Tempt Me (5 page)

“What?” His scent drifted over, made her eyes blur.

“Pheromones,” he gritted out. “So no touching.”

“Huh?” She was so confused—and so, so aroused. The strain in his voice tugged at her very womb. “No touching?”

“No.”

“At all?” she breathed, eyes on his lips.

He inhaled deeply, his eyes flaring with a desire he couldn’t feign or disguise. “You’re killing me here,” he said on a laughing groan. Turning, he padded to the kitchen in his elegant bare feet. “Coffee first. Then I have to do some sketching. Without touching you. Somehow.” He reached down to the front of his sweatpants and adjusted himself.

The frank gesture, so at odds with his typical high tea manners, almost made her moan. God help her, he was even more attractive with his control frayed around the edges.

Pans clanged together in the kitchen.

She bit back a giggle, but it quickly died. Snowed in with a sex demon. How was she going to keep her hands off him?

Knowing he wanted her, too?

––––––––

A
nd...action.

“Dang it,” Wyatt Cooper muttered as the cutting winter wind tried its best to snatch the door handle out of his grasp. He shouldered into the building’s cavernous lobby and stomped the snow off his shoes, juggling a messenger bag, a leather portfolio and an almost empty coffee cup. He’d purposely spilled most of the coffee on himself and the folder on his way in from the parking lot.

The woman helming the huge reception desk looked him up and down as he approached, taking in the wet stain darkening his light blue dress shirt, and the dripping leather folder he carried. “Tough morning?”

He quirked a rueful smile, tipping his head slightly so his bangs flopped onto his forehead. She was a trim, yoga-toned forty, a single mother recently divorced from a man who’d cheated on her with a younger woman. A little light flirting certainly wouldn’t hurt. It never did.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

And she really didn’t. He’d spent all night slogging through the hard drive of the computer he’d hired a colleague to steal from Bailey’s apartment. She hadn’t even bothered to password-protect the thing, and now he knew why. The hard drive was a barren wasteland. Her real work—the good stuff—must be at Sebastiani Security or Sebastiani Labs.

He didn’t have the skill to take Bailey on
mano-a-mano,
but hopefully others who did would keep her busy for awhile. 

He straightened, fighting off tiredness. The coffee he’d spilled was his fourth cup since midnight. He didn’t pull all-nighters very often anymore, but a legit paying gig was a legit paying gig. The fact that such jobs were easier to come by since Bailey closed her business and dropped off the face of the earth definitely stung.

To find her, in Minneapolis, working for Lukas Sebastiani? There was a much bigger story there. But for now, he had to set his curiosity aside. He had bills to pay.

He smiled—admiringly, not tipping into creepy—at the admin. The contract he’d signed with the company’s CIO authorized any and all incursion methods and provided full legal indemnity, but the guy had no clue how little time or actual technical skill it would take for him, or someone like him, to access the company’s supposedly secure computer network.

Until someone developed a patch for gullibility, humans were the weakest link.

“Here.” The receptionist plucked a trio of tissues from the square box sitting between a desktop printer and a silver-framed picture of a gap-toothed little girl, and extended them over the counter. “Use these.”

“Thank you.” Taking them, he made sure their fingers brushed, oh-so-lightly. “Is that your daughter? Very cute. How old is she?”

As the woman chattered about her kid, confirming information he’d already gathered during his background work, he used the tissues to wipe the leather portfolio. Opening it, he looked in dismay at the sheaf of coffee-stained papers. He glanced at his wristwatch, then back at the papers, gingerly lifting a document by its stapled corner. Coffee dripped down the cover page and onto the lobby floor. “Dang it. I have a meeting with your CIO in ten minutes, and needless to say, I’m not going to make a great first impression.” He looked to the entrance, and back at his watch again, patting the pockets of his messenger bag. “I hope I brought...yes!” He pulled a USB stick out of one of the bag’s front compartments. “Could you tell me where the nearest print shop is?”

“No need for that. I’d be happy to print a fresh copy for you.”

“Could you really? I’d be your slave for life.”

“No need for that.” Despite her wry retort, her cheeks pinked ever so slightly.

