Great Exploitations: Sin in San Fran (7 page)

As he moved and grunted, I glanced behind me. At that angle, anyone could identify with absolute certainty that the man throwing me onto my back was Rob Tucker. I turned my face into the mattress to allow myself one small smile, but when he gripped my hips and pulled them back toward him, my smile fell. No victory dance yet. Not quite.

Moving quickly and just as powerfully, I spun around and broke free of his grip. As I crawled across the mattress, I met his scowl with a playful look. “Only good boys get to do a woman that way. And you are not a good boy.” I shook my head maybe a bit too adamantly.

“Something tells me you don’t have a lot of experience with good guys.” Rob reached for my ankle to pull me back, but I kicked his hand away.

Sitting up on my knees, I patted the mattress. “You’re right. I don’t. But I have more than enough experience with bad ones and how they like it.”

Rob examined me, the mattress, and me one more time before laying down. “I like this view better anyway.”

I pivoted over him. Looking down at him, just as obviously as he had with me moments ago, I drilled my fingers into his chest until he grimaced. I might have gone a little deeper after that. “So do I.”

“All right, sweetheart. You talk a big talk. Let’s see what you’re actually made of.” He spread his arms wide, giving me an expectant expression. When I continued staring down at him, unmoving, he grabbed my hips and moved me into position. “Listen. I thought I made this clear, but just in case things are a little foggy in that peanut-sized brain of yours, here it is one last time. If I say jump, you jump. If I say go, you go. If I say shut up, you shut up. And if I say fuck, you fuck.” He sat up on his elbows and lifted a brow. “Got it?”

Other than my blood heating, the rest of me stayed frozen in place. “Fuck—”

“Me. Now,” he interjected.

“Fuck . . . you.
Now
,” I tacked on when he opened his mouth.

“That’s correct. Fuck me. That’s your marching tune for the rest of the night.”

“Let me get this straight, you know, given my peanut-sized brain . . .” I cleared my throat and resisted the overwhelming urge to slap him. “You want
me
to fuck
you.
Is that right?”

When I waited for an answer, his fingers curled deep into my hips before pulling me down on him. “Does it look like I’m about to object?”

I smiled. I couldn’t have helped it if I tried. “No, Rob. No, it doesn’t. It looks like you are practically begging me to fuck you.”

Some things were just too damn ironic.

I moved down him a few times, which was followed by a, “That’s more like it.” A few more times after that, he could barely remember to breathe, let alone form words. When he was close to coming—the vein popping through his forehead gave that away—I slowed down. Then I stopped completely. Glancing at the camera one last time, I winked. No one would see the last few seconds of the tape but me, but there was enough satisfaction in that.

“What the hell, you stupid girl. Keep going before I make you.” He panted, his face red and his eyes bloodshot.

G would be pissed if she knew I’d cut things short right before the grand finale, but Rob Tucker . . . he didn’t deserve satisfaction. What G didn’t know . . . G
didn’t
know. Grinning at him with the overdone smile I’d mastered, I readjusted my position over him. So my knee was between his legs. A foot away from his balls.

“I warned you to stop calling me girl,” I said in a sing-song voice right before I drove my knee into the only soft spot Rob Tucker possessed.

He grunted and curled into himself. It was strange how a man made the same sound when he was climaxing or getting kneed in the balls, but I supposed that whenever his manhood was involved, the sounds were the same. My fake smile turned into a genuine one as I threw myself off of the bed. With Rob curled on the bed as though he was dying, I used his distraction to retrieve the phone from between the pictures. The video was still running, catching every last precious detail that would give Rob Tucker the proverbial shaft in divorce court.

It was time for the victory dance. As I zipped back into my dress, slid into my heels, and grabbed my purse, I gave Vile Human Being #1 one last look. Even curled in pain, he still made me want to squirm.

“Well, Rob Tucker . . . it looks like I really fucked you.”

He couldn’t even work up a simple, no doubt derogatory, reply. He might not have even heard my final words to him, and that was okay. I kept smiling the whole way down the stairs and out the front door because whether he’d heard my words or not, he’d live with the repercussions for the rest of his life.

FINALLY

AFTER THAT WHOLE ordeal, I needed a shower. Not the cutesy, tongue-in-cheek kind, but an actual shower. The kind with scalding water and plenty of soap accompanied by a fresh loofah. Something that would remove the physical grime Rob Tucker had left on me. The other kind of grime? That would never go away, but I had plenty of experience repressing grimy memories, starting with the man I was flying back to see tomorrow morning.

I’d get to see Henry tomorrow.

Why did my subconscious sound like an eager, frolicking school girl instead of a grumpy, pruney old shrew? Add evidence number 2034 to the pile of confusing shit I felt when it came to Henry Callahan.

After all but moonwalking out of the Tucker household, I had to walk a good mile before I made it to a road busy enough to warrant a taxi. Once I’d managed to hail one and climb inside, I was craving that shower so badly, I considered tossing the driver aside so I could put the pedal to the metal back to my hotel. I distracted myself by texting the V for victory to Mrs. Tucker and G. Despite the fact that communication was restricted to emergencies or me texting one-letter messages, Mrs. Tucker almost immediately replied with a smiley face.

I didn’t know exactly what her smile looked like, but I could imagine it. Even if she was still a ways from smiling for real, a smiley face text was progress. A step in the right direction. I imagined texting back
We got the bastard.
But as unlikely as it might be that a lawyer could get his hands on the phone Mrs. Tucker was about to destroy, it wasn’t worth the tiny risk. Not when it came to a man like Rob Tucker.

