Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
marlowe
I n the middle of the night , Gunner receives an overseas business call.
Whispering an apology to me, he slides out of bed and pulls on his pajama bottoms, then slips out of the room to take the call in his study. I’m thoroughly exhausted from our sexploits on the balcony. But I miss the warmth of his body so much that I can’t go back to sleep.
So I get up and put on his silk pajama top. It engulfs me, hanging down to my knees. I roll the sleeves back several times until my hands and wrists are exposed. Then I creep silently downstairs, stopping in the kitchen for a glass of water before wandering down the hall to the library.
Even after a month of living with Gunner, I remain awed by the grandeur of his library. An enormous picture window flanked by leather armchairs overlooks the lake. Row after row of books line the walls, with rolling mahogany ladders providing access to the upper shelves. There’s a Chesterfield couch with matching chairs, plush rugs and a corner fireplace—perfect for curling up with a book on a cold winter night.
Though I love every square inch of the mansion, the library is my favorite room. This is where I spend most of my lunch breaks, wheeling a ladder from shelf to shelf as I explore the vast collection of titles, plucking out a book here and there to read random passages.
I always feel like Belle in Beauty and the Beast , and tonight is no exception as I roam along the bookshelves, running my finger over leatherbound spines of all colors and sizes. There are first editions of everything from Plato to Poe, Aristotle to Nietzsche, Descartes to Voltaire. There’s even a mint copy of Justine by the Marquis de Sade. The thought of Gunner reading the erotic novel makes me grin.
“You’re in librarian heaven right now, aren’t you?”
I turn to see him leaning against the doorframe, eating from a carton of double fudge ice cream.
I raise an eyebrow. “Ice cream? In the middle of the night?”
“I had a craving for chocolate.” As he saunters toward me, the combination of his messy hair, washboard abs and sexy bare feet scrambles my brain. I watch dazedly as he spoons up some ice cream and brings it to my lips. “Have a taste.”
“I’d better n?—”
“C’mon, darlin’. Be bad with me.” The man could entice a whole convent of nuns to break their vow of chastity. What chance do I possibly have?
I open my mouth, letting him slide the spoonful of ice cream between my lips. I moan as the decadent chocolate melts on my tongue and slides down my throat.
“Atta girl,” he murmurs, licking the spoon after me.
I sigh. “I’m gonna pay for that tomorrow when I have to run twenty miles to burn off all those extra calories.”
He gives me a dirty grin. “I can think of several creative ways to help you burn calories. Just say the word.”
I chuckle. “I think we’ve burned enough calories for one night, don’t you?”
“There’s no such thing as enough when it comes to me fucking you.”
“Oh my.” I watch transfixed as he licks chocolate off the back of the spoon, turns it over and licks the inside with a slow curl of his tongue.
As the muscles between my thighs clench, I bite my bottom lip.
His eyes glitter as if he knows the effect he has on me. “I’m too wired to go back to bed. Let’s hang out for a while.”
“Okay,” I whisper distractedly.
We happen to be standing by a large mahogany table near the window. He sets the ice cream down, then wraps his hands around my waist and lifts me onto the table. I scoot back and sit lotus-style with his long shirt tented over my knees, concealing my bare crotch.
He nimbly climbs onto the table so that we sit facing each other with the carton of ice cream between us. It reminds me of Molly Ringwald and Jake Ryan in the final scene from Sixteen Candles , an eighties romcom that Ember and I watched with our mother more times than I’ll ever admit.
“How’d your call go?” I ask Gunner. “Everything okay?”
“For now. Just need to keep a close eye on some unfolding developments in the European energy market.” He feeds me more ice cream, watching with that smoldering intensity as I swallow the mouthful of fudgy bliss and groan.
“My mom would so not approve of what I’m doing right now. I can just hear her tut-tutting me, ‘Now how many times have I told you, Marlowe? A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.’”
“Screw her,” Gunner growls.
“Easy for you to say,” I tease, gesturing to his godlike body. “ You don’t have to worry about cellulite and?—”
“Stop it. There’s not a damn thing wrong with your body. You’re fucking beautiful from head to toe.”
I nearly swoon right off the table.
“I wasn’t fishing for compliments,” I say shyly. “But thank you.”
