Charlene TEGLIA - Dangerous Games(ellora) Read online

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  An Ellora’s Cave Publication, April 2005

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.

  1337 Commerce Drive, #13

  Stow,OH 44224

  ISBN MS Reader (LIT) ISBN # 1-4199-0211-3

  Other available formats (no ISBNs are assigned):

  Adobe (PDF), Rocketbook (RB), Mobipocket (PRC) & HTML

  DANGEROUS GAMES Copyright © 2005 CHARLENE TEGLIA

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. They are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

  Edited bySue-Ellen Gower .

  Cover art bySyneca .

  Warning:

  The following material contains graphic sexual content meant for mature readers.Dangerous Games has been rated E–rotic by a minimum of three independent reviewers.

  Ellora’s Cave Publishing offers three levels of Romantica™ reading entertainment: S (S-ensuous), E (E-rotic), and X (X-treme).

  S-ensuouslove scenes are explicit and leave nothing to the imagination.

  E-roticlove scenes are explicit, leave nothing to the imagination, and are high in volume per the overall word count. In addition, some E-rated titles might contain fantasy material that some readers find objectionable, such as bondage, submission, same sex encounters, forced seductions, and so forth. E-ratedtitles are the most graphic titles we carry; it is common, for instance, for an author to use words such as “fucking”, “cock”, “pussy”, and such within their work of literature.

  X-tremetitles differ from E-rated titles only in plot premise and storylineexecution. Unlike E-rated titles, stories designated with the letter X tend to contain controversial subject matter not for the faint of heart.

  Dangerous Games

  Charlene Teglia

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Ducati: Ducati Meccanica S.P.A.

  Taser: Taser International, Inc.

  Godzilla: Toho Co., Ltd.

  Frederick’s ofHollywood:Frederick’s of Hollywood, Inc.

  Nissan

  Prologue

  There was somebody in his system.

  An automated alert flagged the unauthorized file activity. If his home was a fortress, it was nothing compared to the security measures protecting his internal network. Only the truly determined and the very clever could hope to penetrate his defenses. Even the persistent and brilliant would need sheer luck to get so far.

  That a lone hacker could get so lucky on the first try defied the odds.

  Drake Trahern sat considering this, a large, still form in the darkness that was relieved only by the glow from his computer screen. The dim light revealed harsh features that were outwardly composed, giving no hint of the emotion beneath the surface calm except the flex of a jaw muscle that made the jagged lightning bolt scar along his left cheek jump.

  He touched the scar once, lightly. The scar was a reminder that protecting information could be a dangerous game.

  His security was good. Some might even say paranoid. Still, he’d learned from experience. It wouldn’t pay to take this incident lightly.

  Since the creation of Wyvern’s Quest, the game that had made him wealthy, he’d lived and worked in solitude. That solitude had been unbroken until now. Now he was no longer alone. An uninvited guest was paging through his file system.

  Drake waited patiently until the intruder triggered a trap. Data was captured and displayed. Within a short time, the would-be thief’s identity was unmasked, his entire life an open book. Drake quickly skimmed the facts and viewed the photo of the hacker, a teen with no previous record.

  It didn’t seem likely that a first-time offender could crack a system he’d designed to protect government secrets. He considered the possible explanations for this unlikely success.

  The most obvious possibility seemed the least plausible. Wyvern’s Quest had an obsessive following. The hacker could be a gamer who’d found out where the program was created and tried to get a prerelease peek at the new version just to see it first.

  As another possibility, a rival software company might have put the kid up to it and helped him break in, hoping to hide behind his juvenile status. This scenario made Drake’s intruder potentially a dupe or an accomplice.

  There was a third and more disturbing possibility. Somebody from his former life might suspect he was working on something other than Wyvern’s Quest. That somebody might have been behind the break-in.

  Prosecution was an option, naturally. Drake leaned back in his black leather chair and considered it.

  No harm had been done. Nothing had been taken. His automated security measures had shut the intruder out before any data was compromised.

  But the hacker had broken into his isolation, violated his file system, raised an implied threat. That was personal. An arrest didn’t seem personal enough in response.

  Then there were the unknown factors surrounding the incident. Was it a random prank, or something more serious? And who was really behind it? Was his project at risk, again? Questions too important to leave unanswered.

  Drake tapped the arrow key down to read through the rest of his uninvited guest’s impromptu biography. Enough facts could add up to form a clearer picture.

  Ryan Palmer, resident ofTwin Falls. That was local and made the obsessed gamer scenario more plausible. High-school honor student, orphan. His custodial guardian was the only sibling, an older sister. Melinda Palmer, research librarian. Her picture appeared and Drake gazed at it for a long moment.

