Wicked Pleasure

The directions startled her. “What?”

“The bathroom,” he clarified, his voice easy though his gaze remained sharp. “You wanted to freshen up. That’s what you said, right?”

AJ’s smile was deliberately casual. “Yes. That’s exactly where I’m headed. Thank you.” She knew that, of course. She knew every inch of his sprawling estate, thanks to the blueprints she’d nicked from the city’s website.

Not that she couldn’t have gotten them through regular channels...but why wait for the mind-numbingly slow wheels of bureaucracy to turn when you could just make the internet your bitch? Instead of filling out forms and weeks of waiting, she already knew where the bathroom was, and where his bedroom was, and where the panic room in the back of his bedroom closet that he’d reconfigured into a server room was.

“It’s been entirely my pleasure, I assure you.”

Thanks to emphasis, what might have been a bland pleasantry from anyone else held some heat. Enough to make AJ wish their night could have ended differently.

Ignoring all her good sense, she tightened her grip on her purse and stepped close enough that her breasts pressed against his chest. “Well, if this is your idea of pleasure, it’s probably good we stopped now.” AJ leaned in, then leaned in a little more, until her lips brushed his ear. “My definition might have killed you.”

She pulled back in time to see Liam’s mouth tip up at the corner. “It sounds like it would have been a hell of a way to go.”

God, it had been forever since she’d felt this...alive. Maybe a little walk on the wild side was exactly what she’d needed. “Oh, it would have been. I assure you.”

And with that, she left Liam on the balcony and headed into the house.

Playtime was over. She had work to do.

CHAPTER THREE (#u872f47ce-49ad-5575-8505-d58d75d2453f)

LIAM KEARNEY HATED being bored.

Sadly, it was becoming the status quo.

His personal life had devolved into a slideshow of inanely shallow parties, forgettably beautiful women and exceedingly nauseating sycophants. Sometimes he got the impression that he’d become the thing he hated most in the world...a black-card-carrying member of the entitled elite.

His mother.

Usually he could bury that irritating thought in work, because his professional life was interesting enough. At least it had been, until a month and a half ago.

That’s when Max Whitfield, his rival in the race for the next step in digital cryptocurrency, had grown a conscience and confessed to the world that someone had hacked him, so he was pushing back the release date of his SecurePay app until he’d gotten to the bottom of it. He wanted to make sure that the customers who trusted him with their business were getting the kind of superior product they associated with the Whitfield Industries name...or whatever PR bullshit his sister had spun for him.

All he’d heard in that press conference was that Max had folded and handed him the win. Liam had been planning on taking it anyway, of course, but it would have been so much more satisfying to do it in a fair fight.

He thought briefly of his past dealings with John Beckett, and his more recent dealings with the dead man’s son, Aidan. Max’s former father figure and former best friend, respectively. And he knew Max blamed him for the former part on both counts. Buying John’s code hadn’t been illegal per se, but Liam’s gut had told him the old drunk wasn’t totally on the level when he’d shown up, looking for a deal.

Not his finest hour, but Liam had been young, and hungry, and bent on proving himself to all comers. Passing on John’s raw genius and sending him back to Whitfield Industries because it was the sappy, good-guy “right thing to do” was not an option he’d entertained.

Then Beckett Senior wrapped his car around a tree, Beckett Junior had skipped town, and Max’s side of the rivalry had turned personal.

A tiny ember of guilt tried to flare, but Liam drowned it with a healthy swallow of bourbon. He couldn’t have known how things would turn out when he’d made that deal.

Still, Liam owed Max a fair fight, and he’d been looking forward to it, to putting the products each of them had developed to market in a cryptocurrency battle royale and see once and for all who came out on top.

Max’s software would be good—why have a rival if he didn’t have the chops to push you to be your best?—but it was no match for Cybercore’s hardware.

The Shield was a status symbol, one you could display on a watchband, a bracelet, a necklace or a belt. Max could only sell people the SecurePay app once, but The Shield came in seven different colors, a rotating selection of limited-edition prints, and a coordinating line of accessories.

And that was why Liam was going to wipe the floor with him.

Well, he would have.

Now that Max had temporarily dropped out of the game, Liam’s inevitable victory was hollow and unfulfilling.

He thrived on testing his mettle against a worthy opponent.

Liam stared contemplatively at the empty glass in his left hand. And speaking of worthy opponents...

He wasn’t bored anymore.

Most definitely a party crasher...but how she’d done it was what intrigued him most. This was an exclusive bash he was throwing.

He knew she hadn’t breached the perimeter. Not only couldn’t she have scaled the wall in that dress—God, that dress—and those heels, but his new electronic fence tech was unbeatable...which was why the government was about to make him even wealthier than he already was.

That meant she had not just duped a bar code, which would have flagged her for using someone else’s invitation, but created a new one that let her through the gates under the alias Robin Capucha, without registering as an extra person and tripping the maximum guest number warning, either.

The cockiness of casually breaching his top-notch security by giving Robin Hood a Spanish flair was...ballsy. And intriguing. And pretty fucking hot.

Someone below called his name, but he pretended not to hear as he stepped back into his decoy office—he kept all the really good tech downstairs—and abandoned the glasses on the desk. Then he pulled his phone from his jacket to check the progress on the facial recognition he was running off the security footage from the front gate, where all arriving guests had to check in. No match on her so far.

Liam tapped a finger against the edge of his phone. “What are you up to?”

As if in answer, his phone buzzed again. This time, he answered it.

“Dom. What have you got?”

“Not sure. All the cameras in your office are now pointed at the ceiling, and I can’t get them back online.”

Good to know he could still outsmart his employees. “That was me.”

“I knew it!” His voice got muffled, as though he was covering the mouthpiece. “I told you it was Liam,” he gloated, and then his words were back to full strength. “I told Mina it was you. She and I have a hundred bucks riding on who solves your office cam puzzle first.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, we just had a camera go out. Nothing but static in the library. Nobody on the feed prior to, so either it’s busted, someone hit it remotely or you’ve got a tech-savvy ghost.”

Aha.

The library. It housed a built-in safe behind a false picture frame, like something out of a movie. He’d considered having it removed during the last set of renos, but there was something antiquated about it that appealed to him. And it was a smart hit—a room with a secret was a target that would draw focus.

“Wanted to let you know, but you’re a hard man to get ahold of tonight.”

Liam’s focus drifted to the tumbler on his desk. There was a faint imprint of her lips on the glass, the same deep pink as her lipstick. “I was busy working out a little puzzle of my own.”

Dom laughed. “Yeah, I know what you were busy with. I’m the one who told you ‘the puzzle’ was nosing around your office in the first place, remember? You want me to dispatch some muscle to the book room to investigate?”