Secret Pleasure

by Taryn Leigh Taylor

  “The program I uploaded wouldn’t uninstall properly, so it should still be on there. But just in case Cybercore removed it remotely...” Aidan reached into his pocket, pulled out the cell Kearney had given him, and tossed it to Max. “Here’s what I used to deploy the malware in the first place.”

  Max caught the phone easily. “And to what do I owe this sudden show of transparency and goodwill?”

  “I’m not doing it for you.”

  “He’s trying to save his ass,” Kaylee snarked from her chair, flexing her knuckles under the ice pack.

  He was trying to save more than that.

  “Probably worried you’ll charge him with corporate espionage before he manages to tear us apart from the inside.”

  Aidan hated the hard edge to her words, the grim set to her mouth. He’d done that to her and he accepted the pain under his ribs as his penance.

  “That’s not why I’m here,” he said, focusing on Kaylee, though his words were meant for Max, too. “Not anymore.”

  He’d come back for revenge, for that damned code, for answers. He’d expected to leave victorious.

  Instead, he was broken in every way a man could be.

  “Just go, Aidan. Whitfield Industries is reeling. You got what you came for.” Her words were harsh, but Kaylee’s eyes showed every bit of the hurt and confusion he’d inflicted.

  “You’re right. I did get what I came for. But I didn’t get what I want.”

  Her laugh was tinged with bitterness. “And what is it you want?”

  “You,” he said simply.

  Her throat worked, and her grip crushed the ice pack.

  “I’m in love with you, KJ.”

  He’d never said those words to a woman, and he hadn’t really expected to say them to her now, and certainly not across a fucking office, but if boxing had taught him anything, it was that sometimes you had to improvise and roll with the punches.

  Max’s chair creaked in the continued silence, and Aidan spared him a glance. “Maybe I should give you two a minute.”

  Aidan shook off the courtesy. “No. Stay. I’m done with secrets.”

  He waited until Kaylee looked at him before he spoke again. “I know you think I’m a bad bet. I used you to get back at Max, and I’m going to regret that for the rest of my life. But I swear to you, I didn’t leak your burlesque to the press.”

  Aidan paced the front of Max’s desk, three steps one way, three steps back, a futile attempt to burn off the excess adrenaline in his muscles. He needed to get this out.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time running, trying to escape bad situations and avoid dealing with the hard stuff. I always thought that’s just how I was built. But I realize now it’s because I’ve never had a home I wanted to be at.”

  Aidan drew to a stop in front of Kaylee’s chair.

  “Until you. You feel like home. And I’m going to prove it to you, KJ. The only way I know how. By sticking around and letting my actions speak for me.”

  Her face had gone slack, and he couldn’t get a bead on what she was thinking, but her knuckles were white against the blue ice pack clutched in her hand.

  “You can be mad at me for as long as you need to. But I’m not going anywhere. So when you’re ready, come find me, okay? I’ll be at home.”

  And with a nod at Max and a long look at Kaylee, Aidan walked out the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  KAYLEE DRAGGED A DEEP, shuddering breath into her lungs.

  Aidan loved her.

  It wasn’t...she couldn’t...he didn’t...

  Some random beeping pulled her out of the processing loop she was stuck in, and she looked up as Max removed a sleek black cell phone from the bottom drawer of his desk. It wasn’t the one he used day to day, the silver one she knew was tucked away in the breast pocket of his Burberry suit jacket.

  Desperate for distraction, for anything that would knock the maelstrom that was Aidan out of her thoughts, Kaylee stood and rounded his desk for a better view. “What are you doing? Deploying the Bat-Signal?”

  “In a manner of speaking...” Max hit Redial on a blocked number, and after a couple of rings, a woman’s face appeared on the screen, her light brown skin wreathed in a halo of bouncy raven curls, already talking as though she and Max were in the middle of a conversation.

  “I’m gonna guess you finally read the info I sent you about the real reason the government is putting fluoride in the—”

  “Not now, AJ. I need you to analyze some spyware,” Max interrupted.

  Kaylee had a vague impression of a brick wall behind the woman, similar to the one in Aidan’s kitchen, before AJ leaned closer, her face filling up the entire screen as she lowered her voice conspiratorially.

  “Uh, boss. You know you’re not alone, right? Ixnay in front of your ister-say.”

  Max glanced over his shoulder, and Kaylee turned away to save him the trouble of dismissing her. She almost jumped out of her skin when Max’s fingers brushed her wrist, staying her. She stared at the point of contact, then raised her gaze to his.

  “You can speak freely in front of her.” Max didn’t break eye contact with her as he spoke. “Kaylee and I are trying something new.”

