Naughty or Nice?

by Sherrilyn Kenyon

  “Well?” he prompted.

  Sam bit her lip as she raked her gaze over his long, lean frame. “Other than the fact you look like your seeing-eye dog dressed you this morning, nothing,” she teased. “What did you do to make Heather mad this time?”

  He cursed under his breath. It was common knowledge that Adrian had a rare type of color blindness that rendered him completely incapable of seeing any color whatsoever. As a result, he paid his baby sister to do his laundry, and every time Heather got upset at big brother, she took it out on his wardrobe.

  “What did she do to me now?” he asked warily.

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know your red plaid shirt is still red, but the splotchy pink Henley really has to go.”

  Adrian held his leg out and pulled his jeans up to show her his socks. “What about them?”

  “Unlike your shirt, they actually match your Henley.”

  Growling low in his throat, he buttoned his plaid shirt all the way to his neck. “One day, I’m going to kill her.”

  Sam laughed at the threat he uttered at least twice a week. She’d met Heather a couple of times during lunch, and though Sam liked her, Heather was a bit self-absorbed.

  “So, what did you do?” she asked.

  “I refused to let her borrow my Vette. The last time she took it out, she hit a pole and cost me three thousand dollars in damage.”

  “Yikes.” Sam cringed for him. Adrian loved his vintage 1969 Stingray. “Was she hurt?”

  “Thankfully, no, but my car is still sulking over it.”

  Sam laughed again, but then, she always did that around him. Adrian had a dry, sharp wit that never missed a beat. “Well, I’m glad you stopped by. My Perforce is acting up again. I can’t get it to integrate my changes.” Which meant that the stupid server had her locked out and every time she tried to update a page on their Web site, it refused to let her.

  She hated Perforce, and it hated her. But they were required to use it so that upper management could keep track of who made what changes to the Web site, and out of the entire network services department, Adrian was the only one who really understood the program.

  “What’s it doing?” he asked as he came to stand beside her.

  Sam couldn’t breathe as he leaned down to read her screen. His face was so close to hers that all she had to do was move a mere two inches and she would be able to place her lips against that strong, sculpted jaw.

  “Scroll down.”

  She heard Adrian’s words, but they didn’t register. She was too busy watching the way his incredibly broad shoulders hunched as he leaned with one hand against her desk.

  He glanced down at her.

  Sam blinked and looked back at the screen. “I’m scrolling,” she said as she reached for her mouse.

  “There’s your problem,” he said as he read the gobbledygook. “You haven’t enabled your baseline merges.”

  “And in English that would mean?”

  Adrian laughed that rich, deep laugh that made her burn even more. He covered her hand with his on the mouse and showed her how to choose the right options.

  He surrounded her with his masculine warmth. Sam swallowed at the disturbing sensation of his hand on hers as fire coursed through her. He had beautiful, strong hands. His long, lean fingers were tapered and perfect. Worse, every time she looked at them, she couldn’t help wondering what they would feel like on her body, touching her, caressing her.

  Seducing her.

  His cell phone rang. Adrian straightened and pulled the phone from its cradle on his belt. He checked the caller ID, then flipped it open like Captain Kirk. “Yeah, Scott, what’s wrong?”

  “Radius is down,” Scott, their network security specialist, said over the speaker phone, “and I can’t get it up and running.”

  “Did you reboot?”

  “Duh.”

  Adrian indicated her chair with his head.

  Sam got up and watched as he set the phone aside, took a seat in her chair, and opened a DOS window on her computer. He tapped swiftly on her keyboard, then picked his phone back up. “It’s not cycling.”

  “I know, and I can’t fix it.”

  “All right,” Adrian said with saintly patience. “I’ll be up there in a few minutes.”

  He clicked off his phone, but before he could move, his phone rang at the same time his pager went off and the overhead paging system called his name. Adrian answered his cell phone again and checked his pager.

