Nick had never seen anything more beautiful, sexy, and wanton in his whole life. She was wild, witty, sweet. Something special. Nothing else mattered. Not their escape from the airport. Not his job. Not that goddamned data drive.
His mouth.
Her pussy.
Her orgasm.
His pleasure.
In the blink of an eye, Nicole had become his everything.
Nicole
Silicon Valley, California
“Don’t work too late, Nicole,” he said, punctuating his words with a wink.
That fucking bastard, she thought, but lifted her hand to wag her index finger at him.
A grin swept over his smug, selfish, smoking hot face. Ryan Malone was taunting her, putting Nicole in her place as his subordinate. He did this all the time, as if it was fine for her to keep working at one-thirty in the morning until she was bleary-eyed and too exhausted to have a social life herself while she covered for his incompetence. And he treated her this way just so he could get to the bar down the street to make last call. A drink.
A few drinks.
She let out an aggravated sigh that lifted her long, brown hair off her forehead for a second. It had happened again. She’d let that prick drown her in work—his work—so he could pick up some woman waiting at the bar for the last guy possible, get good and laid, and then drink his sorry ass into the next afternoon, on most weekdays. Now, it was Friday night, so that meant the son of a bitch could start his weekend early. She thought she was being a team player for agreeing to it the first time. Good old Nicole showing she was just as good as the other programmers. Okay, she’d helped out more than once. Twice was maybe a little naïve, but night after night throughout this entire eighteen-month project?
She gritted her teeth together. “You’re the biggest fucking idiot,” she muttered as she gripped the computer mouse as if they were Ryan’s balls in a vice.
This stint in software development at the Silicon Valley head office of Terratech Incorporated was only supposed to be a ten-month gig for Nicole. However, Ryan liked her work so much he extended her contract for another ten months. She should have turned him down, but she loved the work here in the San Francisco area and participating in projects that meant something and made a tangible contribution. Terratech was a software and hardware tech firm, handling military technology contract work exclusively for the military departments of the United States government.
Nicole had graduated from college at the top of her class. Because she had enough extra hours in computer programming, she fast-tracked through a master’s degree in record time. She could have had her choice of many top firms through the country and abroad, but, of course, being an Air Force brat, she knew the calling toward government work would eventually be too loud to ignore. Her father, retired US Air Force Brigadier General Harlan Hunt, could have made a few calls, pulled a few strings to help her get a job at the Pentagon, but Nicole struck out on her own, landing this contract with Terratech. The work was perfectly suited to her training and prior experience, and the money was damn good.
Not that she ever got the time to spend any of it, but whatever.
From her workstation, she lifted her eyes and tilted her head to watch Ryan’s tight, sexy ass as he stood waiting for the elevator. She blinked hard, trying to imagine what he’d look like without those well-fit jeans on, but her computer beeped at her, bringing her back to the fact that he had a life and she did not.
She sighed again and started moving her fingers over the keyboard. Even getting to check out Ryan’s fine piece of ass every day wasn’t worth this. Her own tasks on the project were challenging enough, but adding his duties on top of hers, well, it was just one big headache. Her days ran into each other with the long hours, shitty meals from crap restaurants and fast food places, shifting priorities, tight timelines, no lag time, and damn near becoming one with her office chair as she constantly stared at what felt like miles and miles of code scrolling across her monitor. Now, she had to deal with this arrogant, lazy, sexy bastard of a project manager.
He might have his choice of women at the bar tonight—any night—while Nicole didn’t even have the energy to muster up a quickie with her dildo when she got home.
Ding.
Nicole shook off the image of her lack of sex, even with herself, as Ryan stepped onto the elevator. She watched him turn to hit the button that would take him to his prime parking spot in the underground lot. Before the doors closed, he lifted his hand and blew her a kiss.
Well, fuck me.
That man could manipulate, and as usual, Nicole fell for it. It was another late night, pushing close to their deadline, and now she had to handle the rest alone. She pressed on, telling herself she’d only stay for another two hours.
Nicole pored over lines and lines of code, rewriting and calculating, toggling from one screen to the other. Keeping busy like this was good for her because it kept her mind off her personal life—or her lack of one—and the fact that she hadn’t spoken to her father in over a month. Her relationship with her father became strained after Nicole’s mother died twelve years ago. Nicole was not quite twelve herself when her mother died. Her father was still active military then, so Nicole was mostly alone since then. Whenever her father was around, their interaction was strained and… unnatural. The love and affection in their household always stemmed from her mother,.
A day didn’t pass by without a memory of her mother’s ivory face and dark hair. Every time Nicole looked in the mirror, her mother’s eyes always stared back. Maybe that was why her father was so withdrawn from her over the last decade. She looked so much like her mother. Or maybe it was because Nicole knew the truth…
“God, don’t go there,” Nicole spat out at herself, her words echoing throughout the empty office suite.
