The Dangerous Seduction Page 8

  And he has to nod again. The thought that there’ll be a next time—that Joseph wants a next time—makes his belly swoop and churn.

  Joseph kisses up his body, nuzzles into his skin, breathing in his scent. His hard cock rubs against Ryan’s thigh, burning a white-hot brand into his skin. He raises his head from Ryan’s stomach, crawls up him, body uncurling, elbows bracketing Ryan’s head and hips pressing down. He stares into Ryan’s eyes like he’s trying to cross-examine him with his mind.

  “You like this, you want this,” he says, and it’s not a question.

  Ryan nods, groans, “Yes, yes, God, yes….”

  Joseph smiles, that arrogant, knowing smile, and then he’s leaning in, sucking Ryan’s bottom lip into his mouth. His hand squirms between their bodies, finding and thumbing at Ryan’s thickening cock. “C’mon,” he growls, “c’mon, do it, get hard again, Ryan, c’mon.”

  Ryan’s breath hitches and he can feel the arousal building, and Joseph cursing and urging him on. He feels drained and exhausted and he can’t believe that he is actually getting hard again. He’s thirty-two, not seventeen, and he’s not used to recovering this damn quickly. But Joseph isn’t letting up, and he’s so hot and firm and demanding. His lips graze over Ryan’s face, their mouths find each other again, and they’re kissing, furious and frenetic and male, so very male. He feels his orgasm build once again, hotter and more painful than before, a deep resonating ache throughout his body.

  Joseph pulls back and blinks at him. “What will get you there? What will help?”

  Ryan shudders, his eyes locking on Joseph’s bruised, plush mouth. “Maybe… you… your mouth… on me… down there.”

  Joseph’s lips twist up into a smile. “I bet,” he says, and he laughs, jagged and breathy, but he’s already slithering down Ryan’s body. He breathes hot, damp puffs of air over Ryan’s aching, sensitive cock, and then he’s gliding his mouth down over the thick length. Ryan arches up from the bed, clawing at the mattress and feeling his cock head brush the roof of Joseph’s mouth. Joseph sucks him with the same expertise and single-minded intensity he used to jack him off, the same expertise and single-minded intensity he brings to everything he does. He’s sucking so hard on Ryan’s cock that it feels like Joseph is drawing his very essence out of his body, pulling him out and swallowing him—taking all of him.

  Joseph draws off him and exhales. “Christ, you got a nice dick. You taste so fucking good, Ryan.”

  Ryan gulps, completely floored by the compliment. “Uh, thanks. That’s… nice.”

  Joseph laughs, flashing him a dazzling grin. Then he’s sliding up Ryan’s body again, kissing him with that same burning pressure, grinding his cock into the crease of Ryan’s thigh. They’re dry-humping, rutting like horny teenagers now, sweat and spit sliding their bodies and cocks together. Joseph nuzzles his face into the crook of Ryan’s neck and pants scalding-hot breaths into Ryan’s skin like steam soaking into a towel. Ryan feels the moment Joseph comes, feels the spasm, the shuddering release of the other man’s body. The wet, sticky heat of his come smears between them, and then Ryan’s dick is pulsing once more, and unbelievably, he’s coming again.

  Joseph exhales and collapses on top of him. Ryan can feel the wetness between their bodies, the wetness on his throat from Joseph’s saliva and breath. He’s shivering—the intensity, aftershocks, and effort of coming twice in such a short time making him shake like he’s just finished up a two-mile sprint. He feels sticky and sore and disgusting and completely destroyed.

  Slowly, Joseph lifts his head and looks down at him with flushed, hazy eyes. His irises are dark, a glassy green color in the room’s soft lamplight. Ryan blinks back at him, and stares at the individual features that make up his face. He wants to touch them, to trace his eyebrows and smooth his fingertips over his lips, to run his fingers through his hair and scrape his fingernails against his stubble, but Joseph is already drawing away from him. His hand lingers behind, cupping Ryan’s cheek, giving him a couple of pats, an oddly affectionate and bizarrely platonic sort of a gesture considering what they’ve just done. Joseph rises off the bed, walks into the bathroom, and closes the door behind him.

