Sweet Seduction Stripped (2 page)

"Have you been working out?" he growled, low. "You know how I like it when you're all hot and sticky."

I was going to be sick, stomach contents or no stomach contents. I was about to puke up all over the murderous, lying, manipulative bastard before me. I just knew I was.

I didn't reply. I couldn't. I stood too frozen in his embrace. I should have been reciprocating. I should have been entwining my fingers in his slightly too long blond hair. I should have been nibbling on his ear, like I always did.

But I couldn't. He was going to figure it all out. And I couldn't even pretend to save my life.

His lips brushed along my jaw. His erection prodded my belly. Jaxon's several inches taller than me, something I've always loved. Feeling cocooned in his frame, when he lowers his upper body over me, wrapping his impressive six-foot-two height around me.

Not anymore.

I felt trapped.

His mouth found mine. My lips stayed glued shut. My hands fisted at my sides. My back rigid. His tongue licked the lower curve of my lips, a request for me to open up, to give myself to him. I knew I had to. I had to pretend. I couldn't walk out of here with him present. I had to wait until he went back to work. I had to hope that he would. It was still too early in the night for him not to make an appearance at C&C.

I willed my lips to open. A moan of distress escaped before I could stop it and Jaxon stilled.

Then pulled back and glared down at me.

"Baby, have you been sick?"

Oh, fuck. The vomit. In the rubbish bin. In the office. Where I discovered his lies.

I nodded, my hand going to my stomach, starting to rub in a motion I knew was designed to calm the panic, but must have just made me look miserable. Because in the next instant I was up in Jaxon's arms and being carried towards the stairs. Towards our bedroom.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he demanded, but all I could detect was weighted concern.

He really didn't know. I might survive this night after all.

"You surprised me," I whispered. The truth always sounded so much more believable.

"Ah, baby. You should have said."

We entered the bedroom, Jaxon pulling back the covers on the bed and laying me down on the cool sheet's surface. He reached over and flicked the lamp on beside us, bathing the room in a soft yellow glow. He started to remove my shoes and socks, then moved on to my jeans.

I must have paled, because he paused and looked at my face, his lips pressed in a grim line. Then without a word he pulled my jeans away, leaving me in pale pink lacy knickers and my t-shirt and matching bra.

I watched him, like you watch a wild animal, as he crossed to the dresser and removed one of his old workout t-shirts. The size making it a good choice for me to sleep in. I always slept in his t-shirts.

I wanted nothing to do with that shirt he held in his hand as he turned back to the bed.

"Now the top, baby," he murmured, his eyes fixed on my breasts as they rose and fell a little too quickly.

Jaxon liked my boobs. All natural, but certainly impressive even lined up next to the other surgically enhanced exotic dancers at the club. I was just lucky to have been born with the perfect physique for a pole dancer. One Jaxon took great pleasure in every single day.

I cursed my genes now.

"Let me help you," he whispered, even though I hadn't made a move to remove my own t-shirt at all. He leaned forward, gripped the bottom of the shirt's hem, and then pulled the garment slowly up my chest revealing what lay beneath.

Even when I smelled of rancid puke he makes a show of unwrapping his present. My whole body shook with the distress of my current predicament.

I'd been in lust with this man this morning. I'd let him do decidedly raunchy things to me in this very bed. Then again over the bench in the kitchen not fifteen minutes later. I'd moaned my enjoyment out at his every touch, his every command of my body. And yet I'd never opened my heart to him. Not in the twenty months I'd been living in his home, sleeping in his bed.

Why?

Because I saw the darkness. I recognised it, even if I ignored why it would be there. He kept me safe. He made me feel secure.

And now he was the enemy in my bed. The one who could do far more harm than any man had ever inflicted before.

Did I doubt what I'd found tonight? Not for an instant. Because somehow I'd already suspected. Not exactly what he was or what he had done. But what he was capable of.

Part of that attraction had been a lure towards his dark. Towards that bad-boy image he portrayed. Like a cliché I'd fallen for the act, not allowing myself to acknowledge it was real.

You can't get more bad-boy than Jaxon Harding. The man who was stroking my breasts as he removed my bra, and leaning down to lick and suck a nipple because he can't say no to my body, even if I'm supposedly sick as a dog.

"Sorry, baby," he mumbled, slipping the t-shirt over my head at last. "You know I can't ignore the twins."

A term I'd never be calling my breasts ever again.

"Are they bigger than normal?" he asked, covering my body blessedly with the sheet, cutting off all other nefarious action on his part.

But his casual tone and carefully picked choice of words left me quaking.

