Maid for Spanking (8 page)

She shrugged. “It was kind of
crazy, really. One minute I was cleaning the living room in this sprawling
ranch-style house, and the next I was picturing you spanking me for leaving
streaks on the TV screen.”

He frowned. “If you got
turned on by getting spanked, why did you make me promise never to do it
again?”

“I’m not sure, really.
Denial, maybe.” She gave him a shy look. “Is it the same for you? I mean
,
do you get turned on by spanking me?”

Steve slid his hand in her
hair and pulled her down for a kiss. “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear before.
But the sex before?
It was absolutely the greatest sex I
think I’ve ever had.”

Pleasure surged through her
at the compliment—along with a mix of other emotions she wasn’t ready to
give a name to. She straddled him and leaned forward to put her hands on either
side of his head.

“If you thought that was
great,” she said in her best sultry voice, “just wait for round two.”

Chapter Five

Steve warmed her ass every
chance he got over the weekend. While that made for some earthshaking sex, her
poor derriere was a little tender by the time Monday morning came around. Not
that she was complaining.

Colleen smiled as she ran the
feather duster over the bookcase. Steve was at a meeting with some gaming
company executives, so she had the house to herself. While she and Steve had
spent plenty of time making love the past two days. They’d also spent a lot of
time just hanging out and talking. Surprisingly, they had a lot in common
besides programming. Even though it was definitely way too early on in their relationship
to consider something as crazy as falling in love with him, she could see how
it would be easy to do.

Eager to be back by the time
Steve got home from his meeting, Colleen hurriedly finished up cleaning, then
dropped off the minivan at You’ve Got It Maid before stopping by her apartment
to change clothes. Unfortunately, it took longer than she’d hoped and Steve’s
SUV was already in the garage by the time she got to his place two hours later.
There were also several police cars in the driveway. Fear gripped her.

Heart racing, she jumped out
of the car and hurried up the front steps. The uniformed officer standing
inside the doorway held up his hand.

“Just a minute, Ma’am,” he
said.

Colleen frantically looked
over the man’s shoulder, searching the entryway for Steve “What happened? Is
Steve okay?”

“Mr. Hughes is fine,” the cop
assured her. “Who might you be?”

She was too busy trying to see
into the house to answer right away. She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw
him standing off to the side talking with another police officer, this one in
plain clothes with a badge on his belt.

“I’m his girlfriend,” she
told the cop in the doorway, then brushed past him and over to Steve. She would
have thrown her arms around him, but the look on his face stopped her in her
tracks. “Steve, what happened?”

His blue eyes narrowed behind
his glasses. “Like you don’t already know.”

“Know what?”

“Don’t play dumb, Colleen. I
know you took them.”

The detective glanced up from
the notebook he’d been scribbling on to regard her thoughtfully.

She ignored him and turned
her attention back to Steve. “Took what?”

“The damn hard drives from my
computers, that’s what.”

Her eyes went wide. “Someone
stole your game?”

“Not someone,” he snapped “You.”

She stared at him,
speechless. He honestly thought she’d stolen his game?

“Why don’t you let the police
do the investigating, Mr. Hughes?” the detective said to Steve, then looked at
her. “May I ask your name, and how you know Mr. Hughes?

“Her name is Colleen Palmer
and she’s a computer programmer I hired,” Steve supplied.

A computer programmer he’d
hired? That was how he thought of her? Not as his girlfriend, or lover, but as
a programmer. That hurt almost more than knowing he thought she was a thief.

The detective slanted Steve
an impatient before turning back to her. “Could I ask where you were this
morning?”

Colleen hugged herself. “I
was here. Cleaning the house.”

The detective frowned. “I
thought you worked for Mr. Hughes as a computer programmer.”

“I do. But I also work as a
maid, so I clean his house in the morning and work on the game with him in the
afternoon.”

“I see.” The man nodded. “And
where were you just now?”

She glanced at Steve to see
him regarding her coldly. The way he was looking at her made her heart hurt in
her chest. “I…I left about noon to drop the van off at the cleaning company. Then
I went home to change clothes before coming back here.”

“And which company is this?”

She gave him the name and he
wrote it down in his notebook.

“Did anyone at the cleaning
company see you drop it off?” he asked.

“The dispatcher checks the
van in the moment I get there.”

He nodded. “Did you see
anyone hanging around outside when you left here after you were done cleaning?”

She shook her head. “I don’t
think so. I didn’t really check, though.”

“Okay.” The man flipped his
notebook closed. “We’d like to take a look around your apartment, if you
wouldn’t mind.”

She frowned. “Don’t you need
a warrant for that?”

He smiled. “Not if you give
us permission.”

Colleen chewed on her lower
lip. She had nothing to hide, so why didn’t she just agree? Because she’d seen
way too many police procedural shows where a suspect let the cops into their
home only to have them find evidence that had been planted there. What if the
person who’d stolen Steve’s game framed her?

“If it’s all the same to you,
I’d like you to get a warrant,” she said.

The detective’s mouth
tightened, but he only nodded. “We’ll do that. In the meantime, don’t leave
town.”

Steve brows drew together. “Wait
a minute. Aren’t you going to arrest her?”

Colleen stared at him in
disbelief. He was actually serious.

“Mr. Hughes, there’s nothing
to suggest Ms. Palmer did anything wrong. Just because she worked for you
doesn’t mean she stole your game. And until I get a warrant to search her
apartment, there’s not much I can do.”