Their fingers brushed again as he handed over the stick. She cleared her throat as she accepted it, slipped it into one of her sleek laptop’s USB ports, and double clicked. “Which document? The PDF?”

“Yes, that’s the one.” He’d initially considered trying something more sophisticated, but finally decided to go with the ol’ tried-and-true.

She clicked again, opening the document—and in less time than it took to spool the document to the printer, the virus slithered into the company’s computer network, laying coiled, waiting, and poised to strike.

Gotcha.

What would he find this time? Technical specs for a top-secret product not yet released? Financials? Marketing materials? Patent submissions? Corporate expansion or layoff plans? Cached-up porn that some poor, deluded fool killing time on the night shift thought he’d permanently deleted?

Nothing was ever permanently deleted—not with guys like him around to find it, and to exploit it.

He sighed. He’d abide by the terms of the non-disclosure agreement he’d signed. He kept a firm boundary between his contract penetration work and his...extracurricular endeavors.

A man had to have some standards.

The printer spit three colorful pages into the tray. She plucked them up. “Stapled?”

“Yes, please. Thank you so much.”

She stapled the pages together with a clunk and handed them to him, flicking her eyes to his bare ring finger. She subtly cleared her throat. “May I get you another cup of coffee before you go up to the fifth floor?”

“No, thank you. I have to get going,” he said with visible regret. Webster, the CIO, had no idea he was here, and he needed to keep it that way. He’d take the elevator up to the fifth floor, but come right back down using the back stairway.

After a pause, she snatched one of her business cards from a nearby holder, scribbled something on the back, and held it out to him. “Please let me know if I can help you in any way.”

He took the card with a smile, and with another careful brush of their fingertips, gave her a card of his own. “I certainly will”—he glanced at the cell phone number she’d written on the back before flipping it to the front— “Nicola. What a beautiful name.” Still facing her, he took several reluctant steps away from the desk, keeping eye contact. “Goodbye, Nicola. Thanks for your help.”

She looked down at his card. “Have a good meeting, Mr. Wallace.”

“Please, call me Wyatt.”

She colored again. “Wyatt.”

He held her gaze for one second. Two. Then he pivoted and walked to the elevator, giving Nicola a final glance over his shoulder.

She was staring at him.

Nicola was really quite pretty, especially when she smiled. She’d be a useful contact to...cultivate.

Yep. A man had to have some standards. 

***

H
e couldn’t touch her, so he drew.

Curled in the corner of the couch by the fireplace, sketchpad in his lap, he watched the expressions chase across her face as she worked at the dining room table. If he waited long enough...
there.
There it was, appearing like clockwork—that adorable rumble strip of annoyance pinching her eyebrows together as she glared, again, at her laptop screen. Not taking his eyes off her, his hand moved with ease, but each scratch of charcoal against the pulpy paper sounded unnaturally loud to him, like a match seeking a spark. After a day and a night spent cooped up together in the cabin, working, chatting, and emphatically not touching, the air felt heavy and combustible.

To him, at any rate. Bailey seemed oblivious, barely speaking while she worked except to utter an occasional, colorful curse. She was racing against the clock—or rather, her laptop’s draining battery. Why bother to hide his gaze when she rarely looked up from the screen?

Rafe glanced down at the page, satisfied with his work. The expression studies he’d done were as exquisitely detailed as any he’d done at art school: The delicate whorls of her ears. The huge eyes, framed by dark lashes and slashing eyebrows. The plane of her stubborn jaw, her tiny button nose, and her lips...her criminally neglected lips. The studies wouldn’t help him with the sculpture series for his upcoming show, but it wasn’t like he could ask her to pose for him, stretched out gloriously nude on the rug in front of the fireplace—

He slammed the door on that line of thought. When would the electric company get the transformer fixed? He thought he’d heard repair trucks at first light, along with road crews laying down their salt/chemical slurry, but he hadn’t gone outside to check.

He and Bailey managed to platonically share the big couch last night, sleeping with their heads at opposite ends, awakening this morning with only their lower legs touching.

“You galaxy class bitch.” Her voice sounded half-admiring, like whatever she worked on was putting up a damn good fight. He’d heard the same tone of voice from Lukas when a walleye snapped the line rather than swimming into his net.

