Maid for Spanking (9 page)

Gina looked like she was
about to be sick. “He even asked me once how I remembered all the codes for the
security systems in the houses I clean. I told him I kept them in my purse. I
can’t believe I was so stupid.”

Colleen reached out to cover
the other woman’s hand with her own. “It isn’t your fault, Gina. There was no
way you could have known Fulton was going to steal the security codes. He must
have made a copy of the key at the same time.”

“Well, it doesn’t make me
feel any less responsible,”
Gina
muttered. “Or any
less used. I feel like going over to that jerk’s house right now and giving
that bastard a piece of my mind.”

“You know where Fulton
lives?”

“Over in San Jose.”

Across the table from
Colleen, Kristy eyed her warily. “Tell me you aren’t going to do anything
stupid.”

Should she ask her friend to
define stupid?
Probably not.

“No,” Colleen lied. “I’m just
going to give Fulton’s name and address to the police.”

Right after she checked to
make sure he had Steve’s hard drives. She didn’t want the police tipping off
Fulton and giving him a chance to get rid of the evidence. She’d learned that
on those police procedural shows, too.

Thanks to MapQuest, she found
Fulton’s house easily. She parked her car down the street, then casually made
her way along the sidewalk and around the side of the house. Since she couldn’t
exactly walk up and knock on the front door, she had to be stealthy.

Glancing over her shoulder to
make sure she wasn’t being watched, Colleen crept over to the first window she
came to and peeked inside. The house had an open floor plan like Steve’s, so
she had an unobstructed view of the interior. She didn’t see Fulton anywhere. That
didn’t mean he wasn’t home, though.

Making her way around to the
back of the house, she found another window and cautiously looked inside. Her
pulse quickened when she realized it was some kind of home office. Cupping her
hands against the glass, she looked closer. A dozen hard drives sat on the
desk. One of them had a cable hooked to it that led to a computer. Colleen could
just make out numbers scrolling across the monitor. Crap. Fulton was downloading
the code.
 

She turned and started for
her car, but then stopped. There was no way for her to know if Fulton had just
started downloading the information, or whether he was almost done. She hoped
Steve had encrypted the data, but she wasn’t sure. What if Fulton finished
before the police got here? Once Fulton had the data on his computer, Steve would
never be able to prove it was his.

Colleen chewed on her lower
lip. Her gaze went to the house again. There was only one way to help
Steve—get the hard drives away from Fulton before he could steal the code
and tell whatever gaming company he planned on selling it to that it was his
work. That meant breaking into Fulton’s house in broad daylight.

But how was she going to do
it? Colleen frowned as she studied the house’s exterior. She couldn’t break
down the door or pick the lock. The first required too much strength and the second
too much skill. However, she could break the window next to the door. All she
had to do then was reach in and unlock it.

She looked around for
something she could use to break the glass, and saw several small rocks lining
perimeter of the flowerbed beside the house. She picked one up, but then
hesitated. This was it.
 
She was
going to intentionally break into a house to get a guy’s computer game back for
him. This had to be love, because it was the craziest thing she’d ever done.

Taking a deep breath, Colleen
tightened her grip on the rock in her hand and smacked it against the window.
She cringed at the loud noise the window made as it broke, glancing over her
shoulder to make sure no one had heard. No one came running. That didn’t mean
they hadn’t heard and weren’t calling the cops right now. Eager to get in and
back out before someone came to investigate—or worse, Fulton came
home—she carefully reached inside the opening and unlocked the door.
Saying a silent prayer to Heaven that Fulton didn’t have a security alarm, she
slowly pushed it open. Colleen carefully stepped over the broken glass,
then
closed the door behind her. She looked around,
breathing a sigh of relief when she didn’t see a keypad for an alarm.

So far, so
good.

The house was quiet and her
breathing sounded loud in her own ears as she hurriedly made her way through
the kitchen and down the hallway to Fulton’s home office. Once there, she made
a beeline for the hard drives. One look at the computer monitor told her what
she’d suspected. Fulton was running a program to decrypt the hard drive
connected to it.

Swearing under her breath,
she unhooked the hard drive from the computer and deleted everything the
decryption software had already decoded. Cradling the hard drives in the crook
of her arm, she turned to go when she spotted a gym bag on the floor beside the
desk. She grabbed the bag and stuffed the hard drives into it.

“What the hell do you think
you’re doing?”

Colleen jerked her head up to
find a tall, blond-haired man standing in the doorway. At the incredulous look
on his face, she could only assume he must be Steve’s former business partner,
Ed Fulton.

Her hand tightened around the
handle of the gym bag as she frantically tried to think of something to say. “I…I
was just…”

Colleen’s voice trailed off
as Fulton advanced on her, a menacing look in his eyes. Heart pounding, she
backpedaled. Her gaze darted to the door. With Fulton between her and it, she
had no hope of escape. Unless…

She waited until Fulton was
right in front of her,
then
swung the bag full of hard
drives at his head with all her strength. Fulton fell to his knees with a
curse. Colleen wasted no time. Bag in
hand,
she raced
out of the room and down the hallway into the kitchen. Yanking
open
the door, she flew outside, almost stumbling as she ran
around the front of the house and down the street to where her car was parked.

Jumping in, she started the
engine and put the car in gear just as Fulton came bounding out the front door
and down the steps. Heart pounding so loud she could hear it, Colleen floored
the gas pedal and sped away from the curb, too afraid to look back to see if
she was being followed.

