Plush Book 3: A Billionaire Romance (3 page)

I nodded and stepped past Kimberly’s desk and followed Cooper into his corner office.

Once inside, he shut the door behind me and crossed the room to sit behind his desk. He indicated that I should sit opposite him, in one of the two leather chairs sitting on the other side of his desk.

I struggled to keep from turning crimson as I stared at the edge of the desk, realizing that was where I’d been perched, with my legs wrapped around his hips the first time that he fucked me. It had been several weeks since, but the memory was surprisingly fresh as I stared at the polished oak. It was hard to push it all to the side and regain my focus. When I lifted my eyes, he was staring at me and I could feel the fire in my cheeks.

“Allison, sit,” he said.

I hadn’t realized I was still standing. I’d gotten lost in a rush of memories and lost track of myself. I smiled and lowered into the seat he indicated and waited.

“Did you go out with Parker last night?”

Something inside me told me that he already knew the answer, and that his question was entirely rhetorical. There was no point in lying to him. At the end of all this personal drama between the two of us, my place at Brighton Enterprises was a job. One that I desperately needed to keep in order to avoid going back to stripping—or worse—Kansas.

“Yes, I did. We went to dinner. Nothing happened.” I don’t know why I added the last part. It slipped out before I could stop it.

Cooper nodded and his eyes seemed to shift as he watched me squirm. My limbs were suddenly restless as I tried to figure out what he was thinking. The harder he stared at me, the more I wanted to jump up and run from his office.

“So, you lied to me?” he asked.

I let out my breath. I needed to be careful, but I was also getting incredibly close to the end of my patience with his controlling tendencies. “When you asked me about it, I hadn’t said yes or no to Parker’s invitation. So, no, technically, I did not lie to you.”

He scoffed and a flair of anger coursed through me at the sound.

“Cooper, listen to me,” I began, tempering my voice to keep my tone steady while the rest of my started to tremble. “I am not your girlfriend. You don’t have any say over where I go, who I see, or if I go on dates. I don’t know why you think you can nose about in my personal life, but I’m sick of it. If I am going to work here for you, then I deserve to be treated just like any other employee.”

I steeled myself, waiting for his wrath to fall.

“Allison, why do you think I offered you the job here?” he asked.

It was an odd question and it caught me off guard. “Because you felt bad about me getting fired from Spotlight?” I ventured.

He shook his head. “I know that you’re new to all this, but I don’t make business decisions, like hiring and firing, based off of personal feelings.”

“Really?” I quirked an eyebrow at him, calling his bluff. “So hiring me has nothing to do with…well, with whatever is going on between us!”

He sighed. “No.”

I cocked an eyebrow at him. “I find it very hard to believe that you couldn’t afford to hire someone for this secret project thing you keep talking about. I mean, really? You’re the billionaire CEO of a huge company! You can afford whoever you want. So, why me? If it’s not just because you like staring at my ass?”

“Allison, lower your voice,” Cooper insisted.

I crossed my arms and waited.

“Are you really so insecure that you don’t think I could want you for anything other than your body? You doubt your skills that much?”

I was speechless. I wanted to scream at him, to yell and get loud so he would stop picking apart my walls of defense. But I couldn’t. Because he was right. Even if we hadn’t already slept together, and he was just offering me the job, I would still assume that he had ulterior motives hiding in his back pocket.

“I hired you because I need help obtaining the information we’ve already spoken about,” he continued. “I could have hired anyone, you’re right. I hired you because I know I can trust you to keep things confidential.”

“And how do you know that? Cooper, you don’t even know me.”

I didn’t know why I was arguing. He was right. I was trustworthy and wasn’t going to blab his secret project all over town—regardless of how infuriating he might become.

He stood and came around the desk and I automatically stood up, too, not wanting to be sitting with him standing over me. It felt a little too intimate.

“I do know you, Allison,” he said.

I sucked in a silent gasp as a wave of his cologne hit me. He always smelled so incredible. My knees weakened underneath me but I stayed planted, not daring to move an inch.