"Your period's due, isn't it?" He always kept a close eye on my cycle. Marking it on a calendar more meticulously than I ever did. "Baby," he murmured, sitting himself down on the side of the bed, his hand reaching out and brushing my dark hair off my face where it had begun to cling. "Don't worry about a thing. I'll take care of you." His hand rested on my turbulent tummy and started to gently rub. "I'll always take care of you." He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to my belly. "And if we're lucky, we'll be tied together forever through the little person growing inside your belly."

Oh, fuck. If he'd been possessive before, Jaxon would be intolerable if he thought I was carrying his child. Impossible. Or at least, improbable, as the only thing I
was
meticulous about concerning my cycle was taking my birth control tablets. Pills Jaxon was not aware of.

God. The writing
had
been on the wall. Even my subconscious had known it. Then why the hell hadn't I?

He'd treated me like a treasure. He'd fooled me. No. I'd let him.

"Baby, I gotta go back to work. Want me to get you anything before I do?"

I forced myself to smile. To reach up and cup his jaw, like I would usually do. To look him in his pale blue eyes.

"I'll be fine," I whispered with a shake of my head. "You take such good care of me, Jax."

"Always," he whispered back, then kissed me softly on the lips despite the sick smell that must have lingered there. "Don't forget it," he warned against my skin. "I always take care of what is mine. And you are mine, aren't you, Amber?"

I nodded. It was expected.

"Baby," he purred as he pulled away, "I will never let you go."

He stood, my heart about to leap out of my chest, my mind already deciding what I would pack and what I would leave behind as soon as he walked out that door. I had no plan of where I would go, but I did know I wouldn't be looking back.

Running was my only option now.

I watched him cross to the doorway, then he paused and looked over his shoulder, the pale blue of his eyes darkening to a steel-grey.

"Spoke to your dad this evening," he said, so casually, so easily. "Told him I'd be paying the bill for his care in the next few days. Bit of a relief, I think," he added. "They were about to organise his transfer to the public hospital. I hadn't realised it had gotten that bad."

He had. I'd told him. One month ago when he said he'd paid for my father's specialised care up until the end of the year. I hadn't checked. I believed him. And Dad seemed happy when we last spoke.

Paying the bill wasn't the issue. I could have paid it, but Jaxon had insisted. He wanted to take care of me and what was mine.

What was a worry, though, was the fact that moving Dad elsewhere would be detrimental to his health, could even kill him. If I ran, I couldn't hide Dad. I couldn't move him. Even if I paid his health bill, what would Jaxon do to him to lure me back? Dad wasn't long for this world, we all knew this. But could I stay until he passed, just to avoid what Jaxon might do?

And why was he mentioning this now?

He held my gaze as I nodded, either in thanks or because I was acknowledging the implied threat. Did he know? Was he playing me even now?

I forced myself not to bite my bottom lip, to show a weakness such as that. But it was too late, my fingers were gripping the sheet at my chest too tightly. White crested my knuckles and I was sure Jaxon had seen.

"Baby, sleep well," he said and I let a breath of air out carefully. He started to walk away, but not so quickly that I couldn't hear him clearly say, "Next time you go that far into the system, make sure you don't stay there longer than sixty seconds. The tripwire's set to go off after that."

He knew. He'd known all along. That's why he'd come home. To deliver the warning.

Run and I go after your dad.

Run and I'll chase you down.

Run and I'll never let you out of my sight again.

Baby, I will never let you go
.

I waited until I was sure he'd had enough time to leave. Then I crawled out of the bed feeling much older than my twenty-two years. I've not lived a sheltered life, but a blessed one. Until my mother died in a car accident and my father fell ill with cancer.

I've made my own way through life, done what needed to be done to pay the bills. First, just the living expenses and mortgage on my father's home. Then his palliative care and my study fees at university. The house sold, but the mortgage was too big to make more than a slight difference to Dad's health bill. So, after that I was on my own. Paying for Dad's care, my bachelor's degree, and my own living expenses.

I took ballet as a young child and a friend of mine mentioned the money you could make dancing in a gentleman's club. She pulled in as much as a thousand a week sometimes. Money that I could sorely do with if I intended to keep Dad in the best possible care available. Private healthcare is expensive, and even if the public system offers an alternative for free, it's limited. And slow. So very slow. Too slow for Dad.

I flew him to Australia last year, so he could have advanced, never-before-tested treatment at a centre in Cairns. It helped. They say it lengthened his life by at least six months. But there's no more special treatment available that can stop the inexorable approach of his death. Just to make him comfortable. And he is, in the private hospital he's currently at.

But my dad is a practical person. Although he doesn't know the cost associated with his current care, he would understand if I told him what was happening. His advice would be swift and blunt.

"Run, Amber. Run."
And don't look back. At him. At Jaxon. At the life I've carved for myself here.

