Executive Perks

by Angela Claire

  “That sounds like a little less fun from my perspective. But for the sake of argument, who would you play in this scenario?”

  “The pirate who’s captured you, of course.”

  “A female pirate?” The dubious look he flashed her made her feel mischievous.

  “Unless there’s a whole facet of your identity you have yet to mention to me, I’m a female pirate, yes.”

  He guffawed. “A female pirate it is. Or better yet, how about I’m the pirate and you’re the beautiful noblewoman I’ve taken for ransom and can’t keep my hands off?”

  “I’d rather be the pirate.”

  “I bet you would.”

  “So you look like a fine male specimen, bucko,” she said in her most commanding tone, leaning back against the window grate and spreading her legs wide, in the confident pose she imagined a pirate would assume. “Take your shirt off.”

  One corner of his mouth came up. She doubted Aaron Winston was into games in which he was the submissive. “Come on,” she urged. “Don’t forget I have thirty or so bloodthirsty sailors up on deck who would be more than happy to feed you to the sharks if you don’t obey me.”

  “With that kind of incentive, how can I refuse?” But he didn’t move to obey. Instead, he considered her. “I need a little more context for this game, though. Whose ship are we on? Yours or mine?”

  “Mine of course. After my men made short work of your lily-livered crew—”

  “Hey! They fought valiantly!”

  “They brought you onto my ship, bound hand and foot.”

  “No tying up. That’s a turn off for me,” he warned.

  “You being tied up, I assume.”

  “Sure. Now if you want me to tie you up, I’d be more than happy to oblige.”

  “No thanks. I’m the pirate queen, remember?”

  “You’re dressed pretty sedately for a pirate queen,” he remarked, eying her plain sweater and jeans.

  “Use your imagination.”

  “Help me out. Take off your sweater and bra. I see the pirate queen as barebreasted.”

  “You first.”

  His hands went to the buttons on his shirt. She followed his progress button by button. When he slid it off his shoulders, she hummed approvingly at the muscles in his shoulders, his pecs, his flat abdomen.

  “Very nice specimen indeed. Now the breeches, Captain.” The breeches displayed impressive evidence of his willingness to comply. She looked at it pointedly and said, in pirate queen mode, “I’m hoping you know what to do with that.”

  “Come on over here and I’ll show you.”

  “First the breeches.”

  He unsnapped them and slid the zipper carefully down, maintaining eye contact as he shed them.

  “Oh, drawers.” Sorely taxed drawers. “We can’t have that. Off with them.”

  His hands went to the elastic. “You’re getting off on this, aren’t you?”

  When he was naked, she chided, “Now don’t get cheeky with me. Although, now that I think of it, turn around and let me see that fine arse of your.”

  He reached for her and she danced away, making a circular motion with her index figure. With a smirk, he turned around and presented his backside to her. She reached out. It felt hard and firm to her touch, and she pinched it. He laughed. “You’ll make me blush, Virginia.”

  “I’m not Virginia. Remember, I’m the pirate queen.”

  “Does the pirate queen have a name?” he asked over his shoulder.

  She put her arms around his waist from behind and took hold, two fisted, of his very erect cock, stroking and pulling. “I’d say you like this game better than you’re letting on. And never mind the pirate queen’s name.”

  “I need to know your name. How else do I know what I should call out in my moment of ecstasy?” His voice, low and hoarse, sounded as if he was on his way to ecstasy just with her manual attention. She dropped her hands, not wanting her little fantasy to end so soon.

  “May I turn around?”

  “You may.” When he did so, he just stood in front of her. Oh, he was waiting for instruction. Mmm, this was nice. She whipped her sweater off and over her head, flinging it in the corner. “Now unbutton my shirt.”

  By the time he approached her and complied, lazily, one button at a time, thunder was cracking overhead and they could hear the beginnings of the rain. He slipped his hands inside her shirt, lightly touching her waist and whispered in her ear, “It sounds like a storm, Captain. Maybe we should go batten the hatches or whatever we’re supposed to do.”