Her energy changed when she worked; he could sense it from across the room. At the keyboard, she swaggered like the captain of a pirate ship, master of all she surveyed. He’d been wallowing in her energy, fighting the pull of the tide, for hours.

If she brought even a fraction of that confidence into bed with her, he’d gladly go down with the ship.

Across the room, she glared at the screen. Leaned in and snarled. “Don’t you dare.”

Hiding a smile, he slowly inhaled. Bailey had a temper on her, and he found it...utterly enchanting. Glancing down at his drawing—all eyes and hair, the lower portion of her face obscured by her laptop screen—he smudged the paper with his thumb to create a subtle shadow between her brows, and then picked up his charcoal again. He couldn’t capture the precise color difference between her hair and brows, but their arrogant slant? Yeah.

“Don’t you dare what?” he asked.

“Crash. Blow up. Shit the bed.”

“There’s an attractive visual.”

“Yep, there it goes. Gah!” She whapped the frame of the laptop screen like she was clouting someone upside the head, then leaned back in the dining room chair.

“What are you working on that’s giving you so much trouble?”

Now he was the recipient of her green-eyed glare. “I’ve almost got it.”

Adorable. “I’ll rephrase. What are you working on?”

“I
was
working on an enhancement to Sebastiani Security and Sebastiani Labs’ security suite, but then I got an idea...”

“About what?”

“A possible way to access the tech unit Lorin found last summer. Hard to do without the actual unit, but...” She trailed off, shrugging. “I haven’t been able to figure out how to examine it without putting other networks at risk, and Wyland won’t release the unit back to me until I do.”

Last summer, the archaeological site Lorin and her mother had worked for decades had finally coughed up evidence that supported the legend of their people’s extra-planetary origins—and Lorin had fallen in love.

At least one of them was getting regularly laid.

Her eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips, her face settling into the expression he privately called “Evil Genius.” He could almost see synapses snap and thoughts form.

A burst of energy hit him broadside.

“Oh. Of course,” she muttered. Lifting a finger in the classic ‘wait a minute’ gesture, she picked up a pen and scribbled something in the notebook sitting next to her mouse. Carelessly dropping the pen, she turned to the other open laptop and banged out something with a ferocious rat-a-tat-tat.

He’d never seen or heard anyone type so fast, or so...expressively. The ebb and flow of her intelligence enthralled him as much as the luscious physical reaction she couldn’t hide. Completely focused on her task, she didn’t notice that his tarp-covered sculpture had stopped her pen from rolling to the floor.

His cock stirred, stretching behind ancient, soft denim. The fact that she’d unknowingly shared table space with a sculpture of her own nude body all morning was unspeakably arousing.

He was a sick, sick man—and very hard up, if the sight of her tiny fingers banging the keys was enough to almost make him come in his pants. No touching? What had he been thinking? His attack of scruples was painful, damned inconvenient and likely unnecessary, because he knew she wanted him, too.

What was it about her? Bailey was not at all his usual type. She was so small she was practically elfin. If memory served—and it damn well did—her tiny, tip-tilted breasts didn’t come close to filling his hand. Her blonde hair couldn’t be three inches at its longest, and right now half of it stood on end because she’d been tugging on it most of the morning. A lot of women wouldn’t be able to pull off such a short cut, and fewer women yet would have the guts to even try—but the ruthless crop showcased her gamine facial features perfectly.

Compared to her, his previous lovers suddenly seemed ungainly. 

His stomach grumbled. They’d shared a light breakfast of coffee and fruit when they’d first woken up, but that had been hours ago. Slapping his sketchbook closed, he stood up and stretched, half-turning so she wouldn’t see the wood he sported. “I’m going to eat all that ravioli by myself,” he called to her. Her head popped up. “Yeah, I thought that might get your attention. Come on, let’s eat.”

She saved her work, booted down, and joined him in the kitchen, where they companionably prepared their meal. “Here.” Rafe passed her the plastic lid so she could read the note Chadden had taped to the cover, and then scraped the lobster truffle pasta into a cast-iron pot. Though the message was innocent enough—a request that she return the container at some point, along with the dozens of others in her possession, sooner rather than later, PLEASE—the note’s salutation made his blood pressure spike.