“Just speaking the truth,” he replies, fixing me with a steady, gentle gaze. “We all have an inner critic. Growing up with a toxic parent can magnify those voices in our head, the voices that tell us we’re not good enough, that we’re doomed to fail no matter how hard we try. Don’t give your mother that much power over you. She doesn’t deserve it. No one does.”
I stare at him, marveling that I’ve found a man who seems to understand me on a deep level that transcends physical intimacy. It’s a little scary. Okay, a lot scary.
Glancing away from him, I toy with the spoon buried in the ice cream. “It’s hard to believe someone as accomplished as you could ever doubt your worth.”
“You’d be surprised.” He’s still watching me, searching my face with a thoroughness that’s a little unnerving. “Tell me more about your relationship with your mother.”
A jagged pain tightens my chest. I lower my eyes to my lap, reluctant to wade into the troubled waters of my childhood.
Gunner waits silently.
“She’s never liked me.” My voice catches on the words. “Even when I was little, she was always super critical. No matter how hard I tried to please her, I couldn’t do anything right. After my dad died, she abandoned any pretense of caring about me. My sister was her favorite and she made no attempt to hide it.”
“I’m sorry.” Fury laces Gunner’s quiet tone. “You didn’t deserve that.”
A wry, sad smile touches my lips. “Unfortunately for her, the worse she treated me, the more Ember loved and protected me.” I swallow hard, allowing myself a moment before soldiering on. “Shortly after Dad passed away, Mom donated his record collection to charity even though she knew he would’ve wanted me to have it. I was devastated, and Ember was so furious she didn’t speak to Mom for two whole weeks. Honestly, I think her silent treatment bothered Mom more than my tears.”
Gunner reaches over and takes my hand, his thumb playing circles along the back of it. His tender compassion makes me want to keep talking. So I do.
“She’s always been status-obsessed. She came from a typical blue-collar family in Pittsburgh. Both her father and grandfather worked in the steel mills, and she hated that life. She had big dreams and ambitions. Going to law school was her ticket out of middle-class mediocrity, she used to say. Working at a prestigious law firm opened up a whole new world to her. Suddenly she was going to the opera, attending fancy dinner parties and hobnobbing with bigwigs. She planned to marry some rich guy and become part of a power couple.” I pause, smiling faintly. “She married my father instead.”
“The band teacher,” Gunner murmurs. “She married for love.”
“Yes,” I say softly. “It was definitely love. They were good together. Really happy. But after Dad died . . .” My voice trails off, throat tightening.
Gunner gently squeezes my hand, comforting me without words.
I lick my lips. “Anyway, she wanted me to become an attorney like her, but I had no interest in practicing law. When I told her I’d be majoring in music, she got mad and refused to pay my tuition. Given her high income, I didn’t get much financial aid, and my partial scholarship only covered some of my expenses. To pay for the rest, I got a housekeeping job at a hotel. I also spent four semesters as an assistant to the chair of the music department. Having to work two jobs felt unfair at the time, but it wasn’t. Putting myself through school made me stronger. It made me work harder and not take my education for granted. It taught me how to survive on my own.”
Gunner brings my hand to his lips and kisses the back, gazing into my eyes. “You’re absolutely incredible, you know that?”
I smile softly. “That’s high praise coming from someone like you.”
“Someone like me?”
I gesture to the nearby wall showcasing framed covers of Forbes , Fortune 500 , Money and other magazines featuring articles about Gunner. The Forbes cover has a photo of him and Maverick in killer suits, standing back to back with the caption meet the twin tech titans of silicon hills .
It’s hard not to feel completely awed by the magnitude of Gunner’s power, wealth and influence. The fact that he’s my lover adds another level of surrealness.
“What made you get into the tech industry?” I ask him.
He smiles faintly. “I was a code monkey in high school. I enjoyed programming and playing around with algorithms to figure out how they work.”
I grin teasingly. “I know I’m not the first person who’s ever told you that you’re way too hot to be a computer geek.”
He chuckles dryly. “I may have heard that once or twice.”
My grin widens. “I’m trying to picture you as a socially awkward, fashion-challenged nerd huddled over your computer while a Star Trek marathon plays in the background.”
He snorts. “For your information, I’ve never been ‘fashion challenged’ a day in my life.” Pause. “But the rest is pretty accurate.”
I laugh, thoroughly delighted.