  Ryan collapses back into the sheets, closes his eyes, and draws his fingers through the cooling come on his stomach.

  Chapter 4

  HE FEELS disoriented when he first wakes up, his mind heavy, his head aching. He opens his eyes, squints up at the ceiling, and tries to remember where he is. Slowly, as if from far away, the familiar beeping of a cell phone penetrates his foggy consciousness. He flails around with his right hand, trying to feel for his phone on the nightstand where he always leaves it, but there’s nothing there, just empty air. He remembers suddenly that he’s not at home, he’s not in bed with Daisy, he’s in bed with Joseph Van Aardt. Or at least, he was in bed with him, because Joseph is not there now.

  The ringing stops and he hears Joseph’s voice say, “Yeah?”

  He cranes his head up from the pillow and sees Joseph step out of the bathroom. He’s naked save for a towel wrapped around his hips, his skin flushed and wet, his hair plastered to his skull. Ryan stares, feeling his cock, already half-hard with morning wood, start to thicken as he takes in Joseph’s nearly naked body. He slides a hand under the covers, palms it distractedly, eyes locked on the rise of Joseph’s shoulders, the elegant curve of his back, and the swell of his ass under the towel as he paces the room.

  “What? You’re fucking kidding me?” Joseph grinds to a halt, expression creasing up in annoyance. “What? Yeah, yeah, okay. Soon as you know.” He thumbs off the phone and tosses it to the bed where it falls into the thick comforter.

  “What? What is it?” Ryan asks.

  Joseph turns, noticing him for the first time. “Phil Cartwright hanged himself,” he says. His tone is flat, pissed. He raises his hand to his face and runs it over his clean-shaven jaw. “Fuck! This is not good news.”

  “He hanged himself?” Ryan repeats. “When? Where?”

  “Last night. His wife found him hanging from a beam in their garage.”

  “Oh my God,” he breathes, scrambling into a sitting position, the covers falling down around his hips. “Shit, Joseph. This could be… I mean… the way he was acting yesterday. He seemed terrified. Do you think there’s a chance—”

  “That someone got rid of him?” Joseph shrugs. “It’s possible. Though, it’s more likely he did it himself. The dude wasn’t in the healthiest mental state yesterday.”

  “No, no,” Ryan says thoughtfully. “God, I just… I can’t believe it. Christ, we just saw him!”

  “Yes,” says Joseph distractedly. He runs a hand over the back of his head, through his wet hair. He stalks back into the bathroom, calling out, “I’m going to see if I can meet with the detective in charge of the case.”

  “Oh, okay. Do you want me to come with you?”

  Joseph leans around the bathroom door, raises an eyebrow. “You need to go buy some new pants.”

  “Oh, right, yeah. I guess I should do that,” he says slowly. He slides out of the bed and pads across the floor to rescue his creased and stained pants. He holds them up to the light, says, “Yeah, I see what you mean.”

  He tosses them onto the bed and looks around for his underwear. He feels suddenly dirty, no, not dirty exactly, grubby—that’s the better word—scrambling around to locate his underwear on the floor of the hotel room where he screwed around with his boss the night before. It takes him a few seconds to remember that he wasn’t wearing any underwear last night. He’d left his own room clad in just his dress pants and only his dress pants, so eager had he been to get to Joseph. The memory makes his stomach knot up and he raises his hand self-consciously to his temple, wincing when it meets the cut. Shit, he’d forgotten about that too. It feels like it’s already scabbed over now, sort of spongy and gritty under his fingertips.

  “Hey, let me take a look at that,” Joseph says from behind him.

  He turns around, letting hi
s hand fall to his side. Joseph steps toward him and grabs his jaw, tilting his head to one side and peering at the cut.

  “It doesn’t look so bad; you won’t need stitches. Does it hurt?”

  “No,” he answers truthfully.

  Joseph nods, splays his fingers over Ryan’s jaw, running his fingertips over the bristles. The touch makes Ryan shiver; his half-hard cock gives an interested twitch. Joseph glances down and smirks, then looks up again to meet his eyes.

