Smoke (Archer's Creek Book 5)

by Gemma Weir

  “No,” she says on a sigh. “I’ve spent most of the day on the phone to Pierre. He arranged the contract and there’s a payment clause in there that states that if the client terminates the contract early without due cause, then they still have to pay in full. It’s not the money that bothers me, it’s that I think I got fired because he saw us together the other night.”

  “What?” I roar. “That little motherfucker from the other night is the one who fired you?”

  “Yep. I have never, ever been fired from a job. I’m good at what I do, really good. I’m in demand. I’m booked for projects two years in advance. He has no reason to fire me.”

  Her last few words are little more than a whisper and I pull her into my chest and wrap my arms around her, holding her tightly. She’s angry, but she’s sad as well. I know how to deal with her anger, but her sadness is what compels me to make it better no matter what.

  I hold her tighter, dropping a kiss against the top of her head. “Want me to go kick his ass?” I ask against her hair.

  She laughs and I’m so fucking grateful for the sound.

  “No,” she says, lifting her hands and pushing them between us, forcing me to loosen my hold on her.

  “Want a Martini?” I ask.

  She nods, her eyes still a little downcast and sad.

  Lifting her chin, I press a soft kiss to her lips, then pull away. “Let’s go get you a drink, baby.”

  I guide her to a table close to the wide French doors that spill onto the patio area to the back of the bar. It’s fairly empty with only a couple of tables filled and a bored looking server comes straight over to us.

  “What can I get y’all?” She asks, her eyes focused on the pad in her hand not on us.

  “A Martini and a beer please,” I say.

  She nods, her pen scrawling along her pad as she walks away.

  “So he didn’t give you any reason; just fired you?”

  “He called me into his office as soon as I got there this morning and the moment I sat down in front of his desk he thanked me for my work and said he no longer required my services. No explanation, nothing, just thank you and fuck off.”

  “What makes you think him firing you has anything to do with him seeing me pick you up the other night?”

  Riley pauses, biting her lip before she answers. “Back when I first got to town, we went to dinner a few times.”

  My eyes narrow and I look at her, watching as she avoids eye contact with me. “You fuck him?” I ask bluntly.

  “No,” she cries, outraged.

  I shrug, risking her anger because I need to know why that motherfucker would fire her because he saw us together. “So what happened?”

  “Nothing really. There was some flirting, mainly on his side, and a few kisses.”

  “You kissed,” I say, the words feeling like razor-blades coming up my throat.

  “I watched a girl in nothing but a bikini thong grind on you and play with your dick for an entire afternoon,” she hisses.

  “Did you and he, have something going on?” I ask, feeling violent even thinking it. She’d told me she had a boyfriend when she rejected me, but then she’d told me it was a lie. Did she have something going with her fucking boss?

  “No, not at all. He kissed me a couple of times. We had absolutely zero chemistry and I haven’t seen him apart from in the office since then.”

  My shoulders relax and I exhale slowly. Thank fuck! It’s a lot easier to claim what’s mine, without having to deal with a rich-as-fuck boyfriend I’d need to get rid of first.

  The server arrives with our drinks and the moment hers is placed in front of her, Riley scoops it up and takes a long drink. When the alcohol hits her throat, she sighs and visibly relaxes. Apparently, the way to my girl’s heart is through a Martini glass. I’ll have to remember that.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” I say, wanting to reach for her, but unsure how she’ll react to me touching her right now.

  “I’m just pissed, you know? I was leaving at the end of next week. Him sacking me now is just a kick in the teeth.”

  She lifts her glass and takes another long drink.

  “Sure you don’t want me to go kick his ass?”

  Her laugh is light and I’m grateful. “No, his dad is a billionaire. I bet he’s got like assassins or whatever just waiting for someone to kill. I’d rather that not be you.”

  “Oh, so you don’t want me dead?” I tease.

  “No, alive is better.”

  “Why’s that, baby?”

  “Well, ‘cause I doubt you’d be that pretty as a corpse,” she says with a smirk.

