SeductiveIntent

Seductive Intent

Angela Claire

Set in the same world as Executive Perks.

It’s not unusual for playboy
Brendan Beckett to wake up with a girl in his bed. One holding a gun to his
head, though, does give him pause. In the dark, he can’t see the female burglar
grilling him about some safe, but he has to admit he likes the feel of her straddling
him to keep him still.

Sophia may not know her last name
or her real age, but she knows the life of crime, usually as bait for the rich
men she cons. But now she’s looking for a mysterious puzzle-box that her mentor
urgently needs. When she can’t get any information out of Brendan during her
midnight foray into his apartment, she crashes his sister’s wedding to meet him
and hopefully spark his interest.

The stacked beauty sparks
something
,
all right—his suspicion. At his house in the Cayman Islands, Brendan’s
determined to get the truth out of her. Or seduce her. Actually, he’s kind of
good either way.

Seductive Intent

Angela Claire

Chapter One

The sound of a gun cocking was not something Brendan Beckett
was used to hearing. Even in his dreams. It made an impression, as did the
woman leaning over him in the dark with that very dangerous weapon pointed at
his temple.

“I know this sounds trite, but if you move a muscle, you’re
dead.”

Trite or not, that kind of statement never got old.

“Uh, okay.”

“Tell me where the safe is.”

He was so going to get his money back on that expensive
security system the building had sold him when he bought this penthouse. How
the hell did this woman just waltz right in here in the middle of the night and
hold a gun to his head? He knew it was a woman only from her soft voice and the
feel of her straddling him. Too light to be a man. But it was so fucking dark,
he could barely see the black garbed figure sitting on his stomach.

Sitting on his stomach? What the fuck? It wasn’t bad enough
he was being robbed by a woman—which was only bound to put a damper on the high
regard he normally had for the female sex—but she had to go and mount him? A
position which, by the by, he usually enjoyed a lot more than he did at the
current moment. He’d never hear the expression “woman on top” with quite the
same enthusiasm.

The barrel of the gun pressed a little harder into his
temple, nudging him ever so not slightly into providing the information his
midnight visitor had requested.

“There is no safe.”

“You’re lying.”

“Look around yourself. Or, wait, you probably already have
or you wouldn’t be asking me. I imagine you professional burglars like to get
in and out with a minimum of fuss. You’ve probably been here for quite a while
already, taking care not to wake me.”

“How do you know I’m a burglar? Maybe I’m an assassin?”

Although he was always one for witty repartee with a woman,
he found it hard to appreciate the chit chat given the current circumstances.
As it was, the mere fact of a woman sitting on him in the middle of the night
was having a predictable effect. Christ, to be honest, he was scared as hell,
but apparently his cock didn’t scare easy. He hoped she didn’t notice.

She scooted a little farther up and muttered, “What a wolf.”

No such luck.

“What?” he demanded.

“Your erection is prodding my ass.”

The final indignity. “Well, you are on top of me in my bed.”

“With a gun pointed right at you. You’d think that’d give
you pause.”

“It does. Believe me.”

“But you’re still up for a fuck?”

“Was that an invitation?”

“No. More like an observation. Now where is the safe?”

“Look, I’m being honest here. Why wouldn’t I be? There is no
safe. If there was, I’d point you right to it so you could get the hell out of
here. Believe me, I’m no hero.”

“I believe you.”

Okay, so he wasn’t in much of a position to argue. He really
should just let it go. But this girl, whoever the hell she was, was really
pissing him off here. And it wasn’t just the gun thing. Although he guessed he
should be more pissed off about that.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“What?”

“That I’m no hero.”

“Nothing. You’re the one who said it.”

“But you agreed with me pretty quickly.”

“Well, you do have a reputation for being a playboy.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I imagine you probably have bodyguards and the like to do
the dirty work for you rather than mess up your pretty face.”

She was the one with the gun, but did she have to be such a
bitch about it?

“I’m twice your size. I could probably overpower you.”

“Exactly. But you haven’t even tried.”

“You observe I’m ready for a fuck and now you’re practically
inviting me to overpower you? I’m starting to doubt here that you even are a
burglar.”

His eyes were accustoming themselves to the dark, a dark
much blacker than he usually had in his bedroom. He realized she must have shut
the blinds, since he’d fallen asleep with them open. Her face was so close to
his now, mere inches away at most, that he could almost feel her breath on him.
Arguing with her hadn’t dissipated his erection any more than having a gun
pointed at his head had.