I switched my personal laptop on, the one I don't ever use to access C&C's systems. Sometimes you need a completely clean device. This is mine. Jaxon knows about it. He knows it's one I've reprogrammed as part of one of my advanced papers for uni. He's watched me work on it over my shoulder, but never said a word. Somehow I knew it would be the first thing to go, should things escalate further than they have already tonight.

Jaxon abhors not having control. Why he let me have this computer after I graduated, I don't know. Maybe to create a false sense of security.

I spent the first few seconds checking that the device was still clean. My own tripwires having not been triggered. I cursed myself mentally for failing to pick up on C&C's. I should have seen them. At least suspected they were there. I was too stunned after I cracked the code, and too eager to crack before I did. My mind wasn't as sharp as I believed.

All clear. I logged onto the internet with the mobile stick I used just for this machine. Thirty seconds later I was staring at my bank account balance. The one that should have said I had over six thousand dollars in a Savings account and several hundred in the Everyday. Both revealed negligible balances.

He'd wiped me out. Taken my money, leaving me dependent. I didn't need to be a computer genius to follow the trail. The withdrawal had been made this evening. At a guess, minutes after I'd hacked that secured file. I didn't need to know who'd done it. One of the IT guys I've been working with for the past few months at C&C. On Jaxon's orders.

Not only was I broke. I was now persona non grata at work, as well. There's no way one of those boys wouldn't have told the others what he'd been ordered to do. They gossiped more than a room full of bored housewives. Everyone in Security would know what I had done, or at the very least, that I had done something that warranted a fine. Punishment. I was pretty sure now that they knew what the company's main business interests were. The way they had steered me away from certain areas in the past, monitored what I did when on the job, distracted me with a new code to break when I'd obviously gotten too close to sensitive information.

Jaxon had been training me slowly. My initiation into the firm had been done well. Carefully. Not too much all at once. But I was sure he'd had every intention of bringing me on board fully. Once he'd trapped me in a way that I couldn't possibly escape.

First he used my ailing father.

Now he hoped to use the child he'd been desperately trying to impregnate me with.

I sat back and stared at the screen, wondered why I hadn't listened to my instincts. Wondered how I could have buried my head in the sand for so long and ignored the signs.

He'd showered me with love. Obsessive love, but it had been hard to say no to that kind of determined pursuit.

But that was a poor excuse. I'm not unintelligent. Perhaps a little naive and trusting, but not dumb. I knew there was something dark behind those pale blue eyes. I knew and yet I still let him seduce me into this world. Bit by meticulously planned bit. Little by little until I was way too deep to crawl back out.

So, no money. A father who can't be shifted and hidden from sight. And a boyfriend who deals in death and destruction, and was well aware that I knew it.

I've never been a victim. Never been unable to take care of myself. I was ten when my mother died. I took over all the household chores; cooking, cleaning, buying the groceries. I was sixteen when my father was first diagnosed. Seventeen when he had to stop work completely and I started to do after school and holiday work. Nineteen when I sold the house to pay for his hospital bills, so I could go to university on what little I could earn. Twenty when I started working for Champagne & Chandeliers, in order to finish my degree and take over the paying of Dad's private healthcare.

I've done what I needed to do to survive. I've taken care of business.

I had no idea how to handle this.

A message bubble appeared in the corner of my screen. I had my notifications set to automatic on this machine, because I knew when I was using it I would always be alone. So the forums and notice boards I belonged to all logged in without any action on my part at the start of an internet session. I'd used the entire machine as a practice for how to have a mobile, secure platform for surfing and interacting on the web for one of my papers. I'd passed, top of my class. It was a closed and protected circuit that allowed me to receive messages in an isolated fashion, while keeping my IP address and location hidden in a multi-layered re-routing pathway that my professor called genius. He'd wanted me to sell the patent, but not long afterwards a big named IT company had come out with something similar and cornered the market.

Still, this was all my creation, the only baby I ever planned to have.

I clicked on the bubble and saw the familiar greeting one of my hacking contacts always used. I'd never met him in person, but I felt like I knew him in every way that counted.
He
was the genius when it came to covering your tracks on the 'net. What Ric didn't know, wasn't worth mentioning. And like most male geeks he had a warped sense of humour.

RiC3.1415:
What R U wearing?

I stared at the text, words I'd seen countless times in the past and wondered if his always being on-line, night and day, any time I happened to be, whenever I happened to be, was coincidence as I'd always thought. Or something much more sinister.

My world was no longer black and white. No longer uncorrupted binary code.

I gave him the only answer I ever gave him back.

Danc3r:
Golden glitter & an itty-bitty thong.

My dance outfit, which I only ever wore for Jaxon now, in the privacy of our home.

Our home. This wasn't my home anymore, but my prison.