  “I’m not pretty,” I say mock sternly.

  “Sure you’re not, prettyboy,” she teases again.

  “Hey.”

  She laughs and her eyes scan the bar and the patio as if this is the first time she’s noticed where we are. “It’s pretty out here,” she says.

  “I know, it’s a great view. You can see clear across the state from up here.”

  Her sigh is full of sadness and I want to reach for her, to pull her to me. Instead, I decide to try to distract her. “Puck wants you come in and show him where you found that weird code on the online banking page.”

  “Who is Puck and does he not have a real name I can use? I don’t know who decided that you should all have these stupid nicknames, but really, Daisy, Blade, Smoke, and now Puck. I have no idea how you get anyone to take you seriously.”

  “Because we’re badasses.”

  “Course you are, sweetie,” she replies in an indulgent tone.

  “You are not good for my ego.”

  She smiles. “You don’t need any help with your ego; it’s so big I’m amazed you can fit through most doors.”

  I clutch at my chest dramatically. “You wound me.”

  Her giggle is like music to my fucking ears. “Come on, let’s go see Puck,” I say, draining my glass and placing it back down on the table, tucking a twenty-dollar bill beneath it.

  “You still didn’t tell me who he was.”

  “He’s our computer expert. He does all of the technical online stuff for Sinners Security, plus he’s a kick-ass hacker. He can find anything he wants off the internet, so he knows how to make sure our clients online presence is safe,” I tell her.

  “Oh, okay. What’s his real name?”

  I laugh, then scrunch my face up. “I actually have no fucking clue. He introduced himself to me as Puck. I never asked what his real name was.”

  “God, boys are stupid,” Riley says, drinking the last of her drink and placing her glass back on the table.

  Standing, I reach for her hand, linking our fingers together and pulling her behind me. I wait for her to tug her hand free, but she doesn’t, following me to my bike and climbing on behind me.

  Having her ride with me again feels just as right as it did the first time and now all I want to do is take her back to my place and devour her in my bed.

  The warm sun is shining down, the wind rushing past us, and it’s the first time I’ve been able to pull in a full breath since Dan uttered the words. “I appreciate all of your work so far, but we no longer need you to fulfil the rest of your contract.”

  I have never, ever been fired from a job. Every single game I’ve worked on in the last few years have always asked me to be a part of their next project, but Dan fucking Winters just fired me with less than two weeks left on my contract.

  “I’ll have my assistant book you on the next flight back to New York,” he’d said. How I hadn’t launched myself over the table and screamed in his face I’ll honestly never know, but somehow I’d managed to calmly advise him that I’d make my own travel plans.

  I’d walked out of his office with my head held high, hugged Tony goodbye, packed up my belongings and left. Al had been waiting for me outside the office, a look of sadness and regret etched all over his face. “Did you know?”

  He shook his head. “I got a call to come pick you up fifteen minutes ag
o. I guessed something was going on then. What happened?”

  Scoffing, I tug my purse further onto my shoulder. “I was just advised that my services are no longer required.”

  Al hisses through his teeth, then steps forward and pulls me into a comforting, fatherly hug. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  “I don’t get it. He fought so hard to get me to come here, and now he’s firing me. No explanation, just go away.”

  His arms hold me tighter and I pull in a shuddering breath, then pull back, moving out of his embrace. “Are you allowed to take me back to the hotel, or have you been instructed to only take me to the airport?”

  “Mr. Winters can go fuck himself, I’ll take you wherever you want to go,” Al says, his voice harder than I’ve ever heard from him before.

  I can’t help the laugh that bursts from my lips. “Thank you, Al. But if you can just take me back to the hotel, I’ll get myself a room for tonight and then decide what I’m going to do next.”

  “You give that guy of yours a call, make sure he comes and looks after you.”

  “What guy?”

  “Big guy, rode a pretty sweet bike, seemed awful sweet on you the other night.”

  “Oh, Justin.”

  “Oh, Justin,” Al mimics. “Yeah, Justin. I’m guessing he’s the reason you’re not heading straight for the airport.”

