by Liz Crowe
“Morning, Lainey,” Jon said. “Please try not to sue us for sexual harassment. You’re pretty invaluable around here.” She looked up to see them, her handsome, over-the-top masculine bosses. Men she now trusted more than she had anyone in her life.
“Hey, what’s wrong,” Zane asked coming around the high counter and tugging her to her feet. As he gripped her upper arms, she felt an odd lightening of stress at the realization of his concern for her. She slumped and dropped back into her chair. Zane crouched down in front her. Jon leaned over the tall counter. Both men had legitimate worry in their eyes. “Did somebody hurt you? We didn’t even hear you leave Friday.”
“I know,” she said, waving a hand and trying to pull her act together. “No, nobody hurt me. I did…I did a really dumb thing. And I’m in regret mode right now, I guess.” She stared down at her hands, clenched tight again in her lap. “Don’t mind me. We have work to do.” She grabbed a tissue, blew her nose, and turned away from Zane to face her computer screen.
At that moment, an email message hit her private inbox. She knew it was that one because she only kept it on her phone since private email servers weren’t acceptable on her high-security level work computers.
With a sigh, figuring it for a bill collector, she grabbed the device and swiped it open. As her eyes took in the words, and her brain processed who it was from, she gasped and sat up straighter.
Zane had wandered away from her and was sorting through the day’s messages on his tablet computer. Jon had disappeared into the office he shared with his former SEAL compatriot turned business partner. Face burning, she glanced around, relieved to see neither man had heard her. She put the phone down with a steady hand and got back to work, unwilling to acknowledge what that message meant.
He’d found her, the bastard. And if he’d found her phone, it would only be days, maybe even hours, before he figured out how to get to her.
When Owen came in, he grunted a reply to Zane and Jon then closed the door behind him in his tiny work cubicle. Five hours later, while she was saving a presentation Jon had put together for the Coast Guard onto an encrypted jump drive, his door flew open, and he marched right up to her.
She ignored him, watching as the data repopulated itself on the drive before she saved it to their newly protected cloud storage. Her brain was boiling with terror, but the work of the last few hours had kept her focused. The last thing she would allow herself to do now is get distracted by Owen, Mr. Blow Me and Beat It.
“Lainey,” he said after a solid five minutes of awkward silence as she went about her work, and he stared at her from halfway across the reception area.
“Yes,” she asked, not meeting his eyes as she added a few things to Zane’s online calendar. Busy work, she knew. But she had to do it, or she’d run screaming out into the parking lot.
“What are you doing for lunch?”
She froze, her fingers curved over the keyboard. Her face got even hotter as she whirled around in the chair and glared hard at him. He looked as good as ever, in a black polo shirt that hugged his firm torso and left enough of that hop vine and flowers showing on both biceps. He wore his usual cargo shorts, leaving his prosthesis exposed.
The sight of it brought back that intense Saturday morning, the way he’d tugged her onto his lap and kissed her like nobody’s business until she’d been ready to do anything the man wanted her to do. He’d not been wearing it that morning, and she recalled liking that he felt comfortable enough around her to go without it.
But now—fury made her vision narrow and take on a red tinge around the edges. “Lunch. Really, Owen? Seriously. You want to know what I’m doing for lunch. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s almost three o’clock.”
He ran a hand around the back of his neck. The sight made her have to battle the urge to leap up and wrap her arms around him, to soothe him, to let him soothe her with more of those amazing kisses of his.
“Uh, yeah. I thought we might…um…take a ride.”
She flopped back, her arms dangling at her sides. The memory of the email was shoved aside for the first time since she’d seen it as the thought of going anywhere, doing anything with Owen Taylor made her every cell and molecule do a happy dance. But she frowned at him. “A ride, eh? That a euphemism for ‘Owen needs another blow job?’ Or am I just projecting?”
“Hey, uh, Lainey?” The sound of Jon’s voice behind her made her clench her eyes shut. “Can you change something on page twenty-two of the presentation?”
