Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Mixing Business with Pleasure
HENRY
Morning brought me no reprieve from the invasion of my home.
A cleaning crew swarmed onto the boat in the middle of my breakfast. While I disliked being surrounded by more people before I’d had a chance to decompress from the last batch, I didn’t exactly disapprove of these ones, after what Irina had told me about my guest bathroom.
I tipped the last of my coffee into my mouth, but it did nothing to calm the jittery feeling racketing around in my stomach whenever I thought about her.
A cleaner quickly swooped in, snatched my cup away and whisked it off to the kitchen, leaving me staring at my hands.
Particularly, my left hand, which still tingled with the phantom sensation of her back against it as I guided her up the stairs.
She was nothing like what I’d been expecting …
and somehow, strangely, she was exactly what I should have expected.
I’d assumed the chatty, intimate nature of her less raunchy posts was an act to feign intimacy with those viewing them.
It very much wasn’t. She was that same funny, brazen, unfiltered woman in the flesh.
I cleared my throat, chewing on my Vegemite toast, because thinking about her flesh …
it seemed wildly inappropriate, despite her making a living from it.
And yet it kept popping into my mind—the small scar on her knee, no doubt from some childhood scrape, and the way I’d noticed the hairs on her forearms stand on end more than once during our chat.
And of course, her breasts. Which were even more spectacular than they had appeared on screen.
It struck me as odd that she’d seemed no more than curious at learning I was the rich man who owned the boat.
But it was refreshing. For the rest of the night, Atlas introduced me to a carousel of faces I’d never remember and names that vanished as soon as they were spoken. Still, every set of eyes lit up covetously when they spoke to us.
If I said as much to Atlas, he would tell me I was abysmal at reading people and that I should stop trying. But I knew, in ways he never would, the lengths money could drive a person to.
A plaintive yowl dragged my attention back to the present, and Abernathy crouched on the chair beside me.
This was closer than he usually ventured outside of feeding times.
I wondered if she’d somehow changed his brain chemistry last night.
I’d never seen him even slightly affectionate.
I assumed he didn’t like people, the same way I didn’t particularly like people.
But he’d certainly liked her.
“Is this supposed to be an award-winning technology magazine, or a celebrity gossip blog?” Lucian demanded, leaning across the dining table and sliding an iPad in front of me.
“They got that up fast!” I commented through a mouthful of toast, scrolling the TechRaker article without actually reading it. I coughed, almost choking on toast crumbs when the image appeared.
My hand tingled anew. Because there it was, pressed against her warm body, at the very top of the stairs, just before Lucian had dragged me away with some growled words I hadn’t listened to.
In the photo, her head was tilted back and up, her eyes on my face, a hint of a smile playing on her pretty mouth.
I scrolled up, eyes darting across the words, my stomach fluttering.
‘Emerging from his private living quarters …’
‘Appeared very cosy …’
‘Mixing business with pleasure …’
“We—” I cleared my throat in an attempt to dislodge the crumbs that were still rattling around in there. “Well, they certainly have an interesting take on an innocent encounter.”
“That woman is a menace!” Lucian snarled, snatching back the iPad and dropping into the chair opposite me. “I had to escort her away from Cadence and that Ivanov woman because she was shouting profanities and waving her arms about!”
A small guffaw snuck out of me. “Profanities and arm waving! Won’t someone please think of the children?”
Lucian eyed me, face like a thundercloud.
I had no trouble deciphering that expression.
“While you were lurking down here, avoiding your own party with … her … I was upstairs with eyes on every one of the hundred guests crowded onto your yacht. All it takes, when there are too many people and too much alcohol, is one person’s erratic behaviour to tip it all over into anarchy, and I wasn’t about to—”
“Excuse me, Mr Baxter … but I found these under your bed, and I wasn’t sure …”
I glanced up and registered what the cleaner was holding at the same time Lucian did.
“Innocent encounter my arse!” Lucian exploded as, red-faced, I reached out and plucked the black silky G-string from the cleaner’s fingers. “She was in your fucking room? With no knickers on?”
“Who?” I asked in the worst attempt at innocence, stuffing more toast into my mouth to try and mask my reaction.
I shoved the offending garment into my pocket.