His eyes sparkle at me. “The thing is, I was a privileged rich kid who’d seen and done more than most people will experience in a lifetime. There was only so much skiing, horseback riding and globetrotting I could do before boredom kicked in. I was restless as hell, always looking for new challenges and adventures.” He pauses. “That’s how I got into hacking.”
My eyes widen. “You were a hacker?”
“Shh.” He puts his finger to his lips, a mischievous glitter lighting his eyes. “Big Brother might be listening.”
I laugh, ridiculously titillated by the idea of him living on the edge as a bad boy hacker. “What kind of things did you h-a-c-k?” I say, spelling out the word with exaggerated caution.
He grins at me. “At first it was just harmless pranks. Like breaking into country club databases to switch people’s tee times and dinner reservations. Or hacking into newspaper websites to replace story headlines with satirical ones.”
I laugh in disbelief. “What a devious little shit you were.”
“I prefer the term disruptor ,” he says archly.
I snort and roll my eyes.
He chuckles before continuing, “Hacking gave me even more of an adrenaline rush than skydiving, bungee jumping or running with the bulls in Pamplona. It was insanely addictive. I found underground hacker communities and lurked on the forums, soaking up as much knowledge as I could. I had zero interest in committing crimes or ruining innocent people’s lives. I just wanted to push boundaries, shake things up a little. As my skills improved, I escalated to riskier challenges.”
I give him a wary look. “How risky?”
“At age seventeen, I was one of four hackers to crack a classified encryption algorithm run by the military.”
“Holy shit,” I breathe.
His mouth twitches at my reaction.
“That’s insane, Gunner. Did any of you get caught?”
“No. We covered our tracks too well. But it was a close call, so after that I decided to lay low for a while. Fast forward two years, I was a sophomore computer science major at UT. One day out of the blue, a three-letter agency contacted me about working for them as an information security specialist. I was suspicious, of course. I thought the feds had finally caught up to me. I thought they were laying a trap by dangling a job offer in front of my face.”
I find myself leaning forward, sucked into his story. “Were they?”
“No,” he says with a trace of humor. “As it turns out, one of my professors had been bragging about my coding genius to people in high places. After some back and forth, the agency hired me to expose security vulnerabilities in their systems.”
“Wait. Let me get this straight. The government recruited you to hack their network to protect them from malicious hackers, completely unaware that you once cracked a military encryption code?”
His lips curve. “The irony wasn’t lost on me.”
“I bet,” I say, laughing. “So you were a college student by day and a white hat hacker by night.”
“Basically.” He chuckles. “It was a good job. The hours were flexible, I worked remotely from campus and the pay was phenomenal. Over the course of those three years, I gained valuable experience and made important contacts that proved useful when I launched my startup.”
“That’s awesome, Gunner,” I say warmly. “Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?”
“I knew pretty early on.” A hint of a smile plays on his lips. “Once I decided to use my programming skills for good, I devoted my energies to developing an app to help businesses combat ransomware attacks. Given that my last name is Ransom,” he adds wryly, “you can see why I chose not to name the company after myself.”
I grin. “Good call.”
“It seems to have worked out well,” he drawls.
“I’d say so.” I scoop up a mouthful of melting ice cream and lick the spoon, watching Gunner’s eyes darken. I can feel the coiled energy beneath his lazy posture. He reminds me of a hungry lion ready to pounce.
I smile coyly, sliding the spoon back and forth across my glistening lips. “What’s the best part about being a CEO?”
He blinks uncomprehendingly. “Huh?”
I giggle.
“Sorry. I was distracted by what you’re doing with that spoon. I’ve never been so jealous of a fucking piece of silverware.”
I burst out laughing.
With a low chuckle, he reaches over to stroke my knee. “Repeat your question, sweetheart.”
His touch, coupled with the endearment, almost make me forget what we were discussing. “What’s the best part about being a CEO? Besides the money and prestige, of course.”
He considers the question. “Honestly, I think the most rewarding aspect of my job is identifying and nurturing talent,” he says, sounding thoughtful. “Talented, creative employees are absolutely crucial to my company’s survival, so I make it a priority to bring out the best in them. Like Jack Welch famously said, ‘Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.’”
I smile, appreciating his response. “Apparently you don’t just talk the talk; you walk the walk. Your company’s turnover rate is almost nonexistent, and your assistant told me you’re the best boss she’s ever had.”
