Chapter Six
He had absolutely no idea. The whole day—no, the whole past two days—had been a farce. Blackmailed into spying and then not even able to get that done, hampered by the smart, hot girl he was spying on. Hampered? More like, entranced, distracted, seduced by her. And then to be found out on his second day, like a rank amateur. He should have his hacking credentials, hard won at an early age, stripped from him. He’d committed one blunder after another.
For one thing, she was good. Really, really good. She shouldn’t have been able to detect his resume was fake. Whatever program she was running must be awfully clever. He wished he could ask her about it.
Fuck! Like that! He kept forgetting what he was supposed to be doing in favor of wanting to just, well, hang out with her, talk to her.
He glanced at the rumpled bed. And of course, sleep with her.
He never should have gone to her boss’s hotel suite. It was a stupid move. He didn’t believe she would expose him. He thought she would at least hear him out first. But he kept imagining her alone in some guy’s hotel room and before he knew it, he had come up with the idea to go over there. It did force her to admit she wasn’t going to turn him in. But he wasn’t so sure that was all he was aiming for.
And then to get on his high horse about her program downstairs as they were walking out…
Nice move, asshole.
He wouldn’t have tried to develop it himself. That much was true. His father had even asked him about the possibility once and he had bullshitted him, implying it couldn’t be done. At the time, he had thought of how dangerous it could be in the hands of somebody like his old man.
But lecturing Liv about it when she caught him spying was, well…what had she said? Turning the tables.
And as to making love with her again, without protection no less, apparently he was an even bigger shit than he’d ever thought. He couldn’t think straight around this woman. Sure, he’d slept around. When he was young, he didn’t care about the consequences. But with maturity, and a few life lessons, he seduced not only when he was attracted to the woman, but when it made sense as well, and both parties could walk away with no strings attached and no hurt feelings. It was his own delicate calculus, but it worked for him. If his parents’ fractured marriage had taught him anything, it was that, as the old song said, love hurts. Getting serious about someone wasn’t in his game plan.
So he couldn’t explain to himself why he was so hung up on Liv, of all people. This was all wrong. She was all wrong. And so very right.
Instead of chasing after her like a jealous beau, he should have been trying to figure out how he was going to placate Dickhead. His phone in the backpack in the corner of the room buzzed loudly and he went over to look at it in annoyance, recognizing his blackmailer’s number by now. Sometimes he swore the damn phone was hooked up to his neurons or something. He had only to think about something and it appeared. Now that was a scary thought. He hoped Apple wasn’t quite that advanced.
He answered the phone. Dickhead was probably getting antsy since he had ignored him yesterday. “Yeah,” he said into the phone.
“I haven’t heard from you, Crestwell. Do you have it?”
He glanced at Liv, who had shrugged into her dress, all zipped back up again and sitting at the table, the lamp beside it on. Her hairdo, some upswept thing, was a little worse for wear, long silky blonde strands escaping here and there, but otherwise she looked cool and professional. He wanted to drop down on his knees in front of her chair and jerk her legs open to make her moan some more. Bring her back to that bed and lick the juice from her, as if they hadn’t just been rolling around on the bed like horny teenagers, groaning into each other’s mouths and straining toward that mind-blowing orgasm they’d shared.
“No. Not yet.”
“Don’t tell me it’s taking this long! I figured you would—”
“Well, I haven’t.”
“If you’re fucking with me, I’m warning you.”
“I’m not. I’m…rusty I guess.”
“Never thought I’d hear you say that! It’s almost worth having to wait.”
“I’ll call you when I have it. Stop bugging me. She’s getting suspicious.”
Liv’s attention jerked to the call.
“You can’t even handle a rookie, Crestwell? I’m tearing up.”
“It shouldn’t be too long now. I’m almost there.”
“You better be. ‘Cause if I don’t hear you have it soon, I’m going to share your little sister’s performance with the whole world.”
“You do that, you’ve lost all leverage with me. I know you flunked out of MIT, but I trust you’re not that stupid.”
“I didn’t flunk out,” Dickhead said. “I was kicked out. But fine. Don’t take too long. Although I got to tell you, I am having fun watching this tape of Julie.”
“Fuck you.” He hung up.
Liv nodded her head toward the phone. “Co-conspirators? I’m getting suspicious, is that it? So you haven’t told whomever you’re working with that I know? That I’ve found you out and you’re never getting my program?”
Her voice rose in pitch with almost every word, her cheeks flaming. Their lovemaking was certainly out of her system now, and she was remembering how pissed she was about his spying. “What is this? What is going on? Who are you working for?”
He reached for his shirt, saying nothing.
“Am I really supposed to believe you’re so heartless you’d make love to me, steal my program for whatever—money, glory, pick your poison—and not even admit it to my face? I can’t believe that, Jon.”
“It’s Jonathon. And why not? You don’t know a thing about me. Just some old bullshit rumors around campus, half of them probably not even true.”
“I know…I know…” She stumbled over the thought and he felt like a Grade-A shit again. He buttoned his shirt.
He could give Liv an explanation, such as it was at this point, but what good would that do? He didn’t have a solution.