  “We’re not together.”

  “Sure looked like you were together when I met him and he was making sure Mr. Winters knew you were taken. Sensible guy that man of yours, girl as sweet and pretty as you, he needs to make sure every man in a fifty-mile radius knows you’re taken,” Al says with a knowing smile. “I did exactly the same when I met Janette.”

  “Al, you sound like a caveman.”

  “There’s a little caveman in all of us, honey,” he says with a wink.

  The roar of the engine pulls my thoughts back to the present as the bike slows and we roll into a parking lot out the front of an old warehouse. We park up and I follow Justin across the lot and toward a nondescript door to the right-hand side of an old, industrial building. A small sign over the door says Sinners Security, but that’s the only indication of the building’s inhabitants.

  Justin opens the door for me and I step inside and pause, my eyes scanning the cavernous space. The room is a mix of industrial metal storage units and modern office furniture. I recognize a few of the guys that are milling about from the club; although they look a little different decked out in cargo pants and weapons holsters.

  “What kind of security do you do here?” I ask, surprised and a little alarmed by how many guns are currently in the room with me.

  “We cater for everything from personal protection, to rapid response teams, to night guards. A few of the brothers are ex-military and when they started the business a few years back they had the knowhow and experience to be able to cover anything from asset recovery to hostage situations. These days they have a few divisions that each specialize in their particular expertise.”

  “Holy crap,” I whisper.

  “Were you expecting a couple of overweight mall cops?” Justin asks with a chuckle.

  “Well kind of, yeah.” I admit.

  He scoffs lightly, shaking his head in amusement, then his hand reaches for mine and he tugs me forward. “Come on, Puck’s pit is this way.”

  “His pit?”

  “You’ll see,” Justin says, leading me down to a door in the far corner of the space. He knocks twice then waits.

  “Come in,” a voice shouts from inside.

  Justin opens the door and I immediately understand why he called it a pit. The room is dimly lit, almost all natural light blocked out. Monitors fill two of the walls and an array of computer equipment fills the rest of the room.

  A guy is sat at the cluttered desk inside and when he turns from his computer screen to look at us lurking in his doorway, he smiles brightly.

  “Hi, you must be Riley. I’m Puck.”

  The man in front of me looks like he should be in a fantasy film. His white blonde hair is almost to his shoulders, unruly, with half of it pulled back and held by a band at the back of his head. His face is angular and regal, and his eyes are an intense, eerie silver-gray color. He looks like an elf from The Lord of the Rings, like Orlando Bloom as Legolas.

  I’m fairly sure my mouth has fallen open, but I just can’t help myself. Men don’t look like him in real life; he looks photoshopped. Then his brows pull together and something shadows his features. All of a sudden his face morphs from ethereal to dangerous and I feel myself press back into Justin behind me.

  Shaking myself, I offer him a brittle smile. “Sorry, yes, I’m Riley. Nice to meet you.” I push out my hand to him and he takes it, gripping me gently. The danger evaporates from his expression and he smiles again.

  “Thanks for coming in. I’d normally have looked into this stuff at Beavers myself, but I’m neck deep in a security project for our biggest client and I just haven’t had a minute. Could you show me where you found that code on the bank’s page so I can have a deeper look into it? You have a good eye; you’re right, it’s definitely a different code style to the rest of the commands, but I want to see it in situ,” Puck says, gesturing for us to come inside.

  I shuffle into the room, careful not to touch anything, then look up to Justin, his huge body almost completely filling the doorway.

  “Justin, I’ll need you to log back into Beavers account page please,” I say.

  “Oh sure,” Justin says, moving into the office even more cautiously than I did, and quickly opening up the online banking page. “Here you go, baby,” he says, moving back to the doorway the moment he’s done.

  The term of endearment throws me and I glance at Puck, heat rushing to my cheeks. I like Justin, a lot, but we literally just admitted that we have feelings for one another, were we at the cutesy pet names stage already?

  Pushing my wayward thoughts aside, I point to the chair in front of the desk. “May I?” I ask Puck.

