Secret Acquisitions Read online

  One car for the two of us. I can tell she catches my meaning by the way she blinks, her surprise and yes, pleasure, slipping through the cracks in her calm.

  “Great.” She doesn’t mean her smile either.

  At least we’re on the same page here.

  Chapter 3

  The night is cold and smeared with fog, typical for a San Francisco evening. The lights of the city bleed yellow, orange, and red into the mist, turning everything into a hyperactive impressionist landscape.

  But all that is outside the car, unable to penetrate the warm luxury of the back seat of the hired car. A girl could get used to this.

  I look over at Mark, who is used to this. “A car and a driver?” I raise an eyebrow, mocking him in an attempt to gain the higher ground here. Or at least regain my footing.

  Seeing Arne Fuchs at the party shook me hard. I should have expected him to be there, but it still rattled me. For a long, horrifying moment, I thought he might have followed me.

  But of course he hadn’t. He’d send one of his minions to do that.

  “I usually drive myself,” Mark says. He’s not at all put off, and the way he says special makes me think he got the car just for me. My savior of the evening, spiriting me away when I’d seen a ghost. “Tonight’s special.”

  “Can you give him my address? It’s in the Outer Sunset—”

  “We’re going to my place.”

  “I never said…”

  He lets the pause lengthen until my nerves are as stretched as the silence is. “You could have called a Lyft, hailed a cab, even caught the Muni. But you got in this car. With me. We both know what that means.”

  He’s trying to intimidate me, and it’s working. But it’s not a scary intimidation—it’s one filled with taut longing and scratchy need.

  Still, I resist. “Is this all part of your act? Your super alpha billionaire act? Let me guess: you’ve got an entire room of sex toys at home you want to introduce me to.”

  “It’s no act. And I don’t need toys to fuck.”

  Jesus. My breath leaves me in a wave of heat, because no, he most certainly doesn’t. He’d probably have a woman screaming and begging just with that rock-hard body of his.

  My eyes dart to the front of the car where the driver is staring straight ahead.

  “He didn’t hear,” Mark says. “If we’re quiet, he won’t hear anything.”

  But he might see if he happened to glance back, me on my knees, my mouth buried in Mark’s crotch—the image I now can’t get out of my head.

  “This is highly inappropriate,” I try. I don’t know if I’m telling him or me.

  It bounces right off him. “Says who? Is there some ethics committee watching us? This has nothing to do with the Bastards funding you. When it comes to business, I don’t think with my dick.”

  He’s insulted now, spitting that out. I glance at his crotch, the fabric pulled taut by his erection. He might not think with his dick, but it definitely has some ideas of its own.

  I point to his cock with a courage I don’t actually feel. “So this isn’t business then?”

  He shifts in the seat, his erection straining even harder. “No. This is you and me and the fact that you want me inside you as badly as I want to be there.”

  It’s true—I do want him to fuck me. I’m vibrating with the need to feel him fill me, stretch me, grind into me with desperation. The confrontation with Julian and my shock at seeing Fuchs has supercharged my nerves. I’m gasoline-soaked, and Mark is a lit match.

  “And tomorrow?” I ask softly. “And after that, when I’m back in your offices asking for money?”

  “Tonight is tonight,” he says. “And tomorrow is tomorrow.” As if it’s just that simple.

  “So tomorrow it’s over? Done?” But I don’t like that notion—my muscles tighten in protest. My body wants more than only one night.

  “If you want.” There’s nothing casual about that—he’s not being cool with it being a one-night stand. Interesting.

  The Mark Taylor I knew in college would have been all about forever—there were long walks on the beach, brunches, and puppies in his eyes then.

  This Mark doesn’t have any of that in his eyes. But he also isn’t pushing for a short-term fling.

  I don’t know what to make of it, and it scares me.

  My rule has always been to never date where I work, although Mark isn’t exactly offering a date here. Without asking, I already know he doesn’t have any rules. He’s a man and rich enough to weather any storm. But even when he was broke and a student, it was different for him.

  It wasn’t different for Chloe when she slept with Jake our second year. Being a woman in the computer science program was like being chum among a feeding frenzy of sharks. One smell of blood and they all wanted a bite.

  Chloe slept with Jake, and then she broke up with him. Kevin asked her out after that; she turned him down.

  But Kevin felt like he was owed. Chloe had offered herself to Jake—therefore Kevin wanted a bite too. And Jake was angry that she’d left him.

  Pictures appeared on the CS undergrad email loop, of Chloe naked and bound, on her knees with Jake. It spread like a sewage spill after that, nasty, foul rumors appearing on Facebook and horrible, photoshopped pictures popping up on Twitter.

  By the time Kevin and Jake and the rest of their friends were done with her, Chloe had to drop out of school.

  And I learned that if you want to swim with sharks, you have to be inedible. Untouchable.

  Only for women though. It’s always different for the men, although Mark wouldn’t understand that.

  “Tomorrow is never just tomorrow,” I say. “Today bleeds into tomorrow in so many ways.” Ways that he’ll never understand, protected as he is by his money and his gender.

  “You only want your funding then.” The temperature inside the car drops as low as it is outside.

