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I was torn between a smile and a scowl. A smile because if I chose to call her right then, she would’ve answered. A scowl because the redhead was the first to tweak my interest in a while, and I’d hoped she would end this uninvited dry spell that had taken over my sex life. But despite my earlier anticipation, the desire to get her back in my bed was dwindling fast. I stared at the picture again and stroked my dying wood a second before I hit the Delete button, erasing her from my contacts altogether.
I gunned the engine onto the Pacific Coast Highway, pointing my car toward Downtown LA. With my bedroom plans now shot to shit, and in no mood to return to an empty bed and dreams filled with memories I didn’t cherish, work was the next best option.
Nevertheless, I cursed when my phone rang. “Dammit, doesn’t anyone sleep anymore?” I griped.
Maggie, my assistant, answered, “You don’t pay me to sleep. You specifically stated during my interview that I wasn’t allowed to sleep.”
“You don’t get to sleep. That doesn’t mean you can interrupt mine. I’m shocked I need to explain that to you.”
“Tell me you’re not heading to Fixer HQ right now and I’ll hang up.”
I didn’t bother because she had a GPS tracker on my car. Once or twice that tracker had saved my skin and extricated me from some unsavory situations.
“What do you want, Maggie?” I switched lanes, enjoying the sweet purr of the engine.
“Wow, someone’s grumpy,” she muttered under her breath, then said briskly, “We have an urgent situation.”
I tapped my finger against the wheel. “Aren’t they all?”
“This one is less sex, drugs and rock and roll, more...something else.”
I suppressed a growl. “By all means, hold the dramatics.”
My sarcasm bounced right off her thick skin. It was one of the many reasons she was invaluable. “I’m sending you the address her people sent me. You can be there in fifteen minutes.”
The joy in my ride gone, I cursed. “Her people? Did you not explain to them that I don’t deal with people? That it’s one-on-one or not at all?”
Maggie sighed. “I know how to do my job, Caleb. Trust me, please, just a little?”
I frowned. I didn’t trust blindly because I didn’t trust anyone. Maggie knew this. Why she was choosing to tap into a resource not readily available to me wasn’t improving my mood. The sizeable monthly paycheck I signed bought me her hard work and loyalty. I didn’t expect anything else, and certainly not her request for me to trust her.
My phone buzzed with the incoming address. “I’ll be in touch.” I hung up, pulled off the road long enough to check out the Mulholland Drive address before I executed a slick U-turn.
High walls and electronic gates greeted me when I reached the property. Everything about this smelled like trust-fund princess with her panties in a twist about her latest flame. Or a chihuahua kidnapping that wasn’t worth my time.
Only the assurance that Maggie excelled at her job made me roll down my window and press the intercom.
The cast-iron gate slid back, and I drove up the cobbled driveway of a large stone mansion. In typical Hollywood style, the original property had been remodeled into a grotesque status symbol, with little care for artistic design.
I hid my lip curl as I stepped out and spotted the rent-a-cops stationed on either side of the house.
The front door swung open to reveal a young, sharply dressed man on the threshold. He seemed out of place in this setting but I wasn’t here to judge. “Good evening, Mr. Steele. If you’ll come with me?” He didn’t offer his name and I didn’t ask for it. This was LA, where even D-list celebrities were paranoid about revealing their identities to the wrong person.
The inside of the mansion was as gaudy as the outside, the designer having gone to town with an explosion of golds and leafy greens splashed across every surface.
Suppressing a shudder, I went down a hallway into a large living room, growing impatient when a look around didn’t produce the her Maggie had mentioned.
“Wait here, please.”
He left. I paced, silently hoping this trip would be worth my while. I had a dossier full of needy clients but their demands were nothing I couldn’t handle in my sleep. Thoughts of sleep, or the woeful lack of it lately, ramped up the disquiet inside me.
I was busy smashing it down when the double doors opened in front of me.
At the first sight of her, my gut clenched tight and my lungs flattened with expelled air I wasn’t interested in replenishing.
