Insecure (8 page)

She didn't want Mace to stop. “He was a terrible stepfather.”

He'd been absent and cold. And from what she'd watched Bryan and Thomas go through, not much better as a father. Bryan was ousted from Wentworth four years ago with nothing but a handshake, and a letter telling him he'd voided his claim to a redundancy payout by being incompetent. Father and son hadn't spoken since. Malcolm had a granddaughter he'd never bothered meeting. She shivered. That wasn't going to happen to her. Bryan got distracted by marriage and his passion for flying light aircraft. Jacinta had her eye firmly on the prize and not one of the other leadership team members had the ear of the board or was close to being anointed in Malcolm's stead.

Mace squeezed her foot. “But you work for him?”

“Shocking human being. Great businessman.”

“You admire him?”

“I...why am I telling you all this? You work for him too.” Though were it not for Mace being seconded to the takeover project and everything going bad yesterday, he'd never be in the same airspace as Malcolm, let alone close enough to hear him shouting.

He dragged his knuckle down her instep and she closed her eyes. She was telling him because she liked what he was doing and it was oddly comforting to have someone to talk to other than Jay, and because Jay knew Malcolm she didn't talk to him about this stuff.

“No. I don't admire him. Objectively I respect what he's done, what he's achieved, but he's a deplorable person and there is nothing to admire in his lack of basic human decency.”

Mace's hands moved to her calf. Those clever fingers knew what they were doing. “What do I get if I keep talking?”

His thumbs rolled in small circles across the muscle. It was answer enough. “It's complicated. I do hate him, but I have to respect what he gets done. When I take over I'll do it differently, but I'm not naive enough to think it'll be easy. There'll be sacrifices. There won't be much of a personal life. But I'm okay with that. It's a small price to pay.”

“You think that's small?”

“You think that's ridiculous.”

He shook his head.

She sat upright and almost pulled her leg away from his hands. He couldn't possibly understand what drove her, or the thrill the business gave her. “Tell me—you think it's insane, don't you?”

“Why do you care what I think?”

She settled back with a laugh, but she did care. She cared what the odd geek from IT thought about her, which was worse, so much worse, than wanting him to drag her into the bedroom and go caveman on her body. The latter was simply physical.

“So, yesterday?” he said.

He wanted to know how much she had riding on the shareholder meeting. He'd heard the shouting, it was a fair question. If Wentworth shareholders had approved the takeover, the company would've leapt from fifth biggest in the league banking table to third. So yes, she'd had a lot riding on that meeting, since she'd convinced the board to launch a takeover of their nearest rival in the first place. No meeting, no vote, no approval, no offer. The target company accepted an alternate bid. There were no prizes for coming second.

“I'll have a couple of weeks of being in the doghouse with Malcolm and the board, but there's always Plan B.”

She got fingers dancing closer to her knee, and the eyebrow.

“Oh, you didn't think I had a Plan B?”

He moved so suddenly she started. He planted a hand on the sofa near her hip and a knee level with her thigh. His other hand went to the curve of her ear. He squeezed.

“Ow! That hurt.” She put her hand to her ear, rubbing the sting he'd caused. He was back on the other side of the lounge before she'd scrambled to a sitting position. “What did you do?” He hadn't squeezed that hard, but her ear still smarted.

“I'm listening to your body.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Plan A, Plan B, Malcolm, they make you tense, Princess.”

“And you can tell that from pinching my ear.”

He gave her his moustache-twirling grin. It made her forget about her ear and her tense toes. Made her wonder what miracles his fingers might wrought unleashed on the rest of her tension. He was right, she was always tense. It was one of the sacrifices. Like working weekends, like not having someone like Mace in her life. She really should go to her desk and make sure Plan B was going to be as effective in fixing her mess as she hoped.

“What do you want, Mace?”

He held out his hand. “Temporary residency.”

She granted it.

