Secret Pleasure

by Taryn Leigh Taylor

  Aidan smirked at the warning because he knew it would piss Max off.

  “What the hell is going on? It’s after midnight and—oh my God, Max! You’re bleeding.”

  Both he and Max turned their attention to the gorgeous blonde in the tank top and boxers who’d just emerged from what Aidan presumed was the master bedroom.

  “I’m fine,” Max told her, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It came away smeared with blood.

  “You’re not fine,” she said pointedly, the slight rebuke obviously aimed at Aidan. Not that he gave a damn if Max’s latest piece of ass didn’t approve of his manners.

  “Aidan’s always had shit for timing, but we have some things to discuss. Go back to bed.”

  The animosity cooled, but her look turned speculative. Instead of following orders, she headed toward the tricked-out kitchenette and pulled open the freezer.

  Aidan frowned at that. Conquests, as a rule, disappeared when you told them to.

  So not just a piece of ass, then.

  Interesting.

  Aidan sniffed, and the metallic tang of blood registered in the back of his throat. He grabbed the hem of his T-shirt and wiped his face before prodding gingerly at his nose. It didn’t feel broken.

  The blonde returned with a makeshift ice pack in each hand—ziplock baggie, ice cubes, dish towel—and, surprising the hell out of him, held one out to Aidan.

  “I’m Emma.”

  Aidan took it, a platitude. She obviously had no idea who he was and how her boyfriend felt about him.

  “Max has told me a lot about you.”

  Or he was wrong on all counts.

  He rested the ice on his aching knuckles, his surprised gaze sliding to Max. “I didn’t know he’d ever told anyone a lot about anything, let alone about me.”

  She smiled at that, stepping close to Max, cupping his jaw tenderly as she pressed the ice pack to his injured face. It was almost a protective gesture, and the way Max lifted his hand to cradle hers was not lost on Aidan. It made him uncomfortable, like he was intruding on something private.

  He dropped his gaze, focusing instead on the throbbing in his sinuses. Despite himself, he was a little impressed. Max had landed a hell of a jab.

  “Okay. You two obviously have a lot to discuss, and since that is the extent of my nursing skills, I’m going to make myself scarce.” Emma lifted onto her toes and pressed a kiss to Max’s cheek, but when she turned her gaze on Aidan, there was a warning there.

  Ballsy as hell. He liked her despite himself.

  “I’ll just be in the bedroom,” she announced, walking away from them. “Watching TV. With 911 on speed dial. Play nice, boys.”

  Aidan waited until she’d pushed the bedroom door closed behind her before he turned his attention to Max.

  “How much did you tell her about me?”

  “Everything.”

  “Are you fucking serious?”

  Max shrugged, but there was nothing apologetic about it. “I love her.”

  The admission caught Aidan off guard. It was totally out of character for Max. Well, for the Max he’d known. But he supposed he wasn’t the only one who had changed in the last five years. He because he’d lost his father and his friend in one fell swoop. Max because he’d gained ownership of a multimillion-dollar tech company, finally gotten rid of the son of a bitch who’d raised him, and apparently found true love, as well.

  Everything was coming up fucking roses.

  Aidan let his anger reignite, tightening his muscles, reerecting the emotional wall he’d had in place before Max had opened the door.

  As if Max had read his posture, he sighed. “Am I going to need a drink for the rest of this conversation?”

  “Probably.”

  “You want one?” Max offered, heading for the bar cart on the far side of the room.

  Civilized. So very Max. “Sure.”

  Aidan wandered deeper into the suite, down the three steps that led to the sunken living room, stopping in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the city. Los Angeles looked damn good at night—sexy and inviting, an inky sky twinkling with lights. “So...you live in the penthouse of a hotel? Isn’t that a bit pretentious, even for you?”

  Max shot him a wry glance as he set down his ice pack and pulled the stopper from a crystal decanter. “I like to stick to my strengths.”

  Silence stretched between them as Aidan surveyed the city below and Max poured.

  “This isn’t exactly how I imagined this moment.”

  Aidan glanced over at him. “Been dreaming about me again, huh?”

  “Glad to see you haven’t changed.” Max grabbed the drinks and joined Aidan by the window. “Still as gloriously humble as ever.”

  Aidan accepted the tumbler and the gibe with a tip of his head. “Well, if it’s any consolation, this isn’t how I thought this would play out, either.” He took a swallow of scotch, and it went down smooth.

  Max had always had a knack for the finer things in life.

  “I mean—” Aidan gestured at his friend with the glass in his hand “—I definitely thought I’d throw the first punch.”

  The corner of Max’s mouth pulled up as he took a sip of his drink, and he winced, prodding at his busted lip. For a moment, he stared contemplatively at the cityscape. When he spoke, none of that spark of humor was evident in his voice. “She was crying?”

  Aidan nodded.

  Max sighed. “Then I guess this is the part where I let you explain why the hell she’s coming to you in times of emotional turmoil.”

  Aidan hadn’t dissected it much past he was glad she had. But he should have known Max would parse it for meaning. Aidan rushed in hot, ready for action, and Max hung back, assessing the situation. It was how it had always been with them.