  Was she involved in her brother’s activities? An expert researcher could have located him, could have uncovered his background. A woman struggling to support a teen on a less than lavish income might have sold her expertise to an interested party. The siblings might be in it together for money.

  Drake continued to study her photograph, searching her face for clues and finding none. The longer he looked, the tighter something deep in his gut clenched. The beginnings of a dark idea stirred.

  She might be innocent. She might be guilty. In either case, she had to have given up a lot of things to protect her brother when they were orphaned. He wondered what she might be willing to give up now to protect her brother from criminal charges.

  Certainly it should be worth some of her time. A weekend. That seemed more than fair. She’d give him a weekend of her time for her brother’s crime, and an opportunity for him to discover the truth about tonight’s events.

  He doubted she’d object to his demand. If the Palmers were nothing more than they appeared to be, she had nothing to fear from him. Before he’d acquired the scar, women had found him attractive enough to make a weekend in his company no hardship. Since then, the scar seemed to add to his appeal. Some women found a hint of danger sexually exciting.

  It wouldn’t bother Drake if Melinda Palmer found him exciting. If she was sexually attracted, it would be that much easier for him to gain her cooperation.

  He studied the lines of her face and envisioned her here, with him. He thought of touching her and reached out to trace the electronically displayed line of her cheek with his finger.

  She wouldn’t have a choice—if she wanted to avoid legal trouble, she’d have to come here, to him. He’d find out what he wanted to know. That would satisfy him.

  And when she came, they could play a game of their own, one that m
ight satisfy them both. Drake reached out again to touch the image of her hair, wondering what it would feel like to fill his hands with it in reality. Soft as silk, perfumed with the subtle scent of woman.

  Drake wasn’t accustomed to the heavy weight of desire that descended on him, but he accepted it. He’d been out of circulation for a while. He was angry at the intrusion, his passions engaged by the potential threat. Those passions extended to her by association, a natural enough reaction.

  A momentary attraction meant nothing. She was no more a threat to him than her hacker brother, who had been shut out of his system with nothing to show for thismidnightraid. Still, better to be cautious. There was no need for him to involve himself with her any further than necessary. His attorney could handle the initial contact. Having a legal representative convey his demands would add weight and leave her less room to maneuver.

  He hadn’t started this game, but he’d finish it. They were playing by his rules now. He wanted her here. She would come. When he was finished with her, she would go. Everything would be the same as before, his work uninterrupted, his software creations secure, his world exactly as he wanted it.

  The decision made, Drake made his move.

  Chapter One

  He was a black leather-clad knight on a sleekly designed steed that whispered of Italian engineering and universal danger.

  He didn’t look chivalrous. He looked more the type to storm her castle and carry her off as booty than the type to wear her favor and fight for her honor. He wore leather and denim and heavy work boots. Sunglasses hid his eyes. He hadn’t shaved recently. His dark hair was cut short, presumably to decrease the wind resistance when he leaned low over his mechanical charger and opened the throttle wide.

  He sat looking at Melinda for an eternity while she in turn tried to keep a peripheral eye on the rough-looking motorcyclist who’d stopped beside her on this stretch of interstate highway, without seeming to look in his direction.

  Instead, she looked at the red light on her dashboard and tried not to think about how the steam billowing up from the hood of her practical Nissan sedan made him look like a demon lover rising from the pit of hell, conjured by her darkest longings and come to fulfill them all.

  Not that she wanted anything fulfilled but her current longing for a state trooper or a tow truck, or for the boiling cloud of steam and the red light on her dashboard to go away.

  She didn’t have any dark longings she wanted him to fulfill. None she intended to admit to, anyway. A man like that would know all about dark longings and how to fulfill them. But then men who looked like that were also unreliable and dangerous and probably carried knives and took drugs.

  More to the point, men like that also weren’t interested in women who were shy and didn’t know how to flirt and wore sensible shoes. Men like that were interested in women who wore hooker shorts and leather bustiers and thigh-high leather boots with heels that rose up into the stratosphere like thetowerofBabel.

  Melinda formed a brief mental image of herself, transformed by thigh-high boots and short shorts and something that would make her A-cup size look like cleavage.

  Then the image of her transformed self was joined by the motorcycle man giving her a knowing look that said clearly that clothes didn’t make the woman. She was never going to be a temptress. Besides, they both knew she couldn’t wear those shorts with underwear and Melinda would die of embarrassment if she was seen in public with everybody knowing she wasn’t wearing any panties.