“Yes,” she said, not taking her eyes off Owen. His face was beet red, and he stood at stiff attention as if in the presence of his superior officer. “Put it on my desk,” she said, still watching Owen.
“Um. Sure thing. Sorry…for interrupting.”
Owen didn’t relax until Jon’s office door shut. “Shit,” Lainey muttered turning around to face her monitor, needing to not see Owen again. Ever.
But when he flipped the chair around, and she saw he was sitting in the matching one, and tugging her to him, she gasped, and then giggled at the look of amusement on his face. “Cat’s out of the bag,” he said, cupping her face with his large, warm hand. “They’re gonna be so fucking jealous of me.”
She pressed her lips together but let him keep pulling her chair until she was knee-to-knee with him. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead to hers. One palm was around the back of her neck, the other on her thigh, burning a hole through the fabric of her skirt and making her damp between the legs.
“I’m kind of a fucked up mess, Lainey,” he whispered. She put her hand on his biceps, loving the play of muscles under her palm.
“Yeah, well, that makes two of us,” she said, pecking his nose before she pulled away, embarrassed by the public display. The sudden realization of just how fucked up things were going to get now—now that she’d gotten the signal from the universe that she had to keep moving along, keep running away, to avoid the man who’d sent her the message this morning—made tears spring to her eyes. Owen frowned at her and then grabbed her hand.
“I’m sorry I was an ass Saturday morning.”
She nodded, sniffled and glanced over her shoulder to see both Zane and Jon staring at them through the glass between Jon’s office and the reception area, their mouths hanging open like a couple of doofuses. Owen didn’t pay attention to anything but her, though, which gave her a seriously girly-romance tingle all over.
No. Stop it. You got the girlie romance tingles for exactly one other man in your life. And look where that got you.
She pulled her hand out of Owen’s grasp.
“Can I steal Lainey away for the rest of the afternoon, guys?” Owen called out, looking over at his boss’s still gah-gah faces through the glass.
She flushed hot and looked down at her keyboard. The silence that descended had a personality of its own. When she looked up at Zane who’d materialized at her desk, he seemed to be willing to let her decide. She gave a quick, brief nod. He smiled and looked at Owen.
“Sure thing. We held it down for months before you two got here. I guess we can manage for a few hours without you today. Right, Jon?” He elbowed his friend, who was standing next to him, still gaping at Owen, then Lainey, then back again. “Right, Jon?”
“Ow, hey!” Jon moved out of Zane’s reach and rubbed his side. “Sure. Sure. Go. I mean. Yeah. Go.” He slouched back to his office and shut the door behind him. Zane looked over at the two of them with a wide grin.
“Don’t mind him. He’s just upset ‘cause you kids are acting all grown up.”
Owen glared at him, but Lainey couldn’t suppress a giggle. He glanced at her, his face wide open, innocent of anything but happiness. She grabbed her purse, and then his hand, and they walked out into the hot Virginia afternoon.
Owen drove them toward the coast in silence. Lainey fidgeted, knowing she needed to tell him about the message she’d gotten, figuring he might even be able to help her but unwilling to sully their afternoon with her sordid back story. Finally,
he parked at a dock, jumped out and came around to open her door.
She took his hand. “I am perfectly capable of getting out of a car by myself you know,” she said. “You could save yourself the trouble.”
“It’s no trouble,” he said, giving her a brief brush of his lips against hers. She sighed. “No trouble at all. Come on. I hope you like fish.”
“Uh, yeah,” she said, puzzled since there wasn’t a restaurant in sight. A tall, leathery-skinned guy came out of a small building on the dock.
“Hey, Owen. Got you all set up over there. Give me a minute, and I’ll grab the cooler.”
Still confused, Lainey let Owen pull her over to a large, sleek-looking boat, kitted out with fishing poles, nets, and a giant tackle box. “Your chariot, m’lady,” he said, handing her into the boat. She sat and pulled her hair back into a ponytail with the holder she kept on her wrist. Owen was staring at her, somewhat pop-eyed.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” she said, tugging the hem of her shirt down. “We gotta catch our own lunch today or what?”
