This Year's Black (4 page)

Devin scoffed. “You make it sound so simple.”

“Come on now, you should know better than most… Life so rarely is.”

Chapter Four

“
Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness, simply didn’t know where to go shopping.”

— Bo Derek

The Dylan Corporation hadn’t scrimped when it came to outfitting the corporate jet. There were cream-colored leather seats as soft as a baby’s butt, hand-cut crystal decanters secured behind glass cabinet doors, and a discrete attendant who, once they reached cruising altitude, pointed out the call button and disappeared into the cockpit for the remainder of the flight.

Ryder should have been basking in the luxury. Instead, she was as twitchy as a dog rescued from a puppy mill. She hated flying.

Hated. It.

The innate vulnerability of sailing through the clouds in a metal tube always put her on edge. Usually, the key to surviving a flight was a slight buzz and deep breaths, but not today. First off, Tony would kill her if she shotgunned a beer in front of a client. And, more important, every time she inhaled, the citrusy scent that had clung to a certain man’s bed sheets taunted her.

The main reason for the tension tightening her thighs sat less than four feet away at a built-in table. Devin had ditched his suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his baby blue dress shirt, revealing the bright green dragon that curled up his forearm as one part of an intricate full sleeve tattoo. As he typed on his laptop, his muscles undulated, giving the dragon the illusion of movement. He’d also loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar, allowing a glimpse of the abstract design covering his hard pecs.

If she hadn’t run a background check on Devin, Ryder would have sworn he’d grown up, like her, in the working class neighborhoods of Waterberg, far from the ritzy urban enclaves of Harbor City. Talk about being dead wrong. Even if she had a hundred dollars for every pasta noodle she’d eaten in her life, she wouldn’t put a dent in his trust fund.

Devin cleared his throat, never pausing his pounding on the keyboard or bothering to look her way. “You’re staring.”

Yeah, so damn hard her eyeballs were about to fall out. Blinking rapidly, she straightened in the bucket seat and picked an invisible piece of lint from her black chiffon tank top while running through a mental list of shitty ex-boyfriends to remind herself of why she needed to stop ogling her client. No matter how hot he was.

“I was wondering how a white-bread, private-school-attending, eating-Sunday-brunch-at-the-club dude like you ended up with a healthy start to a tattoo bodysuit.” There. That should put him on the defensive.

His fingers paused on the keyboard. “Ten years as a carny.” The
clickity clack
revved back up to full speed.

Score one for the rich kid. “Tilt-a-Whirl?”

The
clack
ing ceased. He leaned back in his seat and arched his neck from side to side in a move natural to every jock she’d ever dated. Next, he rolled his shoulders under the perfectly-tailored shirt and leveled a heated gaze at her. Appraising and full of dark promise, the look made her clothes too tight to contain her suddenly aching boobs, and her lungs too small to hold the proper amount of oxygen.

“Kissing booth.” He turned his attention back to his laptop.

Years ago, Ryder’s mother had warned her never to poke a bear with a stick. While she’d always remembered her mother’s advice, she hadn’t taken it then and she wasn
’
t going to now.

Big, grumpy bears didn’t scare her. She liked hearing them growl.

Ryder
tsk-tsk
ed. “Funny, I figured you for a big draw at the dunk tank.”

His fingers froze.

A shiver of anticipation danced down her spine. Picking a fight with a client might not be the smartest move, but it was so much better than sprinting across the aisle and jumping his bones at five thousand feet. The butterflies in her stomach disagreed, but what did they know about anything?

“Here’s the brief on Sarah Molina.” He clicked a button on his laptop, and her tablet
ping
ed in her black fake-ostrich-skin tote. “That should entertain you for a while.”

…

Trapped in midair, halfway into the nine-hour flight, Devin acted out his own version of Jack typing in the old Steven King movie,
The Shining
. But he was punching random letters on the keyboard to keep the horny away instead of the crazy.

The looney in this case sat curled up in the seat across the aisle, her bare feet tucked under her pert ass. Dragging his gaze back to the mumbo-jumbo on the screen, he went back to pummeling the keyboard.