“What if I said I was trying to save the Internet? A noble purpose and all?”
“Are you?”
He couldn’t bring himself to lie to her one more time.
“Stealing is stealing anyway. You don’t get a pass because it’s for a good purpose, or supposedly good purpose. I don’t even own this program. Lincoln does. That’s the point.”
“Do you think I care who ends up with your fascist program?” he snapped.
“So that’s it? That’s your explanation?”
He finished dressing, the better to slink on out of there, or at the very least, keep himself from taking her to bed again.
How could he even be entertaining that thought?
He glanced at her and the weight of her misty green stare almost undid him.
He wanted to comfort her.
The impulse startled him, right into an even more startling thought.
He’d go to his father. Maybe he wasn’t giving the old man enough credit. With all his father’s connections, he could undoubtedly stop whatever Dickhead planned to do with Julie’s tape far more effectively through traditional channels than Jonathon could. His father was always lamenting that Jonathon went for the out-of-the-box lever even if there was a perfectly good in-the-box solution under his very nose. Of course, he would have to tell his father what was on the tape, but perhaps it was necessary.
And if he could get the problem with Julie solved, then he would explain it all to Liv and she might forgive him and maybe…just maybe this thing between them could play out.
Like, in a good way.
Of course in the meantime she was probably going to hate his guts.
“I have to go,” he said.
“What?” She stood up. “Now wait a minute here.”
“Room’s paid for. Take a shower or something and I’ll see you when you get back from the Bahamas. I won’t try to follow you or get into your office or your files while you’re gone or anything. I pro
mise.”
He thought he might have just missed a shoe being thrown at his back when he closed the door behind him.
He caught a cab in front of the hotel, giving the cabbie his father’s address. It was a short ride, straight up Park. When he arrived, his dad was getting out of a town car just in front of the cab. Fine. He’d be home. No putting this off then. He paid the cabbie and got out as his dad disappeared through the shiny gold-plated entrance to his apartment building, the doorman tipping his hat.
The town car that had deposited his father at the curb pulled in front of Jonathon in preparation for heading back into traffic and for a second he caught a glimpse of the other occupant of the backseat.
Jonathon froze, though the man, a phone up to his ear, did not see him.
What the fuck was his father doing with his blackmailer Rudy Dickinson?
...
Liv folded a lightweight sweater into her suitcase and zipped it, all done packing for her ten a.m. flight to the Bahamas the next day. Depositing the suitcase by the front door, she went back to the window and the bright lights of the New York skyline. Her studio apartment was exactly five hundred square feet of parquet floor, enough to fit a bed, a TV and a chair or two, with a tiny bathroom on one side and a half kitchen on the other. A steal at a mere two thousand and change per month. On the forty-third floor, it had a jaw dropping view as good as her office, but with the advantage that she wasn’t glued to the computer screen and could look out at it once and a while. She collapsed in the faux velvet puffy chair by the window, watching the tiny cars whizzing down Tenth Avenue in the twilight. She was rarely home, but when she was, she spent half her time curled up in this chair staring out.
She thought of the Google search she’d done on Jonathon Crestwell when she got back from the Ritz to test her memory of what she really knew about him, what was real and what was MIT urban legend. But all she found were a few scanty facts. A brief bio including his age of thirty-one, his educational background, and the estimated proceeds from the sale of his company…by some accounts $1 billion, by some $2 billion…er, so a lot. Nothing about the family he had mentioned to her, or where he lived now, or what he’d been doing in the decade since he sold his company.
She heard the apartment door open and her heart raced. Like every good New Yorker, transplanted or not, she always kept her door locked. But she’d forgotten to chain it! She was halfway out of the chair, grappling for her phone to dial 9-1-1 when she saw who had let himself in without the benefit of a key.
She heaved a sigh, ridiculously relieved. Right before she got ridiculously outraged. “Do property rights mean nothing to you?” she demanded of Jonathon, who was closing her front door behind him and coming toward her. “That door was locked, you know!”
“A piece of cake to pick, by the way. But since this is a doorman building, I wouldn’t worry too much. Although it’s really easy to get by him.”
“Would it have killed you to knock?”
“Would you have answered it?” he countered. “Following rules is overrated. You have to just do what you want. Everybody else does.”
“How did you even know where I live?”
“Lincoln’s HR records aren’t that well protected. I cracked them in about two minutes flat yesterday.”
She collapsed back into her chair. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”
“Yeah, well, I had one a little while ago. I’ve been walking around thinking about what to do about it since then.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning for a brief shining moment, I forgot how fucked up the universe is and was hopeful there might actually be a way out of all this. And then I got a kick in the balls and remembered how things really were.”
“I repeat, meaning? And what are you even doing here since you said you’d see me after I got back from the Bahamas?”
“I’m going to tell you why I want your program.”
She waited. “Okay.”
And waited. He gazed out her picture window. The chill of the night air against the warmth of the window created a faint moisture that he was using to trace something with his finger.
“You were saying?” she prompted.
“Did you ever have somebody you loved, or you were supposed to love anyway, turn out to be such a…”
She could see it was crosses he was drawing. Crosses or X’s. Over and over.
