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SUBMISSION
By
Kimberly Zant
© copyright by Kimberly Zant, December 2008
Cover Art by Alex DeShanks, December 2008
ISBN 978-1-60394-150-1
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31363
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
Luke glared at his computer and finally lifted his head to study the narrow, two story house across the street. It was her address alright and the damned tracker led straight to it.
He muttered a curse under his breath.
Her image rose in his mind. He didn’t know why it had taken him so long to notice her unless it was because she didn’t look like much more than breath and britches at a glance. She wasn’t much over five feet tall despite the ridiculously high heels she wore every day—trying to make herself look taller, no doubt—along with the thick, dark hair she piled on top of her head. He’d caught a flash of red in it in the sunlight, but usually it just looked deep and dark and as deceptive as her face.
She wasn’t flashy, that was for certain.
She wasn’t even beautiful, certainly not in the classic sense, although there was a touch of the exotic about her because her eyes tilted upward faintly at the outer corners. Her narrow little nose ended with just the hint of an upward turn that, along with her heart shaped face and her diminutive size, gave her the look of a pixy. Her mouth was narrow, her lips modest rather than either full or thin, but the shortness of her upper lip gave them a bow shape that was damned appealing. Even the little knob of a chin she had tilted upward, forming a chin that somehow looked stubborn and vulnerable at the same time.
And yet the first time he’d locked gazes with her ….
She had the eyes of a fawn. He wasn’t poetic by any stretch of the imagination but that was the first thing that had popped into his head. They were huge for her small face, and he didn’t doubt that was part of what had spawned the notion, but mostly it was the look in her eyes.
Vulnerability—gentleness—defenselessness. It was the kind of look that made a man fall all over himself to rush to her rescue.
As if she needed rescuing, he thought derisively! The vixen!
He should’ve known no woman with a body like that could possibly be as innocent, or as helpless, as she looked.
Oddly enough, it had taken him a while even to notice her figure—really odd because generally when a woman had that effect on him he immediately checked out the rest of the package—or he checked out the package before he checked the face. Then again, he usually saw her behind the counter, virtually hidden except for her head and shoulders since she was short even with heels.
Beyond that, it seemed to him that she went out of her way to downplay her figure in the way she dressed. She always had the look of someone struggling against their nature to appear neat. Whenever he saw her, her blouse was tucked unevenly, there were ink stains on her hands or clothes, and there was usually a stray hair falling from her bun—not artistically and deliberately, but random chaos.
Despite tucking her blouse to appear neat, she always wore blouses that looked a little too big for her and ditto the slacks—too loose to tell much about what lay beneath which was what made him suspect it was a deliberate attempt to hide her assets.
He’d studied her hard enough, though, he had a damned good idea what she was hiding—a damned fine pair of breasts that were larger than average and still firm, an unbelievably tiny waist, and a heart shaped ass that made his cock twitch with interest every time he got a look at it.
He just didn’t know why she seemed to go out of the way to look ordinary, to fade into the background, when she was anything but ordinary.
Or he hadn’t before today.
Now, he was afraid he knew.
Reluctance tightened in his belly, but he knew what he had to do. All roads led here.
* * * *
The thunderous, imperious knock on my front door so early on a Saturday morning startled me so badly I jumped all over and sloshed hot coffee over my hand and spattered my favorite, disreputable sleeping t-shirt. My heart knocking against my ribcage like a bad valve on a car engine, I stared down at the mess with dismay and dawning anger.
I’d be the first to admit that I just wasn’t a ‘morning person’—far from it. Even on my ‘good’ days, I was grouchy when I first got up and not particularly sunny even after I’d downed a cup of coffee to rev my engines—just slightly more alert.
The weekends, though—those were sacred, the one time of the week when I could actually sleep until I woke up naturally and then ease into my day.
Weekdays, I tolerated what I had to, but anyone who bothered me on the weekend was just asking for it.
The thunderous knock came again. It didn’t startle me the second time, but it certainly pissed me off. Setting my coffee cup down, I made a stab at licking the coffee/heavy cream/and sugar off my hand, and then swiped the rest off on my already stained sleeping t-shirt since there wasn’t anything else handy. Trying to ignore the stickiness, I stalked to my front door ready to blast whoever the asshole was on the other side with my temper.
A shockwave hit me like a physical blow as I snatched the door open and glared at the man standing on the other side of the panel, though.
The expression on his face was every bit as thunderous as the knocking had been. I registered that, vaguely, feeling the glare fall from my own face as it went slack with shocked recognition.
He looked me over from the top of my wild, bed head to the tips of my unpolished toenails, missing nothing in between.
I didn’t see a speck of recognition in his expression when he met my gaze again, and not a lot of appreciation for my dishabille for that matter.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, that disturbed me. I decided I must look a lot worse than I’d realized if the man couldn’t even appreciate the fact that I was standing at the door in nothing but panties and a ratty t-shirt that barely grazed the tops of my thighs. That thought probably wouldn’t have occurred to me at all except for the fact that I’d lusted over this particular young, virile male almost from the time I’d started working at Thorne Bank and Trust.
Naturally enough, that fact made my heart skitter to a brief, painful halt, and then jumpstart into overdrive, sending first a blast of heat then a blast of cold through me and a million thoughts I had no business thinking.
Like the possibility that he’d noticed me, as well, and had finally decided he wanted to get to know me a little better.
