Kristin Hardy Read online

Keely peeked in. “I suppose that means it’s a home for data, not people.”

  “Good guess.”

  The place was surprisingly bright despite the drapes on the windows, courtesy of a trio of skylights that brought sunlight in from above. Keely and Lex wandered through the big open living room, stepping up onto carpet that was thick and plush. Had the drapes been open, the wall of windows would have brought the woods inside. Had the drapes been open, it would have been lovely.

  “Poor house,” Keely said. “Someone probably loved it once and now it just sits up here, empty and alone.”

  Lex flipped a switch and a light came on. “Not entirely empty if someone’s got the power on.” He flipped it back off. “I guess something’s working somewhere.”

  “He’s got to have juice. Unless everything’s hard copy, he’s got to have a computer.”

  Lex nodded. “So let’s find it.”

  They headed down the hallway that led to the bedrooms.

  “So much for wood stoves.” Keely pointed to a thermostat on the wall and stopped to turn it up. There was a tiny flash of light and a brief hum and they heard the sound of a furnace kicking in somewhere.

  She shook her head as they continued down the hall to find the first bedroom empty. “Heat and power, but no furniture. It makes no sense.”

  The second room was empty also, sunlight showing below the curtains covering the windows.

  And the third?

  “Jackpot,” Lex said softly.

  The room held a wide, plush black leather couch. Before it sat a coffee table with the usual jumble of remotes and coasters and magazines. On the opposite wall hung a flat-screen television. To one side sat a sleek gray desk.

  “It’s got to be somewhere in this room.” Lex bent to the desk.

  As though they’d been assigned jobs, Keely turned to the closet. It was bare, at a glance. She opened up the built-in wall cabinets alongside. The top one was empty. The wide drawer below protested as she pulled it out, its runners binding before it relented to let her find it empty, too. The drawer below that was in similarly bad shape. The bottom drawer, however, slid out smoothly. And it was there that she found it—the black mesh fabric of a laptop case.

  “Oh, come to Mama,” Keely breathed.

  Lex turned to see her pulling out the case. “Sweet.”

  “It will be once we find what we want.” Nerves made her hands shake a little as she brought the laptop out and set it on the desk.

  Lex continued looking through the drawers.

  “Anything?” Keely asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m betting it’s all going to be electronic. Easy to store, easy to transport. Easy to forward to his colleague if he needs to offer a reminder.”

  Keely gave a little shiver as she thought of Skele. “I would think he’d want to avoid him as much as possible.”

  “Why? From Bradley’s point of view, the guy is his meal ticket. That’s where the money comes from, and I’m betting that he has as much on Skele as Skele has on him.”

  Except Bradley didn’t kill people for a living.

  The laptop hummed and finished booting up, flashing the login screen. The username was there, the password line empty. “I was afraid of that,” Keely said, hitting the enter key. Password not recognized. Please reenter.

  “We should have expected it. Most computers come up with a login screen,” Lex pointed out.

  “It’s still a problem.” She typed in Bradley’s name. Password not recognized. Please reenter.

  “You tried his first name?”

  “Just did,” she said, making a frustrated noise as the computer obstinately displayed the same message. “And his last name. And your parents’. Let’s think about this. People usually pick names of things or people that are important to them. What would that be?”

  “Yours?” Lex suggested.

  She snorted but tried it anyway. “No dice.”

  “I suppose you tried just hitting Enter to bypass?”

  She didn’t bother to answer, just flicked him a glance from under her brows and began looking around on the desktop, on the bottom of the computer, in the drawers.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “The password.” She slid out the breadboard, examined it, and pushed it back in. “Bradley can never remember his passwords. He always writes them down somewhere.”

  “It’s probably in his wallet,” Lex said, joining the search.

  “He doesn’t carry a wallet. Too bulky. He has this little glorified money clip thing that also keeps a couple of credit cards and his license. No, if he’s true to form, it’ll be here.”

  Except that it wasn’t.

  “Maybe it’s somewhere else in the house,” Lex suggested.

  “Can’t hurt to check, I suppose.” Reluctantly, she rose.

  They headed out into the dimness of the hall, inspecting closets, cabinets and even the bathroom they passed, only to find them all empty. Ahead was the master bedroom. They stepped through the door and stopped dead.

  “More of that minimalist thing,” Lex observed.

  It was filled with a single piece of furniture—an enormous four-poster bed. No mirror, no bed table, no bureau, no chair. No lamps. Just a smooth, square slab nearly the size of Rhode Island, covered with a deep wine-colored duvet and a pair of pillows.

  Keely stared in silence. “Why would he need a bed?” she asked finally.

  “To sleep in?”

  “If he wanted to sleep, he has the couch.” Not this enormous, frankly opulent bed. She couldn’t say what prompted her, but she crossed suddenly to the wall cabinets and opened the door.