Okay, so he’d had some inadvisable hookups in his long and
varied sexual history. Of course there’d been the usual sleeping with his mom’s
slutty best friend when he’d turned eighteen. The slutty best friend of one of
his sister’s even earlier than that, for which he’d inevitably gotten no end of
grief. Then the occasional slutty girlfriend of a friend, though he’d honestly
been ashamed of himself for giving in to that and really hadn’t done it more
than once. Twice maybe. He had a thing for sluts. Then there were the wild days
when he’d pick up a girl in a bar, even a biker bar once and a while just for
fun, when he had no idea who she was or where she’d been, although he was
always careful to suit up first and had never gotten his throat slit for his
troubles.

But he’d never contemplated a hookup as bizarre as this.

Not that this unseen girl was inviting him to hook up. More
like insulting him non-stop, but somehow managing to turn him on nonetheless.
He’d never figured himself for low self-esteem.

And of course there was still the little matter of that gun.

“I’m not going to risk trying to overpower you when you have
a gun to my head. What kind of an idiot do you think I am?”

“A cowardly one?”

Okay, that was it. Enough was enough. He batted as hard as
he could at the gun, feeling the shocking and unpleasant sensation of clipping
her wrist in the process. He heard the gun skitter away as she clasped her
wrist and he flipped her over, coming full on top of her with his weight.

“Ow!” she cried, pushing her palms against his shoulders to
no avail. “Get off me. I can’t breathe.”

He felt for her wrists and wrenched them above her head and
once they were safely by her head, he relented and leaned a little to the side
to take some of the weight off her.

“You’re hurting me.”

“Oh, you big baby. Who’s the one who broke into whose
apartment and held a gun to whose head?”

“And that gives you the right to manhandle me?”

“Well, uh, yeah, Miss Smarty Pants. I’m defending myself.”
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than his overtaxed body registered
the feel of her under him. Wow. Even in the dark, not able to see her, just
feel her. Per his usual custom he was naked and her limbs were encased in some
lycra-feeling material, all over, so they weren’t skin to skin exactly, just
the next best thing. He could feel long, long legs and, whoa, a tight, high
chest. A hook-up wasn’t seeming so far-fetched at right this moment, though he
briefly wondered how he’d find an opening in this cat suit thing and whether he
could trust her enough to let go of her to reach for a condom from the night
stand.

Oh, and whether he should call the police while he was at
it.

He involuntarily arched his hard cock into the vee of her
legs. Very nice. He let out a little moan and pushed her hands up higher.

She wasn’t struggling. Oddly, without her gun, she wasn’t so
talkative either, which did give him pause. Burglar or no burglar, of course if
she wasn’t into this…

She leaned up to him and he felt soft lips graze his chin.
Optimistically, he told himself she’d probably been aiming for higher and he
brought his lips to hers, tasting a slight lemony flavor.

Then he was out.

“Did you have to hit him so hard?”

Arthur lugged the dead weight of a very unconscious Brendan
Beckett off Sophia. She scrambled out from under him as Arthur then let the
handsome, naked man fall back onto the mattress face down.

“Turn him over or something. He’ll suffocate.”

Arthur breathed a very eloquent sigh of disgust and
condescended to flip the bigger man over onto his back. She was always amazed
at how strong Arthur was, given he could look as slight as he wanted to. It was
the same way with age. Arthur could appear anywhere from twenty to eighty-five,
with the right props. Right now, though, he just looked nondescript, in a black
body suit like hers, which allowed them to fade in and out of the night, and
not incidentally climb from the roof over onto the balcony of Brendan’s
penthouse apartment.

“Well, that was a total waste of time,” Arthur commented.

“You didn’t give me enough time with him.”

“I didn’t want to give you any time with him, as you
recall.” He picked up the gun from the floor and wagged it at her. “And
bringing this into the matter was very dangerous, as you well know. It could’ve
added years if we got caught.” He slipped the gun into an almost imperceptible
pocket in his suit. “Get caught,” he corrected. “Let’s get out of here. It’s
not here.”

They had searched the apartment thoroughly while Brendan was
out cold, verging on comatose after a mild sedative they’d managed to slip in
his nightly drink while waiting for him to come home. Paradoxically, they
didn’t dare search until he had gotten home and was safely unconscious, since
the risk of him arriving in the middle of their search, even if they thought
they knew his schedule, was too great.