With his lips and tongue and teeth, with the press of his fingers and the slide of his palm, Mace took the tension in Jacinta's frame, the tightness in her muscles, and the ever-present fatigue she dragged around like a bank vault, and re-routed them through her body. Everything coalesced in a new form of pressure, an unbearable, shuddering, aching need.

She lost the use of speech around the time he found she loved his too tight grip on her hips, and he gripped her harder, marking her possessively. All that was left of her vocabulary was garbled in her throat, escaping in tattered breaths and strained gasps. She lost the use of her brain around the time she looked into his eyes and realised he was as into her as she was him. He didn't simply make her feel good, he drove his own pleasure through her limbs and into her heart. He lost his reticence to speak around the time she discovered what tilting her pelvis did to him.

The breath punched out of him and he eased deeper. “Glorious, you're fucking glorious. Hot, so wet.
Jesus
, Cinta, never want to pull out.”

She was happy with that, it was entirely reasonable.

“Not leaving this bed till neither of us can walk.”

Again, a no-brainer.

“Too beautiful like this. Too damn much. You make me high.”

And she was high with him; on the threat of him, the reality of him, the way he punctuated her body with stops and starts and long strokes and quick dashes, the way he reared up over her then curled around her with firm hands and wandering lips.

“All that tension is for me now.”

“Oh, God. All for you, Mace.”

He took her bones and liquefied them. He took her senses and blew them wide open till she was screaming with the delight of it; soaring, soaring, outside her body, outside her mind, but grounded in his arms wrapped tight around her, in the choppy rhythm of his breathing and the feeling of being held secure.

When his breathing eased, he relaxed his hold on her. “You okay?”

He was curled around her back. She murmured her assent. She didn't want to do anything to tempt him to roll away, though they were both slick with sweat and sleep was the ideal celebration of a joining that rocked her to her core.

“Cinta, answer me.” There was urgency in his voice, and his arms tightened around her waist.

“I'm fine.”

He resettled her so he could see her face. “Don't say that if it's not true.”

She put her hand to his face, his cheeks bristly now. She had the rasp of his scruff all over her body and she still tingled with it.

“I can get a little intense,” he said.

“I liked your intense. It made me come harder than I can ever remember coming.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He dropped down on the pillow beside her and looked up at the sky. But their bubble was broken. She was learning the secrets of his body, now she needed to know what was in his head.

“Last night was good, great—this was better.”

He scoffed. “You do remember.”

“So do you.”

He closed his eyes as though he didn't like being caught out. “I remember something else. Someone hit you.”

She groaned. That had slipped out, alcohol and the danger of the man, the fear of what she might do when she no longer cared to hold back. Her instinct was to roll away, but she wanted him to know she wasn't a victim looking for sympathy or a white knight to chase the dragons away. “I was hoping you'd forget that, or think it was...”

“A game. You really thought I'd think that?”

“You didn't think that? Last night, that's all we were, a game.” But now, now what were they, what could they be? What did she have time for them to be?

“For maybe two seconds I thought that. Until I looked in your eyes. Someone has hurt you.”

“It was a long time ago.”

He came up on one elbow, hand to the side of his head. “Distance doesn't heal everything. Last night I tried to be easy with you.”

“But not then.”

He shook his head, looked away. “I forgot myself.”

“I'm glad.”

“Not if I scared you.”

“You didn't.”

He turned his head and looked down at her. “But someone did.”

He wasn't going to let it go. She rolled to mirror his pose. “Last night I was pissed off and drunk, a little scared, and being deliberately reckless, hitting on you like I did. I didn't think you'd care what I said. And I did trust you. Not in a he won't take naked pictures of me and post them all over the internet way.”

“What? You thought—”

She put her hand over his mouth. “But in a this guy isn't going to hurt me physically way.”

He shook free of her hand. “You couldn't have known that.”

“You told me you weren't dangerous.”

“Cinta.”

