Unfinished Seductions Read online

  I have to talk with Logan though. Privately. Which means I have to go to him.

  After hiding from him for so long, I should be reluctant. Instead, my hands seem to leap toward my keys, and my legs drag me toward the door. My body is humming with eagerness at the thought of him.

  I shouldn’t go to him, not when just the thought of seeing him can set me off like this. But I have no choice.

  Things have gotten too deep for us to swim alone.

  Chapter 6

  “Just a minute,” I say as housekeeping knocks at my room door for the second time in as many seconds.

  They’re damn eager to get in here, which I wouldn’t have expected from such a run-down motel. But no matter how eager they are, I’m fresh out of the shower and in no state to be seen. I check the knot at my hips, making sure the towel isn’t slipping, then use the other one in my hand to towel my hair one last time. Once I’ve got all the drips, I sling that towel over my shoulders. There. I’m covered enough to tell the housekeepers to come back later.

  “Can you come—”

  My voice doesn’t die when I see Callie there—it’s strangled in my throat.

  “Logan.” She’s wearing the same sweater as yesterday, and her hands are knotted in the sleeves. “We have to talk.”

  She’s so pale her complexion is ghostly. The skin around her eyes is the color of a bruise, and her hair is tangled around her shoulders.

  Instantly I’m on high alert. Something’s frightened her, and I’m going to find the thing and destroy it. She might not love me anymore, but I’ll always defend her.

  I take her arm and pull her inside, shutting the door on the outside world.

  She puts a hand to her mouth, her gaze flittering and flicking over me, never landing anywhere. “You…” Her hand gestures to the towel. The lower one.

  So much color floods her face then it’s like watching a sunrise at high speed. Whatever’s got her spooked, she’s still attracted to me.

  I want to pounce on that, to have her panting and needy like she used to be for me, but she’s also scared.

  I act like it’s no big deal I’m only wearing a towel. “You’ve seen this before.” I don’t offer to put on clothes, because I’m not that much of a gentleman. “What’s happened?”

  She pulls out her phone like she’s going to show me something, then stops. “Can they hear us? Corvus? Please tell me I’m being crazy.”

  Cold sparks move across my skin. “Corvus? Fucking Fuchs was here?”

  I’m going to murder that son of a bitch. And Mark’s going to be more than happy to help me. Fuchs fucked with January, the love of Mark’s life, and now he’s fucking with my wife?

  I’m sure Finn knows several spots in the desert that would be perfect for a shallow grave.

  Okay, so Callie doesn’t want to be my wife anymore—my heart twists like it’s dodging a knife—but she can’t battle Fuchs on her own.

  “So it’s true.” Callie sits on the bed with a soft moan. “Oh my God. That’s how he found out.”

  I hate being behind in a conversation—if I’m not two steps ahead, I get surly. “Start from the beginning. But first give me your phone.”

  Callie isn’t surprised by my tone, but that was a great thing about her—she never mistook my moods for meanness. Yes, I know I’m overbearing and too much to take, but she saw it for what it really was. And accepted me, loved me anyway.

  At least she used to.

  Wordlessly she hands over her phone. I pull out the battery, then set the phone and it on a side table. “Don’t use that until I can fix it. You can use my phone instead. Now tell me exactly what happened.”

  She tears her gaze away from her phone. “You came yesterday.” She tucks her hands farther into her sleeves, pulling in on herself. “With those papers.”

  I nod, but my neck aches as I do. “What then?”

  “Last…” She shakes her head, starts over. “This morning TidBytes had a story on our divorce. I thought you might have told them. Or someone else.”

  “How the fuck did they find out?”

  She flinches, and I immediately want to bite my tongue.

  “I didn’t tell anyone except the guys,” I say more gently. “Was it someone you told?”

  The shake of her head is slow and pained. “I never told anyone. I thought it was…”

  “You thought one of the Bastards,” I say flatly.