  She put her arms around his neck. “I give the orders around here. We’ll wait the storm out here. Now kiss me, bucko.”

  “Aye aye,” he whispered, a laugh in his voice.

  * * * * *

  Their loving was quick and charged with energy from their game, but when they were done, they hurriedly redressed and headed at a quick pace back to the house during what looked to be only a brief respite from the rain. Dashing up to the porch, Aaron collapsed in a chair and pulled her on his lap, nuzzling her neck. “Now we’re back safe, I get to be the pirate while we wait out the storm.”

  She laughed.

  Suddenly Mr. Vincent was in front of them, on the steps to the porch, coughing loudly.

  “Sorry to intrude, Mr. Winston.”

  Aaron stayed seated while Virginia scurried off his lap. “No problem.”

  He gestured toward the shutters. “Did you want me to board up the windows?”

  Aaron’s head jerked in the direction of the ocean and he stood up too. “Jesus, those waves are high. I noticed the rain, of course, but wasn’t paying attention to the waves.”

  The waves, which had been regular and soothing when they’d first arrived on the island, seemed about to batter down the edge of the cliffs by now.

  “Mainland just radioed that there’s a pretty bad storm expected to hit us in the next few hours. They thought it might miss us, but now they’re not so sure.”

  “Boarding up the windows? That sounds like a hurricane,” Virginia commented. “We get that kind of thing at our cottage off the east coast, but never this late in the year.”

  “It’s not a hurricane,” Mr. Vincent said. “But it’s as close to one as you can get around here. It’s rare, but it happens.”

  “Yeah, we should board up the windows,” Aaron agreed. “Let me help you.”

  And with that, he was gone with Mr. Vincent to get the planks from the shed.

  Just the way their luck was running these days. A pseudo-hurricane. As if they didn’t have enough problems. At least it would probably keep whatever maniac was stalking her away.

  * * * * *

  Virginia looked at the clock.

  What was it about someone trying to kill you that put a woman into full damsel-in-distress mode? She should be calling Brendan for the latest flash financial figures and worrying about new strategies and planning the next board meeting. Instead, she found herself curled up by the fire listening to the sound of the ocean waves and perfectly content with no more than that. No more than that except the hot guy she was sharing it all with.

  If she was honest with herself, she’d admit she hadn’t agreed to go with Aaron just to keep herself safe. She could do that on her own. But hiring bodyguards wasn’t quite as appealing as having this particular bodyguard.

  She wished Aaron would come back. He and the caretaker had shuttered the windows of the main house, but then Aaron insisted on going back to help do the same to the caretaker’s. This house, which had seemed such a haven when he was in it, was pretty spooky when he wasn’t. Its history hadn’t helped.

  She glanced up at the stern Captain Seabridge.

  “You’re not helping,” she said aloud to the brooding portrait.

  When she heard the front door slam, she rose from her chair with relief. “About time,” she called and then stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of her Uncle Victor.

  Pointing a gun right at her.

&nb
sp; * * * * *

  Aaron was soaking wet by the time he made it back to the main house. He shouldn’t have left Virginia alone all this time, but he’d wanted to speak to Abe Vincent about how the security precautions would hold up at a loss of power and he didn’t want to worry her. He also wanted to talk to him about the possibility that Virginia really had seen someone else on the island.

  He met with both Vincents in the caretaker’s house—the real caretakers gone so that these bodyguards could assume their places without alerting Virginia to his concerns. The third guard he had hired, sight unseen of course—the Asian girl from the photo—joined them for the discussion as well. They’d all come very highly recommended and they all assured him that they had been patrolling all day and no one had gotten on the island. By the time he made it back to the main house, though, it was maybe an hour or so.