  “And what’s that?”

  The question came from the woman on the screen, but Kaylee might as well have voiced it herself.

  “Honesty.”

  AJ scrunched her nose up and leaned back. “Sounds pretty fucked up to me, but whatever floats your ocean liner. I assume that since you’re bringing this to me instead of your pet security wizards over at Soteria, you’re thinking it’s linked to the mole who installed the program on Emma’s computer.”

  Max nodded. “A reliable source tells me that one of the programs on this phone is Cybercore issue, but the CEO is playing stupid about the competing malware.”

  “You think Kearney’s playing the ol’ double cross on your reliable source then?”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “And how did the dueling malware manifest?”

  Max gestured toward the phone and moved slightly to his right. Surprised, Kaylee leaned forward so she was fully in the frame.

  “Frozen screen, garbled calls, trouble closing apps. The battery life is nonexistent,” Kaylee answered.

  AJ nodded. “And where’d you get it?”

  “The phone? Wes Brennan gave it to me after my old one broke. Said he didn’t need it.”

  “And how soon after you got it did the glitching start?”

  Kaylee bit her lip, thought back. “The next day, I guess.” Right after Aidan had installed the spyware. She tried to summon some of her earlier outrage at the thought, but it only made her heart feel raw.

  “Well, color me intrigued. I’m all over it, boss. Let’s nail this bastard.”

  “I’ll leave the phone in the usual spot?” Max resumed his spot on the video call.

  “Correct. Give me forty-eight hours with it and you’ll be begging me to accept the ridiculously generous bonus I will so rightly deserve.” And with that, AJ disconnected.

  Kaylee glanced at Max. Who knew the king of stoicism had so many surprises in him? “Do I even want to know that that’s about?”

  “What are you still doing here, Kale?”

  She didn’t like the question. Didn’t like the meaning behind it, or the concern in her brother’s eyes. Kaylee set the mangled ice pack on the edge of his desk.

  Work. She just needed to focus on work. It was the one thing in the whole world that made sense to her right now. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? We have a press conference in under an hour. And I was thinking maybe we should—”

  “I was an asshole the day you quit, distracted. I’d lost Emma.”

  Kaylee’s mouth snapped shut at the interruption. She had to lift her chin to maintain eye cont
act as he stood.

  “I’m in love with her, Kale. I thought I’d never see her again, and I couldn’t let that happen. So I just walked out and left you to clean up the SecurePay mess. And I’m sorry about that.”

  Kaylee’s eyes widened with astonishment. Her robotic older brother was in love? And with the woman who’d almost ruined SecurePay, the project Max had poured all of his focus into for the last five years and counting?

  “I never would have done it if you weren’t so damn good at your job.”

  Kaylee’s heart stopped at the compliment. The one she’d been waiting to hear from him for her entire professional life.

  “I know you said it was too late for me to play the ‘big brother’ card, and maybe it is, but I can still play the ‘boss’ card. And right now I’m telling you—no, I’m ordering you—to take the rest of the day off work.”

  “But the press conference is—”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “You don’t have any talking points and—”

  “Not only is Kaylee Whitfield an adult, capable of making her own decisions, but she’s done nothing for which she needs to be ashamed. Her personal life is of no concern to us insofar as it does not affect her job performance. Whitfield Industries stands by our director of public relations. And more important, I stand by my sister.”

  Tears stung her eyes at her brother’s words, even though she didn’t want them to.

  Max put his hands on her shoulders, and she started at the foreignness of the touch. “Do you love him?”

  Yes.

  Her heart answered before her brain could kick in, and the realization shook her to her core. “So much it’s hard to breathe sometimes.”

  Max let go of her, tipped his chin in the direction of his office door. “Then go home.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE ELEVATOR GODS smiled upon her, and instead of a million stops on her way to the lobby, there was only one. Kaylee silently cursed the giggly girls who boarded on the sixth floor as she pressed the close-door button with the speed and voracity of a particularly single-minded woodpecker. With any luck, Aidan hadn’t gotten too much of a head start.

  She burst into the lobby the second the doors opened, scanning the anonymous, business-suited workday crowd.

  Relief and adrenaline, and maybe a little fear, flooded her veins when she spotted him near the security desk, being hassled by Roy. She had a sneaking suspicion that Max had something to do with the stalling tactic, and she made a mental note to thank her brother later.

  “Aidan!”

  Her half scream echoed and bounced across every hard surface. Everyone loitering in the lobby turned to face her, whether curious about her outburst or because they recognized her from the burlesque scandal, she didn’t know.

  Didn’t care.