She jammed her fingers into her loose hair and rubbed her aching skull. Two hours turned into five before she even realized it. All that time was a waste, considering that she’d been consumed with a few hundred lines of code that at the moment, kicked her ass into submission. Glancing at her clock didn’t help, and only contributed to a longer, more ragged release of air with a low groan. The morning sun was coming up, casting a golden hue of glare on her monitor.
Time to wrap up and go.
With a few flicks of her wrist and fingers in synchrony that only comes from habit, she logged out of her workstation, stood up, and stretched. She looked out over the cubicles in her section, and not a single head bobbed in front of any of the computer monitors. She was usually in before anyone else, but this being a Saturday morning, no one would be arriving anytime soon. Even though they were so close to the project’s deadline, no one had opted to come in yet over the weekend to put in some extra hours. Unlike her, they were either asleep in their beds, or in someone else’s bed, with said person, each of them fucking the other’s brains out. Hell, Ryan Malone was probably doing the latter. She shook her head, trying to rid herself of the image, as well as the ache in her stomach that reminded her how much she missed being touched by a man in all the right places, and reached for her water bottle.
She stared at the curly pink letters on the container that read ‘Janine’s Bride Tribe – Nicole’, a useful and non-dick decorated keepsake from her friend, Janine’s bachelorette party in Haight-Ashbury six months ago. Janine certainly wasn’t missing a man’s touch. In fact, she was already three months pregnant.
Nicole let out another sigh, realizing she was absolutely parched and needed to rehydrate before making the twenty-minute walk to her loft apartment. It was a cute rental she’d snagged from an online site and was great for the short-term period of her contract with an easy month-to-month option. She’d love to find something permanent—apartment, job… man—and really make a commitment to the San Francisco Bay area, but having lived the roaming life of a military brat, shorter assignments and brief contracts were best right now.
As she made her way toward the lunch room and the perfectly co
ld water cooler humming just inside the door, she spotted her image in the reflection of the shiny supply cabinet. Her long, brown hair was a bit of a mess, but still framed her face nicely. At five-foot-six, she was fit, but not too skinny, athletic, but not overly muscled. People told her she was pretty, although she never really understood comments like that.
So what’s the damn problem?
She stared at herself and wondered.
What was wrong with her? Did she not deserve happiness? A social life? Sex? God forbid… love? She’d had a few short-term relationships in college, but nothing serious or lasting and certainly nothing here in the Silicon Valley since she started working here at Terratech. Was she holding herself back too much? Was her affair with the programming job taking her away from having a real life?
This was asinine. She shouldn’t be doing this to herself. She was smart, had a good job, and made a decent salary. Everything would come in due time. She needed to get over her anxiousness and anxiety. These swirling thoughts were simply a result of overwork and lack of sleep.
Nicole continued down the hallway through the maze of cubicles. Since no one else was here, she thought she’d take a shortcut to the water cooler by cutting through the corridor to the executive boardroom near the back entrance to the kitchen.
She filled the personalized water bottle and drained it in short, quick gulps, enjoying the feel of the cold liquid sliding down her throat. As she refilled the bottle, Nicole paused, thinking she heard voices. She snickered to herself at the small victory of someone else actually coming into work. As she sipped her water, though, it didn’t exactly sound like another programmer from the team or even one of the managers.
She poked her head out into the hallway only to hear the voices—more than one—rise a bit. It wasn’t uncommon to hear the odd person on the phone or a small team using the board room to do a brainstorming session. However, to hear what sounded like a formal board meeting at this time on a Saturday morning was definitely out of the ordinary.
Nicole
Had Ryan come back in? Struck with guilt? Calling a managerial meeting to praise her for her dedication.
Nicole stopped in her tracks when she heard what was definitely… another language?
She tucked her water bottled in the crook of her arm and cocked her head to the left to listen closely. Although the sun was teasing through the tinted windows of the building, it provided just enough light for her to make out the figures of two… three… four… five men inside the conference room. Each was overdressed for o-dark-thirty on a Saturday morning, as if they had an important business conference to attend.
Leaning back into the doorframe, she held her breath. The hairs on the back of her neck stood at attention as her female intuition kicked into high gear. Not over anything maternal or sensual or physical, just that something was… off. Terratech dealt strictly and exclusively in US military clients, but these guys in the boardroom certainly weren’t spit shined and polished in dress blues or camouflage or sporting any ribbons, stripes, or medals. These men were more off the pages of an Armani ad.
She understood having high-ranking brass up here to schmooze during office hours by the VPs and other pricks around here. However, this pre-dawn gathering veered toward the clandestine end of things. She thought for a moment of being helpful, going back to the kitchen area and maybe putting on a pot of coffee for the meeting attendees. That would only come off as a suck-up move, and just wasn’t in her DNA. She was all about doing the job, doing it right, and taking the praise for doing it well and delivered on time. Just like the data project she was working all night.
Which, by the way, she thought, she should just get back to her cube, get her things, and go home to crash. She’d done more than her fair share of not only her own work, but fucking Ryan’s, as well. Maybe she’d throw some shade at the executives on her way out, letting them know who really did the work around here.