  I’ve never understood it, but Callie and the rest of them have never gotten along. My parents loved her, her mom loved her, her friends loved her—so why couldn’t she get along with the men who were more than brothers to me?

  Her mouth compresses at my tone. “It’s a reasonable conclusion.”

  “No, it’s not.” My temper surges, fed by both her assumption and Fuchs’s fucking shenanigans. “They wouldn’t do that.”

  “Whatever. That’s not my main problem. Our main problem.”

  I fist my hands to hold in the surge of possessiveness at that. Yes, it should always be our. Our problems. Our solutions.

  Get over it, idiot. Elliot was right—she just wants out.

  “What’s the main problem?” I ask.

  TidBytes knowing isn’t a serious issue. Yeah, I’d like to know who leaked it, but it’s not like divorces aren’t public record in the end.

  “So there was the story this morning.” She gestures with her hand, the sleeve flapping over it. “Not five minutes after I’d read it, Minerva Dyne was on my doorstep, offering to buy my shares in Bastard Capital.”

  Of all the people to show up on Callie’s porch… “Minerva.”

  Callie cocks her head, watching my expression. “I see you already know her.”

  “Yeah. Elliot just loves her.”

  “Elliot just loves everyone,” she mutters.

  That’s not true, but I let it slide. “Minerva is a special case. You don’t know this, but we had a run-in with Fuchs and her a few weeks ago.” I don’t want to scare her, but I also have to let her know how serious it was. “It involved an encryption company we’d invested in. He wanted to spike their tech so he could keep spying on people through their phones.”

  The blood runs out of her cheeks so fast they sag. “The conspiracy nuts are right.”

  I raise my palms to calm her. “We handled it.”

  We couldn’t erase all the spyware Fuchs has already gotten into people’s phones, but January’s program is going to stop him from using any data he manages to get. And she and Mark found each other in the process. They’re so damn happy, just like Callie and I used to be, it fucking kills me.

  “You don’t have to worry about it.”

  She looks at her phone like it’s turned into a snake. “It’s still creepy. Is that how he heard about…” Her tongue slips out to wet her lower lip. “The divorce.”

  “I don’t think he did,” I say. “According to what we know, the program isn’t being used. My gut tells me there’s a simpler explanation. But I need to confirm it.”

  My suspicions about TidBytes didn’t start today. But to get at the heart of what I think’s happening here, I’ll need some help. So I grab my phone and call Finn.

  He answers with a long, lazy “Dude. What’s up?”

  “Can you find out who really owns TidBytes? Like, immediately?”

  “On it.”

  The line goes dead. Finn is our resident genius, the kind of guy who was hacking into the CIA before he even hit puberty. We’ve been tracking Fuchs’s tentacles in the Valley—he’s got a sucker latched on to a ton of companies—but we haven’t looked into TidBytes yet. Some of their stories have my spider-sense tingling, like they aren’t the trashy gossip blog they pretend to be but something darker. Something with an agenda behind it.

  Plus they run stories on us way too much. I mean, we’re some interesting fuckers but not that interesting.

  Callie is watching me, her gaze soft but intrigued. The towel seems suddenly too tight and itchy. Fucking stupid body of mine
can’t focus like my mind can. Not that I ever could focus around her.

  “That was Finn,” I say. “He’s looking into TidBytes. I’m guessing he’ll find out that Fuchs is somehow involved with them. Which is why they ran the story—to force you to sell as soon as they made the offer.”

  “How would they know I’d seen it?”

  “They knew you were here—” Which even I didn’t know until two days ago. “Shit. He knew you’re here.”

  Maybe Fuchs was tracking her phone. We were never completely certain that the program was dead.

  Callie is shaking her head. “Julian knew I was here and my mom. Along with some of my friends.”

  Right. I knew that. I was the only one who didn’t know where she was.

  I run a hand through my hair and try to think, which is damn hard with Callie so near. She scrambles me.

