Chapter 2
Jordan
It was well into lunch hour, but I’d lost my appetite. Instead of eating, I paced beside the back wall of my office, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the greenery and that weird, giant, marble, sphere-shaped fountain in our inner atrium garden. While I’d been called into an impromptu meeting, my new intern had left lunch on my worktable, complete with a little message scrawled on a sticky note, punctuated with a smiley face. I’d promptly crumpled it into a ball and hurled it across the room. No one was fucking smiling in this room, nor in the offices next to me.
I strode to my desk and opened up my laptop to watch the incriminating video again. I’d been so shocked when Weston, our PR guy, had shown it to us fifteen minutes ago, I’d hardly had a chance to take note of any telling details. Nor had I been aware of exactly how viral it had gone.
And sure enough, all it took was a Google search of “Comic-Con Cosplay Sex” that showed as the first hundred hits. On every social media platform imaginable. Holy fuck.
I hit play and sat back, taking in the background and foreground of the non-descript hotel room—standard furniture and few personal belongings. Forcing myself to ignore the passionate couple in the middle of the screen, I scoured for any detail that my boss might be able to take note of and use to figure out our identities. He’d already spotted my employee badge in the corner of the frame with the name blocked out. Thank God for that, because my ass was on the line here. Adam would crap bricks if he knew it was me. He was already pitching fits about it to begin with, and now I was in the unenviable position of lying to my best friend to save my own miserable skin. Helpless rage burned again.
But hearing the sounds the girl was making on the video was also starting to turn me on, and hot anger soon mingled with lust. I couldn’t sit here and listen to those delicious noises and not get turned on. It immediately brought to mind the feel of her skin under my hands, the way her body had felt against mine. I clenched my jaw, trying to get a hold of myself.
I studied her tight little ass again and that weird tattoo. April Weiss, one the hottest in our latest crop of silly college interns, now was the bane of my existence.
What the hell had I been thinking?
I hadn’t been thinking. That was the problem. I’d been drunk and enjoying my anonymity at the bar. No one had known who I was in the armor and helmet, and while I’d been getting a perfect buzz on, that delectable intern in her skintight leggings and halter top had plopped down next to me, assuming I didn’t know who she was.
And I’d tapped that.
Because hell, why not?
Except she was an intern at my company, and the interns, my boss had warned, were strictly off-limits. But as we sat drinking at the bar, she’d told me that she’d fantasized about having anonymous sex. And I was a guy who had fulfilled a few fantasies in his lifetime.
I was giving and selfless like that.
Well, okay, not entirely. I had to admit that I’d wanted a taste of her since the minute I’d laid eyes on her last fall. But because she was out of bounds, I’d restrained myself. In my drunken state, I’d rationalized that if she never knew, I could get her out of my system and we’d both move on, no harm done.
Only now it was safe to say that harm had been done. I didn’t know what to make of the video’s existence. I could only assume she had made it. But why? And why not tell me she was doing it?
I’d been into what was going on and pleasantly buzzed, but I would have liked to think I’d notice something like that. Unless this was some kind of sting operation. Unless she’d known exactly who I was and wanted something to hold over my head…
I shook my head, trying to figure out what to do, my mind racing. Should I fire her immediately? Should I get a private investigator on it? What about legal takedown notices? Since it was a video of me, I could do that, but I risked exposing myself. Not gonna happen.
My fist closed in frustration, pounding on the desk. All hell was about to break loose because of this damn video. I needed a plan and I needed it fast.
As if hearing my thoughts, Adam, my best friend and boss, busted through the door without knocking, clicking it closed behind him.
I slammed my laptop shut with a grimace, suppressing a streak of guilt.
Now Adam only looked a hundred degrees of pissed off, instead of a thousand. His face had returned to a normal shade rather than the deep red he was sporting earlier. He moved toward my desk and sat on it, leaning back with his ankles crossed and arms folded over his chest.
I avoided his eyes, massaging the stiff muscles at the back of my neck. “Five minutes isn’t enough time for me to figure out how I’m going to handle this, you know,” I said.