  “That will have to wait,” he says. “Go, get showered, buy those new pants, then call me. I’ll come get you. We’re booked on the 12:00 p.m. flight out of here and we should interview Cartwright’s wife before we leave.”

  MRS. CARTWRIGHT looks pale and shaken, her eyes watery and distant and constantly glancing over their shoulders like she’s on alert. She discovered the body, Ryan thinks. She came into the garage to get a new lightbulb for the dining room lamp and she found her husband hanging from the ceiling. There’s nothing he can say or do that will take that away from her. She’s going to remember that for the rest of her life. Still, there are the motions and pleasantries and sometimes these things can even help.

  “We’re so sorry for your loss,” he says as they take their seats at the kitchen table.

  She flinches and her mouth tightens, lips pressing together so hard the color seems to drain from them. She swallows, then says, “I want to join the lawsuit.”

  Ryan hesitates, looking expectantly at Joseph, who doesn’t seem surprised by this development. Joseph nods his head calmly and says, “You know that your husband didn’t want to be part of this?”

  She jerks her shoulders up and down in something resembling a shrug. “I know. I think he was wrong. I told him so. But he still—God knows why, but I think he still felt some sort of allegiance to… to that man.” She spits out those last words as if they’re poison.

  “We would of course love to have you as part of the suit,” Joseph says. “Your family was very hard-hit by Jack McNeil’s actions. But I’m going to tell you the same thing I told all the other plaintiffs: this case could drag on for a long time. With high stakes litigation, you need time and patience. No doubt you’ve seen the stories in the press?” Slowly she nods her head. “Yes, it can get ugly. On both sides. I can understand why your husband might not have wanted to drag your family into it.”

  “I’m his heir,” she says firmly. “Everything that’s left—not that there’s much of it—but it’s all mine now, including everything that McNeil owes us. I’m not going to stand by and let him get away with it. I spent years working and raising this family, scrimping and saving. I’m not willing to let it go.”

  Joseph nods. “Of course, and I’m planning on getting as much of it back as I can. For all of you. I’ve staked my reputation on this case, and I intend to win.”

  She nods, her eyes locking onto Joseph’s face with the fervor of the newly converted. “Phil was wrong about you. I’ve read about what you’ve done for other people. Phil said that you were corrupt and bad news. That you were just in it for yourself, for your percentage and the publicity.”

  “Of course, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t ultimately in it for myself,” Joseph says, not breaking eye contact. “But I earn my percentage when I win money for my clients. And the fact that this case is worth a lot to me professionally means that I’ll do everything I can to win it. You have my word on that.”

  She sucks in a breath and bows her head, staring down at her clasped fingers. “There are a lot of files,” she says hesitantly. “When Phil left the office the day everything happened with the company, he came back with a trunk full of files and papers and paperwork. He was very protective of all of it, and I always thought there must be a lot of sensitive material there. The way he’s been acting these past few months….” She thins her mouth into a brittle, shaky line. “I thought he was paranoid. I thought he was acting crazy. I guess I didn’t realize just how crazy….” She trails off, raising her hand to smooth over her messy ponytail. “But I want you to take it away. I don’t want to think about any of it anymore, and I want… I want it all to help. To mean something.”

  Ryan’s heart thumps wildly. He casts a look at Joseph, but Joseph looks as calm and serene as he always does when dealing with clients.

  “Thank you,” Joseph says, leaning across the table to clasp her fingers. His eyes widen, looking sincere and honest and very green. “I promise that I’ll do all I can to get back what you and your family is owed.”

  She nods again, thanking him with watery eyes and a trembling smile. She gets up from the table and moves to an old-fashioned bureau in one corner of the room. She pulls open a drawer and takes out a small key and a business card. She puts them on the table and slides them across to Joseph.

  “Everything he took is at this storage facility. I told him I didn’t want any of it in the house,” she says. “He used to go there a lot. Sometimes he’d be there all day.”

  Ryan looks down at the business card. Castle Storage, he reads, and a downtown address.

  “Thank you,” Joseph says, his voice resonating with sincerity. “We’ll go there now, if that’s okay with you?”

  She nods. “Like I said, I’ll be glad to be rid of it. It’s box number 211. Take everything you need.”