My G phone didn’t ping back with her usual reply, which was unusual. Her replies were usually so instantaneous, I might have thought she was just staring at the phone, her finger at the ready. So either she was busy or . . . I checked the time. Nope, she couldn’t be asleep yet. The woman didn’t believe in going to bed before midnight.

After paying the cab driver, I practically sprinted for the elevator. I tapped my foot impatiently as it scaled every floor, then I charged for the door to my room. Once I was inside, my dress was off and tossed on the bed faster than even Rob had managed it.

Since I didn’t have a loofah, I snagged my bristle brush from the counter, squirted a glob of liquid soap on it, and scoured every last inch of my body. When I was done with that, I did it again. By the time I emerged from the shower, my skin was red and the bathroom was so thick with steam, I could barely find the door. The steam billowed out of the bathroom with me, making me eye the fire alarms. How much steam could they withstand before I doused the entire hotel and its occupants in a cold shower?

Toweling my hair dry, I was about to turn on the television and pour myself a glass (or a gallon) of wine, when I noticed eight missed calls on one of my phones. Of course it would be my phone for G. How long had I been in the shower? Apparently long enough to warrant eight missed calls. Damn. She was going to be pissed.

I had just lifted the phone when it rang again.

I barely answered the call before G practically shouted, “Where the hell have you been? And what the hell have you been doing?”

I held out the phone a bit so she didn’t do any permanent inner-ear damage and started to answer her.

“Never mind. For me to ask implies I actually care, but I don’t. Not the slightest bit. Not when I just got off the phone with our largest Client in history who was informing me that her husband is with another woman right now.”

My eyes closed. “What do you mean Henry’s with another woman?”

“Another woman as in the competition. You remember the girl I all but ordered you to get out of the picture by whatever means you deemed necessary? The very same one our whopper of a Ten is with right this very minute?”

I checked the time. It was just past one in the morning in Tampa, which meant it was just past ten where Henry was. I sighed with relief before realizing that, for business purposes, even ten o’clock was too late to be with his secretary.

“How does Mrs. Callahan know her husband’s with the other woman?” I asked, trying to approach the conversation from a logical standpoint and not an emotional one. That was difficult to do when we were talking about the man who happened to be my ex, the biggest Target of my career, and the same person who’d saved me a week ago. It was all very . . .
confusing
.

“Does it matter?” G replied in a curt voice.

I’d already rushed into the bedroom and was packing. “It matters because why did she call to tell you that? Was it merely to inform? A warning to step up our game? To gloat?”

“To take us off the Errand.”

That both shut me up and froze me mid-suitcase stuffing. I’d literally just closed the most deplorable Errand of my life, and G was telling me the other one—the one that was important to me for a million reasons—was closed. “My suitcase is packed. I’ll be checked out in ten minutes. I’ll be at the airport in a half hour, and I’ll be in California by morning. This
isn’t
over.” I clicked the phone over to speaker to wrestle into some clothes.

“It’s over, Eve. Mrs. Callahan said her girl from the other company let her know she was closing it tonight.”

I whipped my head from side to side, not accepting what G was saying.

“It’s. Over.”

“No. It’s over when I say it’s over,” I practically snapped. “And it’s not over, G. Not by a long shot.”

“Eve—”

“No, I’m not giving up. I refuse to take the word of some bitch of a wife who is taking the word of an even bigger bitch of a competitor. I’ve seen Henry with his secretary, and unless something’s drastically changed in a few days’ time, she was about as close to tempting him into bed as his Chief Technology Officer, Aziz.” As I slipped into a pair of heels, I grabbed my suitcase and charged into the bathroom to stuff things wherever they would fit. No time for a professional pack job.

“You’re only believing what you want to believe and refusing to hear what I’m telling you.”

G might be determined, but I was that and more. I wasn’t giving up on the Callahan Errand. I
couldn’t
. “And you’re giving up much too easily. After everything we’ve been through, all of the headaches and creative Errand solving, why are you so willing to accept defeat on this one? The one we’ve been dreaming about? Why, G?” I rolled from the bathroom into the living room, threw whatever was left into the stuffed-to-capacity suitcase, threw the half dozen phones into my purse, and was opening the door before G replied.

“I’m not the best in this business because I never accept defeat. I’m the best because I know when to accept it and when not to. And this is when we accept it.” For the first time in the conversation, G wasn’t speaking so loudly I had to hold the phone a few inches from my ear. She was almost quiet.

“Give me one more day—twenty-four hours—before you accept it. Can you do that?” I asked, tapping my foot as I waited for the elevator.

Despite knowing G was resolved to cut the cord, I wasn’t. If I could manage to finagle some time out of her, just a little bit, maybe I could change her mind that the secretary didn’t have her hooks as deep into Henry as Mrs. Callahan and G thought. I was certain someone was elaborating the story G’d gotten. Whether it was the secretary or Mrs. Callahan—my bets were on the competition—
someone
was making the exaggeration of the decade.

I knew how Henry’d looked at me for the past couple of weeks. I knew the extremes he’d gone to for me. He had feelings for me, somewhere in the range of moderate to intense, and they were growing. Each time we were together, I sensed the conflict growing in him, which meant he was wrestling with some degree of feelings a married man shouldn’t have for another woman. How could I know that and accept what G was telling me?

I couldn’t. I knew Henry too well to believe he’d bang any woman who was open for business. He might have betrayed me, but Henry wasn’t the run-of-the-mill cheater. Just because he’d cheated before didn’t mean he’d do it again for anyone willing to throw her panties at him. His secretary was not going to get him in bed. I didn’t doubt that she would try everything she could, but I knew Henry. I still had time. I was wheeling my suitcase through the hotel lobby by the time G cleared her throat.

“Out of respect for you and the effort you’ve already put into this one, I’ll grant you twenty-four hours more on the Callahan Errand.”