  “Did you get the hacker alert?” Scott asked.

  “Hang on,” Adrian said, then he reached for her desk phone to answer his page.

  “Hi, Randy,” he said as he tucked the phone between his shoulder and cheek and started typing on her keyboard. “I’m in the process of switching the main databases over to my SQL. We should be ready to fly by five.” He paused as he listened and switched her computer from the Windows over to Linux.

  Sam watched in awe as he flawlessly entered line after line of stuff she couldn’t even begin to follow or understand.

  “No,” Adrian said to Randy, “our customers won’t notice at all, except the searches will take less time.” He entered more lines as he listened to their senior director, Randy Jacobs, on the phone.

  Another page went off for him.

  Adrian nodded as he listened to Randy. “Yeah, I’ll get to it. Would you mind holding for just a second?”

  He picked up his cell phone. “Scott, it’s not a hacker. It’s an invalid SID. Someone is using a bookmark with an old Session ID attached to it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I’m looking at it right now.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Adrian gave her a sheepish smile as he clicked off his cell phone and picked up the other line on her desk phone.

  Biting her lips to keep from smiling at the chaos, Sam felt for him. At twenty-six, Adrian was known to everyone in the company as the boy genius. He had taken a billion-dollar corporation from the 1980s mainframe mentality into the twenty-first century Web-based e-commerce. He had single-handedly built the entire programming side of their million-dollar business retail site, and put together a Web design team that was second to none.

  Unfortunately, though, everyone in the company turned to him every time something went wrong with the site. Which meant he was always on call and always rushing from one department to the next, putting out fires and trying his best to explain extremely complicated things to people who had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

  Adrian came into the office every morning by five-thirty, and seldom went home before eight at night.

  The stress on him had to be excruciating, and yet he was the most easygoing boss she’d ever known. She couldn’t count the number of times a day someone was complaining, if not shouting, about something, or begging him to help them, and yet he never let the strain of it show.

  “Scott,” Adrian said at his cell phone, “go get a cup of coffee. I’m headed upstairs as soon as I finish with Randy.” He returned to her phone. “I’m back, Randy.” He listened for a few minutes more, then nodded. “All right,” he said, pulling the Palm Pilot off his belt. “I’ll put it on my schedule.”

  Sam watched as he added yet another meeting to his already booked calendar.

  “Okay,” he said to Randy. “I’m on it. See you later.”

  Adrian left the chair, then hesitated at the opening of Sam’s cube as she resumed her seat. In a rare show of uneasiness, he picked up the wooden medieval knight her brother had given her. “This is new.”

  She nodded. “Teddy got it Thanksgiving when he went to Germany.”

  “It’s neat,” he said, putting it back on the shelf with the rest of the knights. She had been collecting them for years. She figured they were as close as she’d ever come to having a real knight in shining armor.

  He glanced around her cube at the large Santa and snowmen cutouts she had pinned up, the small Christmas tree she had next to her monitor, and
the stack of holiday catalogues by her keyboard. “You really love Christmas, don’t you?”

  Sam glanced down at her Santa and reindeer sweater and smiled. “My favorite time of year. Don’t you like it?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a day off, I guess.”

  Still Adrian hesitated, fiddling with her nameplate.

  How odd. It was so unlike him to be fidgety. This was a man who made million-dollar decisions and held meetings with the stars of the Fortune 500 without even a minor qualm.

  What on earth could he be nervous about?

  “Would you mind if I asked a giant favor?”

  Her heart pounded. Oh, baby, ask me anything!

  “What’cha need?”

  He dropped his gaze down to her nameplate as he slid it back and forth in its holder. “Since Heather has totally screwed up my clothes again, I was wondering if you’d mind going shopping with me after work? I’d take Randir, but even I can tell his clothes don’t match.”

  “I heard that!” Randir said laughingly from the next cube.

