard he normally had for the female sex—but she had to go and mount him? A position which, by the by, he usually enjoyed a lot more than he did at the current moment. He’d never hear the expression “woman on top” with quite the same enthusiasm.

  The barrel of the gun pressed a little harder into his temple, nudging him ever so not slightly into providing the information his midnight visitor had requested.

  “There is no safe.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Look around yourself. Or, wait, you probably already have or you wouldn’t be asking me. I imagine you professional burglars like to get in and out with a minimum of fuss. You’ve probably been here for quite a while already, taking care not to wake me.”

  “How do you know I’m a burglar? Maybe I’m an assassin?”

  Although he was always one for witty repartee with a woman, he found it hard to appreciate the chit chat given the current circumstances. As it was, the mere fact of a woman sitting on him in the middle of the night was having a predictable effect. Christ, to be honest, he was scared as hell, but apparently his cock didn’t scare easy. He hoped she didn’t notice.

  She scooted a little farther up and muttered, “What a wolf.”

  No such luck.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “Your erection is prodding my ass.”

  The final indignity. “Well, you are on top of me in my bed.”

  “With a gun pointed right at you. You’d think that’d give you pause.”

  “It does. Believe me.”

  “But you’re still up for a fuck?”

  “Was that an invitation?”

  “No. More like an observation. Now where is the safe?”

  “Look, I’m being honest here. Why wouldn’t I be? There is no safe. If there was, I’d point you right to it so you could get the hell out of here. Believe me, I’m no hero.”

  “I believe you.”

  Okay, so he wasn’t in much of a position to argue. He really should just let it go. But this girl, whoever the hell she was, was really pissing him off here. And it wasn’t just the gun thing. Although he guessed he should be more pissed off about that.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “What?”

  “That I’m no hero.”

  “Nothing. You’re the one who said it.”

  “But you agreed with me pretty quickly.”

  “Well, you do have a reputation for being a playboy.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I imagine you probably have bodyguards and the like to do the dirty work for you rather than mess up your pretty face.”

  She was the one with the gun, but did she have to be such a bitch about it?

  “I’m twice your size. I could probably overpower you.”

  “Exactly. But you haven’t even tried.”

  “You observe I’m ready for a fuck and now you’re practically inviting me to overpower you? I’m starting to doubt here that you even are a burglar.”

  His eyes were accustoming themselves to the dark, a dark much blacker than he usually had in his bedroom. He realized she must have shut the blinds, since he’d fallen asleep with them open. Her face was so close to his now, mere inches away at most, that he could almost feel her breath on him. Arguing with her hadn’t dissipated his erection any more than having a gun pointed at his head had.

  Okay, so he’d had some inadvisable hookups in his long and varied sexual history. Of course there’d been the usual sleeping with his mom’s slutty best friend when he’d turned eighteen. The slutty best friend of one of his sister’s even earlier than that, for which he’d inevitably gotten no end of grief. Then the occasional slutty girlfriend of a friend, though he’d honestly been ashamed of himself for giving in to that and really hadn’t done it more than once. Twice maybe. He had a thing for sluts. Then there were the wild days when he’d pick up a girl in a bar, even a biker bar once and a while just for fun, when he had no idea who she was or where she’d been, although he was always careful to suit up first and had never gotten his throat slit for his troubles.

  But he’d never contemplated a hookup as bizarre as this.

  Not that this unseen girl was inviting him to hook up. More like insulting him non-stop, but somehow managing to turn him on nonetheless. He’d never figured himself for low self-esteem.

  And of course there was still the little matter of that gun.

  “I’m not going to risk trying to overpower you when you have a gun to my head. What kind of an idiot do you think I am?”

  “A cowardly one?”

  Okay, that was it. Enough was enough. He batted as hard as he could at the gun, feeling the shocking and unpleasant sensation of clipping her wrist in the process. He heard the gun skitter away as she clasped her wrist and he flipped her over, coming full on top of her with his weight.

  “Ow!” she cried, pushing her palms against his shoulders to no avail. “Get off me. I can’t breathe.”

  He felt for her wrists and wrenched them above her head and once they were safely by her head, he relented and leaned a little to the side to take some of the weight off her.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  “Oh, you big baby. Who’s the one who broke into whose apartment and held a gun to whose head?”

  “And that gives you the right to manhandle me?”