My eyes locked with his and my stomach twisted. He was standing so close that I could feel his body heat radiating off him, and I so desperately wanted to take one small step forward and have him wrap his strong arms around me and not let go. The last few weeks had been full of so much drama and stress and I was suddenly overcome by exhaustion. I needed a safe spot to land, and for some reason, in that moment—it seemed that my heart had decided that he was it.

I dropped my eyes back down to look at my hands as they nervously fidgeted with the edge of my blazer.

I was about to make some excuse to get me out of the room, away from the suffocating emotions that were threatening to overtake me, and far, far away from the smell and heat and sound of Cooper. Before I had a chance to say anything, he placed his fingertips under my chin and brought my face up to look at him again. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”

I nodded, hardly allowing myself to breathe for fear of falling completely apart.

His face was lowering to mine and I struggled to keep my eyes open. It was startling how much I wanted to let myself melt into one of his hot kisses. His fingers slid down my chin and traced a path down my neck, sending sparks exploding all over my skin, wherever his fingers touched. His lips pressed to mine and my legs nearly went out from underneath me. There was a little voice screaming in the back of my mind, reminding me about the actress, telling me that he wasn’t to be trusted, but the voice was drowned out completely as Cooper’s tongue entered my mouth and swirled around the tip of mine.

He wrapped his fingers around the back of my neck and held me possessively. I let him pull me closer until our bodies were pressed against each other. My breasts ached as I leaned into him, desperately wanting to feel his skin on mine. Scenes of our previous lovemaking flashed behind my eyelids and I was breathless, panting between each crash of his lips on mine.

Just as suddenly as it had started, Cooper stopped and backed away. He released me and my eyes popped open.

“I don’t want you around Parker,” he said, shattering the sexual tension between us.

His words sunk in, and my anger shot back to the surface again. Before I could rail against him, he pushed up his sleeve and checked his watch.

“I have to go. I’ll check in with your progress later,” he said. He swept past me and went to the door of his office.

I squared my shoulders, and strutted past him and through the door as he opened it.

I marched past Kimberly’s desk, not bothering to look back at her—or Cooper.

Chapter Four

I spent the afternoon in my office, alternating between crunching numbers on my personal budget, and fantasizing about Cooper. I was trying to figure out how many months of salary I would need to save up in order to live off of for a year, while I figured out what the hell to do with the rest of my life. However, it was proving to be trickier than I’d imagined, with images of Cooper flashing in and out of my mind in such lifelike daydreams that my panties were getting wet just playing it all out in my mind.

By the time four o’clock rolled around, I figured I wasn’t going to be able to focus on numbers right that moment. I’d been late getting to work and didn’t want to be the first to leave, so I decided to start hacking and get the information Cooper was counting on.

I rationalized that maybe once he had the information he needed, he would leave me alone and give me some cushy filing job that required no involvement with him. Then, maybe I wouldn’t have to budget at all, and could keep my obscene monthly salary coming in indefinitely.

The nagging voice in my head told me that would never happen, but I pushed it aside, much preferring to live in my fantasy land. At least for a little while longer.

I started typing and spent the first fifteen minutes cloaking everything, so that on the off chance someone at the competition’s headquarters realized they’d been hacked, they couldn’t trace it back to Brighton Enterprises. I wasn’t going to be tampering with anything, just researching, so I doubted anyone would ever notice, but it was best to play it safe.

Once I’d double, and then triple-checked that my digital fingerprints were nowhere to be found, I started looking for ways to get into their database.

It was easy to zero in my focus and forget all about Cooper. As I worked, the adrenaline of the hunt kicked in, and I was dead to the world around me.

“That’s weird…” I whispered, leaning closer to stare at the screen and make sure I was seeing things correctly. It looked like there was some kind of digital siphon, sending information from the Brighton Enterprises database and sending it to another address.

