DEAD SEXY (5 page)

There was something on the gurney, a body. Jenna’s throat clenched and her belly filled with acid as she stared at the body from behind a wall of onlookers. She spotted a security guard from the building and made her way over to him.

“What is going on?”

The guard looked at her and then over her head, he motioned in the air with one hand and a cop came over. Jenna, thinking that the guard did not recognize her, said, “I work here…”

“I know. Are you Jenna Lewis?”

Mystified by the question she answered, “Yes why?”

“Ma’am we need to ask you some questions.”

“What? Why?”

“Did you see a man named Tom Pitt last night?”

“Yes, why?” She stared at the cop, he was a hard faced man in his forties. It was obvious he was a detective, he wore plainclothes: a badly rumpled off the rack suit and loosened tie, scuffed loafers and a jacket that hung too loosely.

“He was in your office?”

She opened her mouth to reiterate the why she had already asked and then she closed it again. It was clear he was not going to tell her anything and if there was anything she knew from hard experience it was that a cop asking question and not giving answers was bad business.

“Kevin, what is going on here?”

Blake! Relief swamped her. She turned to him and saw the look that passed between him and the detective. They knew each other, and they did not like each other. Shit, this was hardly working out to be the best morning she had ever had.

“I need to talk to this lady.”

“Jenna? Why?”

“Because a man who was seen going into her office is dead, he was found by the cleaning staff last night, in her office with a knife in his chest and a pair of panties in his hand.”

All the color drained from Jenna’s face. Her panties? Tom was dead? In her office? “He left my office! He was alive when he left!” The words came out in a rush and she winced, they had all run together so that it sounded like a different language. She wanted to take a breath and start over but Blake was looking at her, his eyes dark with suspicion and the uniformed paramedics were loading the gurney up. The thing made a horrible jangle as it rolled into the ambulance and Jenna felt the world beginning to slide away from her.

Blake’s arm caught her as she swayed, she looked at him only to see that he was covered by a fine gray veil. She shook her head to rid her mind of that fog but the physical weakness remained. That weakness bothered her, she had never been the fainting type and the last thing she wanted to seem was the fainting type. Blake and a few of the men who would have loved to take her job were all standing far too near for her to show any signs of weakness.

“I can tell you that he came to my office and he left. When I left, around ten thirty, I was alone in my office and I did not see him, or anyone else for that matter.” There, her voice sounded calm and natural, authoritive even. “Now, I have no idea how he would up in my office—dead—but I can assure you I had nothing to do with it.”

“Do you lock your office at night?” Kevin asked.

Jenna knew it was a trick question, if she said yes she had to explain who might have a key and if she said no she would have to explain why she felt no need to lock her office when it contained such sensitive material. “Of course I do however there are people who have a key, the maintenance crew for example.”

“”Do you know what time the maintenance crew generally leaves?”

“No, I do not.”

“Do you often stay late?”

“I am one of the top executives. I am in charge of over four hundred people not to mention I hold several of our largest accounts, naturally that position does not lend itself to early evening departures.”

Blake was filled with a grudging admiration. Even under this kind of pressure she had a cool head on her shoulders. He looked down at her long slender fingers and narrow wrists, they looked frail and delicate below the sleeves of her dark blue jacket, not at all the hands of someone who would have plunged a knife into a man’s chest.

Unless, what if Pitt had overheard them talking before they had had sex? Perhaps he had overheard the entire exchange and decided to try to force an advantage from her, or himself on her. Would she have protected herself? There was zero doubt in his mind that she would have, he had seen her record and knew she had done so before.

But if she had why leave his body in her office where it was sure to bring attention to her? Besides he had seen Pitt in her office so if that man wound up dead Blake would have known—there was something too neat and pat about that scenario and it bothered him.

Jenna was aware of the undercurrents of dislike between the two men standing on either side of her. She did not know how they knew each other but it was clear that they did and that they did not enjoy each other’s company. The look Blake had flashed the detective had been one of pure unadulterated contempt, and he had not even attempted to hide that.

She was mulling that over, and trying not to look back at the ambulance pulling away from the curb when Dunning arrived. He immediately waved off the reporters that crowded around him and strode over to where Blake, Jenna and Kevin stood.

“What is going on here?”

“They found Tom Pitt dead in my office,” Jenna said. Her voice was still calm but she was anything but. The heat of the day was lost on her, she was beginning to shiver from the cold and her breathing was beginning to accelerate. Dunning gave her a keen look but before he could speak Blake suggested that they all move into the foyer of the building.