  She was so caught up in the daydream that the knock on her driver’s side window made her jump with a guilty start. She instinctively turned her head towards the noise, forgetting that she couldn’t look directly at the motorcycle man or he might attack her right there on the highway, and looked straight into mirrored lenses that reflected her own wide brown eyes back at her.

  It took Melinda a moment to realize he was signaling her to roll down the window. She obeyed the gesture. He looked like a man who was used to being obeyed and she wasn’t any good at confrontation. If she’d been better at confrontation, she wouldn’t be stuck out here in the first place.

  When she got the window rolled down, the man folded his arms and bent to lean them against the glass edge, tilting his head to consider her from an entirely too intimate angle. Melinda’s breath caught. If he leaned forward just a few inches, those unsmiling lips would brush against hers. His broad chest seemed to fill her vision. He was so big up close. And scarred. A jagged lightning bolt ran along his left cheek.Probably a souvenir from a gang fight.

  “Open up the hood.”

  The low, growling voice rasped over Melinda’s senses like his square, stubbled chin might rasp over her skin, making her shiver.

  Then she focused on the words. Of course, she should open the hood. That was logical, practical. She would have thought of it already, but she’d been so busy wondering what he was going to do to her and hoping he’d go away before she found out that she hadn’t been thinking. Melinda pulled the lever on the lower left side of the dash and popped the hood.

  He stayed right where he was for a minute longer, and an earthy male scent made of sunshine and musk and something indefinable filled her nostrils.

  She had a crazy urge to lean forward herself, just a little, just enough to feel that hard mouth on hers and see if his unshaven jaw scraped the way it looked like it would.

  She’d never been kissed by a man who wasn’t shaved smooth. Not that she’d had a lot of time to indulge in kissing. A heavy class load in college hadn’t left much time for frivolity. After graduating with her master’s degree, the sudden responsibility for her twelve-year-old brother had meant a pressing need to find a job instead of a lover. She’d been lucky to get hired by a growing technology company to research the viability of proposed projects and acquisitions. Buried in shyness and statistics and grief, her opportunities for kissing had not flourished.

  When the man turned away, Melinda couldn’t help noticing how his worn denim jeans molded themselves lovingly to his muscular butt. She watched his taut backside with avid interest as he walked around to the front of her car and lifted the hood.

  It was easy to rationalize ogling him. After all, if she had to get stuck in the middle of nowhere with a dead car and a dangerous hoodlum, she might as well enjoy the view. Besides, if she kept an eye on him she wouldn’t be caught unawares if he decided to attack her.

  She stifled the thought that if he did, it would probably be the most exciting thing that would ever happen to her.

  Exciting just didn’t describe the current state of her life. If it did, this wouldn’t be the only Friday evening in recent memory when she had plans that involved leaving the house to meet a man. And it would be a purely social occasion instead of mandatory. Although in any case Melinda couldn’t imagine any exciting plans that included a drive on this route after a full day at work.

  The distance wasn’t so terrible, it was the terrain it covered.

  Hot air spilled in through the open window. Summer inIdaho’s high plains desert meant temperatures that soared well over a hundred and there wasn’t anything to provide shade for miles. There wasn’t anything to block the winds that swept across the plains, either, and her hair blew around her face as the wind gusted in with the heat. The temperature would drop once the sun went down, but during the summer the extended daylight meant a cooling breeze was still hours away.

  The only relief from the barren, rocky landscape was the river, winding along in the shape of the reptile it was named for. The highway followed the Snake River canyon, and the land scrubbed free of topsoil by the river’s great flood thousands of years earlier remained inhospitable to the present day.

  Maybe the intense heat had baked her brain. It would explain her crazy thoughts. Her imagination was running wild with unlikely ideas involving herself and a strange man. She shouldn’t be thinking of herself as some sort of would-be seductress in impossible clothes, or a stranger in tight jeans as some sort of
black knight bent on storming her castle.

  This was all Mr. Drake Trahern’s fault.

  Melinda scowled at the thought of him and his lunatic proposal. If that man had been willing to listen to reason, she wouldn’t be here now, ogling a strange man and having impractical, irresponsible, incorrect fantasies.

  She shouldn’t be thinking of kissing. She should be thinking of how to live up to the bizarre agreement she’d made without anything like kissing taking place this weekend. Assuming she ever made it to Trahern’s high-tech fortress to keep her end of the agreement. The way her car had sounded before she’d pulled over, it didn’t seem hopeful. The man wasn’t likely to accept car trouble as an excuse, either.