  “Everyone here wants funding. You should know that better than anyone.”

  “I’m not talking about everyone. I’m talking about you.”

  The way he says that puts the rest of the world into soft focus, with me as the sharp, defined center of his attention.

  I can’t have him looking too closely into my motives though. “What about you?” I ask. “You didn’t used to be like this.”

  He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand, which is a relief. We’ve got enough brewing between us without adding polite lies. “Neither did you. How did you get into encryption? Why this for your first start-up?”

  This isn’t my first company, but that’s not what he means. I’ve worked for plenty of start-ups already, a few that did okay, more that crashed and burned. He means why this for my first stab at running everything myself? Why did I decide to take my chance on this?

  “I’ve always liked puzzles. Crossword puzzles, logic puzzles, anything tricky that my mind has to unravel.”

  “I remember that. I tried to help you once with a crossword. It was a disaster.”

  I laugh, because I remember too. The two of us in a computer lab, everyone else tapping away while we bent our heads together over something so old-fashioned. “That was a New York Times Sunday crossword. Those are tough.”

  “You finished it.” His expression is too deeply assessing to really be appreciative. “Without cheating or asking for help. I remember that too.”

  I shrug uncomfortably because his tone is one I can’t parse. Is he upset that I was good at them? Does he admire it? I can’t tell at all. “Encryption and puzzles go hand in hand. In each instance, you take some information, scramble it according to a particular pattern, and then reassemble it at some point.”

  In the end, encryption is just making a puzzle that no one else can solve. Not even a computer.

  I’m hoping to make a puzzle that Fuchs’s spyware will never solve. One that will prevent him from looking into people’s most private secrets.

  “What about you?” I ask. Enough about me. Letting him get too clos
e would be a mistake here even if we do sleep together. Sex is one thing. Secrets are another entirely. “I wouldn’t have guessed you’d end up as a VC.”

  He’d struck me as someone more like myself, interested in algorithms and designing hardware—all more esoteric stuff that you did for the sheer joy of it. I don’t know him that well anymore, but I get the impression he doesn’t have much sheer joy in his life these days. Yeah, not everyone can have a birthday party at Alcatraz, but he wasn’t exactly enthused by the place.

  “You’ve probably already heard the story.”

  Yeah, the media loved to retell it, because it was such a perfect calculation of the American dream: one part skill, one part determination, with a hefty dose of luck. A group of six friends get together to create an algorithm to predict stock prices. They plan to sell it to some Wall Street firms if it works well enough. Only it ends up working so well they get rich just off the testing phase when the stock buys they made to test the algorithm end up making millions.

  Yep, they were modern-day fairy tales come to life. Now they spend their days betting on the next big thing, nurturing the firms that will be the future of the valley.

  It’s a great story, an awesome story. But it still doesn’t quite explain how Mark got here. Stock-price predictions seem too banal for him.

  “I know that you and Paul were good friends at Stanford,” I say. The Paul of today definitely fits with the Paul I’d known back then. His family is business royalty in Singapore, and the path to where he was now seemed pretty straightforward. Of course he’d want a magic program to see into the future of the stock market. “How did you meet the rest of them?”

  He shrugs as if the six of them coming together was pretty ordinary and not a crazy twist of fate. “Paul knew Logan from some machine-vision project they both worked on. Logan and Finn went to Caltech together. And Elliot is Logan’s brother.”

  Oh yes, Elliot the lawyer. Not a programmer, not an engineer, but still a Bastard. I hadn’t seen him at the party, but he never appeared in TidBytes like the rest of them. He must be too busy doing lawyerly stuff.

  “And Dev?”

  I was only asking the question everyone in the valley wanted to know—who was Dev and where had he come from? The profiles never gave any information about his family or where he’d grown up. They did mention that he’d gone to Cal State Fullerton—not exactly a tech powerhouse—and that he was the brains behind their magical stock-trading algorithm.

  None of the Bastards had ever confirmed exactly which of them had written it. They’d always insisted it was a group effort.

  “Dev is Dev.” Mark smiled crookedly as if to say I’m as puzzled by him as you are.

  The atmosphere between us shifts, still sizzling hot, still charged, but more comfortable as well. I’m horribly aware of him and my own body, but I’m also enjoying talking to him.

  “A man of mystery, huh?” I smile back, because it is a little silly in this day and age for a grown man to spring up from nowhere. The internet knows all and sees all, except when it comes to Dev.

  Arne Fuchs might know who he is though. He might have peered into those dark corners of the internet, the ones the reporters don’t even think to search, and found out everything there is to know about Dev. Especially the stuff Dev clearly doesn’t want others to find out.

  Shudders run over me even though I’m warm and safe inside the car. Mark catches it, and his frown is protective, concerned.

  “What spooked you at the party?” he asks.

  Everything’s blurred, confused, cold as I struggle to answer. I still don’t know if Mark and Fuchs are friends or even business associates, but they’re close enough to be dangerous to me. And to Grace.

  “Was it Julian?” he asks when I don’t answer.

  My anxiety pops so fast I want to laugh from the release of the pressure. He’s jealous. Yes, I know that Julian and the Bastards have bad blood—tech people are as gossipy as anyone else—but the only thing I want from Julian is funding. Honest.