She snickered at herself as she straightened and began to ease out quietly into the hallway.
Something stopped her dead in her tracks, though.
In the board room, the three dark-haired men with their backs to her spoke in low tones. She could swear that she heard one phrase clearly.
Zuìgāo jīm.
Nicole gasped and furrowed her brows as she rolled the Mandarin Chinese words around in her head. To an ordinary person, Zuìgāo jīm sounded like something you’d ordered off the dim sum cart in Chinatown on the weekend, but Nicole knew better. She’s spent the first semester of her junior year abroad working in Shenzhen, a Chinese city connecting the mainland to Hong Kong, and home to a veritable shopper’s paradise, as well as a tech analyst intern’s dream resume-builder for eight months. She’d also made great friends with a local and co-worker named Mei-Ling, who took Nicole under her wing, introduced her to the culture, food, and nightlife. In fact, Mei-Ling had been the one to point out the job opening at Terratech, which put her back in the here and now. Nicole had studied Mandarin and Japanese before her trip. Honestly, her goal was mainly so she’d know what she was eating, where to find good brands of Japanese sake, and how to tell overly grabby men to fuck off when they got too up close and personal with her. She’d also kept current with both languages, so she knew exactly well what Zuìgāo jīm meant.
“Top secret,” she barely whispered under her breath.
That phrase “top secret” certainly wasn’t an oddity around this office since Terratech dealt in some pretty high-end shit for the military. Her team members had varying levels of security clearances, depending on the project du jour. Still, something about these three Chinese men in expensive suits in Terratech’s board room didn’t settle well in her already growling stomach.
Speaking of dim sum…
Her hunger pangs rang out again. It was time to make tracks, even though her interest in eavesdropping got the better of her. It was growing up a military kid with a father who was away a lot and let her play “spy” with him when she was home. She’d literally consumed mystery, thriller and spy novels as a teen. Damn did she love a good whodunit back then. Just not this early in the morning when her lids felt glued to her eyeballs, and her body ached from lack of sleep, food, and human touch.
Maybe she’d go home and pull out her left drawer bedroom friend and relax a bit, provided the batteries were still good.
She slid down the carpeted corridor, hoping to ease unnoticed by the boardroom as she made her way back to her cube. She’d snag a handful of AAs from the supply cabinet on her way out the door.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Bob Worthington, Executive Vice President of Development, and eventually her top boss up the food chain of the org chart. He paced back and forth while inside the board room, and eventually stopped in front of the three well-fashioned Chinese men. Nicole ducked back into the shadows once again.
“I assure you, Mr. Wu, we are very aware of what we need to do,” she heard a familiar voice say. It was Luis Moreno, one of the Senior Vice Presidents over sales and product marketing.
“For your sake, I hope you do,” said the tallest of the three Mandarins.
She saw Bob let out a long sigh and then lower his voice. Nicole strained to make out what he was saying when she definitely picked up on him mentioning something very hush-hush her programming team was working on—what she’d been toiling over all night.
“TDE-5X,” Bob said.
The three Chinese men nodded as Bob continued.
Nicole gnawed on the fingernail of her index finger as she tossed this around in her brain. This conversation was strange—fishy, in fact—because TDE-5X was a Level 3 adaptive data encryption device—including both hardware and software—Terratech was developing under an exclusive contract for the US government, orders direct from the Pentagon. She’d been working on all the backdoor firewalls to help secure the device’s safety from hackers, espionage, and…
Who knows who else?
Even though her curiosity was piqued, Nicole d
idn’t like the kick up of adrenalin her heart had started pumping out. Her own breathing rang out in her ears, and she was breathless as she waited for more. Was TDE-5X actually something the US military was working in tandem with the Chinese? Certainly not. We weren’t sworn enemies of the country, but the US wasn’t BFFs with them, either.
The man identified as Mr. Wu withdrew a cell phone from his coat pocket and presented it to Bob. “This is what we agreed to,” he said succinctly. “No others will know.”
Nicole’s pulse picked up. All thoughts of hearing office gossip or even nabbing free supplies to power her vibrator later were all lost. She set her water bottle down at her feet and dug into the pocket of her pants for her cell phone. She could record this interaction on video and play it back at home when her brain was more alert, to figure out what was going on.
“Son of a bitch,” she hissed to herself. Her battery had died at some point, on account of working full steam through this long night of working.
Of course. Wasn’t that always the case? Just when you actually needed it…
Luis’ voice brought her back in. “We understand the importance of TDE-5X.”
There it was again. She cringed at the second reference. TDE-5X was not something the Chinese—or anyone for that matter—should have any knowledge of. It was a military project and a military project alone. She highly doubted these guys were some sort of off-duty US military in for a weekend briefing.
This wasn’t right.
Damn her stupid phone.
Terratech Incorporated had no Chinese officials, expats, or anyone so related working on TDE-5X. Neither did the Pentagon team they coordinated with.
Two Firefighters Next Door: A Bad Boy MFM Romance Page 15