He clenched his teeth and looked away, appearing every bit as frustrated as I felt. “Just tell me how bad this is—for real. You’ve been working with the investment bankers through all of this IPO stuff. What is this going to do to our bid?”
I bit down the first—and most honest—response that flashed inside my brain. It’s going to fucking tank it. Investment bankers and their army of underwriters were a skittish, superstitious bunch. The minute they got wind of a sex tape involving Draco employees going viral, they were going to pull out faster than an eighteen-year-old during sex with his underage girlfriend.
I cleared my throat and formed a more careful answer. “I don’t know. We need to come up with a plan for damage control. They don’t like scandal, especially sex scandals.” I took a breath and then released it. The manure I was going to have to spread in order to smooth things over with Adam was about to get thick.
“We need to find out who the guilty party is immediately. My next phone call will be to that Internet security firm I use—”
I held up a hand and tried to stifle the panic. “Whoa, pardner. I told you I’d handle it, and I will. Just leave it to me, okay? I’ll take care of it all. But…we also have to be careful about throwing accusations around before we have any solid proof. We don’t want to be guilty of sexual harassment. Might be time to contact our lawyer, too.”
Adam scowled. “Jesus Christ. Between last year’s murder-suicide case and this one, I’m going to have to start bankrolling him.”
I blinked, surprised that, in my panic, I hadn’t looked at this in context with last year’s events. A devoted player of our game had, in a fit of rage, driven over to his girlfriend’s house because she had meddled with his in-game progress. He’d pulled out a gun and shot her and then himself. The parents had blamed his actions on his addiction to Dragon Epoch, using the media to tell anyone who would listen. And, of course, they’d filed a lawsuit. These events, along with others, much deeper and more personal, had shaken Adam to the core.
And now this, which was my doing. What kind of shitty friend was I to add to his load?
“That might be a good idea, actually. You might just want to see what you can do about employing Joseph full-time,” I said.
He shook his head. “At least it’s not too late for us to pull out of this deal. We could wait ‘til all the shit blows over…hold out for a better time. We’ve filed the S1 form with the government, but companies back out of an IPO all the time.”
Over my dead body would we be pulling out of this.
Every muscle in my body tensed. I rocketed out of my chair and stalked to the window to stare out at that goddamn fountain. Long, deep breaths. In with the good—out with the bad.
I’d been working on this project for years, keeping meticulous books and documenting everything the company had done since its inception. This had been my goal since the beginning, and it had taken me at least a year of begging and cajoling Adam to go along with it.
Lord knew the last thing a control freak CEO wanted to do was to slice off a portion of his corporate pie and hand that power over to a board of directors. For the longest time, he’d wanted no part of it, even though the day we’d open on the stock exchange he’d become a billionaire.
But then he’d fixated on a new pet project—one he needed the liquidity in order to develop. And I’d seen that as my chance to swoop in and win him over. Finally. Finally, he’d agreed. Trust Adam to be motivated by his own ingenious imagination rather than fattening his bank account. It was an admirable trait, but one that I didn’t share with him. Which explained why we worked together well.
I had to play this carefully. The bankers weren’t the only ones who were skittish.
I glanced at Adam. “Can I ask you to give me some time to come up with a plan? I’ve been meeting with these bankers on a regular basis for months. I’ve been schmoozing, wining, dining, and charming the hell out of the lot of them. I don’t think that things are that dire.”
Adam raised his brows at me and his dark stare never wavered. Yeah, he’d known me a long time. We’d been good friends since our freshman year at college. He knew when I was full of shit, and today I was full to overflowing with it.
“You’ve got two weeks and I’m yanking everything if it doesn’t look good.”
I almost howled in frustration. “How about a month? There’re a lot of bankers…some of them are not located nearby.”
He continued to stare at me, and I knew what his next words were going to be before he even said them. “Two weeks, Jordan. And then I’m pulling the plug.”
Fucking hell.
Adam straightened, unfolding his arms. I clenched my jaw so tight my head ached. Without another word, the boss turned and left the room, firmly shutting the door. I picked up the legal pad on my desk and flung it in the direction where he’d left. It slapped against the closed door then slid to the ground.
