The Boss Vol. 6: a Hot Billionaire Romance (3 page)

Even before it was over, she fumbled to take my lips with her own. Our kiss was rough, artless. Sloppy. So goddamn desperate, still.

Sex couldn’t sate what we’d gone way beyond.

She drew back enough to trace shaky fingers over my damp, well-used mouth. “Though I’m a feminist, if you wanted to carry me to bed just now, I might not say no.”

Recognizing the concession for what it was, I gave her back one of my own.

“After that, Ms. Copeland, you just might have to carry me.”

I
stared at the ceiling
. My body was still crackling in response to his touch.

Blake.

My…something.

Lover seemed to tame a word, even if the L-word twined around it in distracting shades of intense reds and hues of blue. That’s what he was. Passionate rage and cool blue.

I was somewhere in the middle.

An amalgam of us both. A steadier version for sure, but that seemed almost boring compared to Blake on either end of the spectrum.

Tonight had been red.

Cool hadn’t even been on the surface of us. I wasn’t sure what to think, to be truthful.

I almost laughed out loud.
Truth
.

Such a stingy word used in our relationship. My lies, his lies, our lies—and somewhere in there was a truth buried under lines of code—both in computer language and my grandmother’s flowery, dramatic prose—add in worry, and an endless need for Blake to control something…

Well, then you had me, the limp noodle who’d barely survived the aftermath.

And yet I couldn’t turn my brain off.

He could.

As focused as he could be about work, about making me insane both in and out of a bed—when we actually used a bed that is—dear God, what he could do with a &&&&&. My nipples beaded up and my breath hitched in muscle memory.

God, I wished I could turn things off like he did.

I turned my face to him in the dark. His chest rose and fell in that deep sleep he could magically summon.

Usually he turned away from me in the dark. As if he still needed to block me from his world even when he was unconscious. But not tonight.

Tonight he faced me, and his fingers had crossed our tentative thresholds to slip under my pillow. One more piece of him that he’d finally shared with me.

Part of me wanted to slip under the cool sateen fabric and curl my fingers around his. Maybe then I could soak up some of his restful mojo and follow him into blissful oblivion.

But my too busy brain just wouldn’t let things go.

Especially not the memory of my grandmother’s panicked gaze burning through the screen in that twenty-second message.

Annabelle Stuart could be as dramatic as an actress trying out for a Broadway play sometimes, but that was often done for fun. She loved messing with the blue bloods of Lady’s Cove. To use their taste for power against them with pieces of spicy gossip.

Sometimes made up by her, sometimes a whisper in her ear.

But this was no game.

And the people who’d broken into my home—okay, Blake’s home, but it would always be mine in my head—weren’t scheming harpies at a dinner party. No, these men had guns and a desperation that didn’t fit in my world.

I reached across the invisible line between us and danced my fingers through the lock of his hair that had fallen forward. The only time he was slightly ruffled was in sleep or in passion.

I trailed the back of my fingers over the hollows of his cheek to the beard that he’d grown in recently before I slid out of our bed.

My chest constricted at the idea of
our
anything. Lies stretched between us with tendrils of love trying to bridge the gap. I saw it in the fierceness of his gaze on me, felt it in the possessive nature of his touch. I recognized it because it echoed in my own.

I just wasn’t sure if the love would win, or the lies.

I swiped his dress shirt off the chair by the door and shrugged it on over my nakedness. Downstairs, moonlight crept through the shadows via the skylights and wide windows done in his signature glass.

Protection in the light.

I clicked on the lamp next to the oversized leather chair beside the fireplace. I was tempted to light the gas to chase away the chill, but I was afraid I’d fall asleep thanks to its warm glow.

Instead I pulled one of my many sketchbooks out of the end table drawer. I used the cool moonlight and crisp white light of the lamp to sketch by memory. The stained glass of the back of my home came to life under my hands.

Of my grandmother’s home.

Now Blake’s.

The panel where I’d found her journal had been a nearly flawless replica of the frosted glass I’d chosen for the original design.

Now it had been replaced with his glass.
Blake’s
glass.