“…disappointment? Time and time again. A crushing fucking disappointment?”
Not that she owed him honesty, but since she wanted it from him, finally, she answered him truthfully. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I know exactly how that feels.”
He turned to her.
“My mother,” she continued. “I loved her, I never gave up hoping she would suddenly morph into Jen’s mom or Mrs. Brady—”
“Who’s Mrs. Brady?”
“You know, the Brady Bunch?”
He smiled. “Aren’t you too young for that?”
“It was sometimes the only thing to watch on TV in the middle of the night when I waited for my mom to come home from the bar. Anyway, sometimes I didn’t even care if she wasn’t the perfect mother; I just prayed she’d be sober enough to come to a class play. And she disappointed me again and again. Right up until she died when I was nineteen.”
“And you never just said fuck it and gave up on her?”
Liv shook her head. “How could I do that? She was my mother.”
“Well, maybe if she had lived, you would have. One betrayal too many and you would have.”
He had a five o’clock shadow and his curly hair hadn’t seen a comb since she had wreaked havoc on it in the throes of ecstasy at the Ritz. He was still wearing the clothes he had left the hotel room in, the oxford buttoned—one button off she saw. She was in her standard comfort wear of tee shirt and drawstring pajama pants, the same outfit she had been in when he’d come back to the office last night and they’d made love.
Was that just last night? It felt as if it were ages ago.
“Maybe you should get whatever it is off your chest, Jonathon.” She remembered to call him by his full name, not Jon.
He hopped up on the radiator and toed off his black Nike sneakers. “I didn’t try to steal your program for money or to keep it from being developed at all, though I do think it’s a shitty idea. But I’m not out to save the Internet or any crap like that. I gave up on trying to fix this fucked-up world a long time ago.”
The vehemence of that surprised her, and she wondered why Jonathon Crestwell had disappeared from sight to begin with all those years ago.
“The reason I want your program is a lot more personal than that. I have a sister.”
What did that have to do with anything?
“Uh, yeah, I remember. I mean, assuming that was true.”
“It’s true. Julie. She’s nineteen.”
“Is she the one who’s disappointed you?”
“No, she’s great.”
Liv waited.
His words came out in a rush. “Somebody wants your program bad enough to use my sister to get it. They figured I would be able to steal it, and that I would steal it so that they wouldn’t hurt my sister.”
She tried to digest that, folding her arms around her knees, sinking a little further into the chair. “Hurt her? Do they…do they have her hostage or something?”
“I’m not ready to share all the gory details,” he said. “But that’s the truth. Okay? That’s why I was spying on you. And now that you’ve found me out, I have to figure out how to get my sister out of this if I can’t deliver the program to these people.”
His expression by the light of the one lamp she had on in the apartment was hard to read, but it probably would have been if she’d had a spotlight on him. Perched on the radiator by the window, the darkening skyline behind him, he took her gaze but gave little back, his face blank.
“I’m not sure why I should believe you,” she said slowly, even as she realized she did.
“I’m not sure either, but I’m asking you to. And I didn’t make love to you for any reason other than the obvious one. You turn me on, a lot, and I wanted to. You’re, ah, really wonderful.”
A swift delight seized her at the admission.
“But it was selfish and stupid and I probably brought this all down on my head, but so help me God, I wanted to touch you and slip inside you and—” He stopped abruptly, hopped off the radiator and stood up straight. “And if you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to do it again.”
She didn’t know she was looking at him any particular way and she dropped her head, unfolding her legs while she was at it, her hair swinging forward to shield her face.
He crouched down in front of her and put a finger under her chin, tipping her gaze up to meet his. “Can I kiss you?” he whispered.
“If what you’re saying is true, this is a matter for the police.”
“No, I’ll handle it. I just need some more time. I thought I had a possible solution, but, ah… Turns out it might be something even worse.”
“What?”
He shook his head and though she had not answered on the kiss front, the finger under her chin wandered up to her lips, tracing them.
She shivered. “I’m sorry about your sister.”
“Yeah, me too.” Nudging her mouth open, he took that incremental lean forward and replaced his finger with his tongue, running along her lips, causing a delicious sensation, dipping inside.
He slid his hands beneath her, tugging her forward until her bottom was at the edge of the puffy chair. Cool air wafted over her as he untied the drawstring pants and pulled them down to her thighs. “Did I mention I love these things? So light and easy to slip off.” He nuzzled her neck, his hands slipping between her legs, middle finger rubbing, causing an intense pulse of pleasure below.
He dragged her pajama bottoms the rest of the way off and sat back on his heels, opening her legs, his hands on her thighs. After a reverent moment, looking at the pink wetness, he brought his mouth to her, kissing her clit lightly, pulling her legs over his shoulders.
“Oh, my God…”
He used his tongue, his teeth, his lips, all in perfect harmony as he worked on her, and she grasped the top of the chair, fighting to hold on, helpless in the face of all this sensation. He grasped her butt, rubbing, molding her cheeks, a caress in itself, holding her up to him, open to him as he worked his magic, and she shut her eyes, feeling it build, twisting in his hands, biting her own lips to keep from crying out.
Tempting the Corporate Spy Page 10