Owen’s jaw snapped shut. “Uh, no. I’ve got that all arranged. I just thought, you know, it’s a gorgeous day, you’re a gorgeous lady, and we could spend some time together that didn’t involve computers or hackers or office work.”
“Or blowjobs?” She raised one eyebrow and tilted her head, treating him to an obvious up-and-down his lovely body with her eyes.
His face reddened. The leathery guy appeared holding a big cooler in both hands. Owen turned to take it. “Thanks, Greg. I owe you one.”
“Yeah, yeah. That’s what they all say.” Greg shot her a jaunty little salute and then headed back to his shack. She noted his limp for the first time.
“He’s ex-Marine. Like me,” Owen said as he plunked the cooler down between the seats. “Here,” he said, handing her a bottle of sunscreen. “Oh and here.” He pulled a pink shopping bag out from somewhere. She frowned at it a half second, and then took it. “Guessed on the size.” He gave the eyeball crawl back, in spades, down her chest and torso, to her feet, then back to her face.
“Guess I deserved that,” she said, pulling out a black string bikini in the perfect size—which wasn’t easy. Her top didn’t match her bottom. But he’d figured it out.
“Yeah, you did.” He tugged off his shirt and draped it over the captain’s chair. She bit her lip at the sight of his chiseled torso with the intricate tattoo across both shoulders and down his upper arms. “You can change…uh…”
She already had her bra tugged out the armholes of her shirt and was busy tying the strings under her boobs.
“How did you…”
“Girl magic. Best not to question it.”
He shrugged, winked, and then gunned the motor. Once she had the bikini bottoms secure under her skirt and had hidden the evidence of her lust in the form of her totally damp panties down in the shopping bag, she cast off from the dock, then turned and faced him. He was doing that ogle-eyed stare thing again, this time at her lower half.
“Jesus, man. Get a grip on yourself.”
She reached for him and put her hand over the lovely hardening mound under his zipper. “Or I’ll have to do it,” she whispered, going up on her bare tiptoes to bite his lower lip.
“Aye-aye,” he said, putting his arm around her before he kissed the top of her head. “Take a seat before you make all the rest of these bozos fall off their damn boats.” He motioned around them. There were at least a dozen men staring at her from boats and the dock. She blew some kisses, waved at a few of the ones who dared wolf-whistle at her until she was forced to sit when her lunch date gunned the engine.
She turned to admire Owen as he stood, making small movements on the wheel to guide the boat around the crowded harbor. When they hit the ocean, he opened it up, and she shrieked with delight as the boat skimmed over the top of the water. The salty spray peppered her face. The noise of the engine filled her ears. For a few seconds, she allowed herself to think she might have found a real man and a good life with a job she enjoyed almost as much as cooking. But reality soon crept in, and her brain began to fog over with anxiety.
After about twenty minutes, Owen slowed the engine, and idled, as he seemed mesmerized by the vast horizon in front of them. She got up and put her arm around his waist, loving the warm press of his torso against her bare skin. She hip bumped him after a few minutes.
“I’m starved.”
His eyes widened as if he was emerging from a deep sleep. When she tried to pull away from him, he held on tighter. She let him, not bothered at all by the nearness of him, the way she felt comfortable and safe in the circle of his arms. Finally, he tilted her face up and stared into her eyes in a way that brought to mind cheesy romance novels. But she couldn’t stop looking back at him so she gave a mental shrug and decided to go with the cheesy romance moment.
“I’m not really a nice guy,” he said. “Or at least, I haven’t been. I’ve never had what you’d call a girlfriend. Just a bunch of bedmates. I don’t like too much emotion. I’m not used to it.” He hesitated then slanted his lips over hers. The kiss was gentle but picked up steam when she turned to him and pressed against his body, wanting him closer. Needing him closer.
They were panting when they broke away from each other. Her whole body was covered in goosebumps in spite of being in the full sun on an eighty-degree day.
He gripped her arms. “I’m not a nice guy, Lainey. I’m not.”
“Why don’t you let me decide that? I mean, after you feed me ‘cause I’m gonna waste away to nothing out here.”