Goddamn this. It got worse and worse with each minute. It had started as your ordinary shit hangover Monday and devolved into this crap situation. I was now an anonymous Internet star featured in a sex tape that had gone viral and was about to tank my company’s biggest project since it had been founded.
All because I’d gotten shitfaced and then, in my stupor, decided it would be a great idea to bang the hot intern in the elf costume.
I was never drinking again, damn it all. Glaring at the door that Adam had shut, I jumped at a sudden knock. That meant it wasn’t Adam returning to dump any more ultimatums on me.
“Come in,” I growled.
Tentatively, the door cracked open, and then, inch by inch, it slowly widened. A dark head poked in. And there she was, the author of this miserable situation—Miss April Weiss.
Her silky dark hair hung over her shoulders as she gave me a timid look. This morning I’d been staring at her ass, remembering how hot it had been to do her that night, drunk or not. Remembering those deep-throated husky moans in my ear and the feel of her—shit. I didn’t know whether I should be turned on or pissed off. Right now, it felt like both.
Because she had recorded it and uploaded that shit to the Internet.
Those dark blue eyes met mine, a question in them. “Hey, Jordan. Just checking to see that I got your lunch order right. Charles said you do Subway on Mondays.”
Her gaze flicked to the untouched meal and the door widened. Now she was in the office, wearing that form-fitting skirt and that thin, tight sweater that clung to her lush breasts. My fist tightened at my side. Two weeks ago, I’d fucked a cover model—eight times in a three-day span. This girl was nothing special, hot hookup or not. I looked away and swallowed.
“I wasn’t hungry,” I growled. I was so goddamn pissed off I couldn’t even look at her.
She almost tripped on the legal pad that I’d thrown at the door. Her dark eyebrows pinched in a frown as she scooped up the pad and moved to the table, her shoulders slumped slightly—as if somehow my rejection of the goddamn sandwich reflected upon her performance of her new job. My eyes went back to her face again, drawn like magnets. She was beautiful—fresh, glowing skin, shiny hair and those blue eyes. Perfect features. Christ, the lady in HR in charge of assigning interns must have been smoking crack when she put this one in my office. Like throwing chum in a shark tank.
I’d known she would be my assistant and that it was risky to do anything, but the moment she’d said “anonymous,” it had been too tempting to turn down. Anonymous, yeah, but broadcast to billions. I studied her serene features, attempting to find evidence of a cold-hearted conspirator underneath.
Slowly, April started tucking the food back into the bag. “I’ll clear this out and put it in the fridge in the break room for later.”
I blew out a breath, stood and stormed out of the room without another glance at her. I headed straight for Adam’s office. Maggie, his assistant, tried to wave me off, but I barreled right past her and entered.
Weston, the publicity guy, was there, showing him something on his tablet. Adam was poring over it. Weston looked up, clearly offended that I’d interrupted his private time with the boss. He was not my biggest fan and the feeling was mutual. Tough shit. I needed some private time of my own. Adam must have seen that in my face immediately, because he straightened and handed the tablet back to the now dejected-looking Weston.
“We can go over the rest later. Thanks, man,” Adam dismissed him.
Weston glared at me until he passed by my shoulder and I shrugged. When the door shut, I began by clearing my throat. “Two weeks isn’t long enough—”
“Well—” he began to cut me off before I held up my hand to stop him.
“But…if you insist, then please, for the love of God, send me some real help and yank the intern? My assistant is pregnant and sick all the time, and I can’t babysit an intern. We are a multi-million, possibly billion-dollar corporation. We can afford to hire me a professional to get through this—”
“I’ll get you whoever you need, but the intern needs to stay there for now.”
That brought me up short.
Shit. I had to get rid of this girl, but I couldn’t raise any suspicion that it was anything more than her being a waste of my time. “I’m going to be too busy to teach her anything.”
Adam looked away as if already bored with the conversation, which irked me, and had I not been semi-panicked, I would have said something.