  “Well, uh, yeah, Miss Smarty Pants. I’m defending myself.” The words were no sooner out of his mouth than his overtaxed body registered the feel of her under him. Wow. Even in the dark, not able to see her, just feel her. Per his usual custom he was naked and her limbs were encased in some lycra-feeling material, all over, so they weren’t skin to skin exactly, just the next be
st thing. He could feel long, long legs and, whoa, a tight, high chest. A hook-up wasn’t seeming so far-fetched at right this moment, though he briefly wondered how he’d find an opening in this cat suit thing and whether he could trust her enough to let go of her to reach for a condom from the night stand.

  Oh, and whether he should call the police while he was at it.

  He involuntarily arched his hard cock into the vee of her legs. Very nice. He let out a little moan and pushed her hands up higher.

  She wasn’t struggling. Oddly, without her gun, she wasn’t so talkative either, which did give him pause. Burglar or no burglar, of course if she wasn’t into this…

  She leaned up to him and he felt soft lips graze his chin. Optimistically, he told himself she’d probably been aiming for higher and he brought his lips to hers, tasting a slight lemony flavor.

  Then he was out.

  “Did you have to hit him so hard?”

  Arthur lugged the dead weight of a very unconscious Brendan Beckett off Sophia. She scrambled out from under him as Arthur then let the handsome, naked man fall back onto the mattress face down.

  “Turn him over or something. He’ll suffocate.”

  Arthur breathed a very eloquent sigh of disgust and condescended to flip the bigger man over onto his back. She was always amazed at how strong Arthur was, given he could look as slight as he wanted to. It was the same way with age. Arthur could appear anywhere from twenty to eighty-five, with the right props. Right now, though, he just looked nondescript, in a black body suit like hers, which allowed them to fade in and out of the night, and not incidentally climb from the roof over onto the balcony of Brendan’s penthouse apartment.

  “Well, that was a total waste of time,” Arthur commented.

  “You didn’t give me enough time with him.”

  “I didn’t want to give you any time with him, as you recall.” He picked up the gun from the floor and wagged it at her. “And bringing this into the matter was very dangerous, as you well know. It could’ve added years if we got caught.” He slipped the gun into an almost imperceptible pocket in his suit. “Get caught,” he corrected. “Let’s get out of here. It’s not here.”

  They had searched the apartment thoroughly while Brendan was out cold, verging on comatose after a mild sedative they’d managed to slip in his nightly drink while waiting for him to come home. Paradoxically, they didn’t dare search until he had gotten home and was safely unconscious, since the risk of him arriving in the middle of their search, even if they thought they knew his schedule, was too great.

  When he’d had his drink and undressed and the sedative kicked in, she and Arthur had come out of hiding and thoroughly searched the apartment, as big as most houses, but a confined space after all. Two floors of space and no safe or other hidden compartment that they could detect.

  There hadn’t been one in the blueprints either, but that wasn’t uncommon. Often a rich occupant like Mr. Beckett here installed his own, although they could find no evidence of him having done that either as they cased the apartment after he moved in. Still, Arthur was convinced one might be here.

  And when they couldn’t find it and the effect of the sedative was likely to wear off, Sophia volunteered to try to get the information out of Brendan. It was then that she’d produced the gun, loaded even. Arthur never showed when he was mad. He just got quiet. She didn’t need a lecture from him on the A to Zs of successful house burgling. So she quickly said, “I’ll wake him up and ask him. He’ll be so scared, he just might tell us.”

  “He just might see us too.”

  “We’ll do it in the complete dark. I’ll put the gun to his head and he’ll be blabbering within two minutes.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “You’ll be right here.”

  Arthur had agreed, but she knew he hadn’t been happy about it and now an “I told you so” was written all over him.

  “You didn’t give me enough time with him,” she repeated.

  “Time for what? Having sex him? Was that part of your plan, my dear?”

  “No. I just… Fine. Never mind. Let’s get out of here. It’s probably somewhere else.”

  As they went out onto the balcony to scramble back up to the roof, she took one last look through the glass doors at the darkened bedroom. He was going to have an awful headache in the morning.

  Brendan wasn’t a morning person. Admittedly. But he wasn’t a “what fresh hell is this?” person in the morning either.

  “Time to rise and shine, Master Beckett.”

  “For Christ’s sake, if you call me Master one more time, I’m going to fire you. I swear I will.”

