Dirty Ties (25 page)

Fuck him. Fuck both of them. I shouldered past Logan and his narrowed eyes and the anger radiating from his tie to his Converse sneakers.

In the office, I slowed my strides and rounded the desk. Strands of hair had tumbled from my bun and hung in my face. I swiped them away as I found what I was looking for.

Wrenching the flash drive from the computer, I shoved it in my bra and straightened my dress. Of course, there were copies of the video, but Trent wouldn’t be jerking off to this one.

Logan’s vibrating presence heated my back, the intensity of his gaze dripping down my spine. I shivered, hating him, hating how much I was attracted to him. Which was salt in the deepest wound. The pain rose to the surface, pressing beneath my skin, trying to escape.

“We need to talk.” His voice pushed me into a quiet place, the eye of the storm.

I turned slowly to face him and gave him the eye contact we’d shared last night. I put all my backbone in it, let him see that I was hurting but not ruined. “I don’t want to talk…or do anything with you. Can you handle that?”

His eyes closed. When they opened, I pulled back my arm and swung with every ounce of my strength. My fist landed across his cheek, and his face flew to the side.

He could’ve dodged it. I realized that as he looked back at me, his jaw loose and posture stooped, as if waiting for another punch.

So I hit him again. Same spot on his cheek. My fist throbbed, and not surprising, that second punch didn’t make me feel any better than the first.

Resignation dulled his eyes, and his arms hung at his sides. Arms that had braced me against a wall and pinned me to a bed. Arms I had wanted so desperately to hold me to sleep last night.

My throat ached, my composure wavering, made worse by the threat standing in the bathroom doorway, watching us.

I brushed my sweaty hands over my dress and pivoted toward the exit. Fixing my hair as I walked, I was confident in my outward appearance by the time I stepped into the corridor.

Strong, even strides carried me to the elevator. I held my chin up and my face relaxed when I reached the ground floor lobby. But when my heels hit the sidewalk and the cool wind brushed my face, the trembling started, in my legs, my hands, my lips.

Stepping into the heavy flow of foot traffic, I removed the phone from my bra and dialed Collin. Voice-mail answered. I hung up and dialed again. Voice-mail.
Goddammit!

I let the pedestrians lead me away from Trenchant as I dialed and texted Collin over and over, watching the sidewalk blur beneath my feet. I really didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts right now.

Hindsight was a brutal bitch, and I wasn’t just thinking about last night. If only I’d had the foresight to tell our parents to go fuck themselves the day I completed grad school, before I’d signed a marriage contract, before I’d been sucked into their dirty affairs.

What would it be like to have a mom to talk to, who would listen with understanding and love? Who wouldn’t judge me for the mistakes I’d made or the hurt I felt? Who would never have forced me into a hopeless situation?

But I had Collin.

If he would answer his damned phone. I dialed again. Voice-mail.

I trudged on for blocks, aimlessly walking. Surrounded by people. Alone in my head.

And my head was stuck on Logan. I ran over all of his expressions and reactions from last night to now. I knew I was seeing things that weren’t there, and I tried to parse the facts from the bias, but I kept coming back to the look on his face when I hit him.

It was possible that he regretted betraying me.

Not that it changed anything.

I stopped at a crosswalk and dialed again.

Finally, Collin picked up, his voice rushed. “Where are you?”

I glanced up at the street sign. “Corner of Michigan and Ontario. Where are
you
? Why weren’t you answering?”

“Okay, I see you. Turn around.”

I did, just as the limo pulled up beside me. The door swung open, and Collin jumped out, his arms open and his eyes wide with worry. He knew.

“Your dad called you.”

He caught me in a hug and lifted me on my toes, cracking my tightly restrained emotions. “Yeah. He told me everything.”

Probably not everything, but I’d rehash it when I was ready. Right now I just needed… I looped my arms around his slender shoulders and held tight. God, this was what I needed. The power of a hug. It invited me to let go.

My spine buckled, my breath slipped from my lungs, and my eyes closed, trapping the rising moisture. “Is Seth in the car?”

He shook his head. “Just us.”

And the tears escaped, hot and silent, down my cheeks. His hand on the back of my head, his arm supporting my back, Collin’s embrace bore my pain.

What was the price of revenge? What would I pay to exact atonement for all the wrongs done to me and others like me? When my hands were stained with blood and I dumped my first kill into the incinerator, I thought I knew what it cost me.

Standing beneath the cover of an awning eight blocks from Trenchant Tower, I watched Collin Anderson hold his wife across the street. That was when I felt the real price constricting my chest and siphoning my air. It was too much.

The trembling in her shoulders as she clung to him was too much. Her arms wrapped so tightly around his neck as if afraid he’d let go was too much.

The stream of pedestrians parted around them. Collin spoke in her ear, and her fingers slipped into the hair behind his, her head nodding against his neck.

It was hard to watch and impossible to look away. Whatever her reasons for sleeping with me, she loved
him
. It was too much.

I rubbed my chest, tried to massage away the resentful awareness. I resented Collin for having her. I resented hurting her. But most of all, I resented feeling this way. It was a foreign, unexpected emotion, and I fucking hated it.

The voice of reason told me everything about her was calculated, from her reserved poise to her sexy-as-fuck heels. She was Trent’s protégée after all.

But the seething
I fucking hate you
she’d said to him stabbed my chest with doubt. Trent had a hold over her that was deeper than her greed for money and power. Did she even want those things?

When Trent played the video, I’d braced for a flinging string of spit, a scourge of insults, and a major-league explosion of drama to fit the treachery I’d committed against her. Instead she’d held her chin high, her eyes open and dry, and calmly punched my face.

I prodded my cheekbone, tracing the swelling. It twinged beneath the touch, but nowhere near enough.