  To find a small, tidy stack of sheets.

  She sank down on the soft mattress, feeling it give under her. “It’s an empty house. No furniture, no dishes, no towels. No light bulbs in most of the fixtures. Even the refrigerator’s empty. He didn’t stay here.” Her voice tightened. “Why would he need a bed?” She glanced down.

  And then she saw it.

  A long, dark hair curled across the pillow.

  Unbidden, her imagination conjured up an image of Bradley there, naked, with a woman wrapped around him, the two of them hot and sweaty and crying out as he cheated on her, cheated on her, cheated on her….

  Cheated on her.

  She turned to Lex. “Have sex with me.”

  He stared. “What?”

  She slid her jacket off her shoulders. “Have sex with me. Now.” She dropped the jacket on the floor and crossed to shut the door, shivering a bit despite herself at the chill in the air.

  “Whoa. Wait a second. What’s going on?”

  “I think it’s a pretty simple request. You wanted it the other night, unless you’ve changed your mind. And Bradley’s very considerately put this nice, big bed here.” Her hands dropped to the buttons of her shirt. “I say we use it.” She freed the bottom button.

  “You’re nuts.”

  “You don’t want me?” she demanded, a hard, bright, merciless light in her eyes.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with me. As near as I can tell, this is about you and Bradley.”

  She unfastened another button and walked up to him, her movements feline. “Come on.” She leaned in to breathe the words over his lips. “It’ll be good. You know it.”

  Against his will, he felt himself tightening, but anger swamped the desire. “I’m not a tool here, lady. I’m already cleaning up one of Bradley’s messes. I don’t want to clean up another.”

  She whirled away, two spots of color burning high on her cheeks. “I’m a mess? Thanks very much for that.”

  Now he was the one who stalked up to her. “Don’t put words in my mouth. You want to go to bed and it’s about you and me, done, I’m there in a heartbeat. But I am not going to be your revenge lay.”

  “Who asked you to be? You don’t know what I’m thinking.”

  “Why did you and Bradley break up?” he asked evenly.

  She whitened. “That’s
none of your business.”

  “The hell it’s not. Why did you and Bradley break up?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.” She tried to step away but he caught at her shoulders.

  “Why did you and Bradley break up?”

  “Let me go!”

  “Why did you and Bradley break up?”

  “Because he was an evil, lying sonofabitch,” she burst out.

  The words echoed in the air for long moments. Keely could hear each separate beat of her heart. Her gaze was locked on Lex’s, she couldn’t look away.

  “What did he do to you?” His voice was soft.

  “He was cheating on me.” She kept her voice dry, scrubbed of emotion. “I stopped by his house during the day to get some things and I walked in on him doing Kama Sutra pose number 28B with some woman, complete with Dolby stereo sound effects.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It was a surprise,” she agreed. “And then I went back to my house, just to get my head together and found Stockton and his buddies tossing the place and telling me my name was connected with money laundering and fraud.”

  “Jesus.”

  “In a word.” Her smile held no humor. “I’ve had better mornings. Oh, and then two days later, my boss told me to disappear for a while because of the newspaper headlines. And then I come here to find a bed that he’s obviously used with someone…” She swallowed. “So yeah, revenge sounds pretty damned good right now. Are you in?”

  He leaned in and pressed his lips to her forehead. “No. Not that way. I don’t want to sleep with you because you’re trying to get back at the guy you’re in love with because he hurt you.”

  “I’m not in love with Bradley. I haven’t been for a while, even before that day.” She walked over to stare out of the narrow opening in the bedroom drapes. Leafless trees, stark and barren and colorless. “I was going to break up with him that night. That’s why I went to his apartment, to get my stuff.”

  “Why? Had you found out?”

  She shook her head. “Not directly, not about any of it. I just…it started feeling wrong a little while after we got engaged. Like we were just going through the motions. He was my Prince Charming from when I was a girl but we were grownups now and we weren’t living in Far Far Away. It just felt like we’d be sorry. Like I would be,” she amended. “So I went over to get my stuff so I could tell him that night.”

  “And you found him.”

  She tried for a smile that didn’t make it. “Funny thing about being humiliated. Even when you’re not in love with the guy, it still feels like hell.” And to her utter mortification, she felt tears prick her eyelids.

  “He was an idiot,” Lex said softly. He moved to her and slid his arms around her waist. “He was out of his mind to cheat on you.” He leaned down to drop a kiss on her hair, on her forehead, on her eyes.

  It started out as comfort, nothing more. She opened her eyes to stare up into his and find the anger gone, replaced by kindness. When they touched their mouths together, it was with the innocence of the very young. It was connection, reassurance.

  And then it changed.