They did and Dunning hustled them all into the express elevator. Nobody spoke, the tension was heavy and thick and Jenna wanted to lean against Blake, to take some of his warmth but she did not dare. She controlled the trembling of her mouth by pressing her lips firmly together and kept her shaking legs still by sheer willpower. Blake noticed all of those things, and knew that she was dangerously close to shock.

If she said anything at that moment it could damage her, and he knew it. A fierce need to protect her rose up and when they went into Dunning’s office and were ordered to sit he pulled a chair up right beside hers, his knee grazing hers for a bare second but it was a second that soothed her somewhat.

“Ms. Lewis, please explain.” Dunning said in his iced and soft voice.

Jenna was not fooled by his voice, she knew he spoke that way to lure people into a false sense of confidence. “There is nothing to explain. Tom came to my office for some reports and updates, we talked for about an hour and he left. I assumed he went back to his office or home. I left later and that is all I know.”

“We are going to need security footage from that floor.” Kevin said.

Dunning leveled a look upon him that would have reduced an employee to tears. “Call my lawyers. In fact, from here on out, if you need anything you will wait until a company lawyer is present. That means if you wish to question Ms. Lewis any further it will wait until she has counsel present.” Jenna knew he was not protecting her, he was protecting his company but still she felt gratitude creeping up.

Kevin gave Dunning a tight smile. “I am sure you can understand the need to question her.”

“I am sure you can understand the need to have my company’s counsel present during that questioning,” Dunning shot back.

Blake hid a grin. He had known from the start that Brad Dunning was one seriously hard nut, and Kevin was clenching his teeth like his jaw ached. It probably did. “I do,” Kevin rejoined. There was nothing else he could say.

Jenna sat silent and wary. Dunning never did anything without a reason, and she knew her well-being was the farthest thing from his mind. Even if she came out of this unscathed by the law her past stood a good chance of being exposed, and her job would likely be lost either way.

Tears rose to her eyes but she held them in check. Everything was falling apart, and somehow it all had begun when the man next to her had sauntered into an elevator and started her heart pounding and her body aching.

Damn him all to hell! He had no right to screw up her life! She realized Dunning was speaking to her and she forced herself to listen. “Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” she did not have a clue what he had said but she had a feeling that the gist of it was that she was not to speak to anyone other than a company lawyer. Not that she had any intention of doing so since she knew damn well that talking was the last thing she needed to do right now.

The meeting adjourned with Kevin stalking out. Blake watched him go, his own emotions barely held in check. Being in the same room with that same man was difficult, he wanted to punch him in the face. He wanted to open his mouth and spit out the whole truth, purge it from his conscience once and for all.

Jenna saw the look on his face before he disguised it and again she wondered what was between the two of them. She had bigger concerns however, the first being her job. “Mister Dunning where should I work today?”

“In your office.”

Blake blinked. The man could not expect her to work in a crime scene, even if it were possible. “They are processing her office so that is out for the day.”

Dunning gave them both a long level look and when he spoke again it was through a shark-like grin that showed every single large tooth in his head. “I suppose you’re right. The only recourse is to allow her to take Pitt’s office.”

It wasn’t a choice. It was either work there or go home and leaving the company would mean leaving her employment behind, and they all knew it. Brad Dunning would only protect her as long as she was a liability, and at that moment that was precisely what she was. He would do whatever it took to keep this incident from wrecking his company’s reputation and there was not one person in that room who did not know that not only did Dunning not care if Jenna had killed Pitt, he would do whatever it took to get her off the hook just to keep the company’s name intact.

He was a harder nut than even Blake had suspected. Jenna squared her shoulders and asked, “Do you suppose it would be possible to recover my files?”

Blake wanted to shake his head. Business as usual, and a man was dead. Maybe she was cold blooded enough to be a killer.

Jenna was rattled, despite her outward composure. Walking into Pitt’s office she felt a sense of wrongness, like she was breaking into someone’s home. In a way she was, Pitt had once been even more dedicated than ever Jenna—and his personal life reflected that.

It was widely known that he often stayed late at the office, not to work, but from lack of anything else to do. His kids had grown up and left home and his former wife was a stranger, as was the rest of his family.

Jenna had often seen him after hours, sitting at his desk, leaned back in his chair with his tie loosened and his jacket tossed over the back of his chair, his computer turned to sports news and his dinner sitting on the edge of his desk.

His office smelled of Pitt: musky cologne and egg salad sandwiches, as well as the pine scented air freshener and the ubiquitous lemon oil used by the cleaning staff. Everything was neat and tidy and she paused for a moment, confused. Pitt was hardly tidy, he always had a stack of papers teetering on his desk’s surface and a wad of trash in the wastebasket, most of it brown paper bags and foam drink cups.

