“Are you sure he wasn’t lying?”
“I considered it,” Simon told her. “Unless it was a very long inconvenient con, though, I think this one thing is true.”
He didn’t saywhyhe was sure. Pretty sure, at least. The night at the Raceway had been reframed in his memory as turgidly sentimental now that he knew he’d been a mark, but that didn’t mean he was going to vomit it up for anyone else to look at.
But there were bits that still felt authentic. It had been hot, packed, and noisy. Simon spent most of the day leaning against walls, envying people their cold beers. Jacob spent it talking to mechanics and betting on cars. But when Simon offered to hire a car so he could have a go, Jacob had gone gray.
“I couldn’t leave you sitting here,” he’d objected. It was warm, and Jacob had already been sweating, but he was sweating more. “Besides, I wanted you to have fun.”
Consideration and modesty were not traits that Jacob pretended to have. Probably because they weren’t qualities he prized. So yeah, Simon trusted that one thing.
Simon pushed himself back from the desk and stood up. He shot his cuffs and tugged his jacket straight over his shoulders. Dev wore his suits with the resentment of a kid on the first day of school, but Simon found their strict lines reassuring. It was almost like a uniform. To keep the proper lines required the same posture.
“I’ll find him,” he said.
Dev rocked back in his chair, and the hinge creaked under him. “I know,” he said. “And just as important? Find outwhohired him.”
Nora put her glasses back on. “My money’s on Bres Industries,” she said. “With the court’s ruling in our favor on the lawsuit, they’re going to have to pull out of their Arctic projects. That will be a big loss, especially if our experiments bear fruit.”
“They’re going to appeal,” Dev pointed out slowly, but Simon could tell he liked the idea. It wasn’t like Dev was stupid or easily led. He was one of the leading voices in a scientific community that Simon, despite having it explained with small words by a twelve-year-old, didn’t completely understand. But it was personality, not intellect. He liked his problems straightforward—something to fix, whether it was a carburetor or the ozone layer, and someone to hit.
Simon didn’t think it was going to be that simple. Syntech was on the cutting edge of geo-engineering.Everyonehad problems with them—from hippies who thought they were interfering with Mother Nature to competitors who thought they might have a head start on interfering with Mother Nature.
He said, “I’ll check them out first.” If he’d owed Dev before, he owed him even more after the other night. So if he wanted an easy answer, Simon would do his best to get it for him.
Chapter Three
THE CHAIRwasn’tright.Jacob shifted, squirmed his shoulders against the leather, and frowned at the computer. Code streamed across the screen in flickering bars, sorting itself according to algorithms he’d had tailored for the job. The program was 75 percent finished, his playlist was finally streaming seamlessly to the speakers, and he had answers for his employer. He should have been happy, not dissatisfied and fidgety.
Maybe it wasn’t the chair. Maybe the monitor was in the wrong place.
It had been a month since Jacob cleared out Syntech and his loft in the same night. Not the first time he’d had to do a flit, but for some reason, he just couldn’t settle into his new place. The windows were too big, it turned out he didn’t like wooden floors, and no matter how he tweaked it, he couldn’t get his workstation set up just right.
Jacob sighed, sprawled back in the chair, and stretched his long legs out under the desk. His bare feet stuck out into a beam of sunlight, and the wood was warm under his heels. One of these days, he was going to fall down his own rabbit hole and buy his own lies, but not today.
There were three cardinal rules in his line of work. Okay, he’d made them up himself—it wasn’t as though there was a trade school for corporate spies—but that didn’t make them any less true. The first was “Don’t get involved with the mark. You’re a professional, not a British undercover cop pretending to be an ecoterrorist.” He’d still done it, though, hadn’t he? Hadn’t been able to resist dark gray eyes and a sculpted mouth that rarely relaxed into a smile… or the shoulders. Although, to be fair, who the hell could resist those shoulders?
For a second, Jacob’s mind drifted to somewhere sweaty and pleasantly dirty—elegant, callused hands pinning Jacob’s wrists over his head, the heavy muscle and bone breadth of those shoulders, and Simon’s teeth biting heat into Jacob’s lips. The insistent press of Simon’s cock against Jacob’s stomach making his balls twitch in anticipation.
The chime of the program as it reached 100 percent interrupted his reverie and dragged him back to his grouchy reality, now with aching balls. He pushed himself up in the chair, wincing as his jeans pulled tight over his half-hard cock, and scrubbed a hand over his face.
Fine. He missed Simon. That was the truth. “Now suck it up,” he told himself. His voice sounded loud over the pixie pop that his playlist had thrown up. “That ship’s been sunk.”
And if Jacob couldn’t think of a way to manipulate someone into doing what he wanted? It probably couldn’t be done. There was a reason he was so good at his job. So, since a box of Godiva wasn’t going to mend his fences with Simon, he might as well get back to something that was going to pay off.
He hooked his foot onto the chair to give his cock a bit more room under his fly and typed in the commands to generate the appropriate reports and encapsulate the remaining data behind a password-protected partition on the remote server. Most of his clients saw the benefit in keeping things transactional, but there was always someone who got the idea they were starring in an episode of24. This way they were both protected—Jacob from someone deciding to stiff him, and the clients from a contractor who might turn on them.
All he had to do was meet up with his current client and he could take his payday and head to Bali to sweat the mope out on the beach—with a brief stop in Pennsylvania. Maybe hope just sprang eternal, but Jacob was sure he could find a surfer with irresistible shoulders in at least one of those places. Admittedly, that was probably more likely in Bali, but he wouldn’t count Pennsylvania out yet.
He fired an e-mail off to the dead drop and pushed himself to his feet. His T-shirt stuck to his back. Once he was upright, his hips felt stiff and there was the whiff of a pulled all-nighter around him. He stripped off as he went and dropped his clothes on the floor as he headed into the bathroom for a shower.
Standing under the hammer pulse of the scalding, he had the best intentions in the world, but when his hand wrapped around his cock, it wasn’t some interchangeable surfer boy he conjured up. He braced one hand against the tiled wall, and tension balled in his shoulders as he pumped his fist in slow, steady strokes.
It was Simon he imagined, with his hands on Jacob’s hips and his mouth hot and eager on Jacob’s balls as he twisted his hand along his cock in wringing, practiced strokes—Simon’s dark hair slicked to his skull, the curl drenched out of it, and the long, clean muscle in the tanned slope of his back.
Jacob licked soapy water off his lips and swiped his thumb over the head of his cock. Precome was slippery against his skin. Reaction pinched through his nerves, twitched from his groin down to his knees, and pleasure pulled into a heavy, eager knot in the cradle of his hips.
He came with a jolt. The come was sticky between his fingers and on his stomach before it washed away. His hand slid on the tiles until his forearm pressed against the wet ceramic. The shower thudded water between his shoulders, and his hair hung in dripping knots around his face as he caught his breath.