  He flipped his drenched slicker onto a hook in the hallway and called to Virginia over the sound of the rain.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Put your hands up, Winston.” The old man in front of him, gun pointed neatly in his direction, was nobody Aaron thought he’d ever seen. Not to mention, he was ancient. In the wilder days of his own youth, Aaron would’ve scoffed at being accosted by a septuagenarian assailant, but he himself was older now and had a more healthy respect for firearms than he did back when, like every other teenager, he thought he was invincible.

  He put his hands up.

  “Do I know you?”

  “Shut up.”

  Fine, no need for pleasantries. “Where’s Virginia?”

  “Your whore, you mean?”

  He stiffened, knowing it was ridiculous to feel such rage at the insult considering the situation he—and apparently Virginia, if her absence indicated anything—found himself in. But he felt it nonetheless. “She’s not a whore,” he said before he could stop himself.

  “What else do you call a woman who sells her family, her company, out for the sake of a good fuck?”

  Shit. Suddenly he thought he knew who this was, that comment and the man’s age giving him away despite the gun the man was holding and the improbable wet suit. “Uncle Victor?”

  “Watch your mouth, you young whelp. I’m not your uncle and I’m sure enough not that bitch’s uncle by virtue of anything other than my unfortunate marriage into that cursed Beckett family.”

  “Look, I don’t know how you got on this island—”

  “Child’s play!” the old man scoffed.

  Now that really pissed him off. “But there are more than a dozen,” he could exaggerate with the best of them, “trained bodyguards on this island and they’re going to be here any second.” He wasn’t half bad at lying either.

  The old man wasn’t buying it. “Then I’d best be quick about this, shouldn’t I?”

  Aaron heard the gun cock. “Where’s Virginia?” he asked urgently, knowing he had to keep the bastard talking, and wanting to know anyway with a desperation he couldn’t hide.

  “Firmly secured in the basement of this old monstrosity, just waiting for me to take care of you so I can turn back to her in my leisure. She can probably hear us right now through the pipes since the acoustics in this house are so abominable. I myself have been here almost a day and have had to listen to numerous nauseating bouts of fucking between you two.”

  “A day? But we checked the sensors just hours ago.”

  “Well, I was obviously busy, my boy, making sure you saw what you expected to see. As I said, child’s play—for me, anyway.”

  “I don’t suppose I could hire you.”

  “Enough talk.”

  A crack of ominous thunder accompanied that clipped observation. The old man was losing his patience.

  If Virginia was still alive, there was no choice but to overpower her uncle, right now, which normally wouldn’t have been much of a problem, except for the aforementioned gun pointing right at him. Hard to believe the guy couldn’t manage to get off at least one shot while Aaron tackled him. He’d just have to take the chance.

  Another ear-rending bout of thunder drew Aaron’s attention to the window directly across the room from him, which should’ve been boarded up, had been in fact by him and Vincent some time ago. But it wasn’t. The storm must’ve torn the wooden planks away as the window was transparent again, the driving rain like a single sheet against it.

  A face appeared in the window and he gasped, causing Victor to glance over at it.

  “Samantha!” the old man cried and in that split second, Aaron tackled him, the gun indeed going off, but in the course of the distraction caused by that face at the window managing not to even nick Aaron.

  Aaron wrenched the gun from the blue-veined suddenly shaky hands and in a fury punched the old man in the jaw as hard as he could. When Victor collapsed, eyes closed, Aaron was pulling back for another punch, having none of it when he heard a familiar and bizarrely out-of-context voice behind him. “I think he’s out, buddy. In fact, he may have fainted.”

  Aaron’s head snapped back and Rye was standing in the doorway, in a drenched yellow rain slicker with several uniformed sheriff deputies, in their own drenched accoutrements, behind him. Aaron tried to take it in, but failed in view of the figure that appeared behind one of them.

  “Virginia!” he rushed to her and grabbed her as she flung her arms behind his neck.

  “God, I can’t believe it was Victor,” she cried into his shoulder before pulling her tear-stained face away. “I thought he’d kill you.”