The cleaning staff must have been in at some point. She sat her files on the desk and stared across it at his chair, it had been used for so long there was a Pitt shaped indent in the brown leather and she was loathe to sit in the space that was his.

“Thank God someone cleaned it,” Denise said from behind her. Jenna turned around to see her secretary standing in the doorway grimly clutching her own things to her chest. “I don’t know how Helen stood it for so long.”

“Helen?”

“His assistant. She was never a secretary, always an assistant. She retired last year.”

“Who was his secretary lately?”

“Nobody, he didn’t want anyone and let’s face it—the man was just riding out the days to retirement. He only had a few months.” Denise gave a disdainful sniff.

Jenna was aware that everything that the boss did was known by their staff but to hear Denise speak so baldly about things nobody talked about made her feel uncomfortable. It was disrespecting the dead. To cover that she clapped her hands together briskly and said, “Well, I have work to do. I need the files for…” and with that her hectic day began.

Blake was also in the middle of a hectic day. He had spent almost four hours running down the names of the maintenance crew and cleaning staff personnel, he found that every night maintenance was done somewhere in the building. The night before on Jenna’s floor alone a lamp had been replaced, carpet that had been wearing out had been taken up and relaid and a leaky faucet in the executive washroom had been repaired.

The cleaning staff had been in every office except those that had been occupied. When he talked to one of the staff members later that evening she informed him that while it helped the executives to get ahead by staying late it often prevented the cleaning staff from doing their jobs, and more than one person had been fired for that.

He knew was snooping into the investigation that the police should be handling and so he forced himself to concentrate on his own investigation as well. It was after nine when he decided to cut out for the day and when he passed the office where Jenna had taken up residence he saw the lights still on.

He walked through the silent outer office and knocked on the closed door of the inner one before opening it. She looked up and he felt his dick stiffen and his heart contract. Under her eyes lay dark circles and she had taken her hair down, leaving it to hang in burnished waves to her shoulders. The chair she sat in was large, masculine, and it swallowed her delicate frame, made her look young and small and incredibly fragile.

A surge of protectiveness washed over him. He said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Jenna looked down at the files before her. She wanted to protest, she still had a few things to do and they could not wait. Or could they? Was she doing the same thing Pitt had done in this office, used it as a way to keep the loneliness he felt at home at bay?

“Are you supposed to be consorting with the enemy?”

“Yes, it how I get my best work done. In a past life I was Mata Hari.”

“I bet you looked amazing in those veils,” Jenna could not help smiling. Blake had a wide streak of sunny humor below his dark exterior, and it filled her need for laughter.

“You bet I did. And those harem pants too,” he actually did a slow shimmy that sent Jenna into convulsions of mirth. When she managed to stop chortling she looked up at him and realized that was exactly what he had wanted.

The silence fell between them and she tapped her pen against a folder before speaking, “I did not kill Tom. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.” He did, even though every instinct warned him not to draw a conclusion without proof. Why did she affect him so? She made him want to ride in on a white horse and save her and the truth was, Jenna Holt was hardly in need of saving, she was a tough woman who was more likely to save herself than appreciate a rescue from someone else. “I’m starving and I know a terrific little trattoria over in Chinatown. Are you up for food?”

She was hungry and at the mention of food her belly rumbled loudly. Her face went red as the loud gurgling sound filled the office. “I think that’s a yes.”

Blake laughed and said, “Or a bear got loose from the zoo. Do you ride?”

Ride? Bears? I am sorry, I think I am confused.”

“Not bears, bikes.”

Bikes? “Yes, why?”

“Good, come on.”

Jenna packed her stuff up and they went downstairs, the silence between them had grown easy and comfortable. Blake led the way to the parking garage and strode over to a gleaming, heavily chromed motorcycle. Jenna gawked at it then at him. “Er, I thought you meant bikes—like bicycles. I mean I did not expect…I am in a skirt and heels so bicycling would not have been…I thought you wanted to know for future reference…”

Damn! The man constantly flustered her! She had seen him a few times over the day, his jeans and ass making him the object of stares everywhere he went.

“So if I asked you out for a bike ride you would say yes?”

There he went, twisting up her words again. “Yes, I mean no. I mean…”

Blake hauled a second helmet out of the saddlebags and tossed it to her. The dare in his eyes was unmistakable. Jenna looked at him, at the dangerous, shining machine and knew that whatever her mind might say about this being a stupid thing to do her body was going to ignore.

She put the helmet on, and the heavy leather jacket he handed her. When she pulled the collar up closer to her jaw she smelled leather, cologne, and a hint of old sweat. It was an erotic odor, one that made her knees weak and her center moist.