“I owe her dad a lot, okay? He hired me at Sony Online. She wants to get into business school and having experience working in your office will be a golden opportunity for her. I have good reasons. Trust me on this, okay?”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes at him. Typical. Adam had his own mysterious reasons for doing what he did and only occasionally shared those reasons with lesser beings—even his goddamn friend and business partner.
I gritted my teeth. “I’m not here to entertain spoiled little rich girls. Besides…you never even knew her name. You just called her Snow White. Now suddenly she’s your old boss’s daughter?”
Adam shrugged. “She looks like Snow White… Look, David Weiss, her dad, emailed me last year, asked if his daughter could intern here. I said sure and referred her to human resources. I had no idea until last winter, when I saw him at the Congressional hearing in D.C., that Snow White was his daughter. Which is kind of funny because Weiss means ‘white’ in German.”
“Yeah—hilarious—now about getting rid of her—”
He tensed. “I’m not going to do that. I know this situation has us all stressed out. I’ll hire whoever you need, okay? Just let her…I don’t know…shadow you, make you coffee, work under you for a while.”
Oh, that was rich. Work under me…right. There were several things I could think of that I would like her to do under me, but work wasn’t one of them. I studied him for a moment, taking in the way he gripped the edge of his desk. It was sometimes hard to read Adam, but I knew him well enough to know he was tense. It would be better not to push it.
“Fine, but I don’t have to be nice to her.”
Adam shrugged. “You’re a rat bastard. Everyone knows that.”
I flipped him the bird, and for the first time since seeing the goddamn video, he actually cracked a smile. Meanwhile, my mind was racing, trying to figure out how to worm my way out of this mess.
But another part of my brain wondered if this might not be a good thing. If April worked in my office, I could keep an eye on her, figure out her purpose in taking the video. If I had sway over her with a business school recommendation, then I had some leverage to keep her from using it for blackmail. At least I hoped. And that hope was the cold, sick ball of lead in the pit of my stomach.
I took a deep breath and let it out. “Fine, whatever. I promise you I’m going to handle this, but you have to have a little faith in me.”
His jaw tightened and he nodded. “I do. I will. Just…talk to the bankers. Get the lay of the land and find out if they are going to throw us under a bus or not.”
My arms stiffened with resolve. “No one’s throwing us under a bus. Over my dead body, anyway.”
He raised a black eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound promising.”
“Yeah, that was a shitty choice of metaphors.”
Adam checked his watch. “I’ve got a meeting with programming right now. But I need you to meet me over at R&D later—the new prototype equipment arrived. We’re testing it out and doing a little demo.”
“Ain’t nobody got time for that,” I quipped. “I’ve got fires to put out here.”
“Well, since you are going to be talking to the bankers, and this is the stuff we are trying to raise the capital to buy and develop, it would be good for you to see it in action.”
That was something that might actually be useful to my cause. “That’s a really good idea. I should get some pictures, maybe a little video. We could add it to the beauty contest.”
Adam frowned at me. “I don’t speak ‘business.’”
Ours was a partnership of Adam’s brilliant mind and imagination and my know-how with business. But I was as fascinated with the prospects of our new advancement as he was. It might not have been my sole motivator like it was his, but things like this still excited me—when I didn’t have the weight of the world on my shoulders.
“It’s just what we call the phase where we show off the company to the underwriters, try to convince them why our corporation is a great investment. Now would be a really good time to wow them and get their minds off of, ah…other things.”
“Okay, see you over there at four. Bring Snow White.”
Oh, for Chrissake. Was I really stuck with this girl?
He followed me out of the office, and I turned and went into mine while he headed to his meeting.
The minute I rounded the doorway, I stopped in my tracks. Snow White—uh, my new intern—was bent over, her round, delectable ass in the air, dragging a heavy box stuffed with files across the floor.
After taking a split second to admire the view—complete with yellow thong peeking up over the edge of her skirt—I noticed that her short-cropped sweater had ridden up, revealing the tramp stamp tattoo. I’d traced that tattoo with my tongue. It had tasted delicious, that very distinctive tramp stamp. A very memorable—incriminating—one.