Ryder wasn’t the first woman who had hightailed it the other way from him without any prior hint of dissatisfaction. Hell, a man couldn’t get to twenty-eight without at least one raging-bad breakup, but she was the first who’d sneaked out at dawn while he was drooling on his pillow.

He’d woken up that morning to an empty bed. The air had still been thick with the smell of sex, and his balls had been as heavy as fifty-pound barbells. She’d ignored a week’s worth of follow-up texts and calls. That kind of rejection stuck in a man’s craw—especially when he couldn’t stop thinking about the woman who’d run away.

Ryder crossed the aisle and slid into the bench seat on the opposite side of the table. Wispy hints of her heady cinnamon perfume reached out to him and sent his thoughts back to that night in his bed—although judging by the tightness behind his zipper some parts of his anatomy had never left the rumpled sheets.

She tapped her tablet screen and brought up the first page of Sarah Molina’s employment record. “So, Sarah has been Dylan’s executive assistant for thirty years?”

“Yep, she climbed the corporate ladder with him. Rumor is she had to yank him up a few rungs, but she did it.” Grateful for the safe distraction from where his thoughts kept traveling, he relaxed back against the booth.

“His father founded the company. Why wouldn’t he float up that ladder?”

“George had some wild days when he was younger. He and my dad refer to them as the lost years.”

Devin had more than a few of those lost years himself, documented in bright ink across his body. He hadn’t gotten them as a carney as he
’
d told her, but training as a mixed martial arts fighter had seemed like a circus.

“Your dad and George are old buddies, huh?” She tilted her head. “Never hurts to have connections.”

She didn’t come right out and say “spoiled rich kid,” but he got the drift loud and clear. Of course, she didn’t understand that his father had demanded a hefty price for the privilege of being born with the last name Harris and the bank account that came with it. Devin had rebelled by being just the kind of reckless idiot his father had always told him he was. His brother, a certifiable genius, had stayed on the straight and narrow, but had still suffered the Harris family curse…in a way far worse than just dealing with daddy’s disapproval.

“Depends on the connection.” Refusing to go any farther along that dangerous path, he scrolled down his notes on the laptop. “Sarah used her company computer and email address to book her tickets to The Andol Republic.”

Ryder glanced up at the ceiling and sucked on her bottom lip, obviously mulling the facts. “She is either dumb as a box of rocks, wants to get caught, or doesn’t care that we know she
’
s the embezzler. Which do you think we’re dealing with?”

“She’s not dumb.” He shook his head. Iron-willed. Mean as a wet cat. Deviously determined. Oh, yeah, those pretty much summed up the executive assistant who’d spent three decades by George’s side. “I think she’s pissed off.”

“Why?”

“George hired a second executive assistant eons ago, about the time when the money started going missing. Sarah didn
’
t take it well. There was a big dust-up, but George wouldn
’
t relent. Then about a month ago, he hired another young assistant. You remember Suzie, the frazzled receptionist from yesterday?” When he paused, Ryder shot him a pointed stare that practically screamed, “
Get on with it
.” “Sarah is territorial and doesn’t want anyone messing with her turf.”

“And her turf was George Dylan.”

He nodded.

“So had they ever mixed business with pleasure?”

“No idea. And I don’t want to know.” He shook off the image with a grimace. There were some people he never wanted to imagine buck naked and doing the nasty. George was at the top of that list. “What may or may not have happened between them doesn’t concern us. We need to get to Andol, find Sarah, and get the money back.”

“What about contacting the local police?”

Heat seared his lungs and spread through his shoulders, down his arms, and out his fingers. “Not gonna happen. If word leaks about this snafu, I can kiss the merger good-bye—and probably my job, too.”

“You think George would fire you?”

“He gave me a chance when no one else in the world would, and he’d still fight for me today, but the Dylan Corporation board is a whole other barracuda. Someone
’
s going to have to take the fall. It’s not going to be the guy with his name on the building.”

She clucked her tongue against the back of her teeth, drawing his attention to her glossy pink lips. “Your brief mentions Sarah
’
s originally from The Andol Republic.”

Glancing out the window to the patchwork green of South America below, he centered his focus back where it should be: catching Sarah. His career was riding on the merger deal. If this blew sky high, he might as well stay in The Andol Republic himself and become a beach bum.