  Because right now, she had only one concern—winning back the gorgeous, infuriating badass with the golden-blond hair and the black leather jacket who’d turned to face her at the sound of his name.

  Kaylee’s fingernails dug into her palms as she stood there, frozen, waiting to see what he would do. And then she realized only an elephant would wait.

  And she was a motherfucking butterfly.

  Her pulse slammed in her ears, sounding a lot like the speed bag at Sal’s, but Kaylee ignored it and walked toward him, one step at a time. She didn’t falter, didn’t stop until Aidan was directly in front of her.

  He was still the sexiest man she’d ever seen, the cocky swagger of his stance, the set of his big shoulders, a slight arch in the eyebrow above his bruised eye. “What are you doing down here? You’ve got a press conference to—”

  He stopped talking when she fisted her sore hand in his T-shirt and yanked him close. There was nothing soft about the way she kissed him, commandeering his mouth with the unrestrained hunger he so easily stoked in her. A clash of lips and teeth and tongues that dared him to keep up. Telling him with her body how much she needed him, how much she wanted him, how much she loved him.

  He growled as she licked into his mouth, and his hands came up to cradle her head. It was too tender a gesture for the heat of their kiss, love amidst the rush of lust, and it was almost Kaylee’s undoing.

  They were both panting when the kiss broke, their foreheads pressed together, his hands fisted in her hair, destroying her bun.

  A slight smile toyed with the corner of Aidan’s mouth. “What was that for?”

  “For being the one person who always saw me, all of me, and never made me feel like I wasn’t enough. It’s the reason I had a crush on the boy you used to be. And it’s why I’m in love with the man you are now.”

  She placed a hand on his scruffy jaw. “I always thought the reason I kept secrets was because I got off on the illicit thrill of doing something I shouldn’t. But I was just hiding. I see that now. I was too scared to stand up for myself and take what I wanted. But I’m not scared anymore.”

  His hand came up to cradle the back of hers, and he turned his head, pressing a kiss to the middle of her palm.

  “I love you, Aidan. And I don’t want it to be a secret.”

  “I love you, too,” he said, lacing his fingers through hers and pulling her hand down from his cheek. “And I intend to spend the rest of my life proving it to you, but right now, you’ve got a job to do.” He made a move for the elevator, but she tugged him back.

  “Actually, Max is taking care of that. He owes me a press conference. So I thought maybe you could take me home instead.”

  A beat slipped by as her words landed, and then he squeezed her hand. “It would be my honor,” he said softly as they started toward the exit doors.

  “Everyone’s staring at us.”

  He glanced around. “Yeah, well, people are perverts, and you just tongue fucked me in the middle of the lobby.”

  Kaylee laughed. For the first time in recent memory, she felt light inside. Happy.

  “Besides, they’ve probably never seen a burlesque legend so close up before. With all this publicity, you should have a full house for your show this week.”

  “Actually, I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time for Lola to retire, hang up the old pasties.”

  The announcement stopped him dead. Aidan’s frown was full of concern as he searched her face, and it warmed her to know she had that kind of support in her corner.

  “What are you talking about? You don’t have to give up burlesque. This bullshit media stuff is going to blow over. Even if it doesn’t, fuck what they think.”

  “It’s not that. I just don’t need her anymore. I don’t need to put on a blond wig and blue contacts to feel like myself. Don’t get me wrong—I love Lola. I love the confidence she gave me. But right now, I just want to be myself for a while.”

  Aidan pulled her into his arms, lifted her up his body. Kaylee locked her legs around his waist.

  “I love you so fucking much, KJ.”

  She licked her lips, and his eyes darkened with need as she twisted her hips against his growing erection. “I love you more. And if we weren’t in the middle of the lobby, I’d prove it to you.”

  “Jee-zus. You can’t say shit like that to me in public.” Aidan’s fingers dug into her ass as he did an about-face and headed away from the doors.

  Kaylee giggled at the sudden change in direction. If they weren’t getting looks before, they definitely were now. “What are you doing?”

  “You said Max had everything under control. And just because we’re being honest with each other doesn’t mean we can’t still have some secrets.”

  She moaned at the delicious friction when he hitched her up his body without breaking stride.

  “There’s got to be a supply closet around here somewhere.”

  She was never going to get enough of this man, Kaylee realized, lowering her head until her lips brushed his ear.
“Hang a left at the security desk. It’s the third door on the right.”

  * * *

  If you loved this book, don’t miss the next book in Taryn Leigh Taylor’s The Business of Pleasure series:

  Wicked Pleasure

  coming May 2019 from Harlequin Dare!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Undone by Caitlin Crews.

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