  “Yeah, about that.” Aaron looked to Rye as one of the deputies was cuffing the still unconscious and now bizarrely miscast villain. “How the hell did you know to get here?”

  “Your security system, buddy. It stopped working, so like we planned, I brought in the cavalry.”

  “I had Rye standing by on the mainland,” Aaron explained to Virginia, before turning back to his friend. “But we checked it just a few hours ago. It was fine.”

  “Apparently, this old guy, if that was who did all this, managed to mask the disengagement on the panel here and in fact did disengage it long enough to get on the island, which we figure must have been sometime last night, but a back-up he didn’t know about kicked in after a lag and alerted us. Thank God he didn’t go to kill you right away.”

  “Yeah, I’d say that was a flaw in the system,” Aaron noted wryly, still hugging a shivering Virginia close to him. “But at least something kicked in at the end. The old man wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.”

  “Pretty smart, though,” Rye observed neutrally. By now, one of the deputies had managed to bring Victor to and was urging him, handcuffed, to his feet.

  “I saw Samantha,” the old man was muttering, “right there in that window.”

  A window that, as they all looked to, appeared to still be boarded up despite what Aaron himself had seen. Aaron shook his head and turned to Virginia. “Did you just pry the wood back when you looked in?”

  “What?”

  “When you looked into the window. He must have thought you were Samantha. That must be what shook him up so.”

  “Samantha? The dead girl?”

  “Yes. I guess Victor was convinced he was seeing her ghost.”

  Virginia shook her head and Aaron was just now realizing her clothes seemed to be dry. “He must have been imagining things.”

  Aaron hesitated. “I saw it too.”

  “It wasn’t me, Aaron. I was in the cellar trying to figure out how to rescue you, when Rye and the rest of them found me.”

  “I found her before you showed up, Aaron, and then we could hear Victor with you, through the pipes just as he said. We got up here as fast as we could without alerting him.”

  Aaron still stared down at Virginia. “You didn’t…”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “There has to be a rational explanation for this. I saw her—you, I mean—clear as day.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re welcome for rescuing you even though we had to go throu
gh a hurricane to do it,” Rye said.

  Aaron turned to his friend and laughed. They could figure this all out later, since they seemed to have caught the culprit. He felt as though a huge weight was lifted off him. “We don’t have hurricanes in Oregon, Rye. Anyway, what’re you complaining about? You’re still on the clock, aren’t you?”

  “Needless to say,” Rye said with a smile, wiping his glasses.

  * * * * *

  By the time they’d ridden out the storm and gotten back to New York so Victor could be questioned by the cops running the investigation, Baker had picked up Brian to question as well—for good reason, as it turned out. Both men who married into the Beckett family had a lot to answer for.

  Baker let Virginia and Aaron watch the questioning through a one-way window. Victor had waived an attorney, more evidence of his dangerous arrogance, and was sitting with the detective.

  “So who was Samantha to you,” Baker started out, “and why did you murder her?”

  “She was my granddaughter.” Sitting in the barren little questioning room, on a plain metal chair at a small table, it was hard to believe Victor had been such a threat. He just looked like a defiant old man in the harsh fluorescent light, an orange jumpsuit making him appear more pathetic than his tailored Brooks Brothers suit undoubtedly did or even the wet suit had. “And I didn’t murder her. Virginia did.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, not technically, but it was all her fault. Samantha came to see me about a month ago. She had learned who her father was and she—”

  The policeman finished for him. “Was blackmailing you?”

  “No! Of course not. I took one look at her and knew she had to have some Beckett blood in her somewhere. When she told me her father was my poor dead Jeremy, well, from the look of her, so much Beckett in her appearance, I had no reason to doubt it. A fairly simple search of birth records confirmed it. Jeremy had never known. Her mother, by all indications, was trash, no more than a one-night stand really.”

  “Jeremy,” Virginia explained to Aaron, “was my cousin. He died a long time ago in a boating accident.” She turned back to listen through the window, unseen by this man she’d known all her life, but evidently never known.