Had he chosen it for her?

Hidden the journal for her?

How had they been in contact this whole time and I’d been so freaking oblivious? Nothing made sense.

Were there other places with hidden nooks in the home that I’d lived in for so much of my life? How many more facets of my grandmother had I been blind to?

I set the sketchpad aside and stood. Jack’s network-secure MacBook sat on the kitchen island. I crossed to it and smoothed my hand over the chilly casing. The only way I was going to find answers was to dig. I opened it and logged in with the passcode he’d given me.

I scrolled through the pages of spreadsheets to open the diary pages with Annabelle’s scrawling script. Where were the originals?

Had she burned them?

Buried them?

None of this made sense. Yes, my grandmother had a knack for electronics that few of her contemporaries could rival, but to create a code like this?

It seemed unlikely.

And yet here it was—nearly hacker-proof.

Had she really wanted to keep it such a secret? Or was she creating her very own DiVinci Code to screw with us all?

Were there more answers in the house?

Sure we’d had moments of fun and intrigue with our trips to the cove to bury treasure for the mermaids, but nothing on this scale.

Nothing that would make her personal version of hide and seek any more decipherable.

I skimmed the pages filled with more codenames and her biting humor. Even here, she’d filled the pages with gossip.

K
itty
and the Tomcat were on the prowl again. Could they be more obvious? Tomcat wasn’t exactly a genius when it came to keeping his gentleman in his pants. The problem for both of them was that it required far too much money to keep their respective sidepieces. So much so that Kitty came looking for play money again. Just a touch too expensive to keep her boytoy in Boston. Even with the interest rising, she still wants more, the fool.

I
wasn’t
sure why she hid this journal entry. She hadn’t bothered to bury her distaste for Catherine Bishop in any of her other entries. Then again, she rarely held herself in check when they’d been face-to-face, so it really wasn’t a surprise she’d only give Cat a perfunctory codename.

Husbands were about as faithful as tomcats in my grandmother’s social circle. The rich liked to play a little to much as far as I was concerned. My own circle didn’t fare much better, but then again I didn’t really keep track of those that I’d gone to school with. I didn’t care about social standings. I’d cared even less for their one-upmanship at parties.

Art was all I cared about for so long.

My grandmother had even tried to get me involved with other children from surrounding towns in the summers. As I’d gotten older she’d encouraged me to teach, and though I’d obliged her for a while, I didn’t have the head for it.

All I wanted to do was create, not help others find their way into art.

That made the fact that I’d met Blake all those years ago even more damning. Was I truly that in my own head?

Evidently so.

I wanted other children to understand and love it like I did, I just didn’t want to be the one doing the teaching. That required patience, and I’d been sleeping off an artistic fugue state when the gods had been handing out that particular virtue. My own projects? I could sit for hours with shards of glass and find my way into a design.

As long as people left me the hell alone to do it.

When glass was on the table, that’s where my focus stayed. Eventually my grandmother had left me to my own devices in college. My internships had been wretched, but I’d endured them to find new techniques and test new materials.

In the end I’d returned to the antiques, and the broken. I found that I liked to restore just as much as I loved creating new.

Philomena had understood that. She’d used that fire to get me into the gallery, and showed me how to channel it into money. How to let go of the pieces I hoarded and believe they were worth something to other people.

She’d helped me sell my first piece. Oh, I’d had my first showing in college, with a few prospective buyers, but I’d gotten caught up in a typical college romance and had slacked off on coming up with more items to sell right when I was on the cusp of breaking through. That she’d given me another chance later, and that she’d been at my side when I finally first sold, meant more than I could ever say.

I owed her a debt that I’d never be able to repay. But instead of working my ass off on another piece to sell, I was hip-deep in gossip and spreadsheets that didn’t make any sense.

I toggled to the spreadsheets and lowered to lean on my forearms as I scrolled through names of companies I didn’t recognize. It was obviously a ledger of some sort, but for what?

The companies had nothing to do with Marblehead—hell, nothing to do with Massachusetts for most of them.

A hand slipped over my hip and I screeched.