  Keely didn’t know who changed the angle of the kiss, whose lips parted first. Like a twist of the thermostat firing the furnace, the friction of lip to lip sparked an answering response in her body, a desire poised to grow into need. Lex’s arms tightened around her. The heat between them rose and suddenly the kiss wasn’t about comfort anymore.

  For days they’d circled around it, like moths around a candle. Now, they weren’t circling. Now, there wasn’t any reason to stop. Now, they were here in this private place, just the two of them, and the stalling was done.

  Now, they were both diving for the flame.

  His fingers slid between them, unfastening the remaining buttons on her shirt even as she pushed his jacket off his shoulders and let it drop to the floor. Then he stepped in to pull her against him, to take her mouth, possess it, plunder it.

  And it was marvelous.

  Keely let her head fall back and in a giddy delight she felt Lex’s tongue trace a warm path down to the base of her neck. He pressed his lips against the hollow in her throat as if he were drawing sustenance from her, as though his life depended on it. And his hands, his hands were doing wonderful things, roving up and down her body, sliding and caressing so that even through the clothing she wore, her nerve endings awoke.

  Sex with Bradley had always been measured and quiet. She’d been aroused but within limits. She didn’t want limits anymore. She wanted, needed to be ravished. She wanted to be taken.

  She wanted to lose control.

  “It wasn’t like this,” she said unsteadily. “Not like it is between you and me, it was never like that with Bradley.”

  “We haven’t even started yet,” Lex said against her skin.

  Oh, but they were going to. This time, there wouldn’t be any interruptions. This time, they would do it all. Clothing was an impediment, to be thrown aside as quickly as possible. And then they were naked, on the bed, and she’d never felt anything so glorious.

  His body was lean, tough. He didn’t have the smooth, exaggerated physique of a gym junkie but the hard-muscled build of a man who spent his days in motion, lifting, carrying, working.

  He curved his hand around her cheek and drew it slowly down over her jaw, along her throat. The first time they’d seen each other again, she’d wondered what his hands would feel like running over her. Her imagination hadn’t even come close. And every touch just made her burn to have his touch on the pulsing places where she craved him most.

  He traced his fingertips down to where the tender, fragile skin of her breast began and Keely gasped. “Please,” she whispered.

  “No,” he said. Instead, he just kept tracing his fingers around first one breast, then the other. When she made an impatient noise, he ignored her, taking his time, tormenting her with pleasure, spiraling in toward the center, leaning in to watch in fascination as the ruddy flesh of her areolas crinkled up around the hard nubs of her nipples.

  How was it that such a whisper-light touch could send need rocketing through her? How could his circling fingertips feel like they were setting her afire? And how was it possible that she could feel the sensation radiating out from her nipples when his circling fingers were still on the pale skin of her breasts?

  Lex leaned in and blew a stream of air over the sensitive flesh and she gasped. Eyes closed, she heard his low laugh. And with a suddenness that had her body bucking in shock, he fastened his mouth over her.

  Warm and wet, quick and teasing, his lips and tongue had her crying out, pressing against him. He took his time, focusing on first one peak, then the other until she was moaning feverishly, tangling her fingers in his hair. When she didn’t think she could bear any more, he lingered longer.

  And then he moved lower, his tongue tracing patterns on the quivering skin of her belly.

  Keely was trembling, she knew she was trembling as he roved over her body, pleasing himself, stringing her as tight as a wire. She waited, breathless. The ache between her thighs grew.

  The brush of his cheek against the soft skin of her inner thigh had her jolting. Warm breath flowed over her most sensitive places and still, still, he didn’t touch her where she burned for it. Her fingers clutched the sheets as she struggled not to beg.

  Then his mouth was on her, hot and wet and relentless.

  It was too much to bear, too intense, too direct. Her entire world reduced down to that liquid caress. She didn’t recognize the sound that came from her throat, something urgent and completely wild. His hands were on her breasts. She was melting under the warmth, her hips moving as the sensation built in the center of her. Every atom of her body was focused on that exquisitely sensitive spot where his mouth, that delicious, clever, talented mouth was winding her tighter and tighter until it was unbearable, until she was crying out incoherently, thrashing her head from side to side on the pillow, certain she couldn’t take a millisecond m
ore. And then she was flung over the edge, flying apart, endlessly flying apart into a million shimmering fragments of pleasure.

  Even as she was still shuddering from her climax, he moved up the bed. They pressed together again, touching, stroking, enticing, until the need pulsed within her, the need to have him all the way.

  “I want you,” she whispered.

  He moved atop her, lying between her thighs. “Are you sure?” he asked, his face taut with the need for control.

  In answer, she reached out to pull his hips toward her. She could feel him positioning himself, the slide of his hard flesh against her slickness almost unbearably arousing.