LUKE: Complete Series (6 page)

“Fuck yes.”

I licked him up and down then stopped at the base of his cock and took his sac into my mouth. I stroked his length with my hand as I teased and sucked his balls. I moved back to the tip and licked him clean before I took him deep into my throat then pulled him out. I did this a few more times, pushing him as far back as I could stand it before I ceded to my gag reflex.

“Oh, fuck! I’m gonna come.”

I bobbed my head slowly until he exploded in my mouth. I had to swallow quickly before it spilled over my lips. I kept him in my mouth, savoring every last drop, until his cock stopped throbbing with pleasure.

He pulled me up and laid a forceful kiss on me. I had to push him back so I could catch my breath. “Your turn,” he murmured, as he pulled me toward him again and kissed my neck.

I shook my head. “Nope. You already took care of me today. Time to get ready for the party.”

After thirty minutes of setting bottles of beer and champagne on ice, and one very sexy ice fight where Luke went fishing for a piece of ice in my jeans, he left to pick up one of the lead programmers who didn’t drive. I offered to do it, but Luke insisted he didn’t want me sitting alone in a car with a sex-starved man.

As soon as he was gone, I slipped my phone out of my pocket to check my messages: four texts and one voicemail from Milo. The voicemail reminded me to cozy up to the programmers to see if I could get my hands on one of their tablets or cell phones to search for the password. The text messages were blank. He was just pestering me to get me to check my messages.

Luke arrived twenty minutes later with an overweight guy who was probably in his early-twenties, but looked more like he was in his early-thirties. He looked the way I felt most days.

“Brina, this is Josh Ramos. He’s the lead programmer on the Blaze project.”

I held out my hand to Josh, but he just raised his eyebrows and smiled as he walked right by me toward the wooden barrel packed with ice and beer. He grabbed a beer and disappeared below deck. Something about the way he grabbed the beer and left without another word brought up the memory of my brother’s first day back from his tour. He spent most of the night sitting on my parents’ sofa, guzzling beers and throwing phony smiles at anyone who passed.

“What’s wrong?”

Luke was staring at me with that familiar expression of concern.

“Just… Just thinking about my brother. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“I know. I just…. Can we not talk about this?”

He looked disappointed at first then he nodded. “When you’re ready.”

More programmers began showing up within minutes. Most of them were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, except for the one guy who wore doctor scrubs and house slippers. I tried to speak with everyone, but some were more talkative than others and, before I knew it, the rain had arrived. There wasn’t enough room for everyone to take shelter below deck so half the party left.

I stood on the forward deck and closed my eyes as the rain dotted my face. It didn’t take long for Luke to find me. He came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist.

“You’re so beautiful.” He spun me around and yanked me by my waistband until our bodies were pressed against each other. “Thank you for helping me with this. I was afraid I wouldn’t find anyone to replace Janice before tonight.”

“Oh, is this what you used to do with Janice?”

He chuckled as he kissed my forehead. “She wishes.”

He brushed my wet hair out of my face and kissed me. I traced my fingers lightly over the smooth skin on his back and he shuddered in my arms.

“Brina?”

“Yes?”

He stepped back so he could look me in the eye. “I really… care about you.”

This was his way of telling me he was falling in love with me, too. I couldn’t breathe and soon my entire body began to tremble.

“Are you cold?”

I nodded and he pulled me quickly toward the stern and below deck with the cabin full of drunken men. They stared at my chest as I entered and I realized the rain had turned my tank top into a soaking wet, semitransparent shroud. I crossed my arms across my chest and Luke stepped in front of me.

“I think it’s time to call it a night. There’s a storm coming,” Luke said, a tinge of anger in his voice. “Thank you all for coming down and for all your hard work on this project. Keith: Can you drive Josh home?”

“Sure thing, Boss,” Keith responded, and they filed out of the cabin in a single file line, a couple of them still soaked in enough liquid courage to sneak a peek at me as they passed.

Luke left me alone for a few minutes as he followed them out to call for some cabs and make sure everyone made it down the gangway without stumbling. While he was gone, I roamed the cabin, picking up half-empty bottles of beer and champagne. I checked the restroom and found a phone on the counter. I grabbed it and was about to race up to the deck before I realized this was my opportunity to look for the password. I closed and locked the restroom door behind me then sat on the toilet to search through the contents of… Josh’s phone.

A picture of Josh and an older woman, probably his mother, was set as the background image. He was smiling much wider than he ever smiled all night and I wondered if maybe this was a picture of him before…. Maybe his mother was gone like Ryan.

A twinge of guilt echoed in my heart as I began searching through Josh’s apps for anything that looked like it could be a portal into Blaze. Then I found it. The app was named “NeoSys”. Either Josh had access to our mirror network at NeoSys or this was Josh’s idea of a joke; a taunt.

I touched the app and, as suspected, it prompted me for a password, which had already been saved in the app. This was it. All I had to do was take this phone to Milo tomorrow morning and we had everything we needed. I stuffed the phone in my back pocket and buried my face in my hands as I contemplated my next move.

4

When I came out of the restroom, Luke was staring at me and I didn’t know if he knew Josh had left his phone behind or if he were just giving me that intense stare he liked to give me right before he proposed something dirty. I smiled and pulled my shirt over my head. He stared at my breasts for a moment before he came to me.

He unbuttoned his pants and I quickly shrugged out of my wet jeans before he lifted me up and I wrapped my legs around his waist. His pants dropped and he pushed me up against the restroom door as he entered me. I ripped his shirt off and gasped as he pounded me against the door.

“Fuck me,” I urged him on. “Fuck me hard.”