RiC3.1415:
UR killing me here, sweetheart.

His standard reply. If someone ever hacked our conversation, we'd always know if they were an imposter or not.

Then he added, always something different, never the same; the point our on-line conversation segued into normal chatter...

RiC3.1415:
Is it edible glitter?

Normally I smiled at his comebacks, tonight I just felt jaded and a little unclean.

I was scared. I was an emotional wreck. I was tired of a game I'd only just realised I'd been playing. I decided I'd call his bluff.

Danc3r:
Where are you?

You never asked a fellow hacker that. The pause was lengthy. For a moment I thought he would cut the session short, not bother to reply.

But then...

RiC3.1415:
Do you need me?

No abbreviate text language, like he usually used. As though the conversation had suddenly become serious. And it had, I realised. I was calling his bluff. Asking him to step out of the shadows, because I needed to know who he was. One of Jaxon's? Or a friend?

I'd always thought of Ric as a friend. We'd joked, "talked" for hours in our own private sessions. Hashed out complicated data, discussed the latest programmes hitting the black market. Even shared the creation of a line of code that helped erase your words as you typed them. A sort of super-spy protection programme for the particularly paranoid among us.

But his answering question threw me for a moment. How much could you really know a person by words typed on a screen?

I leaned forward and started typing in another open box on my laptop, while also typing an answer to his question.

Danc3r:
Need a friend.

His covers were good. I expected them to be. Ric wouldn't make it easy to locate him. I just needed a general location. A continent would do. Anything but New Zealand. I didn't think Jaxon's reach would go further than our shores. He may have been a big fish in Auckland, but he would be decidedly small fry in Australian waters and probably krill further afield than that. Not his bag, baby.

RiC3.1415:
We are friends.

No, we were on-line hacking acquaintances. Shared a few secrets about each other, but nothing that could get us locked behind bars. I needed more than that.

Not Europe, although some of his re-routing went through Luxembourg. I'd always used Sweden, their technological infrastructure was superior than anywhere else I'd come across so far.

Danc3r:
Got a difficult problem. Could use a sounding board.

Not an unusual request. I needed him to stay on-line, to not be alerted to my presence at his back door just yet. Not that I'd made it that far; at the moment I was getting bogged down somewhere in Africa. I was picking Jo'burg, but Ric's code was complex.

RiC3.1415:
Fire away, Grasshopper. I live to delve into your binary code.

I did smile at that one. Please don't be in New Zealand.

Central America, closing in. My heart beat faster, even as my breaths slowed down. He was miles away. Nowhere near the South Pacific.

Danc3r:
Not so much computer code, but human nature.

Huh. Not South America. I was so sure I had him there for a second, but now I was back in Luxembourg and couldn't find my way out.

RiC3.1415:
Oh, a personal problem. And here I thought you were a computer programme written by the men in black suits to trap unsuspecting and perfectly good looking computer nerds like me.

Danc3r:
Good looking?

RiC3.1415:
Sweetheart, I steal breaths for a living. I am hawt.

A giggle erupted from deep within. I immediately sucked it back and glanced around the room I was in; a spare bedroom where I kept my laptop and some of my personal things. It was vaguely considered my space. But Jaxon and I both knew that was a cop-out. I didn't have that much to bring with me when I moved in, what I did have was second hand and headed straight for the rubbish dump. This room still even smelled like him.

I glanced back at the screen, finding my exit out of Luxembourg and ending up in... Sri Lanka?

How many re-routes did this guy have? I think I'd passed my number ages ago. But I had to admit, I liked the backtrack. I was already considering writing that into mine. Nice touch.

Danc3r:
Then you're just the guy I need.

No, not Sri Lanka. Not even close. He was in London. How unoriginal.

RiC3.1415:
*Rubbing my hands together in anticipatory glee.* Step into my parlour, sweetheart. I've got just the sort of thing you need.

Hmm. London was a bust, but I was still in the UK, now somewhere near Glasgow. He didn't sound Scottish. Did an accent carry over into the type written word? Yes, in a way. I closed my eyes and ran over on-line conversations with the guy in the past. The words appearing in my mind as though I was watching them being written. For once I was glad of my picture perfect recall. My ability to see in my mind's eye almost anything as long as I'd seen it before. Hearing something; forget about it. But seeing it, was a whole other thing.

Danc3r:
Spiders spook me.

Damn and blast. Not the UK. Where the bloody hell are you, Ric? I was staring at possibly the most convoluted and complicated re-routing code I had ever laid eyes on, and I suddenly realised that this guy was out of my league.

I also couldn't pick up a memory of ever seeing him type in slang or colloquialisms that would hint at a locale. If he'd only just started each conversation with a "G'day mate," I 'd be home free.