* * * * *

Steve swore under his breath
as he stared at the useless computers and blank monitors. He’d been a fool to trust
Colleen. And if he hadn’t been so distracted by her pretty face and sexy ass,
he would have known something about her had been off. Hell, everything about
her had been off. What computer programmer would get a job as a freaking maid,
for crying out loud?

Shit
.

That was the last time he
ever listened to what his gut told him about anything. And it was sure as hell
the last time he thought with his dick, that was for damn sure. God, he’d been
so stupid. And the worst part was that he’d let himself fall for her.

There was a piece of him that
wanted to believe he was wrong about her, but nothing, not even the tears in
her beautiful blue eyes when she’d begged him to believe her could refute the
evidence. There had been no forced entry, which meant whoever had stolen his
hard drives had the security code to the alarm and the key to his house. No one
had those except his maid.

He shook his head. She
couldn’t possibly think she was going to get away with it. The police were
going to search her apartment and find those hard drives.
Unless
she’d hidden them somewhere else.
Or was working with a partner. Like
Fulton? The thought made his jaw clench.

The doorbell rang,
interrupting his thoughts. It’d probably be too much to hope that it was cops
coming to tell him they’d found his hard drives.

The bell chimed again, more
insistently this time. Someone was impatient. He jogged across the living room
and into the foyer to yank
open
the door.

“Steve, thank God!”

He stepped back as Colleen
rushed in, partly because he was stunned to see her, but mostly because she
would have knocked him down if he hadn’t.

“What the hell—?” he
began, but she cut him off.

“It was Fulton who stole your
game, not me.” She whirled around to face him. “He got the security code for
the alarm from one of the other maids who cleaned your house. And before you
ask, I won’t tell you which maid. He tricked her into going out with him, then
stole the security code and the extra set of keys to your house when she wasn’t
looking.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Because I went to his house
to see if he stole
your
hard drives. By the time I got
there, he was already starting to decrypt them.” She stopped to take a breath.
“I know I should have called the police, but I was worried that if they didn’t
get there in time Fulton would take off with your game, so I broke in and took
the hard drives back.”

Steve’s gaze went to the bag
in her hand. What the hell kind of game was she playing now? Did she honestly
expect him to believe she’d broken into Fulton’s house and gotten his hard
drives back? More likely, she’d decided to return the hard drives because the cops
were this close to tossing her in jail.

Still, the look on her face
made him stop and think. She was either the best actress in the world, or she
was really telling him the truth. Could he have been that wrong about her?

“Colleen—” he began
,
only to be cut off by the sound of a man’s voice.

“Is a regular Nancy-fucking-Drew,
isn’t she?”

Steve turned to see Ed
standing in the doorway. He couldn’t say he was surprised to see his former
partner. The only question was whether the man
were
working with Colleen or not. But the gun the man had trained on both of them gave
him all the answer he needed. He had been wrong about Colleen. And now they
were probably both going to end up dead because of it.

Shit
.

He stepped closer to Colleen.
Regardless of how much he wanted to pull her into his arms and apologize right
then, Steve’s gaze never wavered from Ed, or the gun in his hand. “I should
have known you were the one who stole my game.”

Ed kept the gun trained on
them as he closed the door. “When I heard you were coming up with a new game, I
couldn’t help myself. Can you blame me? If the thing is even half as popular as
your other games, I’ll still be set for life.” He glanced at Colleen. “Things
would have been a lot simpler if your girlfriend hadn’t stuck her nose where it
didn’t belong, of course. Now, I’m going to have to get rid of both of you.”

Steve inched closer to
Colleen, putting himself between her and his crazy-ass ex-partner. “You’d kill
us over a stupid game? How greedy can you be? You’re already a millionaire
thanks to the games we sold when we worked together.”

Ed’s hand tightened on the
gun. “I used to be rich, past tense. When you walked away from the company, so
did our investors. I tried hiring other programmers, but no one can write code
like you can, much less come up with a creative idea. The money I made didn’t
last long after that.”

“You could have tried writing
a program yourself,” Steve suggested. Baiting him probably wasn’t the smartest
thing to do, but he had to buy some time. “Oh, wait. You can’t, can you?”

“Smug son of a bitch.” Ed’s
eyes narrowed. “You know I never was any good at that.”

“That’s right.” Steve
smirked. “The only thing you were good at was taking credit for my work.”

Colleen grabbed his arm. “Are
you trying to piss him off?” she whispered nervously.

Steve gave her a quick look.
“When I tell you to—run,” he said softly.

* * * * *

What?

Colleen blinked. Was he
serious? There was no way she was going to leave him. Especially if he did what
she thought he might do—something incredibly heroic but unbelievably
stupid.

“You don’t honestly think
you’ll be able to pass the game off as yours, do you?” Steve asked Fulton. “I’m
already in talks with Innovative Games, and I pitched to several other
companies before deciding to sell to them. Anyone you try to sell it to will
know it’s my code.”

Fulton ground his jaw as he
considered that. “I’ll go overseas then.”

Steve snorted. “Good luck with
that. The cops already know you were the one who broke in here and took my hard
drives. Colleen called them as soon as she left your place.”

No, she hadn’t. But Fulton
didn’t know that. And it was freaking him out. She could see it in his eyes.

“They’re already on their
way, Ed,” Steve added.

“Guess that means I better
shoot the both of you and get out of here.”