  Sam smiled. The guys in her department teased each other mercilessly, and it was what she loved most about her job. Everyone got along well and no one minded the incessant quips and taunts that were hurled about as often as Adrian got paged.

  “Anyway,” Adrian said, ignoring Randir’s interruption. “Would you mind? I’ll buy you dinner.”

  Yes! Her heart skipped a beat as she did her best to appear calm, while inside, what she really wanted to do was turn cartwheels. “I don’t mind.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Great,” he said with a slight smile. “Then I guess I better go to Scott before he hyperventilates.”

  “Okay, see you later.”

  Adrian took one last look at Sam as she returned her attention to her monitor. He clenched his teeth as he watched her fingers stroking the keys on her keyboard.

  That woman had the lightest touch he’d ever seen, and he ached to feel those hands on his body. Ached to take them into his mouth and nibble every inch of them.

  Worse, what he really wanted to do was pick her up from that chair, take her into his office, and toss everything on top of his desk onto the floor before laying her down on top of it.

  Oh, yeah, he could already taste her lips as he peeled the thick sweater and jeans off her body. Feel her hot and wet for him as he coaxed and teased her body into blind ecstasy.

  His groin tightened in pain at the thought.

  Stop it! he snapped at himself. He was her team leader, and she was one of his best employees. Company policy stringently forbade dating between management and staff, and violation of that policy meant immediate dismissal.

  Yeah, but the woman made him seriously hot.

  Dangerously hot.

  She always wore her long, dark hair pulled back from her face where it fell in thick waves down to her waist. He’d spent hours at night fantasizing about that hair draped on his chest, or spread out across his pillow.

  And she had the palest eyes he’d ever seen. She’d told him once they were green, and it pained him that he had absolutely no idea what that color meant.

  But from what he could see, green had to be beautiful.

  Her eyes were a bit large for her pixie face, and they were always bright and teasing when she looked at him.

  He could stare into those eyes for an eternity.

  Adrian ran his gaze over her lush curves, and he hardened even more as raw, demanding desire tore through him. Sam had once complained about her weight, but he couldn’t find any fault with it. After growing up with a skinny, frail mother and sister, he couldn’t stand to see a woman with no meat on her bones.

  Her full, voluptuous body made him absolutely crazy with unspent lust. And for the last year, he’d been forced to learn to live with a raging erection every time he got near her, or heard the sound of her smooth Southern drawl.

  Sam paused and looked up at him. “Did you need something else?”

  Yeah, I need you to smile at me.

  Touch me.

  Better still, I need you to climb me like a ladder . . .

  “No,” he said as another page sounded for him.

  Adrian turned away from her and answered the page with his cell phone as he headed upstairs to tend Scott’s antsy twitters.

  Sam clenched her hands as her computer clock showed ten after five. An anxious tremor went through her as she feared Adrian might have changed his mind about going out with her.

  Taking a deep breath for courage, she shut down her computer, then walked the short distance to Adrian’s office.

  He had his back to her as he typed like lightning on his keyboard while talking on the phone. “It’s switched,” he said. “Everything is clear . . . No, I ran the logs, and as of yesterday, we’ve cleared seven hundred thousand dollars in orders since the end of October . . . Yeah,” he said with a light laugh. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  He hung up the phone, and she saw him rub his hand over his eyes as if he had a headache. His cell phone rang. Without breaking stride, he answered it.

  “Hi, Tiffany,” he said to their marketing director. “Yeah, I’ll be here for a few more minutes. I was planning on implementing your changeover after Christmas since there’s a good chance it could slow down site access.” He listened as he worked and Sam shook her head.

  The man was simply amazing. She didn’t know how he managed to stay on top of everything, but he did.

  He pushed his chair back from his computer desk and swung it around to the desk in front of her. As his gaze fell on her, he smiled that wolfish grin that made her blood race. She felt a vicious stab of desire straight through her middle.