My heart raced as I clicked around, trying to figure out what was going on. I’d been hacking for several years, on and off, but I’d never seen anything like this. I kept an eye on the information going out, numbers running along the screen, changing into other numbers rapidly. I tried to open the database, to see if I could find the origin, but then it changed and two tables were affected. Either the hacker on the other end of things was in the database at the same time, or what I’d just done had made it spread.

It was a virus.

“Oh, my God.” I pulled up another window on my second monitor and started searching frantically. I had some cyber friends who were deep in the hacking underbelly. I logged into a forum, using my alias, and without giving specifics, typed out what was happening.

A reply came back that sent a chill over my entire body.

It’s a wormhole.

“Oh, shit!” I scrambled to type a reply back, begging for help. Once my SOS was posted, I grabbed the phone and dialed Cooper’s cell phone. I didn’t want to go through his assistant, and this was too important to wait another second.

“Hello?”

“Cooper, it’s Allie. I need you to get down to my office, now!”

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“There’s been an attack,” I said. A reply to my forum post popped up and cradled the tiny phone against my shoulder, craning my neck so I could use both hands. “Just come down here!”

The phone slipped and hit the desk. I could hear Cooper’s voice coming from the speaker, but couldn’t make out anything he was saying. I clicked off the call and hoped he would take me seriously enough to get down here. Not that he could help with the techy stuff…but this was his company…his network…and although I didn’t know that much about wormholes, I knew that if this hack continued, he could lose everything.

I was typing frantically, setting trackers and taking screen shots, to capture everything that was happening while waiting for further advice to come in from my friends on the forum.

“Allie, what the fuck?” Cooper appeared in my doorway. He looked breathless and scared out of his mind. “An attack?” He looked around as if expecting to see chunks of the walls missing.

“A viral attack,” I said, turning my attention back to the computer screen in front of me. “A wormhole, to be more specific. If we can’t get it stopped, the entire system could go down.”

“What?” He rushed around and stared over my shoulder. His cologne engulfed me and it took all my concentration to not turn and look at him. His face was inches from mine and I could hear his breath as it returned to an even pace. “What is all this?”

“I just found it,” I said. I was a little embarrassed that it had taken me so long. From what I could tell, the data mining had been going on for some time. It was hard not to be mad at myself for not catching it sooner. If I hadn’t spent so much time procrastinating and working on that stupid spreadsheet, things might be different now.

Not that I was going to tell Cooper that part…

“Whoever set this up has been taking information from the Brighton Enterprises database and is sending it to another database.”

“What kind of information?”

“Emails, sales data, personnel information,” I listed.

“Holy shit.”

I nodded. “Yes, holy shit.”

“Can you stop it?” I felt his gaze on me and turned my head, our faces inches apart. My mind drifted back to his office and the feel of his kiss. He was like a magnetic force, and I felt myself getting sucked in.

“Allie? Can you stop it?” he repeated.

I jolted back to focus on the screen. “I’ll try, but, I’ve never seen this before. Is there anyone else you can call to help?”

I hated admitting that it might be above my head, but this danger was too real to let something like my ego stop me from asking for help.

“Everyone’s gone home. I’ll call and see who can get back here.”

I nodded.

“But Allison, please, do what you can,” he said.

“I will.”

He left the office, already on his phone before he rounded the corner out of my line of sight.

While he was gone, I continued working, trying to figure out what—and more importantly—
who
was taking the information.

“Anything?” Cooper asked, striding back into the office twenty minutes later.

“It looks like whoever is taking information is gathering the most data from Plush. So, that must be what they’re after.”

Cooper pulled a chair around the desk and sat next to me, staring at the computer screens, but I could tell he was completely out of his league as his eyes frantically watched the activity on my two screens.

“Do you need anything?” he asked.

“Is anyone else coming?” I prayed the answer was yes. Even with the help of my forum friends, this was way more complex than anything I’d ever done before. The ironic thing was that I’d just been planning to do the same thing to the competition. Granted, I wouldn’t have been stealing, simply observing. Which raised a very important question…why were they stealing the information? Wouldn’t it be easier to simply copy the data? Whoever was behind this was not just looking for the data, they wanted to destroy it.