Jenna swung her leg over the motorcycle and held on as Blake cranked it up and drove off. The parking garage exited onto a crowded city street and at first she was terrified, clinging stiffly to his body and flinching every time they swerved around a car.

Eventually the rumbling of the motor below her ass, the heavy vibrations stroking her inner thighs and even her labia, the feel of him against the front of her body and the speed of the machine all combined to create a hazy lust that rose higher with every second.

Her body went loose and she began to move with him, leaning when he leaned, her hands unlocked from his waist and she held on tightly but loosely, allowing him freedom of movement. Blake had always thought that you could tell a lot about a woman by the way she rode a bike, and Jenna rode very very well.

They roared along the streets, dodging the snarls of traffic. The wind stroked Jenna’s bare legs, and the exhaust sent heat up to her. Her pussy grew wetter with each passing second. Her thighs began to squeeze involuntarily and her eyes closed as the throaty rumbling purr below her became a slow and demanding pulse between her legs.

She was moments away from an orgasm when Blake pulled the bike against a curb and shut it off. Jenna had to bite her lisp to refrain from telling him to start it again. He dismounted and helped her off, she could barely meet his eyes for fear he would know exactly why she was so flushed and close to hyperventilating.

Blake did know, and he was both amused and aroused. Jenna’s hair was a mess, the ends of it had whipped madly about below the helmet, her eyes sparkled and a pale crimson blush stained her cheeks. She looked a little bit wild and a whole lot sexy. In fact, she looked downright…edible.

He didn’t bother trying to banish that thought. He wanted her, he would have to be dead not to. Everything about her: the pert sway of her hips, the cute little dimples in her cheeks, her direct green gaze, and the smell of her hair, all of it made him ache with desire, literally. His cock was so hard it actually hurt. To keep her from seeing that he walked into the place ahead of her and grabbed the first table he saw, yanking her chair out and almost tossing her into it so he could seat himself.

They ordered salt-baked crabs, pork dim sum, steaming plates of noodles and washed it all down with pots of green tea. It was a feast and they were both starving, and not just for the food in front of them. Blake watched Jenna eat, watched the pink triangle of her tongue touch her full bottom lip—searching for a stray crumb—watched her lick at the drops of oil that spilled down her hand before remembering and grabbing her napkin. She ate like a cat, she was sensually greedy and it turned him on. He hated nothing more than sitting through a dinner with a woman who picked at everything and ate nothing.

Over a plate filled with creamy rice pudding studded with cinnamon and raisins they began to talk about the day’s harrowing beginnings. Jenna knew she should not trust Blake but yet she did and so she said, softly, “Thank you for helping me with that detective this morning.”

“You do realize if they name you as a suspect…”

He did not have to finish that sentence. “Yes. I don’t know what to do. I never planned on ever having to tell anyone. I could lose everything.”

He scanned her face carefully, “Is your job that important?”

Jenna stared down into her cup of tea, wishing there was an answer written there. “I wish it were that easy. It isn’t the job, not for the most part. It’s having to be Kendall again that I hate, I never wanted to have to revisit that. Do you know what I mean? I somehow thought that the past was just the past and it would stay there. I never wanted anything so much in my life as to not have that past, and as far as anyone knows, I do not.

“I don’t suppose you would understand what it’s like to make a decision and then regret it for the rest of your entire life but that is how I feel about my childhood. I made decisions based on what the people around me wanted or needed or told me to do and …ah, I cannot explain it.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” He did. He hated to admit it but he knew exactly what she meant and along with that thought came another one. How often had he gone after someone who had had no choice in the things that they had done? Jenna had been a child, she had been at the mercy of family members and criminals and she had done whatever it took to survive in that harsh environment.

What was his excuse? He hadn’t committed any crimes, but he had known that they were being committed and had done nothing. Even when he saw that kid’s face plastered all over the news with the headlines Gang Member Takes On Cops In deadly Shoot Out! He had not spoken up.

An empathy he had never had before bloomed inside his heart. Jenna had every right to be afraid that people would see her as Kendall, instead of Jenna. That was how he had viewed her at first, and most of the world would not take out the time to get to know her. Furthermore Dunning had a hardcore clause in his executive’s contracts that would prevent them from collecting severance pay or benefits if they were removed from their position due to lying on their applications.

Jenna had not lied; Jenna Holt had committed no crimes. Kendall had committed many. Dunning would never see the difference.

“It was so weird, working in his office. I mean Tom, he was—well he was messy and disorganized and everything else. I half-expected to see dirty socks floating in the drawer where he kept his pens.”