His Absolute Insistence: A Scandalous Billionaire Love Story (Jessika, #2) (8 page)

Asher shifted to the side, letting the female journalist sit in the taxi next to him.  She closed the door for privacy, then pulled out her phone.

"You're not recording this," he said.  "If that was your plan, to sneak something onto your phone so no one would notice, I'm going to have to decline."

"Not at all," she said.  "I just wanted to bring something up.  Give me a second..."

She tapped and flipped through different screens and content on her phone until she arrived at an email app.  She tapped that, opened it, scrolled through a few things, tap, click, and a video started playing.  The screen was black, but he could hear noise in the background.  She clicked something to raise the volume, then handed the phone to Asher so he could listen.

"Up" Asher heard someone say.  The speakers in the phone weren't of the highest quality, and the noise sounded muffled, too.  Still, he quite distinctly recognized Lucent's commanding tone.

Then the sounds of clothes rustling?  Or leaves in a tree?  He couldn't tell.  A squeak that sounded like a chair rolling across the floor.  And something else he didn't recognize.

"Kneel," Lucent said.

"Lucent, I—"

That was definitely Elise.  Asher recognized her quiet, almost timid voice, though she spoke clearly and almost confident in her shyness?  He didn't really understand it.

"Miss Tanner," Lucent said.  "Kneel."

More clothes maybe.  Rustling.  Elise kneeling?

"You're an extremely difficult woman," Lucent said.  "You sneak into my office without my permission, use my desk for your own pleasure, and then you have the gall to act as if nothing is amiss.  Have I missed anything?"

Elise snapped back at him.  "I certainly didn't use the desk for my own pleasure.  I was trying to get some work done."

Asher laughed, because it sounded exactly like something she'd say.  Lucent might be a little austere at times, but he and Elise had a certain sort of playful banter between them.  She was the only one Lucent let get away with this, even if he tried to deny that he let her get away with anything.

When Asher realized who he was in the car with, Hanna sitting beside him, he stopped laughing and hid behind a serious mask once more.  She simply lifted one brow at him, mouth pursed, curious.

"I recognize you have a mouth, Miss Tanner," Lucent said.  "But I don't want you to use it at the moment."

"You asked me a question!" Elise shouted.

Something happened then, but Asher didn't know what.  He heard sounds of... something?  Was that a soft moan?  Barely audible, mistakable for anything, really.  He couldn't say for certain.

A few seconds later, Elise spoke again.  "Why did you stop?"

"I needed a moment to contemplate your punishment," Lucent said.

"You could spank me?  You did say that I was using your desk for my own pleasure, but I don't think I was, so if you want, I can, and you can spank me there?"

Asher reminded himself not to laugh this time.  Something struck him as increasingly odd, too.  First off, when was this recording taken?  In Lucent's office, apparently, or so it seemed from Lucent and Elise's conversation.  During work hours, presumably, or at least Elise had mentioned trying to do work.  Except there were mentions of spankings, which definitely didn't follow common office protocol.

"You do realize that you're awful at this, still, don't you?" Lucent said.

"I'm trying!  I knelt on the floor, didn't I?"

"It goes on like that," Hanna said, tapping the screen of the phone to pause the recording.  "And then..."  She tapped something else to fast forward it to another part.

"Will you be good?" Lucent's voice again.  "Will you do anything I say, Elise?"

"Yes, Lucent," Elise said.

"I don't want you to speak.  I want you to use your mouth for something else.  Do you understand?"

There was nothing visual happening, but Asher could easily guess what Lucent meant.

"You may begin," Lucent said.

No more talking after that.  More sounds like before, but this time they had context.  While Asher couldn't confirm with absolute certainty what was happening, it seemed all but assured that Elise was kneeling in front of Lucent, giving him a blowjob.  In his office.  During standard working hours.

Hanna let the recording continue for another ten seconds or so, then she stopped it again and took her phone back.

"Do you have any idea what that was?" she asked.

"I believe I just listened to two people roleplaying some sort of office relationship with sex involved," he said.