I wasn’t sure whether it was the shock of her roughly chopped white-blond hair that gripped my attention or the wide, full red lips currently getting sucked between her teeth. Maybe it was the bright, oval-shaped green eyes staring directly at me. Or the lush petiteness of the body draped from head to toe in black leather and lace.
Leather and lace.
The combination was lethal enough without the silver-studded leather cuffs encircling both wrists and her slim throat.
Jesus.
She was a cross between a wannabe punk rock star and a BDSM enthusiast’s wet dream.
She stared at me, our height disparity forcing her to angle her head and expose her delicate neck to me. Edgy hunger burned through me as I tracked her alabaster-pale face, the lightest flutter of her nostrils, the velvet smoothness of her mouth. The racing pulse beneath her choker.
She inhaled and exhaled slowly. “I hear you’re a fixer.”
“You heard correctly.” I wasn’t in the phone book. Referrals were strictly by word of mouth. I sent silent thanks to whichever client had sent her my way.
She gave a brisk nod. “Before we start, we need to discuss an NDA,” she said in a sexy voice I wanted in surround sound in my head.
I was used to nondisclosure agreements. No one worth a damn did business these days without first whipping out an NDA. But whether it was the time of night or my general mood lately, I shook my head.
“Before we discuss NDAs I need the broad strokes of the job first.” Who was I kidding? This woman, whoever she was, intrigued me. I was fairly sure I was going to take the job.
Her mouth firmed. “Fair enough. I’ve picked up a stalker,” she said matter-of-factly. “It started off as cyberstalking but in the past three weeks it’s escalated to physical stalking.”
The bolt of unexpected protectiveness shot through me, unsettling me enough to make me cross my arms. “And you haven’t called the cops because...?”
“Because it could be linked with the work I’m doing.”
“What work?”
“Extremely sensitive work that I can’t discuss without you signing the NDA.” She held out the document.
My intrigue spiked. “Okay, let’s see it.”
It was seven pages long, far more detailed than the standard three-page NDA, with her name left blank. I noticed her studying me from the corner of my eye as I read it a second time. When I was done, I shifted my gaze to her, my interest mounting when she met my eye boldly. “It looks good. Pen?”
As if on cue, the door opened, and the young guy who opened the front door walked in. I watched him, then her, looking for signs of a relationship. She nodded her thanks when he produced a pen, but there was nothing else in her gaze that tweaked my senses.
I grimaced at the relief that shot through me, and signed.
She took the pen and inserted her name.
Lily Angela Gracen.
I stared at the name, searched the corners of my mind and came up empty as the guy witnessed the document.
As she walked him to the door I allowed myself a second, more intimate look.
Hell, she was stunning.
No one deserved to be stalked, online or in real life, but fuck, looking at her, I understood why she could become an object of some psycho’s obsession.
The moment the thought crossed my mind, I froze, rejecting the idea of her being in danger, even while my cock stirred to life, excited by the magnificent vision crossing the room toward me.
She moved with understated but sexy awareness, a woman who acknowledged her considerable attributes but didn’t need to flaunt them. A woman who knew the power of those curvy hips, her plump lips and generous breasts.
Despite her combat boots adding a couple of inches to her height, she barely came up to my chest. Petite, perfectly proportioned, she was the epitome of a filthy, decadent Pocket Venus.
She probably weighed no more than a hundred and ten pounds. On a good day I bench-pressed twice her weight. My mind reeled with images of how she would feel in my arms.
Easily pinned against a wall, her naked, delicious weight trapped between my greedy hands.
Easily tied down to a bed with silk ropes if that was her thing, her skin flushed pink as she straddled the fine line between preorgasmic tension and a screaming climax.
Easily subdued and tossed into the back of a van by some unhinged asshole with entitlement issues.
I yanked myself away from lurid sexual scenarios and adjusted my stance to ease the constriction in my pants as the most gorgeous creature I’d seen in a long time stopped before me.
“Who was he?” I nodded at the door.