  THE STORAGE box is set up like an office space, albeit an extremely cramped, untidy, and depressing office space. One wall is piled high with archive-box files, which on a cursory glance all seem to be stuffed full of papers, folders, and files. More loose papers lie strewn across an ugly battered desk on which sits an old-style Mac computer. Legal manila files stand in teetering towers on either side of the desk, and there are open index files spilling yet more papers, newspaper cuttings, and printouts of spreadsheets all over the remaining floor space, taking up all four corners of the room.

  “Jesus Christ,” Joseph breathes when he sees it all.

  “You think we just hit the jackpot?” Ryan says.

  “I think we have to get all this shit boxed up and shipped back to the office asap. And I think we’re not making that flight. I’ll call Estelle and get her to move our flights. You just get a start on it. We need everything. Everything, Ryan.”

  It takes them five hours. They sort through as much as they can; Cartwright’s filing system is nonexistent or a tightly held secret known only to the dead man. A lot of the papers seem to be duplicates of stuff Ryan has already read, because he is already intimately familiar with the Operations team Cartwright led for nine years. But there’s a lot of new stuff in there too, stuff that has Joseph’s eyes narrowing and his eyebrows drawing together as he looks over it and sets it all aside into a file that he’s going to carry on board the plane with him. The rest will be shipped via UPS.

  “Shit, look, look at this,” Ryan breathes as his gaze stutters over a stapled-together series of spreadsheets. Joseph looks up from his paper and comes over. He takes the pages from Ryan’s hands. Their fingers brush together, and Ryan feels the breath catch in his throat. Joseph is standing really close and he smells really good, and Ryan wants more than anything to grab hold of him, push him up against that desk, and press their bodies together. The thought sends a rush of heat through his body, up his spine and down to his tingling fingertips. He’s suddenly really aware of himself and his own body and just how on edge he’s been for the entire day, just how much his body has been craving Joseph.

  He blinks and forces his attention back to the papers in Joseph’s hand. “It’s a series of transaction statements, all for consultancy fees relating to an acquisition,” he says. “The first one’s dated March 7, 2005. That was when the Penrose acquisition went through, right? I’m pretty sure that all the consultancy fees relating to that deal were accounted for in the books. Which means that whatever this is”—he taps the paper—“wasn’t mentioned in the official accounts.”

  Joseph nods thoughtfully, leafing through the spreadsheets. He glances up at Ryan through his eyelashes.


  Ryan tempers the grin threatening to spill over his face and sucks down his excitement as he says, “McNeil paid 300 million for Penrose, and there’s a clear record of all the consultancy payments he made in the accounts. There’s no record of this payment anywhere.”

  “No, there isn’t,” says Joseph slowly. “You’re right. But unfortunately, this has no bearing on our case.”

  “No, no,” says Ryan, thinking quickly, swallowing down his disappointment at Joseph’s easy dismissal. “But these kinds of accountancy discrepancies should be investigated. I mean, I’m no expert in corporate tax fraud, but that looks like an offshore account number to me. The IRS cleared McNeil of tax evasion years ago, but something like this might be enough to get them to run another audit on him?”

  “Perhaps,” says Joseph, his tone noncommittal. He tucks the papers into his private file and slots it under his arm. He can obviously read Ryan’s disappointment in his face because he gives him a faint smile. “Hey, you’re right. It would be great timing for us if we could suggest to the government that they look into McNeil again. Anything that damages his reputation in the press would be great for our case, but you know that this isn’t relevant.”

  Ryan nods, blows out a breath. “Yeah, I know. I just… God, I just want to get that man, Joseph.”

  “Believe me, so do I,” Joseph says emphatically. “I’ll give this to James and Eden in the tax department; they have all the background on the McNeil tax audit, let’s see what they can do with it. If there is anything here”—he taps the file under his arm—“then they’ll find it.” He claps Ryan on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. We will get that slippery bastard. I promise you that.”

  RYAN’S PHONE buzzes and skips across his desk, rousing him from his reading. He looks up and blinks, bringing the rest of the world into focus. He reaches for his phone and squints down at the display. Daisy calling….