"You laughed," she added.  "I take it you recognize the people in that recording?"

"I'm not sure what you want me to say," Asher said.  "I'm not going to answer you either way.  I don't know what the context of that recording was, and I have no idea where you got it."

"Someone sent it to me," she said.  "Supposedly it's Lucent Storme, your Director of Public Relations, and his newest girlfriend, Elise Tanner.  Again, supposedly, it's from recording equipment installed in all of the Landseer Enterprises laptop computers.  My sources say that these were found this morning, apparently privately installed there by Mr. Storme.  They weren't sure why he would do something like that and they didn't explain how they discovered the software, but there's apparently thousands of recordings from different computers all throughout Landseer Enterprises.  Not just from the Tower, but people working at home and having their private lives recorded and sent via the internet to some private storage database."

She paused to gauge his interest, but he refused to give her any fuel for her fire.

"You can deny it," she said.  "This isn't an interview.  You don't have to say anything.  I just thought you should know.  Rumor has it this has been going on for awhile now.  Supposedly someone discovered Lucent Storme was basically wiretapping the entire company and they planned on doing something about it.  Again, supposedly, these recordings were secretly kept at your estate.  The information is fuzzy from there.  Did you know about it, or were you an unwilling addition?  This is hypothetical, mind you.  I have no idea.  That's what my sources are trying to claim as the reason for the fire, though, and why Lucent Storme and Elise Tanner are missing at this very moment."

"Your sources have an incredible imagination," Asher said.  "Would you mind telling me who they are?  Perhaps some email addresses or phone numbers I can contact?"

"You know I can't do that," Hanna said.

"I figured as much."

"It's not just this," she said.  "This can be explained away.  It doesn't sound good, but there's no video to go along with it, so it could be two people having fun privately and roleplaying out some office fantasy situation.  There are other recordings, Asher.  Full video recordings of people working throughout the day doing who knows what.  This is a huge invasion of privacy and it could cause you and Landseer Enterprises a lot of problems."

"So," Asher said.  "Let me stop you there for a second.  My guess is that you're going to blackmail me, then?  What exactly do you expect to gain by telling me this?"

"No, not blackmail," she said.  "I don't want anything.  I just wanted to tell you.  The press would sensationalize this, and it's possible I'm going to be on the sensationalizing side if it gets leaked further.  I don't know who the informants are going to or what else they're saying, but it's not looking good.  You seem like a nice guy, though.  I read your wife's short story and her book and I enjoyed both of them."

"You're trying to tell me you're doing this out of the goodness of your heart?"

"I—"  Hanna paused, swallowing hard and looking like she wasn't going to continue her original train of thought.  "My sister isn't in that great of a spot, alright?  She tries but she doesn't have much money.  Her daughter is getting a lot of government aid for college, but she wanted to give my niece a chance to do more, too.  All of her friends were going on a trip before college, and my sister wouldn't have been able to afford it if it wasn't for you.  I don't know if you know everything about that, but the special program for high school kids, if they write an essay, something about experience before college?  Yeah, that.  My niece won it, and my sister saved up to give her some spending money.  It might just be some stupid trip to everyone else, but it meant so much to the both of them."

"She..."  Hanna stopped for a second, almost on the verge of tears.  "I'm a news reporter, not some sappy schmuck, alright?  My sister was so happy, though.  I don't think I've seen her happier.  I'd love to do a piece on you and what your company does sometimes.  The good parts.  I know you're trying to bring more free festivals and events like that to the city, too.  No one cares about that stuff, but I think it's important, and I want to try and figure out a way to help and make it seem important to others, too.  Think of this as my peace offering of good intentions, if you want.  I get that it sounds like this is coming out of nowhere, but if Landseer Enterprises is ruined, then the festivals are done, maybe the sponsorships for students gaining experience are through, and who knows what else."

Asher nodded, remaining silent.