  Why the hell he even had a butler, he had no idea. In fact, it hadn’t been his idea. He just happened to be at a house party over in the UK a few months ago when this bitch of a hostess fired Mandrake here for no good reason. Of course, her reason had probably seemed good to her at the time. Mandrake had been caught in bed with her own current lover, an annoying Italian young man of obviously confused sexuality who had been hitting on everyone, Brendan and his own date—a fresh-faced English girl—included all weekend. Brendan hadn’t felt that Mandrake here should bear all the brunt of the hostess’ ire. So he’d hired him on the spot.

  Unfortunately, Mandrake took his duties very seriously. Even though Brendan had put his foot down about letting him live in, which Mandrake had somehow suspected was a homophobic move, Mandrake insisted on showing up for work here every morning as if he was punching a time-clock. What he did during the day while Brendan was gone, he had no idea and he didn’t care. His fondest hope was that Mandrake would someday be the beneficiary of New York State’s groundbreaking rules on same-sex marriage and retire after tying the knot with some similarly inclined rich man.

  And then he remembered. Last night. Or the middle of it anyway. He hadn’t dreamed it, had he? The pounding in his head and the bump he could feel at the base of his skull suggested not.

  As Mandrake busied himself putting the unasked-for tray of coffee and rolls down on the nightstand, Brendan said, “I was robbed.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Here. Last night. A woman.”

  “You brought a woman home and she robbed you? I’ve warned you about that kind of thing, Master Beckett. There are so many nice, suitable girls in Manhattan. I don’t know why you insist on—”

  “I didn’t bring her home! She was just here.”

  “You had a girl waiting for you when you got home? Well, I suppose that’s not so unusual for you. But it would serve you well to be on your guard a bit more, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  He stood up. “Get me some aspirin, would you, Mandrake?”

  Mandrake pursed his lips and hurried in to the adjoining bathroom. When he came back out, he had the aspirin and a robe. “I would really appreciate it, as I’ve mentioned to you before, Master Beckett, if you would not parade about in the nude around me.”

  Brendan took the aspirin and shrugged into the robe. “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. I forgot.”

  “It’s common courtesy. I would ask the same of a woman employer.”

  “Yeah, sure. Sorry.” He downed the aspirin with a slug of coffee, burning his throat in the process but not caring. He was starting to think that hostess had maybe just used her boyfriend in bed with Mandrake as an excuse to fire him. He was kind of a pain.

  “And the thief wasn’t waiting for me when I got home. She was sitting on top of me when I woke up. With a gun to my head, by the way.”

  “Oh, dear. Would you like me to call the police?”

  Brendan looked around. His wallet was on the dresser as usual and nothing, in the bedroom anyway, seemed out of place. “She was asking about a safe. Maybe she didn’t really take anything. Does anything look missing?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed, but I didn’t do an inventory against an insurance roster or some such thing.”

  Brendan made a snap decision. “Forget it.” He didn’t relish telli
ng anybody that a woman had held a gun to his head and then, what? He didn’t really know. He supposed she, or more probably an accomplice, had hit him with something. At least they didn’t shoot him. “I would like to know how she managed to get in, though. That was a little unsettling.”

  “I know a man who may be able to help.”

  Since Mandrake had notoriously bad taste in men—Exhibit A being the Italian boyfriend—Brendan hesitated.

  “He’s a private investigator I met at a party a few years back. He’s good. He could evaluate your security measures.”

  “He’s a friend of yours?”

  “More like a friend of a friend kind of thing.”

  “Okay. Give him a call. See if he can come over this morning.”

  When the man, W.S. Kendon—Sam, he’d said to call him—showed up an hour later, he seemed competent enough. “They came in through the balcony,” he said after inspecting the apartment.

  “They? Why do you think there was more than one of them?”

  “Scuff marks up here.” He gestured to the outside of the building above the doorwall. “They climbed something, probably something as simple as a rope, back up to the roof. See those slight marks? Probably caused by scuffs of the toes of a shoe gaining purchase as they climbed. The distance between them suggests they were made by two climbers.”

  Brendan looked down to Manhattan seventy stories below. “Everybody has balconies,” he grumbled.

  “Yes, but it would be dangerous to climb from one to another. Really only the top one, the penthouse balcony, is safe enough to climb onto because you need to just be unseen the short distance down from the roof. That’s why a lot of penthouse apartments don’t have balconies.”

  “They sold that as a plus.”

  “Yeah, well, it is a plus. Most burglars these days don’t bother to climb into an expensive apartment like this. They’d figure the security precautions would keep them away.”

  “Which, thanks for reminding me, they didn’t.”

  “Disabled somehow, would be my guess. I can look at the control panel if you like.”