“Did she now?” He strokes his chin, his eyes gleaming with warm humor. “I’ll have to give her another raise.”
I laugh and eat more ice cream, waving the spoon around at the tiered shelves. “How many of these books have you read?”
“All of them.”
“Every last one?”
“Every last one.” He looks amused. “Does that surprise you?”
“Not really,” I say. “You’re obviously brilliant, cultured and intellectually curious. You speak Mandarin and Farsi, and I read somewhere that you have a genius IQ.”
He chuckles. “Don’t believe everything you read.”
“So you don’t have a genius IQ?”
His eyes glimmer. “‘People who boast about their IQ are losers.’”
“I—wait. Did you just quote Stephen Hawking while evading a question about being a genius?”
A crooked half smile is all the answer he gives me.
With a deep sigh, I put the spoon down and say, “Well, tomorrow’s Wednesday and we both have to get up early. So I guess we’d better?—”
“How do you feel about children?”
The question catches me off guard. “Um, what?”
“Do you like them?” Gunner clarifies.
I smile. “I love children.”
“Do you?”
“Of course. Especially babies,” I add with a grin. “There’s something downright irresistible about their pudgy cheeks, drooly smiles and chubby little thighs. And I love inhaling their sweet baby breath when they yawn. So freaking precious.”
A flicker of tenderness skates over Gunner’s features as he gazes at me. “Do you have a lot of experience with them?”
“With children?”
“Yes.”
“I do. I used to babysit the neighbors’ kids for extra cash. I was good with them, so my services were always in demand.” I tilt my head to one side and grin at him. “Why do I feel like you’re vetting me for a nanny job?”
His mouth curves faintly. “I was just curious.”
“So what about you? Do you like children?”
“I do,” he says warmly. “I have a godson named Walker.”
I smile. “How old is he?”
“He just turned three and he’s a bundle of energy.”
“Aww. He sounds adorable.”
“He is,” Gunner confirms with obvious affection. “His dad’s an old college buddy of mine. He moved back to California after graduation. You can meet him and his wife—and Walker—the next time they’re in town.”
“Looking forward to it.” I give him a teasing smile. “I’m gonna start calling you The Godfather.”
He chuckles, his lashes lowering over his eyes as he studies me. “Do you want children?”
“Eventually,” I say, smile softening. “I want to finish school first and get established in my career.”
“Of course,” he murmurs.
“What about you? You plan on siring any offspring?”
He nods slowly. “When the time is right.”
I find myself picturing him as a father. Stern but loving, overprotective but indulgent. I imagine him being hands-on, helping his children with their homework rather than relying solely on expensive tutors. I picture him down at the dock sanding one of his boats with his son, a miniature version of himself with messy black hair and beautiful blue eyes. I imagine him sitting by a crackling fire with his little girl on his lap, reading her a bedtime story about kickass warrior princesses and?—
“Hey.” His voice breaks into my thoughts. “Where’d you go?”
“Sorry.” I swallow an odd lump in my throat and force a laugh. “I was just thinking about how spoiled your kids are gonna be. They’ll attend elite private schools, wear designer clothes, have extravagant birthday parties and travel around the world. They’ll have the best of everything.”
“Maybe,” Gunner quietly concedes. “But all the material possessions in the world won’t matter if I don’t provide them with the most important thing.”
“What’s that?”
“A good mother.”
I stop breathing while his eyes hold mine. There are so many layers to his words, so many possible meanings. Could he be vetting me to see if I’d make a good mother? Is that what’s happening here?
My heart is suddenly beating too hard and too fast. I look away, first at a painting on the wall, then down at the carton of ice cream.
“Your midnight snack is melting,” I finally whisper.
“Give me one more taste,” he murmurs.
My hand trembles slightly as I scoop out a dollop of gooey chocolate and offer it to him.
He closes his lips around the spoon, staring at me as a burning heat spreads through my body.
As he releases the spoon from his mouth, my eyes slip downward to the broad expanse of his chest, then further down to the silky fabric of his pants stretched across his thick thighs. My mouth goes dry and I swallow hard.
When he whispers my name, I lift my gaze to his.
The deep, hypnotic blue of his eyes has me swaying toward him before I even realize it.
He meets me halfway, our lips connecting in a kiss so sweetly perfect I think my heart will burst.
It’s like something out of a movie, but ten times better.
Fade to black and roll credits . . .