"I can't tell you who the source is because I don't know.  The email was anonymous and now any messages sent to the email address are being marked as unsendable.  I don't know anything.  I tried to get someone I trust to see if they could figure out more, but we've got nothing.  So that's all I can give you.  I'm going to do this report on you and your wife, because it's my job.  I don't want to have to do a report on the downfall of Landseer Enterprises, too.  If you can't figure something out, I might have to, though.  That's all I wanted to say."

She paused before opening the door to the taxi.  "Thank you for your time, Mr. Landseer."

Asher nodded, brow furrowed.  Hanna closed the door behind her.  A moment later the taxi driver returned and hopped into the front seat.  Hanna and her cameraman walked away, maybe to do a live report on the situation at the hospital or maybe to do something else.  Asher had no idea.

"Landseer Tower," he said.

The driver nodded and stepped on the gas.

I
asked Jeremy to go to the grocery store for me, partly because I
did
want him to pick some things up there, but also because I wanted to use my computer without prying eyes.  It wasn't that I didn't trust him, but some things were best done alone, and this was likely one of them.  Also, as much as I would have preferred it, the incident earlier that day proved I couldn't very well go grocery shopping at the moment.

Jeremy left with my grocery list.  I waited in the kitchen of my old apartment, seeing if he'd come back at the last minute because he forgot something or if he was truly gone.  Five minutes passed, then a couple more, and everything seemed safe enough at that point.  I hurried to my bedroom and my computer desk, then sat in the old-style office chair and powered on my PC.  The tower hummed and whirred, fans forced into labor after nearly a year's worth of downtime.  I hoped that didn't mean anything; I hoped the computer still worked fine.

It booted up slower than I remembered, but maybe that was just because I'd grown accustomed to speed.  Asher bought me the best of a lot of things, and my laptop was one of those.  We had a shared desktop computer in our bedroom in his mansion, too, but I didn't like to use it much unless we used it together.

The little Windows start up screen appeared, then vanished soon after.  A password box replaced it and I typed in my password without thinking.  It'd been so long since I used this computer, but old reflexes kicked in fast.  My desktop revealed itself, start up programs starting up, and after a couple of minutes everything was in working order.  Hopefully.

I clicked to open an internet browser, then went to search on Google.  I didn't really know what to look for, so I started with the obvious.

"Jessika and Asher Landseer sex tape"

An assortment of results popped up and I browsed through them.  Mostly news outlets from what I could see, though I hadn't heard of half of them.  I clicked to go to one of them and saw some scandalous headline with a few censored pictures of what most definitely looked like me and Asher.  Granted, from the vantage point of the camera, only parts of Asher's lower body showed through, but my own body was mostly on open display.

I scanned through the article quickly, but it didn't say much.  Just a few mentions of purported sexual photos involving us, and notes about supposed sex tape video clips.

Well, yes, I wanted to see the clips.  Obviously news outlets wouldn't be showing those, though.  Did they even have them online yet?  I kind of hoped not, but a part of me was morbidly curious.  What exactly would I do if they were?  Asher mentioned we could deny it... or not.  My immediate first reaction was to deny it, but if they were already on the internet, what use would that be?  People would see them, regardless.

My father and mother might have seen this, I thought to myself.  Or, obviously they would have.  Maybe not the video or the pictures, but they'd know about it.  Anyone not living under a rock must know by now.  Which... no, I removed those thoughts from my mind before they could sink in.  If I started worrying about a situation I had no control over, I'd just end up stressing myself out.

I clicked back to Google and tried to think of something to search for that would bring up the video clips, if they existed.  If they did, I guessed they'd be on some porn site?  They obviously wouldn't be on YouTube or anywhere like that.

"Jessika and Asher Landseer porn video"

Not entirely accurate, but that's how the media would probably spin it.  The search brought up similar results as before, though.  On a random whim, I added "download" to the end of the search words and searched again.

Ah ha!  There were new results on... um... well, sites I didn't particularly feel like getting too comfortable with.  I didn't need to, either.  I just wanted to see this quick.  I clicked the first one and ended up going to some streaming video site for adult XXX videos.  The video started immediately without me prompting it, and there I was.