He was chastising her. No one called her that. Her mother and Malcolm had insisted on her full name. She was Jacinta at work. At school she'd been Jac, and she was Jac to Bryan, and Jay called her Cin, but Cinta was a new one. She liked it and felt vaguely silly for it. “You weren't lying. You wouldn't hurt me.”

“But some other guy did. For all you knew, I was that guy.”

Before her one night stand turned himself inside out over a comment she'd never meant to make, she had to put him out of his misery. “You think I randomly hit on you, that you were just there—right place, right time?”

“I think.” He frowned and resolved whatever he'd been about to say with, “Yeah.”

“I was reckless, but not dumb. I knew who you were. I've been watching you.”

He sat up, hauled the sheet over his lap and crossed his legs. “Watching me.”

Was he creeped out? She'd made it sound stalkerish. She sat too, but didn't bother covering herself. There was nothing about her body he hadn't seen, touched, excited. She needed to explain that she'd chosen him in a calculated way from watching him work, seeing him interact with others.

“You only think you know.”

Was he angry? Did he feel used? There was no hint in his voice, no shade in his expression to tip her off. But his fist was furled in the sheet.

“So tell me about you. Tell me what else you get intense about.”

“No one else, if that's what you're worried about.”

“I wasn't...you don't.” Fabulous, she sounded like him. She touched his knee. She wasn't sure how to soothe him. She was annoyed with herself for wrecking their peace and with him for his sudden petulance. He knew which way was up when he got in her car.

“Maybe the curfew is over.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. It'd gotten stupidly complicated. She'd check the police website; the sooner Mace left the better. She had things to do.

“Intense is my default mode.”

Feet on the floor, she stopped.

“I'm either in something or I'm not. I'm no good with half-measures.”

She reached for her robe. Behind her he was still, but she hung on to his voice.

“I only work at Wentworth to have money to live on, to pay for what Buster needs.”

She dragged the robe across her knees, but kept her back to him. “Go on.”

“I've got shit for brains.”

She laughed. “You think telling me you have interests outside Wentworth is a problem.”

“I don't think it's smart to admit to the company heiress you're planning on being somewhere else. She might decide to pull the rug out from under you.”

“That would be the same heiress who hit on a junior employee who could have her up on sexual harassment charges and blacken her name forever. Who do you think is really at risk here, Mace?”

“Not you. I would never.”

Exactly what she'd figured. He was dangerous, but he was safe too. She pulled her robe on and belted it, but shifted on the bed to face him.

He'd let go of the sheet and his shoulders lifted with a deep breath. “I have a Plan A.”

She moved closer, crossed her legs; let her knees almost touch his. She didn't want him to go. She liked this little slice of life they'd created. It wasn't made to last but it was a holiday from her real world and precious because of it.

“Personal life management.” He stopped, as though that told her everything she needed to know.

“Do you mean identity security?”

He reached for the leftover cord of her gown and threaded it through his fingers. “More. I mean knowledge and control of an individual's personal data. You can build intelligence from data. The more data the more intelligence, the more capability and control.”

Wentworth had data about retail customer's deposits, loans and spending patterns, and employed data engineers whose job it was to mine it and develop new services to market. She watched Mace move the silky tie between his thumb and first finger. He'd used those clever fingers inside her. She wanted them there again before the day was over.

“Everything you do online causes information to be stored about you. Like when you shop online, or pay a bill or use your credit card in a restaurant. You have very little control over that, but companies, like Wentworth, profit from it, sometimes without your permission. I believe people should have control of their own information, from X-rays and dental records, through to the cost of your last parking ticket and how much you spent on entertainment in one easy to see and manage program. Like a mega diary and a file store of every piece of your personal data that's important. It operates like a sophisticated car dashboard that gives you relevant data on call, like blood pressure, savings targets and the list of books you want to read. It works like social media but for managing your life for real, not just talking about it and taking selfies. You get to say who sees that information and what they use it for, not the other way around. You might even charge for the privilege of using your information.”