He grinned and chucked her under the chin, then opened up the cooler. As she studied the contents and started setting them out, he raised a striped canopy that covered two-thirds of the boat, shielding them from the sun. And other boats, she noted with a little shiver of anticipation.
They put away the club sandwiches and apples, and then sat back sipping from ice-cold water bottles, snuggled together under the canopy and watching boats race around in the distance. Just when she was convinced he’d kiss her again—which would turn into something much more fun, something she’d never thought she’d want to do on a boat in the middle of the ocean but that she wanted to do so badly at that moment her whole body was on high, horny alert—he got up and grabbed a fishing pole.
She looked at it, then at his happy, almost boyish expression. “You’re serious.”
He nodded. She took the pole, smiling at his eagerness as he baited her hook and then his. As he cast off, she took a few minutes to admire the killer view—the wide shoulders, rippling back muscles, the firm ass. Even his legs were a marvel to her—including the device below his left knee. She reached out and touched it, loving the coolness of the metal and plastic, loving it because she loved every inch of him.
She sat back, shocked at herself for even thinking such a thing.
“Owen, I need to tell you something,” she said, as she stood and cast her line out the other side of the boat.
“Hmmm,” he said. She leaned back against him, letting the warmth of his skin give her strength.
“I’m married.” He moved, and she nearly fell on her ass. She reeled in her line and turned to face him. His eyes were wide, his knuckles white around the fishing pole. “But I ran away. I’m trying to work enough to afford the divorce attorney. I’ll need a good one, you see because…” She stopped and bit her lip, as the horror show rush of memories bowled her over. “He’s, ah, he’s really rich and influential. He owned a bunch of restaurants including the one where I worked in Orlando.” She sucked in a breath, willing away the images of him, her powerful, handsome, rich, asshole of a husband. “He was great at first. Nice. Charming. Eager to please. Then he wasn’t. He’s a bully. A thin-skinned narcissistic asshole, but by the time I figured that out, I was married to him.”
Owen set his fishing pole down carefully. She could tell he was moving slowly so as to manage his own rising temper. “How long were you married to him?” He seemed to
choke on his own words.
She set her pole down and reached for his hand, but he jerked away from her.
“Just tell me all of it. Are there…are there kids?”
“No, no, nothing like that. Neither of us wanted kids—thank the good Lord for small favors.” She sat and tugged him down into the seat across from her. The boat rocked side to side in a large wake. Seagulls screamed overhead. The sun beat down on her bare shoulders and chest. “We’ve been married almost four years. He ‘let me’ work for two years then made me quit and move to California with him. He’s got houses all over the place. Cars. Boats. He even has a damn helicopter. It’s all family money, though. He’s just the playboy son of a rich father. Anyway.” She forced herself to relax and look into Owen’s eyes. “One night, I just…ran. I took one of the credit cards he gave me, booked a flight to the east coast, waited tables a while in the Outer Banks, then moved here and got this job. I promised myself that I wouldn’t stay long, just long enough to be able to afford a lawyer.” Tears burned her eyes. Despite her effort not to let them, they spilled down her cheeks. “I’m trying to divorce him. I’ve been looking over my shoulder for almost two years now, staying one step ahead. But…um…” She squeezed her eyes shut.
“What?” Owen demanded as he took her chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilted her face up so she had to look at him. “What is it? Did he hurt you, Lainey? Tell me now because if I have to find out from someone else…”
She shook free of his grip, suddenly pissed off by his anger. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll handle it. I already found a lawyer who said he’d take my case on for half the price.”
“Yeah, did you meet this so-called lawyer face-to-face?” He gave her a blatant, ugly, non-flirtatious once-over. “I’ll just bet he’d take your case for half price.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“Don’t be stupid. I know you’re not, so don’t act like you are.” He raked his fingers through his hair and stared at the horizon again. “All right. Back to my original question.” His voice was soft, falsely calm, but she decided to be totally honest with him. A new thing for her, she realized. “Did he hurt you?” He punctuated each word as if they were their own sentence.