“He came with the house rental. I asked him to stick around to witness the document.”
“Okay, now that I’ve signed your document, let’s start again. I’m Caleb Steele. Fixer.”
She stared at the hand I held out. “Lily Gracen, chief coder for Sierra Donovan Media.”
Despite what was happening to her, she had more than a little sass. And if she was a coder, she had brains, too. A lethal combination on any given day. Packaged in that body, I got the strongest suspicion I was in for an exhilarating ride.
After several moments she took my hand.
The second I felt the warm sizzle of her flesh, experienced an extra shot of testosterone through my system and watched her eyes widen in mutual acknowledgment of the rush, I accepted my reality. Signed NDA or not, the unholy fire spreading through my bloodstream had only one destination.
I was going to cross a helluva lot of lines, all of which started and ended with one fact.
I was going to fuck Lily Angela Gracen.
CHAPTER TWO (#udea9900a-deea-5404-b610-7f92341bf7a4)
Caleb
WHOA. TAKE IT down a notch or six, cowboy.
Getting involved with Lily Gracen while she was my client had bad idea written all over it. I’d learned that lesson the hard way.
Which was why I broke my rules for no one.
A fixer’s first and last defense against failure was his neutrality. Starting out I’d disregarded that by getting involved with Kirsten. A young actress on the precarious rise, her cultivated vulnerability had slipped beneath my guard, triggered emotions she’d expertly manipulated to suit her purposes. Emotions that had turned me into a laughingstock and nearly tanked my reputation.
Never again were two words I abided by.
Already, my sexual attraction to Lily Gracen was getting in the way of that neutrality. And that bite of protectiveness the moment I saw her? That needed to go, as well. My task was to find her stalker without messy emotions getting in the way.
But...once that was done, there would be nothing stopping me from rewarding myself with a taste of her.
Yeah, I wasn’t perfect. At no point in my life did I try to be. You can’t go countless rounds in the boxing ring of life without emerging with a few scars both inside and out.
I’d dragged myself from the rougher parts of South Central LA and into the twenty-thousand square feet of a Malibu mansion via some seriously rocky terrain, experiencing every imaginable facet of human nature along the way.
It was the reason I now lived by three simple rules:
Protect the innocent and vulnerable at all cost. Always.
No sleeping with clients, no matter how tempting.
No sleeping with the fucking clients, no matter how fucking tempting.
The foundation of rule one would never waver. I feared for the foundation of rules two and three as I held on to Lily’s hand, drifted my thumb across one satin-smooth knuckle. She gratified my touch with a sharp catch of her breath.
God, I wanted to hear that sound louder, preferably preceding a scream as I buried my cock inside her sweet little pussy.
But first, I needed to get down to business.
She beat me to it by tugging her hand out of mine. “Shall we discuss the details?”
As she walked away, I caught the scent of her perfume—earthy, evocative of rain-soaked heather, the kind that invited you to roll around in when the sun came out. I wanted to follow that scent with my nose. And then with my hands and my mouth.
Down boy, I cautioned my cock when it jumped in agreement.
“Sure.”
She sat down at one end of the sofa, crossed her legs and waved me to the seat next to her. “Sit down, Mr. Steele.”
The take-charge attitude from such a diminutive person was an unexpected turn-on. I let her have the leeway. For now.
I sat, dragging my gaze from her shapely calves and thighs. “One thing you should know—I won’t be managed. If you want me to catch this...person, you’ll let me do my job.”
She stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “We’ll get to that in a moment.”
Again, I tried not to react like a horny teenager to the sound of her voice, but God, it was something else. Hell, from the top of those roughly chopped locks to the tips of her boots, she was something else.
“Is Steele really your last name?” she asked abruptly, her slender arms folded.
I raised an eyebrow. “Do you always go out dressed like that?” Okay, not how I’d wanted to start, but it was a pertinent question. I didn’t have a problem with the way any woman dressed, but some guys out there were sick enough to form vile opinions about women based on the way they dressed.