He thrust himself deep inside me and I screamed with a mixture of pain and pleasure. He kissed me roughly, his stubble rubbing my lips raw, as he screwed me hard and steady.

“Don’t stop,” I whispered, as he took my breast into his mouth and teased my nipple with his tongue. “Oh, God, Luke. Don’t stop.” He pounded me hard until I couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m coming,” I cried, as my body shuddered in his grasp.

He laid me down gently on the bed and within seconds he came inside me. He kissed my collarbone, his cock still twitching as he moved down to my breast. He licked my nipple and laid a trail of hot kisses over my belly as he moved down.

He licked and sucked my clit gently as his arms kept me lifted off the bed. He moved down and thrust his tongue inside me and I moaned as I clutched the blanket. He moved up again, licking me the entire way like a delicious ice cream cone he couldn’t get enough of. He kissed my clit lightly, using his lips and tongue to do things no man had ever done to me before. Just as I was about to come, he jammed his cock into me.

“Oh, my God!” I cried.

“Oh, fuck. You’re so fucking hot.”

He pulled out and flipped me onto my stomach. He pressed his chest against my back and I shivered as he kissed the back of my shoulder and lifted my leg as he slid into me from behind.

“What I said earlier,” he said, as his lips moved up my shoulder to the back of my neck. “What I meant to say is… I love you.”

I turned my head to look at him as he sank slowly in and out of me. His face was not the face of a man who expected me to say anything in return—but I did. “I love you, too.”

“How did it go? I want every fucking detail.”

Milo was dressed in the usual gray Armani suit with the usual black tie. One thing he had on Luke was his fashion sense. The man dressed better than I did. He sat across from me at
La Parilla
Mexican restaurant with his ankle crossed over his knee as he leaned back in his chair, completely at ease with himself. He sipped his forty-dollar glass of top-shelf tequila as I contemplated my options.

I could hand over Josh’s phone and secure my career with NeoSys. I could ensure that my parents would never go hungry and maybe I could even afford to get my mother a therapist, which she refused to do after my brother’s suicide. I could pay for the best treatment money could buy if my father did indeed have cancer. Or I could tell Milo I didn’t find anything and tomorrow I could pretend to find Josh’s phone on Luke’s boat.

“It was just a bunch of geeks sitting around, getting shit-faced, and telling jokes about binary code.”

“They didn’t say anything about Blaze?”

The waitress arrived at our table and set our plates of fajitas in front of us. I grabbed my fork and immediately began digging into my food.

“Hello, Brina? I asked you a fucking question? Did they talk about Blaze?”

“I don’t know,” I said, through a mouthful of food. “Maybe… they might have. I couldn’t really keep track of everything. It’s as if they have some kind of code of silence around this thing.”

Milo leaned over his plate, practically getting in my face. “Of course, they do! They signed a fucking nondisclosure agreement. That doesn’t mean they don’t talk about it amongst themselves.”

“Well, I’m not one of them!”

“Your
job
is to be one of them.”

I set my fork down and wiped my mouth with my napkin. “They never talk about it in front of me. Even when they were drunk, they were unbreakable. I didn’t find anything.”

“Are you sure you’re not getting too close to this guy?”

“
What?
I’m not stupid, Milo. I know what’s at stake here.”

He glared at me with his dark eyes and it took all my willpower not to look away.

“Are you going to tell Kip to take me off this assignment?”

“Is that what you want?”

I stared at my bottle of beer and my eyes followed the drop of condensation as it slid down the bottle, and the memory of Luke and I making love as the rain tapped a relentless beat on the deck above us came back to me. I didn’t know if what I had with Luke was real. I didn’t know if he was stringing me along to see if I would actually follow through with this plan. I didn’t know if he really had no idea why I was there, though I found that hard to believe.

What I did know was that I was in far too deep to destroy what Luke and I had. I would rather lose my career and have my heart broken, then throw Luke to the NeoSys wolves.

But what I wanted didn’t matter anymore.

“No. I want this assignment. I just need some more time.”

More time to figure out if I could bury this desire, this addiction long enough to put my family’s needs before my own.

“They’re announcing Blaze at the developers’ conference in six weeks. I’m going to ask Kip to give you one more week. If you don’t deliver by then, I’m going to recommend he pulls you out ASAP.”

“I understand.”

“And, Brina,” he began, his eyes softening. “I know you think you need this for your family, but I think you need it more for yourself. You won’t be able to live with yourself if you let them down.”

I stared at my plate of food and tried not to let my emotions get the best of me. “Milo, with all due respect, you don’t give a shit what I need. You’re just waiting for me to fuck this up so you can sweep in and save the day.”

He leaned back in his chair again and took another sip of his drink. “You’re right. I want your job, but you’re wrong about me not giving a shit.” He gazed at me across the table looking like a fucking high roller at a poker table: drink in hand, poker face, oozing confidence. “I know you’ll do the right thing. You always do.”

I walked into the office the following Monday determined to get this mission back on track. I couldn’t keep giving in to these urges. I had to break it off with Luke.

I set my purse on my chair behind the reception desk, Janice’s old chair, and made my way to Luke’s office. I knocked on the door and it opened on its own. I entered and found him sitting at his desk with the face of a young Asian man on his computer screen.

“Okay, just package the code and send it to me over the network. I’ll take a look at it. Thanks for the heads up, John.” He tapped the screen and John’s face disappeared. “Good morning, gorgeous. Come here.”

I wanted nothing more than to go to him, but I had to stick to my plan. “I need to talk to you.”

“Uh-oh. Sounds serious. Is this about what I said last night?”

I took a seat in one of the chairs in front of his desk and he pointed his remote at the office door to close us in.