  He shrugged, sipped his drink. “What can I say? Ladies love a good listener.”

  Max’s flat, subzero stare got under his skin. Made him want to move, pace it out.

  “So after five years of this silent feud of ours, you roll back into LA and just happen to start seeing my sister? Who apparently means so much to you that you’ve come over here to try and kick my ass? That’s what I’m supposed to believe?”

  The question hit dead center. Max had the precision of a sniper.

  “Just to be clear, if I’d meant to kick your ass, you’d be laid out on the ground right now.”

  “Maybe. But I swear to God, man, if you’re using her to get back at me...” Max let the threat hang as he took a swig of scotch. The accusation prickled along Aidan’s spine.

  “How long have you two been together?”

  Shit. Aidan shifted his shoulders. He should have expected the inquisition. Max liked to dismantle things to find out how they worked.

  “I’m through answering questions until you tell me what you did to her.”

  Max’s jaw tensed, and it felt good to shift the momentum. To put him on defense. “Let it go, man.”

  “You know I’m not going to do that.”

  The man beside him at the window was quiet for so long that Aidan was surprised when he finally spoke. “I told her my dad used to hit me and I let him to keep her safe. And it made her feel like shit because apparently it’s the only thing I’m good at with her.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Now it was Aidan’s turn to take a swill of premium liquor. Pieces of their past clicked into place. Max asking him for pointers after their schoolyard brawl. The way he’d tagged along to Aidan’s neighborhood boxing gym, despite the dozen or so snooty health clubs that would have bent over backward to count the Whitfields among their ranks. How hard he worked to bulk up the summer after they met. “While we were in high school?”

  “It stopped by junior year. No point mentioning it after that.”

  “Fists?”

 
“Belt.”

  Shit.

  “You shoulda told me.” Anger tightened Aidan’s shoulders, and his hand flexed around his empty glass. “I could’ve helped.”

  Max’s glance darted to him, then back to the city. “You did help. You and Sal. I took care of the rest. And you wouldn’t have understood. You had a great dad. A dad who cared about you. Loaned you start-up capital for your business. Was proud of your accomplishments.”

  Aidan’s laugh was bitter. “What after-school-special version of my life were you watching?”

  The question got Max’s attention.

  “My dad was a drunk, Max. A high-functioning one at work, most of the time. The rest of the time he was passed out or betting on whatever odds he could find. It got really bad when my mom got diagnosed and worse after she died. He started to slide. Lost his job. By the time I was thirteen, I spent more time taking care of him than he did taking care of me.”

  “How did I not know that?”

  “Because by the time we met, he’d started to pull it together a little. He was obsessed with the idea that you two turned into SecurePay. You saw the good part of him. The coding-genius part. He saved the ‘passed out in his own puke after dropping fifty grand on the ponies’ part for after hours.” Aidan ran a hand down his beard. “And he really cleaned his act up when you got him that job at Whitfield Industries. For a while anyway. I could tell things were getting worse toward the end. I knew I should have come back.”

  The guilt that always flared in Aidan’s gut when he remembered that moment—the moment he’d decided fuck the old man, let him take care of himself for once—struck again. His dad had been ranting on the other end of the phone, a sure sign he was a few drinks too deep. Aidan had been in Spain, some five-star hotel in Pamplona, celebrating the milestone of making his first million and not in the mood to babysit. It was complicated, loving someone and hating them in equal measure.

  “I didn’t want to deal with his drunk ass, so I stayed away. And now I have to live with that choice.”

  Max’s face turned stony. Unreadable. “That’s on me. That’s not on you. I’m the one who put John on my father’s radar. You asked me to look after him, and I let you down.”

  “Turned out okay for you, though, huh? Ended up pushing Charles out of the way and taking over the family business. Now you’re going to make millions off my dad, and you don’t have to share the spoils or the credit.”

  Max grew still, but Aidan knew he was leaving a mark. Knew his words were well-placed knives. Knew it cost Max not to wince. Aidan itched to deepen the wound, to get a rise. He was more comfortable fighting.

  Max’s smile was bitter. “So that’s what this is about. Revenge.”

  “I know that SecurePay and Cybercore’s knockoff are built on the same code. That you shared it somehow and violated the exclusivity clause in Dad’s contract. And I will prove it in court, Max.”

  He’d been expecting fury. Threats. Bribes. Another punch. Pretty much anything but the way Max stared out the window, at the ceiling, at his bare feet—anywhere but at Aidan.

  After years of covering for his father, of letting people believe what they wanted, of lying by omission or through silence, Aidan recognized the signs. A cold sweat broke out across his back and the world shifted under his feet, the realization making him motion sick. He’d blamed Max and Charles for years for pushing John Beckett past his breaking point, and if that wasn’t how it had happened...

  He tasted bile as he leaned forward. Just breathe.

  “What did he do?”

  Max shook his head. “Don’t do this, Aidan. Don’t open this wound. Charles is going to jail. It’s over.”

  The advice didn’t make him feel better. “What did he do?” he repeated.

  Max stared into his glass for a moment, and when he raised his eyes, they were older, calmer than Aidan had ever seen them. Five years hadn’t quite made him a stranger, but he wasn’t the same man Aidan remembered, either.