“What are you doing, Ms. Copeland?”

I whirled around and punched Blake in the arm. “Do. Not. Do. That.” Each word was a hit.

Instead of wincing, he simply stood there and took it, one eyebrow raised. His hair was disheveled and he was only wearing a low-slung pair of sleep pants, his feet bare.

I should be used to his body by now.

I should be used to every part of him after the last few months, but I’m not. The moonlight from the skylight tripped down the wide plane of his chest, down the rigid muscles of his torso. If that wasn’t bad enough, his tattoo was on complete display.

It swirled over one half of his chest and down his left arm. So intricate, just like the man himself.

“Continue to look at me like that, and you’ll end up on the counter.”

I swallowed. “Again?”

“Don’t test me, Ms. Copeland.”

We’d gone at each other desperately only hours before, but it didn’t seem to matter. The want was always there. It was the only constant between us.

He reached around me to the laptop, but instead of pushing me out of the way, he urged me to turn around. “Did you find something?”

I tried to concentrate, but the problem with Blake was that he didn’t invade my space unless he had an ulterior motive. I tapped the screen to life. “I’m not familiar with any of these names.”

His breath fanned along my neck and ruffled the little curls around my ear. “They have New York addresses, but the streets don’t make sense.” He reached under my arm. “See here?”

I tried to read where he was pointing, but all I could concentrate on was the fact that his arm was brushing against the side of my breast, and his chest crowded along my back.

I didn’t even want to go into what else was crowding me.

Focus, Grace.

I bent closer to the small screen. “Brooklyn?”

“Right. But that address is about two blocks from the park.”

I looked over my shoulder. “You know that off the top of your head?”

He brushed his bearded cheek against my jaw. It never took long for his five o’clock shadow to get dense. “I used to sneak into the city to watch movies.”

“I thought you were from around here?”

“When I was in college, I’d work the fishing boats during the summer.” His voice was low. Just above a rumble in his chest.

“You did?”

“I did. But at the Brooklyn Bridge Park they would play free movies a few times a year back then.” He rested his chin on my shoulder as he scanned the screen.

He’d said it like it was just a passing factoid, not a bomb of information that skewed my entire view of him. There was only Blake in a suit in my head.

It wasn’t the first time he mentioned vague things about his past, but they were just that…vague as hell.

Wait. He’d said something about the park. That was important, Grace. Wake up.

I frowned and looked closer. “This spreadsheet says it’s a warehouse.”

“Exactly. And that address is smack dab in the middle of the park.”

I skimmed my fingertip down the track pad. “Do you have your phone?”

“Where exactly would I be keeping it, Ms. Copeland?”

I cleared my throat. “Um, right.”

He stepped back and opened a drawer, pulling out an iPad. “Will this do?”

Though I expected him to stand next to me like he usually did when we were in work mode, he returned to his spot behind me. “Yes. Jack’s computer is a closed circuit system.” I turned on the tablet and stilled as he used his thumb to unlock the screen. He rested his hands on either side of me, on the countertop.

I wasn’t about to let him know that he was crowding me. He’d only do it more. His citrus scent was stronger and less spicy since the smell of his aftershave had worn off.

“Smart,” he murmured.

I tried not to flush, but I couldn’t help the small smile as I plugged in the addresses of the companies into the maps app. A few of them matched buildings, but for the most part they were half addresses that didn’t make sense, or were businesses sitting in the middle of rural neighborhoods.

Frustration curled in my belly and transferred out to my fingertips. My nails bit into my palms. “What the hell is this list?”

“My guess?”

I really didn’t want to know. I’d watched enough movies, and heard enough stories over the years. “Yeah,” I said softly.

“Tax shelters or shell companies most likely. Emphasis on the latter.”

“What the hell was my grandmother into?”

“We’re going to figure that out.” He closed the laptop and turned me around. “Tomorrow.”

I sighed. “It’s already tomorrow.”

He settled his hands on my shoulders. “Even more reason that we should get a few hours of sleep, preferably in a row. I’m going to hack at this in the morning.”

I frowned up at him. “And what the hell am I going to do?”