I slammed the door shut so loud the entire wall shook. The girl almost jumped out of her skin, stumbling on her high-heeled boots and staring at me, her beautiful blue eyes widened in shock.
“Uh. Oh, I’m sorry, Jordan. I just noticed this file box on the floor over there and it looked really messy, so I figured I’d—Oh, but now I remember that Charles said I probably shouldn’t touch your stuff.”
My eyes narrowed. What kind of game was she playing? Was she flashing that tattoo at me on purpose—trying to taunt me with it and the dirt she had on me? A small ball of rage flared up in my chest.
I spoke between my clenched teeth. “Do you have any idea what’s going on in these offices today, Miss Weiss? Why the officers seem in an uproar? Have you picked up on any of that?”
She frowned, her hands clasping each other nervously. “Um…people have said there’s something weird going on, but no one knows what it is.”
“Well, thank God for that. But you know what? I’m going to tell you what it is, and you aren’t going to breathe a word to any of your little intern friends, got it? Because there’s a viral video out there on the Internet right now featuring people dressed up like characters from Dragon Epoch, and at least one of the participants is an employee of this company.”
She froze, going white as a sheet. Truly living up to her nickname now. To say it didn’t feel good to see her terrified half out of her mind would be a lie. As pissed off as I was at this moment, I wanted to scare the shit out of her. She wasn’t messing around at the sorority anymore. I could play hardball, and I wouldn’t be swayed by a pretty face.
“You wouldn’t…know anything about that, would you, Miss Weiss?”
She glanced at me and then away, starting to shake and appearing as if she might faint.
I walked toward her slowly, but she didn’t look at me. Her eyes shifted to the floor and her head bent forward, her long, dark hair falling forward to curtain her face. I circled her like a predator. She visibly swallowed, utterly petrified.
Good.
“I—” she began shakily.
“Shh. Say nothing. You are going to do everything I say and you are going to do it yesterday. The first thing to remember is that the dress code in this office is business casual, and it would be in your best interest to make sure that tattoo of yours stays covered up. Got it?”
She jumped, her head snapping up. “Y-yes. Yes.”
“And the other participant in the video…?” I breathed. I was standing behind her now, speaking over her shoulder. It was as intimidating as hell, I was sure. But I did it mostly so she wouldn’t see my face. I had to be certain that she didn’t know it was me.
April was silent for a moment—a tense moment—while I waited behind her, feeling the warmth of her body close to mine, smelling the scent rising off her hair, her pale neck. She smelled sweet, like honey. It drifted to my nose and I remembered—again—burying my face in that soft hair, that neck. Even looking down at it now, I was fascinated by the white skin, the delicate lacing of blue veins underneath, the tiny dark freckle just below the hairline. My entire body was reacting to her. Christ almighty.
“I—I have no idea. He was…some guy at Comic-Con.” Her voice was shaky, nervous.
The relief that washed over me in that moment almost floored me. Thank God. At least there was that. I still had to mop up this mess, but at least it wasn’t my ass on the line.
“I should fire you right this second,” I growled.
She faced me. “Please. I don’t know how it happened. I just—”
“Shh—” I held up a finger to her mouth. Her lips were dark pink, full, soft. How amazing they had felt wrapped around my—
Goddamn it. I took a step back. “I want that box of files organized, indexed and out of this office with a full description of every slip of paper in them before you leave today. Got it?”
She blinked. “Uh, yeah. Yes. Sure.”
“Then do it. Now.”
With a jump, she turned back to the box, about to bend over again.
“Get a damn cart to wheel it out of here. Christ.”
She walked out of the office on shaky legs without even looking at me.
I rubbed the back of my neck, determined to be gone when she got back. She was too quick for me though and re-entered a minute later, pushing the cart dejectedly across the office to the box.
I growled again. “You need to meet me in Research and Development at four. Other than that, you are working on this until it’s done and you don’t go home until then.”
Without missing a beat, she nodded. “Yes. Yes, sir. I’m—”
“Save it. Just get it done.” I turned and stormed out, heading for the cafeteria to grab some shitty food to eat while she cleared out of my office.