  “When you asked him for that loan to start your business, John didn’t have what you needed. So your dad broke his contract and sold the patented code to Liam Kearney to get the money.”

  Corporate-fucking-espionage.

  “No.” That couldn’t be true. If it was, nothing in his world made sense.

  It’s okay, Aidan. I got a bonus at the last minute. Take it. It would make your mother happy.

  “When your dad got wasted, told me what he’d done, we tried to cover it up so my father wouldn’t find out. And I told John he should tell you, that you’d understand. But he didn’t want you to know. He felt losing your mother was hard enough on you, and he didn’t want you to feel like you’d lost him, too.”

  Aidan had poured all his rage and hatred and guilt on Max for so long that it felt weird to believe him. But he knew in his gut that what Max had just told him was the truth. Knew how much it must have hurt Max to discover his mentor had let him down.

  “It wasn’t until after the accident that I discovered my father knew what John had done, that he’d already taken his revenge. In the original contract, your dad held on to a percentage of the SecurePay profits for as long as the code was exclusive to Whitfield Industries. Since John had violated the agreement, Charles forced him into signing away all his rights to the SecurePay code along with any intellectual property developed during his tenure at Whitfield Industries. Threatened your dad with jail time, and said he’d go after you as well, since your company was founded on dirty money. My father fucked him over completely. That contract is the reason your dad was drunk the night he died.”

  Everything in Aidan went still, but his heart began to race. His blood thundered in his ears as Max’s words landed with all the impact of a detonating bomb.

  “You were right when you accused me of being selfish. I didn’t want to lose Whitfield Industries. My grandfather built this company, and my father almost destroyed it. I didn’t want to let him. I wanted my birthright, my chance at the helm. But I hope you can believe, at some point, that it’s not the only reason I didn’t turn him in for what he did to John. To you.”

  Max faced him now. “I didn’t want your dad’s name dragged through the mud. I didn’t want your memory of the man he was to be ripped apart because my father is an asshole. And I didn’t want my dad to make good on his threat to come after you.”

  So like Max, really. Just like he’d protected Kaylee. Taking the brunt of the punishment and the blame.

  “I’ve spent a long time hating you for that.”

  Max finished his drink. “I know.”

  Something inside Aidan’s chest unlocked. Breathing didn’t seem so hard anymore. “It wasn’t your job to save me.”

  “You’re not the one I was trying to save. Your father, the version of him I knew anyway, was an incredible man who made a mistake. But he did it for you.”

  Do this for me, Dad. Ninety days to dry out. It’ll go by fast.

  Eat something, Pop.

  Damn it, Dad. The track? Again?

  I’ll make it up to you, Aidan. I swear.

  He stared at Max, who looked as drained and as bleak as he felt. Five fucking years of secrets had taken their toll.

  “I’d rather have had you in my life for the last five years than a slightly less tarnished memory of my dad.” The truth of that made Aidan feel better and worse. They’d lost a lot of time, missed out on a lot of things.

  The thaw in the room wasn’t large, but it was noticeable. And uncomfortable.

  “I should go.” He placed his empty glass in the hand Max had extended. He didn’t want Kaylee to wake up alone after everything she’d been through.

  Max didn’t say anything, just followed him to the door. Aidan stopped with a hand on the knob, one foot in the hallway, and looked over his shoulder. “This thing with Kaylee? It’s new. And I have no idea what’s happening. But i
f you make her cry again, I won’t stop after one punch.”

  Max’s answering nod was tight and controlled. “Same goes.”

  The door snicked shut behind him, and for the first time in years, Aidan let himself miss the friendship that had preceded all the pain and guilt that had consumed him since his father’s death.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  AIDAN WAS TINKERING with his bike when he heard Kaylee moving around upstairs. Max’s questions had pounded in his brain all night, which, along with the throbbing in his face, made sleep an elusive bitch. He was tired and moody and disgusted with himself.

  What the hell was he doing with Kaylee? He wasn’t back in LA to stay. He’d come here to fuck Max over and get the patent on his father’s code. And now that there was neither vengeance nor legal rights for him to claim, he should get the hell out of Dodge.

  Because the one thing he wanted to stay for had disaster written all over it.

  Aidan sighed and dropped his wrench on the concrete floor with a clatter.

  His father had put alcohol and gambling above all else, and it had cost him everything.

  And now it had cost Aidan everything, too. His friendship with Max. Any chance of something real with Kaylee.

  She trusted too easily, cared too much about people who didn’t deserve her loyalty.

  And he counted himself among them.

  “Morning.”

  Her voice made his abs draw tight, a kick of lust he’d given up trying to control. He kept his head down, focused on his bike. “Hey. You’re up early.”

  “I have to get home and change before I go to work. You want coffee?”

  “I’m good, but thanks.”

  He ignored the part of him that liked the sound of her in his kitchen, and that she knew which cupboard to open to find a mug. It wouldn’t do him any good to realize how long it had been since he’d had someone consistent in his world or how comforting it was to think of a place as home.

  “Can you believe this battery is dead already? No wonder Wes gave it to me. This phone is a piece of crap.”