When he’d had his drink and undressed and the sedative
kicked in, she and Arthur had come out of hiding and thoroughly searched the
apartment, as big as most houses, but a confined space after all. Two floors of
space and no safe or other hidden compartment that they could detect.

There hadn’t been one in the blueprints either, but that
wasn’t uncommon. Often a rich occupant like Mr. Beckett here installed his own,
although they could find no evidence of him having done that either as they
cased the apartment after he moved in. Still, Arthur was convinced one might be
here.

And when they couldn’t find it and the effect of the
sedative was likely to wear off, Sophia volunteered to try to get the
information out of Brendan. It was then that she’d produced the gun, loaded
even. Arthur never showed when he was mad. He just got quiet. She didn’t need a
lecture from him on the A to Zs of successful house burgling. So she quickly
said, “I’ll wake him up and ask him. He’ll be so scared, he just might tell
us.”

“He just might see us too.”

“We’ll do it in the complete dark. I’ll put the gun to his
head and he’ll be blabbering within two minutes.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“You’ll be right here.”

Arthur had agreed, but she knew he hadn’t been happy about
it and now an “I told you so” was written all over him.

“You didn’t give me enough time with him,” she repeated.

“Time for what? Having sex him? Was that part of your plan,
my dear?”

“No. I just… Fine. Never mind. Let’s get out of here. It’s
probably somewhere else.”

As they went out onto the balcony to scramble back up to the
roof, she took one last look through the glass doors at the darkened bedroom.
He was going to have an awful headache in the morning.

Brendan wasn’t a morning person. Admittedly. But he wasn’t a
“what fresh hell is this?” person in the morning either.

“Time to rise and shine, Master Beckett.”

“For Christ’s sake, if you call me Master one more time, I’m
going to fire you. I swear I will.”

Why the hell he even had a butler, he had no idea. In fact,
it hadn’t been his idea. He just happened to be at a house party over in the UK
a few months ago when this bitch of a hostess fired Mandrake here for no good
reason. Of course, her reason had probably seemed good to her at the time.
Mandrake had been caught in bed with her own current lover, an annoying Italian
young man of obviously confused sexuality who had been hitting on everyone,
Brendan and his own date—a fresh-faced English girl—included all weekend.
Brendan hadn’t felt that Mandrake here should bear all the brunt of the
hostess’ ire. So he’d hired him on the spot.

Unfortunately, Mandrake took his duties very seriously. Even
though Brendan had put his foot down about letting him live in, which Mandrake
had somehow suspected was a homophobic move, Mandrake insisted on showing up
for work here every morning as if he was punching a time-clock. What he did
during the day while Brendan was gone, he had no idea and he didn’t care. His
fondest hope was that Mandrake would someday be the beneficiary of New York
State’s groundbreaking rules on same-sex marriage and retire after tying the
knot with some similarly inclined rich man.

And then he remembered. Last night. Or the middle of it
anyway. He hadn’t dreamed it, had he? The pounding in his head and the bump he
could feel at the base of his skull suggested not.

As Mandrake busied himself putting the unasked-for tray of
coffee and rolls down on the nightstand, Brendan said, “I was robbed.”

“Really? Where?”

“Here. Last night. A woman.”

“You brought a woman home and she robbed you? I’ve warned you
about that kind of thing, Master Beckett. There are so many nice, suitable
girls in Manhattan. I don’t know why you insist on—”

“I didn’t bring her home! She was just here.”

“You had a girl waiting for you when you got home? Well, I
suppose that’s not so unusual for you. But it would serve you well to be on
your guard a bit more, if you don’t mind me saying.”

He stood up. “Get me some aspirin, would you, Mandrake?”

Mandrake pursed his lips and hurried in to the adjoining
bathroom. When he came back out, he had the aspirin and a robe. “I would really
appreciate it, as I’ve mentioned to you before, Master Beckett, if you would
not parade about in the nude around me.”

Brendan took the aspirin and shrugged into the robe. “Oh,
yeah. Sorry about that. I forgot.”

“It’s common courtesy. I would ask the same of a woman
employer.”

“Yeah, sure. Sorry.” He downed the aspirin with a slug of
coffee, burning his throat in the process but not caring. He was starting to
think that hostess had maybe just used her boyfriend in bed with Mandrake as an
excuse to fire him. He was kind of a pain.