She should’ve kicked my balls to my stomach and ridiculed my performance in bed. She should’ve threatened my life with venom in her eyes. That was what I expected going in.
That
I could’ve handled. Anything would’ve been easier than the quiet, lonely hurt that had shattered beneath her brave expression.

Amidst the flux of traffic, standing beside his fancy, black limo and comforting his wife, Collin lifted his eyes and aimed them directly at me. I leaned away from the building, straightening to my full height, and stared back.

He wouldn’t know who I was, wouldn’t be able to differentiate my face from the dozens of others moving between us. Yet he looked at me for a deliberate heartbeat, one that extended into endless more. Too long to be cursory. Too pointed to be unintelligible.

He knew.

Knew who I was? Knew I’d fucked his wife? Whatever he knew would not inspire an introduction with handshakes. I flexed my fingers at my sides. My muscles heated and bunched, ready for an ugly confrontation.

I wasn’t sure what shocked me more. The fact that he picked me out of a crowd or the sight of him turning his back to me and pulling her into the limo.

My eyes blinked rapidly as the limo motored forward and merged into traffic. What the fuck? I rubbed my neck beneath the strangling collar. Had I just imagined all that?

I must have, because if I were her husband, I would’ve beaten her lover into the sidewalk until he stopped breathing.

As I walked back to the Trenchant Tower, it niggled. While I sat on the couch in Trent’s office—
my
office—lots of things about Collin Anderson niggled.

What had he done to incite his wife to cheat on him? Not that he was to blame, but why would Trent frame him for murder? Was it an empty threat or did he have legitimate proof?

It was a strong enough threat to convince Kaci to stay on as my direct report. Which worked to my advantage. I needed her employed so I could monitor her activities.

Trent’s moving crew scurried around me. Trent had left for the day and evidently wasn’t keen on leaving me alone with his equipment. My burly babysitter from the day before stood by the door, eyeing every twitch of my finger.

He stepped to the side as a younger man rolled out a cart loaded with Trent’s computer equipment. When I’d given Trent the video, I’d watched him move a copy of the file from the flash drive to his laptop. But I’d embedded a logic bomb in the video file. Twenty-minutes ago, the time-activated malware destroyed every copy except the one that remained safely hidden in my warehouse.

A sex tape scandal was one threat Kaci didn’t have to worry about and one of the many reasons I wanted to talk to her when she ran out.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Christ, my head pounded with so many unanswered questions.

When I’d walked into Trent’s office unannounced this morning, he’d greeted me with his palm out and a sleazy smile on his face as he said, “Give me the video.”

Of course Holden had contacted him, but how did he know I’d gone through with the trap?

But what bothered me most was the scene in his bathroom. It wasn’t just the tension between him and Kaci that had set my teeth on edge. It was the way they were standing, his body too close for a man with his daughter-in-law. Was he in the habit of harassing her? Did he touch her, force himself on her?

My hands shook, and my ears pounded. If he fucking hurt her, I wouldn’t just kill him. I’d kill him slowly and painfully.

I spent my first two days as CEO of Trenchant Media ruminating on this shit between introductory meetings with department heads. Kaci didn’t return to work after she left with Collin, and Friday morning, she called in sick.

The GPS tracker I’d wedged behind her windshield turned me into a stalker. She took the bike out Thursday and Friday night. The app on my tablet showed her hitting top-speeds around the outskirts of the city. For two nights, I watched that red dot move over the map like a man possessed.

Like now, sprawled on the couch in Benny’s gaming area, I couldn’t bring myself to look away. There was comfort in it, knowing she was out riding her bike rather than at home riding her husband.

I ached to jump on my bike, chase her down, and demand answers. Hell, I had a key to her condo. I could barge in and fuck the truth out of her.

I pulled on the collar of my t-shirt, a desperate knot hardening in my throat.

Which was why my ass was on this couch. I needed to cool off as much as she needed to nurse her wounds. I’d give us both until Monday.
Two more days.

Benny stretched out beside me with her laptop balancing on her stomach as she stalked Kaci on Trenchant’s internal network.

Using a clone of my top-level security profile, she dropped sniffers on servers and desktops tied to the network while disabling action-logging to hide her trail. These wire-taps were a lightweight hack, a simple way to monitor Kaci’s online activities, so I was surprised as hell when she told me an hour later she’d found something.

She leaned up and twirled one of the dozens of blue braids covering her head. “Jenna Greer.”

I hadn’t met Jenna yet, but I knew who she was. “Kaci’s administrative assistant.”

She gestured at the activity log on her screen. “Yeah, so she picks up these files from an encrypted server every day and e-mails them to Kaci.”

I raked a hand through my hair, unable to drag my eyes from the moving dot on my tablet. “What files?”

“Don’t know. They’re encrypted.”

And she’d need the private key to open them. The app on my tablet chirped, the dot moving north, Kaci’s speed reaching 160 miles per hour. My heart raced as I pictured her in her silver leathers, her braid whipping around her back, risking her goddamned safety at that speed. I wanted her straddling
me,
bent forward and ass up, her thighs gripping mine like her life depended on it.

Benny leaned over my shoulder. “No matter how long you stare at that dot, it’s not going to sprout an ass and tits.” She tapped her chin. “Though I could code a modification for that. Think about it. An x-rated GPS navigator that guides you to your destination with a naked avatar and a bedroom voice.” She tilted her head back and drawled a ridiculously low moan, “Take a
hard
right, baby. Yeah, right there. Drive harder.”

I sighed heavily and turned off the tablet. “Jenna sends encrypted files to Kaci. And…?”

She rolled her green eyes and turned back to her laptop. “I checked out the activity on the server. The only other users logging in are Hal Pinkerton and Trent Anderson. Hal drops files. Jenna and Trent pick them up.”