Taryn Taylor - Wicked Pleasure

The reminder gave her the strength to shoot him a cool smile. “Not a position you’re used to, I’m sure.”

He stepped closer. It was disconcerting, the way his broad shoulders blocked out the view of anything but him.

“On the contrary, I pride myself on being familiar with a wide array of positions.”

AJ swallowed, ignoring the urge to mess him up a bit, rake her hands through his hair, tug his tie askew, get him a little bit naked. “You’re handsomer than I expected.” The thought slipped past her lips and raised his eyebrows.

“That didn’t sound like a compliment.”

She gave him a once-over and shrugged. “Kind of cliché is all. I mean, hella smart, stupid rich and disgustingly handsome? It’s a little much. Most people settle for two out of three.”

His gaze roamed her face. “I don’t believe in settling.” His voice was low and intimate and vibrated at the perfect frequency to tighten her nipples. “Tell me your name.”

“A—Robin.” She remembered her alias at the last second. Damn. Maybe that bourbon had affected her a little. She’d been this close to saying AJ. That would have been a rookie mistake, giving him her real name. Well, real enough, anyway.

“Robin,” he repeated, leaning forward. Or was she leaning forward?

Either way, their breaths mingled, and her breasts ached for his touch, and being horizontal sounded like a way better idea than being vertical because being vertical was highly overrated as a state of being anyway.

It would just figure that the only man to light her up, to really light her up, in the last four years would be the one man who was completely off-limits to her. A mark. Nothing more.

GD sex hormones. This was no time to be all hopped up on dopamine and serotonin and Liam Kearney’s mouth.

“Liam! Hey! Awesome party!”

The intrusion was perfectly timed, and AJ took a step back from temptation and sent a cursory glance at the bikini-clad girls beckoning from the lawn below them.

“Why are you hiding up there? Meet us in the pool!”

“Yeah. Come get wet with us!”

When AJ looked back at Liam, his gaze was still locked on her, and she ignored the zing of heat in her belly.

“It seems I’ve monopolized you for far too long. Your fan club is getting restless.” The rueful note in her voice wasn’t fully for show. “But it was nice to meet the man behind the legend. Thanks for giving me a reason to dress up and drink your bourbon.” She swallowed the final mouthful and pressed her empty glass into his left hand, ignoring the spike in her pulse when her fingers brushed his. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go freshen up.”

“It was nice meeting you, too.” A noticeable beat slipped by before he added, “Robin.”

Something about that pause made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

Liam raised his hand, gesturing toward the house with her glass. “You’re looking for the first door on the left at the top of the stairs.”

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.

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.