Taryn Taylor - Wicked Pleasure

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?”

“In a minute. First, check the other feeds for looping. Start with the west stairs to the basement and the hallway outside the master bedroom. Work out from there.”

“There’s no way anyone pulled something as bush-league as a loop with Mina and I on the—Jesus H. Christ in a porno, that’s a bingo on the hallway cam. God damn , this is clean. It didn’t trigger any of the fail-safes.”

Liam’s blood picked up, like a predator who’d just scented his prey.

Definitely not bored.

“Send someone to the library anyway. Low priority. Tell security not to cause a scene. And get the cameras back online. I’ll take care of the bedroom myself.”

Liam stowed his phone away, helpless against his own smirk of satisfaction as he hit the button that would close the window to the balcony. It had been a long time since anyone had gotten under his skin like she did. And longer still since anyone had gotten the drop on him.

Gorgeous and brilliant was a hell of a combination.

Liam savored the rest of his bourbon, contemplating the upcoming battle of wits, giving his sexy little interloper a few minutes’ head start on whatever she had planned.

Then he pulled the doors to the office closed behind him and returned to the party, placating attention-seekers with a distracted smile and nod as he headed toward the stairs that led to his bedroom.

LIAM KEARNEY HAD all the best toys.

A self-satisfied smile curved her lips as the light on the electronic trip wire went dead. With the final booby trap dispatched, AJ shoved her phone back in her purse and slipped into the master suite. Safer to leave the light off, since the giant floor-to-ceiling window across from his bed looked out over the party. All she needed was one nosy guest to report her skulking around and she’d be sunk.

Focus , she warned herself. Quick. Efficient. Eyes on the prize.

No time to indulge in perverted thoughts about his ginormous bed or how good he might look in it. Or on the floor. Or up against the dresser.

This was a onetime deal. She’d known that when she’d hacked her invitation. She’d been all over the security feed since the second she’d stepped onto Liam’s property. A second chance at this was never part of the plan.

Might as well hit the main server before she disappeared for good. Right?

You don’t owe him anything , she reminded herself sternly, when the answer to her previous question wasn’t a resounding yes. He was the enemy. The asshole who’d hacked Max.

And yeah, he was sexy as sin, but their association had the same approximate expiration date as nonrefrigerated dairy in the California sun.

Swallowing her unease, AJ hurried over to the dark mahogany closet, wishing she could have pulled this job in her Doc Martens instead of stilettos. Props to all the women in action movies who kicked ass in heels on the reg. It wasn’t easy.

The doors slid out of the way as she approached—the man had a damn spaceship for a closet—revealing an impressive square-footage of meticulously arranged suits, shirts and ties, but she didn’t waste time admiring the dark-to-light color coding. Instead, she walked directly to the rows and rows of shoes that lined the wall at the back of the room.

According to the blueprints, the entrance to the panic room should be behind them. AJ ran a hand along the side of the shelves until her fingers caught on a lever.

“Gotcha.”

She pressed it, and with a click, one side of shelving came loose from the wall so she could pull it open like a door. But when AJ looked behind it, she encountered the one thing that she hadn’t expected from a tech god...

Uh oh.

It was freakin’ brilliant, no doubt about it, but there was no way she was getting past the vault door. Three key locks that seemed to be on separate timers, a good old-fashioned combination lock and a manual keypad.

She was a hacker, not an old-timey bank robber.

Touché , she thought with a mental salute to the man who’d won this round. Looked like she wouldn’t be using any more of the cool tech she’d loaded on her phone after all.

Good thing she’d gone after Liam’s phone when she’d had the chance, or tonight would have been a total bust.

The memory of their dangerous flirtation flooded her body with heat.