What had I been thinking, snatching it from the cleaner?
I should have told her to throw it away, that I had no idea how it had gotten there.
Except I did. The vision of her waving these very panties in my face last night, the amused glint in her eyes, bloomed fresh in my memory, and my cheeks burned.
“Did you invite her into your room?” Lucian asked, softer now. I toyed with the crust of toast on my plate.
“I did not. I found her in there. She said she’d ducked inside to … deal with a wardrobe malfunction and was waylaid by Abernathy climbing onto her lap.”
Lucian snorted. “By Abernathy? The cat who notoriously refuses to acknowledge the presence of humans unless it’s to demand food or attack them?”
“The same one. He must have sensed something about her, or …”
“Or crazy is attracted to itself,” Lucian muttered.
“I think you’re judging a book by its—” The pressure of a feline paw on my lap stopped my words in their tracks. I stared down, not daring to move as Abernathy tentatively stepped onto my thigh, claws piercing my trousers as if testing the stability of my leg.
“What is happening?” Lucian asked faintly, peering warily at the fuzzy beast through the smoky glass of the table. “Don’t move, he might be planning to rip your balls to shreds.”
“I don’t think that’s his intention,” I murmured. “I think he’s …”
Abernathy hopped entirely into my lap, rolled onto his back, and started purring.
“This is not normal,” Lucian mumbled.
“I think he’s found her scent on the … undergarment.”
“Jesus, he really did take a shining to her!” Lucian pushed back from the table, shaking his head. “What the hell did she do to him?”
I shrugged, daring to reach down and run my fingers between Abs’ ears. The purring intensified.
What indeed?
“Well, I’d better get up top. It seems I have a security guard to fire.”
My head snapped up. “Why?”
Lucian glowered down at me. “A strange woman snuck into your room last night, and no one was any the wiser until you stumbled upon her. She could have been a spy for a rival tech firm … she could have been there to attack you.”
I grunted. “I highly doubt that—”
Lucian knocked on the table. “Bax, you’re now a very wealthy man with a high profile. You have access to data that is valuable enough to some people that they might not think twice about harming you, blackmailing you … hacking into your personal computer.”
I sat back in my chair, numb. Abernathy purred obliviously in my lap. Had she been a plant? I didn’t think so, but I’d possibly been blinded by my curiosity about her.
Lucian nodded, as if I’d given him express permission to terminate the security guard, and strode off in the direction of the stairs.
I gingerly lifted Abernathy into my arms, careful to keep the pair of panties in physical contact with him, and carried him into the bedroom. On the bed, he happily curled up with the underwear clutched between his paws. He really was odd, even for a cat.
I headed straight for my computer.
I would ensure that Irina Rusnac hadn’t hacked my computer. And I would do enough digging to satisfy myself that she was the woman I thought her to be.
Irina Rusnac was not the woman I thought her to be. But I was almost positive she wasn’t trying to steal trade secrets from Tickle.
Almost positive.
I had to pause to ask myself, would a not-quite-twenty-two-year-old sports science graduate whose student visa had expired a few weeks ago be desperate enough to try and hack into my computer?
And what would she get out of that? Information to blackmail me?
To what end? I had no power to keep her in Australia if that was her goal.
Was money her aim? Based on the earning projections I’d done on her account, she was earning quite a comfortable living from Tickle.
Additionally, she had no cause to expect access to me or my computer when she started her account.
There was no reason to conclude she joined the creator program solely to get close to me.
I’d also discovered she was a decorated swimmer. At Sydney University, she’d racked up handfuls of medals and broken several club records. The student paper ran articles bemoaning that, once she returned to Romania, she’d likely face her former teammates at the next Olympics.
But she hadn’t returned … at least not yet.
Nothing was adding up, and that alone had me certain she’d been honest: she’d only ducked into a private spot to remove her panties, then got distracted by Abernathy glomming onto her like a furry limpet.
I popped two pieces of gum into my mouth and drummed my fingers against the desk.
There was something about her—a puzzle that needed solving. And maybe getting to the bottom of it would also ease Lucian’s concerns about her being in my room for nefarious purposes. I realised, as I was pondering this, that they were Lucian’s concerns—they weren’t mine.