  Reaching for a stack of reports, he flipped to one of the middle pages. “Okay,” he said to Tiffany. “I’ll take care of it first thing in the morning.”

  He clicked off his phone. “Sorry about that,” he said to Sam. “I didn’t know you were standing there. Just give me a sec, I’ll get this finished, and we can leave.”

  Sam let out a relieved breath. Thank goodness, he hadn’t changed his mind. She moved into his office and took a seat against the window as she waited for him. “Have we really done seven hundred thousand dollars off the site since Halloween?”

  He nodded. “We should easily hit a million by Christmas.” He flashed her another smile. “Should make for nice bonuses.”

  Money, she didn’t care about. So long as she made enough to cover her car and rent, she was completely happy. But she was glad for Adrian’s sake. Their business-to-business e-commerce Web site was his pride and joy, and he took a lot of flak from the higher-ups when the site didn’t perform the way they thought it should.

  Sam looked up as Tiffany stalked into Adrian’s office. “Adrian,” Tiffany whined as she glanced at Sam without acknowledging her. Thin, tall, and gorgeous, Tiffany should have been a model. All the leggy blonde had to do was bat her eyelashes, and every guy in the building would drop what he was doing and rush to her side.

  And every time Sam got near her, she felt like a warted troll in comparison.

  “Adrian,” Tiffany said again. “I got an e-mail from a customer wanting to know why he has to enter in his password every time he wants to order something. He wants us to fix it so that he can just do a one-click order option. What should I tell him?”

  Adrian didn’t pause in his typing as he answered. “That it’s a safeguard to save his butt should one of his disgruntled employees get ticked off, and decide to order several thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise and charge it to his account.”

  Tiffany rolled her eyes at Adrian’s sarcasm. “Well, he says—”

  “I don’t give a damn what he says,” Adrian said calmly.

  Sam bit her lip as Tiffany’s face flushed bright red. That was Adrian’s only flaw. The man didn’t pull punches, and he always spoke his mind, consequences be damned.

  “Those safeguards are there for his protection,” he con
tinued, “and I’m not about to change it since he’ll be the first one to whine when he gets burned.”

  Tiffany stomped her foot. “Would you look at me when you’re talking to me?”

  Sam arched her brow as Adrian turned around with a look on his face that should have sent Tiffany running. To his credit, all he said was a simple, “Yes?”

  “I need a more tactful answer for him than that.” She narrowed those blue eyes at him. “Look, I know you think you own this Web site, but the last time I checked, you were just another flunky here like the rest of us.”

  He took a deep breath as both his pager and phone went off. “I tell you what,” he said in a self-controlled tone, “since I’m a flunky here like everyone else, why don’t you come in at midnight tonight to post a press release because the man who signs our checks wants it to go live exactly at that time?” He picked his phone off his belt.

  He checked the caller ID, flipped it open, and said, “Scott, it’s not a hacker. I’m validating the PHP.”

  Adrian hung up the phone. “Now, Miss Klein, if you want a more tactful response, then please forward the e-mail to me and I will respond to it myself.”

  Tossing her hair over her shoulder, Tiffany glared at him. “I want a copy of your response.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  Tiffany’s nostrils flared. Turning on her red high heels, she stalked out of his office. But as she left, Sam heard her muttering under her breath, “What a friggin’ geek.”

  She couldn’t tell if Adrian heard it. He merely checked his pager, then grabbed one of the reports and swung his chair back around to his computer.

  “You must get tired of all this,” she said quietly.

  “I’m used to it,” he said simply as he started typing again.

  Sam shook her head. Poor Adrian. He wasn’t even allowed to get sick. She remembered last summer when he had pneumonia. He’d been forced to drag himself in to work to fix some problem no one else could solve.

  The man needed a break.

  And how she wished she dared get up from her chair, go over to him and massage those broad, tense shoulders for him. She could just imagine the feel of his lean muscles under her hand, the sight of his handsome features relaxed.