  “Of course,” he quickly replies.

  Sliding into the chair, I navigate through the banking pages and access the code, moving efficiently back to the command that had seemed out of place to me when I’d found it before. “Here it is,” I say, looking up to Puck who is standing behind my left shoulder. “The command itself appears to be pointless, just going around in a circle, but the way it’s worded is different.”

  Puck leans in, his body crowding me slightly as he reads over my shoulder. “Here,” I say, pushing out of the chair and letting him take my place. He stares at the screen for a minute, his head tilted to the side, then his fingers fly across the screen, typing commands so quickly that I can’t keep up.

  Within seconds, he’s hacked into the bank’s mainframe and I gasp at how fast he just breached their security. I look at Justin and find him watching me, an amused smirk on his face. He crooks a finger at me and I find myself across the office and in front of him a second later.

  The moment I’m within reach, he hooks his hand around my hip and pulls me the rest of the way until I’m pressed into his chest and his lips are on mine. Just as quickly he turns me in his arms, my back now pressed to his front, his huge hand across my stomach, his thumb beneath my shirt rubbing circles on my skin.

  Goose bumps pebble where he’s touching me. I try to focus on what Puck’s doing, but my mind keeps drifting back to Justin. How his warm chest is pressed against my back, the way his huge palm is hot and present and reassuring.

  Puck is in front of us. There are guys in the main floor behind us, yet all I can think about is him. My breathing becomes audible. I can feel my heart beating, too fast, too insistent.

  “Baby,” he whispers against my ear, his thumb sliding lower, to the waist of my shorts and dipping beneath the fabric.

  I swallow my gasp, closing my eyes and placing my hand over his to still his movements. “You need to stop,” I whisper.

  “What if I don’t want to?” His voice is ba
rely a rasp.

  Squeezing at his arm, I feel his soft chuckle as it vibrates through his chest. He knows how he’s affecting me, but I’m affecting him too. I can feel how hard he is, his dick pressing up against my back, and I roll my hips grinding against him. His laughter dies and I hear his soft groan against my ear.

  “You need us any more, brother?” Justin says, his voice gravelly.

  Puck’s eyes never move from the screen in front of him, but he shakes his head. “Nope, I can take it from here. Thanks.”

  Justin’s arm tightens again, but this time he uses his grip to turn me. He moves to my side, walking us both out of the building and to his bike. Neither of us says a word as he straps on my helmet and waits for me to climb on behind him.

  He starts the engine, and the rumbling of the bike makes my already heightened senses come to life even more. We move and the wind seems louder, the road flying by as we ride. I don’t know where we’re going, but I don’t care. The anticipation, the way my body is humming and alive; I don’t want this to end.

  I want to cry when he slows to a stop and parks in a space outside an apartment building. I want to yell at him to move again, to start his bike and give us back this feeling. Only he doesn’t, he pulls his keys from the ignition and holds his hand out for me to take. When I place my hand in his, I feel tingles along each of my fingers. When I climb off, my legs are shaking as my feet hit the floor, my breathing feels ragged, and I can feel my heart beating, racing inside my chest.

  “This is my place,” Justin says, his voice rough and low.

  My eyes look from him to the building behind him.

  “We don’t have to,” he says and I look to him, finding his eyes unsure, hesitant.

  Without speaking, I reach for his hand, entwining my fingers with his and pull him forward. Glancing over my shoulder at him, I see his smile, the happiness and laughter clear on his face. Before I’m even aware of what’s happening, he bends and lifts me into the air, depositing me over his shoulder, his even pace becoming a jog as he rushes us toward the door.

  I giggle, glad that the intensity of only a moment ago has been shattered. Reaching down, I swat at his ass playfully. “Hurry up,” I urge, and his pace increases. Pushing open the doors into the clean, but dated lobby, he waves at an older lady who is collecting her mail from the boxes against the far wall. When he pushes the button for the elevator, the doors slide open immediately and he strides in, pressing a button, before the doors close and we begin to move.