  There are a million ways Fuchs could have tracked her here, ways I didn’t want to use. If Callie hadn’t wanted me to know where she was, I wasn’t going to go stalker on her to find her. Even though not knowing was like a cancer on my heart.

  “Okay.” I start to tick off on my fingers. “So Fuchs knows you’re somewhere near this town. We don’t know exactly how he does, but he does. He can see where people are visiting TidBytes from. He sees a visitor from Platina, California, pop up—I’m betting no one else here visits that site on the regular—and bam. He knows you’ve seen. Knows you’re vulnerable. And then he swoops in.”

  Motherfucker. My hands flex, imagining Fuchs’s throat between them. I usually go in for more modern forms of fighting—buyouts, things like that—but I can see the appeal of some old-fashioned ones right now.

  “Why?” Callie asks. “Why would he want those shares so bad? He could start his own VC firm. He’s rich enough.”

  “To fuck with us.” Money isn’t the point for Fuchs. He’s got enough. Fucking with people in secret is how he gets his kicks. “That’s why I think he owns TidBytes—he’s putting stories in there to make us look bad.”

  Her mouth drops open. “Wait, those stories are planted?” She scrambles for my phone, pulls up TidBytes. “They’re all fake?”

  The hope in her voice is like a bright shard of sunlight.

  Then I see the stories she’s talking about. She’s pulled up all the stories tagged with my name, Logan Martell, and is scrolling through all of them. Each one has a zoomed-in picture of me with another woman. Each and every one.

  Holy fuck. How the fuck did I miss that?

  Okay, so I noticed they were reporting on the parties I went to, but I never looked at the stupid-ass pictures. Never noticed before now that they were getting snaps of me with all those random women. Who the fuck wants to look at pictures of themselves in a tabloid?

  But Callie navigated right to them. Callie had been seeing those pictures every time she went to the site.

  “How often do you visit this site?” I ask in a hollow voice.

  “Every day.” The realization that I haven’t said the stories were fake echoes in her words.

  She saw those pictures almost every day.

  And she thought I was cheating on her.

  That fucking gossip rag and whoever was behind it ruined my marriage. On purpose. It wasn’t me hurting her, being gone too much—it was Fuchs and his schemes.

  “I never slept with any of those women.” My jaw is tight with rage.

  “I actually don’t care that much even if you did.” There’s a hitch on care, because she does, her voice cracking out of its usual soft tones. “The point is, when you were out having these pictures taken, you weren’t home with me.”

  “They were for business. I invited you, you always said no. That you hated those parties.”

  She turns away, her mouth set.

  I put my hand under her chin and force her to look at me. “Can’t you see? We’ve been set up. The pictures, leaking the divorce, trying to buy your shares… Fuchs is manipulating us.”

  I’m still pissed that she fell for it and didn’t tell me about it and left me in agony for months but… but touching her makes me feel alive again. Painfully alive, but it’s better than the numb agony of before.

  Her eyes gleam with tears. “It wasn’t just that.”

  That is not what I want to hear. But I can’t let her go.

  “What didn’t I give you?” I ask. “If you wanted something, you only had to ask. Just tell me what to give you to make it better.”

  If I can convince her to come back, to make a home with me again… then maybe I can breathe again, come out of this awful nothing I am without her.

  “I only ever wanted you.” That’s lower than a whisper.

  “You always had me.” How did she not understand that? Yeah, there were those shitty pictures, but I came home every night to her. Home to a house I built just for her, filled with things I bought to please her.

  She opens her mouth, ready to protest. So to prove it to her, I capture her mouth with mine.

  Chapter 7

  For the first time in forever, I’m not thinking.

  There’s Logan’s mouth on mine, his hands on my torso, his hips pressed hard against my pelvis, and my body takes command. I can’t worry or fret or even imagine beyond this moment, because all I can do is feel.

  His kiss is hungry and soul deep, and my heart unfurls under it like one of the roses I keep trying to paint. I put my hands to his jaw, the razor-sharp line of it that makes his face so unforgettable. There’s stubble there and warm skin, and I swear I feel his pulse beneath my palms.