  Even more honest: I want more than just funding from Mark.

  “No, it wasn’t Julian.” I wasn’t a bit guilty about leaving Julian behind without even a wave—given his shit-eating grin when Logan went after him, I’m guessing he said yes to my invite more to fuck with the Bastards than to hear my pitch.

  Mark leans back against the seat, but it’s too late. He’s already given himself away. I ought to be triumphant since he’s more vulnerable than he’s letting on, but instead I’m relieved. And happy.

  “Then who was it?” he asks. “You looked really scared.”

  He sounds like he wants to track the guy down and make absolutely certain he can never scare me again.

  “I thought I saw someone who wasn’t there.”

  If that works, I can’t tell, because the car is coming to a stop. We’re on a street lined with beautiful homes behind high gates, right in the heart of the Marina. I can see the bay from here, the boats in the harbor, the dark mass of Marin, and even the Golden Gate Bridge, its lights almost as pretty as the starlight. This view alone must be worth several million.

  This isn’t Millionaires’ Row—this is MultiBillionaires’ Row.

  “Sir,” the driver says from the front.

  How much has he heard? And how much is Mark paying him not to hear?

  “January.” Mark’s voice is low, quiet in the idling car. Almost gentle. “You still have a choice.” He opens the door, slides out, then offers me his hand.

  If I shut the door on him, the driver will take me wherever I want to go. I don’t have to stay here.

  But if I shut the door on him, we’re done. No nights together, no funding.

  The fact that I think of the funding second startles me.

  I’m in serious trouble with not one but two powerfully wealthy men after me. Only, Mark isn’t pursuing me to bring me down. At least not to any place beyond his bed.

  If I take his hand, agree to enter his house, his world, I’m only ensnaring myself in something I may never be able to twist out of. I should say no. Keep it professional between us. Cold.

  Except I’m not cold at all. I’m aflame, because I need him. In every sense of the word.

  So I take his hand and let him pull me from the car. And I send up a little prayer that somewhere in this hard, intense man is the college boy who used to smile so sweetly at me.

  Chapter 4

  My house is filled with beautiful things. Sleek, fine, and worth every penny I paid for them.

  I don’t say that to brag. Because despite all the luxury surrounding her, there is nothing more gorgeous than January stalking through my living room. The windows overlooking the bay frame her with the ink-dark water and the light dancing across it, the Golden Gate stretching from the City to Marin. It’s a setting that’s perfectly made for her, a diamond amid all that glitter.

  I should be remembering that she brought Julian to our party, causing a scene, and that the only reason she walked into Bastard Capital was because of the money.

  But then I have to remember the frisson of fear running through her as she gave her pitch and her very real, very naked fright tonight.

  There was also her tender smile as she remembered doing the crossword together all those years ago. I thought I’d feel nothing but cold satisfaction at getting her here, but the past is more potent than I’d realized. Dangerously so, the same as January herself.

  “Is that a real Miró?” she asks, pointing to the painting on the wall.

  I shake my head. “My cousin is an artist. That was from her surrealist class. All the stuff here is hers—she’s very prolific.”

  “And talented.”

  January has no idea. Everything I’ve got is merely Joan’s castoffs—the real stuff is sitting down in a gallery in Union Square, being snapped up by my tech peers. But I like having this slightly off art in my home, chosen not to show how big my wallet is or what cutting-edge taste I have but pieces more real to me than any multim
illion-dollar canvas could ever be.

  January sends me a tilted, teasing grin, and my heart is jolted. This feels so damn real, like we’re picking up from where we should have left off in college. Or maybe I only want it to be that real.

  She’s here for her company. For the money. I might be a charming motherfucker, but she’s also desperate.

  And frightened. My heart jolts again. She never did say what spooked her, because it wasn’t any damn ghost. No, it was something—or someone—all too real.

  “Has she ever painted you?” January asks.

  I answer her smile, because she’s going to love this. “Yeah.” I motion her forward into the hallway that leads to my office. The mahogany double doors are wide open, my antique banker’s desk framed between them, forlorn in its massive majesty among all that sleek modernist crap.

  The top is green felt, and the feet and drawers are carved with griffons and vines. It’s a desk that belongs to an entirely different era, and I love it.

  January immediately gasps at the sight. “Where did you find this?”

  “In the East Bay at some random furniture store.”

  She runs her fingers over the felt, bends over to inspect the carvings, throwing herself into exploring my desk.

  I’ve never had sex on this desk or any desk; it’s just too damn clichéd. But suddenly I want to bend January over, pull up that tight skirt of hers while leaving those killer heels on, and sink fully into her.

  Wait, scratch that. I want her sitting on the desk instead, her legs spread wide and me between her thighs, tasting her. Driving her wild.

  I can almost imagine how she’ll smell, musky and sharp, thick with desire. The sensation is so real, so forceful, my hand starts to shake. I curl it into a fist and tell it to behave. I’ve given a lot of women oral sex—I’d even call myself pretty fucking good at it—but only January threatens to bring me to my knees before I’ve even begun.