“Most of her family is on the island. She had some kind of fight with them and left when she was young—shortly after George visited when his first marriage busted up. Sarah never went back to visit home, but she
’
d swore to George that she
’
d go back someday.”

“Looks like that day came.”

“But not for long.” He poured a finger of whiskey into a crystal tumbler, then poured a second. Leaning forward, he took a whiff. The strong scent of bourbon burned along his nostrils followed by the hint of orange peel and gingersnaps. He pushed one of the glasses across the table to Ryder. “It’s Four Roses Single Barrel.”

She wrapped her fingers around the glass and lifted it to her lips. Devin reached out, halting the tumbler inches from its intended target.

“This isn’t for shooting. It’s for sipping. It comes from specially aged bourbon barrels and has a high rye content that creates a spicy, yet fruity, flavor.” He released her glass and held his own aloft, touching the rims together. “To all of the things we have and all we still want—and to truces.”

A Mona Lisa smile curved her lips as she stared at the amber liquid. “To truces.” Despite his orders, the stubborn woman shot back half the glass.

They worked in companionable silence until Ryder started grumbling under her breath. “Tell me again why I can’t go online? I thought every private jet had wifi.”

She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. Irritation colored her cheeks as she twisted a long strand of dark brown hair around a finger. The move was the last thing he should be noticing right now, but damned if he could stop staring.

Pulling himself back from the brink before his cock realized where his thoughts were going, Devin shot back the last of his bourbon. “You ride a lot of private jets?”

“No, but my butt’s in coach every few months and even the discount airliners offer in-flight Internet.”

“You’ll have to ask George why there’s no wifi.”

She rolled her eyes, her expression clearly telling him to fuck off. “I’ll add it to the list.”

The plane bobbled in the air, sending the empty crystal tumblers onto their sides. They rolled across the inlaid table and bounced back from the wall a second before the captain’s voice sounded over the intercom. “Sir, we’re approaching a patch of weather. I’m going to do my best to keep things smooth, but I need you to please buckle up.”

Devin grabbed the glasses and put them in the designated container, then slid across the bench seat so he could get to the seats with the safety belts. But Ryder didn’t move. Her finger worked double time twirling her hair while her other hand held onto the table edge with a death grip. The sight kicked him somewhere soft and resurrected the protective instincts he thought had died after the accident that almost killed his brother.

“Come on.” Devin stood and held out his hand. “Let’s get you buckled in.”

Her gaze snapped up, scared but defiant. “I’m fine right here.”

As if the fates were mocking her, the plane did a little dip that nearly jostled him off his feet. He threw out his hands to maintain his balance.

She pinched her lips together tight enough that a white line zipped around the edges. He grasped her wrist and tugged, coaxing her out of her comfort zone. Like the skittish polo pony he’d had in prep school, she refused to make eye contact. Still, she inched across the leather bench seat, never fully loosening her hold on the table.

He kept his stance wide and his center of gravity low. The last thing she needed—or he wanted—was for her to see him go down like Joe Frazier in a bout with Muhammad Ali. “Just a little bit farther.”

“I’m not a moron,” she gritted out between clenched teeth as she stood.

He bit the inside of his cheek to stop from grinning at her surly attitude. “No one said you were.”

Sticking close together, they crossed the aisle to the bucket seats. He waited for her to clip her seat belt closed before settling into the chair across from her. Right on cue, the jet did another midair jiggle and Ryder’s olive skin turned green. She slouched down and closed her eyes, rubbing her belly.

If he didn’t distract her soon, this was going to end ugly.

“Give me your foot.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” He curled his fingers in a come-on motion. “Unless you
’
re chicken?”

Her eye narrowed, but she complied, sticking out one foot.

The moment he touched her warm skin, a current sizzled between them. He forgot about the jet, about the turbulence, and the fact that if they weren’t fucking, they were fighting. Instead, he focused on her cinnamon perfume as it invaded his personal space, teasing him with memories of the night when he’d kissed his way down her neck. His reward that night had been her soft moans as she rubbed herself against his hard cock. But today wasn’t about that. It was about making her feel safe. Even if she wouldn’t admit she needed anyone’s protection, he needed to give her that.