  I kiss him back, half desperate, half longing, because it’s been forever since I’ve touched him and my skin misses him. The way Logan touches me—no one ever touched me like that, not before or since, and my body craves it.

  He slips a hand under my sweater, his palm finding the bare skin of my stomach. I gasp, because it’s like being shocked back alive.

  This is what it feels like to be touched. This is what it feels like to be desired. This is what it feels like to be truly alive.

  Logan groans, a vibration of painful pleasure that echoes through both of us. Our mouths are fused together, and I don’t think either of us could break free if our lives depended on it.

  His hand makes his way up my torso, his fingers marking off my ribs, claiming that territory as his own once more. I’m not wearing a bra—I hardly ever do—and my breasts tighten in anticipation, my nipples hardening. I have to pull my mouth away from his to gasp.

  “Do you remember now?” His whisper in my ear is a rough rasp. “How we are together? The way I make you feel?” His hips thrust against mine. “How I make you feel?”

  I had forgotten. The memories were there, in dreams, and in my waking moments I told myself I was only lonely, that my body couldn’t crave him that much.

  But it does.

  He kisses his way along my jaw. I tilt my head back, completely surrendering to him. It’s like being offered water after crossing Death Valley—you could tell me it’s poisoned, and I’d still take it.

  “Let me love you again,” he says.

  I jump like I’ve been stung. Somehow the word love gets through to me, shocks my brain into taking back control.

  “No.” I try to put a hand between us, but Logan isn’t giving up even a millimeter. “I didn’t come here for this.”

  He’s not exactly fighting me, but he’s also not letting go. His expression is tight with suppressed anger.

  I shift again, trying to break out of his arms… and my hand catches on his towel. Before I can stop it, it comes loose and falls to the floor.

  I go very, very still. I keep my eyes hard on the dingy carpet, as if even catching a glimpse of his nakedness will strike me blind.

  “Looks like we have a situation here.” His voice rumbles through me.

  He releases me, then takes a step back. I’m still staring at the carpet as though my life depends on it, but in the corner of my eye, I see his hands lift.

  He’s backing
away from me with his arms raised as if I’m the dangerous one.

  “Could you please put back on the towel?” I say, my voice thin with embarrassment. And frustrated desire.

  “You pulled it off.”

  “That’s—” I snap my gaze to him without thinking and immediately regret it.

  He’s even more beautiful naked, his body as classically handsome as his face. My mouth goes dry, and my sexual frustration turns all the way up to eleven.

  “Please,” I say through a clenched jaw. I grab the towel from the floor and toss it at him, my hands shaking as I do.

  Somehow, through an insane force of will, I manage to look back at the carpet, which looks even dingier than before. Compared to Logan’s skin, everything looks pathetic though.

  “It’s safe now,” he says dryly.

  It isn’t, because it won’t be safe until he’s back in the City and I’m back in my cottage. But then there are still the divorce papers waiting for me at home…

  His phone rings, interrupting my thoughts. He grabs it from the nightstand before it has a chance to ring a second time.

  “Yeah?” he says.

  Logan glances over his shoulder at me, the muscles in his back rippling. He always keeps himself in excellent shape, approaching his workouts with an intensity an Olympian would envy. When he’s sweating, shaking, with nothing left to give—that’s when he considers a workout done. I loved catching him after, because he always found that last extra ten percent within to fuck me against whatever was handy. I’d lick the sweat off him, salt and musk and effort, while he’d bring me to a screaming climax.

  “Son of a bitch,” he mutters into the phone. “We should have checked from the very beginning.”

  He looks back at me as if reassuring himself I’m still here, torn between watching me and trying to make his conversation semiprivate.

  I put my hand to his shoulder and pull. He turns to me, smooth and controlled, because he won’t let his body be anything but a precision instrument.

  I won’t let him make this conversation private because this situation involves the both of us. And we are still married.