Erin McCarthy - Bad Boys Online

"It's on my hard drive." But Kindra had a better idea.

Her hand back on his pants stroking him, she whispered in his ear, "Let's make another one instead."

Mack watched Kindra walk toward the door, her sweet little ass swaying as she shot him a "come and get it" look over her shoulder.

Damn, he was one lucky guy.

He followed her, his tongue probably hanging as low as Bitsy's. "Baby, let's go burn up your hard drive."

"I don't feel the love in this room."

Jared Kincaid stared at Harold, who was standing in the middle of his office, hands on his leather pants-clad hips.

What Jared felt was not love, but a skull-grinding, breath-robbing headache. Trust him to get hired at a marketing firm where the boss was having an existential midlife crisis.

It had started with Harold's leaving his wife six weeks ago. Now it had graduated to his boss's wearing a gay hairdresser's wardrobe to work every day, preaching to the staff about oneness with self, and eating massive quantities of hummus.

Since Jared's instinct was to tell Harold to take his love and shove it up his leather pants, he remained silent. With a little luck, in a month or two Harold would rediscover his true passion lay in Beamers and Armani suits and they could get back to normal.

A sultry low laugh filled the room. Jared gritted his teeth.

That laugh was a perfect example of why he was doomed to middle management and a lifetime of dodging trouble. Trouble followed Jared. Everywhere he went.

Trouble usually had long legs and breasts. This trouble had all of that plus blowzy blond hair, a Southern accent, and lush cherry lips that pouted and taunted.

And her name. Who the hell named their kid Candy Appleton? Had her mother envisioned her newborn baby as a future porn star?

Maybe it had been cute when Candy was a little girl, before she'd grown breasts, but now, on that body… it was just perverted .

Candy, who looked relaxed and sexy as hell in her red suit, kicked the heel of her crossed foot up and down, annoying Jared even further. When she did that, he had a view straight up her thigh nearly to the promised land.

She'd be the type to wear garters, he was sure. Black ones, green ones. Red ones, cream ones.

He shifted in his chair, slouching to hide the fact that he now had a steel boner.

A boner. In the middle of the goddamn day, in the middle of his boss's office.

Trouble. Plain and simple.

Trouble spoke. "Harold, I don't think Jared's ready to feel the love."

He sat up straight. What was that supposed to mean? He could feel the love if he wanted to. If he could ever figure out what the hell Harold was talking about.

Candy tossed him one of those sultry, open-mouth smiles that made him want to tug her full bottom lip into his mouth and suck hard. He dug his fingernails into his thigh.

Harold frowned. "Is that true, Jared? You're not ready to feel the love?"

He was ready to feel up Candy's curves. Did that count? Jared cleared his throat. "Uhh, what exactly are we talking about here?"

"I'm talking about the fact that we have exactly three weeks to get together the ad campaign for Chunk o' Chocolate, and you and Candy have barely spent an hour on it."

That's because he just about ran away every time Candy came near him. She scared the hell out of him. He had been forced to leave five years of hard work and a 401k plan behind him when he'd left his previous marketing firm, due to an unplanned encounter in the copier room with the big boss's secretary. Unknown to him at the time, that secretary was also the boss's girlfriend.

Work and sex didn't mix. Jared and women didn't mix. Every embarrassing and detrimental incident in his life could be traced back to a woman and his inability to control himself around them.

The buck stopped here. Or his dick, however you wanted to look at it.

He was not going to screw this up. Or screw Candy, no matter how much he wanted to taste those lethal lips.

"We can work on it whenever Candy likes." He avoided looking at her and focused on the bright yellow spot Harold had dyed on the front of his rapidly diminishing hair. It looked like a flashing caution light.

Caution: Middle-aged man approaching baldness.

Candy said, "Maybe you should assign someone else to work with Jared. I don't think he really likes me all that much." Her words were slow, and rolled, like a water drop across his skin.

That's where she was wrong. He liked Candy. Candy was sweet and lickable and belonged in his mouth, where he could swirl it around, sucking and tasting every delectable inch.

Harold clapped his hands together, startling Jared out of his erotic fantasy.

"See, that's what I'm talking about! Jared doesn't like you, and you don't like Jared. I can't have that."

Candy didn't like him? Jared turned to her in amazement. Well, hell, that hurt. It was okay if he was avoiding her, but she wasn't supposed to avoid him.

He was likable. He returned phone calls and held open doors for women. Of course, whenever Candy was around, he usually just grunted and bolted for the nearest exit. He supposed she might take that personally.

But what was he supposed to do? Tell her it wasn't her, it was her hot knockers that had him running like a cat from water? That was sure to go over big.

"I like Candy," he managed to say, not at all sure he wanted to know where Harold was going with this.

Candy laughed again, and he was suddenly aware of his poor word choice.

"Liar," she murmured. "But that shouldn't have anything to do with this client."

"It doesn't."

Harold studied them both and said, "I've noticed the tension between you two, and it's got to stop. It's affecting the rest of the staff. It's altering the feng shui state of the office. There are negative auras camped in my company, and that has got to go."

If Harold pulled out crystals and started chanting, Jared was out of there.

Not that he could afford to quit. As luck would have it, he'd bought himself a pricey condo right before he'd gotten canned from his previous job. The three months pounding the pavement had put a real dent in his assets. Another stint of unemployment and he'd be eating macaroni and cheese out of his car after the bank foreclosed on his mortgage.

"We don't want negative auras." Candy dropped her foot to the ground and smiled at Harold.

It made Jared suspicious. She never looked as if she was being sarcastic, yet he suspected she was. She was intelligent, and her ad work was brilliant, yet that brain was housed in a stripper's body.

He had the feeling that, if left alone, Candy could outmaneuver them all, leaving a string of drooling men in her wake as she deftly climbed her way up the corporate ladder.

Maybe he'd catch a glimpse under her skirt on her way up.

Jesus, he was hopeless.

"So Candy is willing to work on improvement. What about you, Jared? Do I have your word that you'll open your mind to a more natural unity?"

Sure. Why not. He had to say yes. This was his boss, no matter how off-the-wall Harold was acting, and he was still in charge. Jared didn't like macaroni and cheese, so he forced his mouth to open and say, "You have my word, Harold."

Harold beamed. He said, "Yesterday I had the best idea.

You're going to love this. There is obviously something holding you and Candy back, something that needs to be resolved." Harold put his finger to his lip. "We could be talking about a betrayal in a past life, I'm not sure."

Jared pressed his hand to his temple. If he'd had a past life, he'd obviously done something really shitty to have earned this torture in his present life.

"What did you have in mind?" Candy leaned forward as she redirected Harold.