Steve’s jaw tightened. “No
one broke in. That means whoever did it had a key and the code to the alarm.”

“Or disabled it before it
went off,” the detective said. “It’s also possible that Ms. Palmer forgot to
lock the door and set the alarm when she left. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m
going to go work on that warrant. I’ll be in touch.”

Colleen stood there staring
at the floor, too numb to do more than that. She couldn’t even look at Steve.

“You’re good, I’ll give you
that,” he said bitterly.

She lifted her head to look
at him. “You can’t really think I did this.”

He folded his arms across his
broad chest. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”

“Because I…”
I think I’m falling in love with you.
She swallowed hard. “Because I wouldn’t steal from you.”

He snorted. “I wish I could
believe that.”

Colleen took a step closer.
“Steve, think about this. If I had stolen the game, would I be stupid enough to
come back?”

He was silent as he
considered that, and for one crazy moment, she thought he was going to believe
her. She was wrong.

“What better way to throw off
suspicion?”

She forgot that he liked to
watch police procedural shows, too. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“I said you were a thief, not
a mastermind.”

Hot tears stung her eyes and
she blinked them back. “How could you think that after what we shared this past
weekend?”

The muscle in his jaw flexed.
“For all I know, seducing me could have been your plan all along. Maybe you
thought that if you got me into bed, I wouldn’t suspect you.”

His words hurt more than if
he’d slapped her. She knew she should stay and defend herself, but she
couldn’t. If she did, she would surely lose it, and she was barely holding it
together as it was. She turned and ran for the door, tears spilling onto her cheeks.

By the time she got to her
car, she was crying so hard she could barely see. That morning she thought she
might be falling for Steve, but she’d been wrong. She’d already fallen for
him—hard. Why else would his accusations hurt so much?

Colleen stared at the house.
Should she go back inside and try to reason with him? What would be the point? Steve
was in no mood to listen to anything she had to say. The best she could hope
for was that the police would find the real thief, and soon.

Digging in her purse for a
tissue, she dried her eyes,
then
started the car. As
much as she wanted to, she couldn’t sit in Steve’s driveway all day. She didn’t
need him accusing her of stalking him, too.

Colleen knew she should go
home in case that detective showed up with his stupid warrant. But instead, she
found herself heading to the cleaning company’s offices. The building would be
empty at this time of day, but curling up on the couch in the break room while
she waited for the other maids to come back was better than going home to her
empty apartment.

As it turned out, Kristy and
a few of the other maids had finished up early and were already in the break
room when she walked in.

“Hey,” Kristy said. “I
thought you’d be working with Hughes all afternoon.”

Colleen tried to come up with
a lie to explain why she wasn’t writing game code at that very moment, but the
moment she opened her mouth, the tears started again. All four women stared at
her in surprise.

“Whoa.” Kristy grabbed a
chair from the other table as Mia, Lauren and Gina scooted over to make room at
the table. “Here. Sit.”

“What happened?” Mia asked as
Colleen dropped into the chair. “Did he fire you?”

Colleen shook her head. “No.
He…”

Lauren’s eyes narrowed. “Did
he try something with you?”

“No!” Colleen grabbed a
tissue from the box on the table and wiped her eyes. “Steve would never do
something like that.”

“Steve? Since when did you
start calling him Steve? Two weeks ago, he was Hughes this and Hughes that.”
Kristy shared a look with the other women. “What haven’t you told us?”

Colleen hadn’t told them
anything other than that she was working for Steve in the afternoons. So, she
took a deep breath and told them everything. She left out the part about Steve
spanking her, of course, which was probably a good idea considering how shocked
they were when she told them she and Steve had slept together.

“Why didn’t you tell us you
were seeing him?” Gina asked.

Colleen shrugged. “I wasn’t
seeing him.
Until this weekend.
He asked me to stay
for dinner Friday night and everything else sort of just happened. And now, he
thinks I stole his game. If he should be accusing anyone, it should be his former
business partner, Ed-the-scumbag-Fulton.”

Gina set down her coffee cup.
“Ed Fulton?”

Colleen nodded. “Do you know
him?”

“I don’t know if it’s the
same guy, but I went out with this jerk named Ed Fulton a little while ago.”

Colleen sat up straighter in
her chair. “Was he a computer programmer?”

Gina nodded. “Yeah, that’s
him. In fact, that’s all he ever talked about. He thought I should be so
impressed that he designed computer games. I’ve never met such an arrogant
prick. He was lousy in bed, too. And if that wasn’t enough, I came out of the
bathroom one night to find him going through my purse. The creep had the nerve
to say he was looking for toll money because he didn’t have any change. Like I
believed that. The son of a bitch was trying to steal from me.”

Colleen frowned. It couldn’t
be. Could it? “Gina, where do you keep the security alarm codes for the houses
you clean?”

“In an address book in my
purse.” Gina’s eyes went wide. “Oh God, do you think that’s what he was looking
for?”

Colleen nodded. “You keep an
extra set of your clients’ house keys in your purse, too, don’t you? Just so
you don’t have to go through the hassle of grabbing them from Caroline, right?”

It was against company
policy, but all the maids had an extra set of keys made because Caroline was
notorious for handing out the wrong keys during the morning rush.

Gina nodded wordlessly, her
face pale.

“Fulton wasn’t trying to
steal money from you,” Colleen said. “He was stealing the code for Steve’s
security alarm. He probably asked you out because he knew you cleaned Steve’s
house.”