His expression wasn’t exactly conducive to that thought, but one could hope, and one did.
And one was seriously disappointed the moment he opened his mouth because it instantly became clear that romance wasn’t what was on his mind.
"Ms. Bridges?"
"Uh … Yes?"
"Can I come in?"
Since he followed that question by pushing past me into the foyer, I realized immediately that it was a mere formality. I turned to gape at him blankly as he halted in the center, feet apart in a stance that radiated hostility, his hands balled into fists and planted on his hips as he surveyed my house. Dragging my gaze from him after a moment, I glanced outside. There were two dark vehicles parked outside—one in my driveway behind my beat-up economy car and one in the middle of my slightly overgrown lawn. Three of the bank’s security guards stood just outside the cars, surveying my house from the outside.
Frowning, feeling my belly begin to flutter with nerves, I closed the door and turned to look at Luke Thorne questioningly.
"You have a computer?"
It was said with a questioning lilt, but it was clearly a statement. Another shockwave washed over me. The question instantly connected in my mind with my son. "My s…." I broke off abruptly, feeling another frigid bite of fear and glanced up the stairs toward my son’s room guiltily. "What’s this about?"
Eagle-eyed, he’d caught the direction of my gaze.
I dashed around him and stood on the stairs, blocking his path even as he took a step in that direction. He didn’t even pause. His hands shot out. He grasped me beneath the breasts as one might a young child, lifted me straight up, and then set me to one side. I was so flabbergasted, both at the move and the gall of the man, that he was nearly at the top before I recovered enough to charge after him. "Don’t you dare go in my son’s room!" I bellowed at him, galloping up the stairs behind him and flinging myself at him like a linebacker.
He staggered a step as I tackled him but regained his balance. I heard a frantic spurt of movement within my son’s room, heard the window shoved up the sash. Apparently Luke heard it, too. He peeled me loose from his waist, set me aside, and strode toward Jimmy’s room. I raced around him, slammed my back against the door, and braced a palm on either side of the door frame, barring his path.
He plunked his hands on his hips, glared at me a moment, and then grabbed me as he had before and set me aside.
The door was locked.
I’d just breathed a sigh of relief when he slammed his shoulder against it. The door flew open. I tried to beat him inside but it was like an economy car battling a tank. He stepped on my foot as he plowed past me. I let out a yelp and hobbled into the room behind him, wondering if the elephant had broken one of my toes but too intent on guarding my son from his wrath to stop to examine it for damage.
The window was open. Shoving past him, I raced to it and nearly fell out in my rush to see if I could see any sign of my son. Luke grabbed me and hauled me back inside, but not before I’d caught a look at the security men who’d accompanied him. They had my son.
I plunked my hands on my hips, glaring at him as he drew his head back inside the window. "What the hell’s going on here?" I demanded.
He shoved his face into mine until we were practically nose to nose. "As if you didn’t know!" he growled, drawing away almost immediately and scanning the room.
Jimmy’s computer caught his eye and he crossed the room in two strides and began pecking at the keys.
"This is against the law, you know!" I pointed out to him with what little bravado I could muster considering I had a fair idea by this time of what was going on.
He slid a dark, narrow eyed glance at me. "You think bank robbery isn’t?"
Oh my fucking god! I felt the color leave my face, felt a wave of dizziness wash over me. Denials sprang to my lips but I couldn’t find my voice to utter any of them.
He straightened, fixing me with a look filled with intent. I felt my eyes bug, took a step back as he advanced on me and fell over a pile of Jimmy’s clothes that were lying in the floor at the foot of his bed. Luke made a grab for me as I toppled backwards and ended up sprawling out on top of me on the bed.
* * * *
Jesus! It needed only that, Luke thought with a mixture of disgust and raging lust. It wasn’t bad enough that he’d been battling between lust and rage from the moment she opened the damned door in nothing but a flimsy t-shirt that emphasized her breasts more than it hid them?
If she’d had any sense of self-preservation, or any idea how badly he wanted to push her down on any handy surface and fuck her unconscious, she wouldn’t have been throwing herself in harm’s way.
He knew it was a mistake the moment he made a grab for her and realized he was too off balance to stop her fall.
And he still hadn’t realized he was off-balance enough to sprawl on top of her.
Falling into her was nearly his undoing, though. Bent backwards from the knees because she’d fallen over the footboard, her jutting pelvis made almost painful contact the moment he landed with the raging hard on he’d been trying to ignore. Her soft breasts flattened against his chest.
For a handful of moments, he was more interested in thoroughly enjoying the opportunity she’d handed him than getting off of her.
Until it dawned on him that it might not be as accidental as he’d thought.
And he realized he was seriously contemplating dismissing his suspicions and focusing on what he wanted.
It cooled his ardor with sickening speed—not completely. It left a dull, throbbing pain in his groin that was like a toothache—impossible to totally ignore.
* * * *
I let out an inelegant grunt as Luke squashed the breath from my lungs. He weighed a fucking ton! We wrestled for several moments because that was how long it took me to figure out that he was trying to find a place to put his hands to push himself upright. He finally managed to get leverage and pushed himself off of me, dragging me with him by way of a handful of my t-shirt.
Did I mention that it was old?
The neck stretched as he levered me up and one boob came within inches of popping clean out of the damned shirt.
He paused, his face flushed, his breathing ragged, but I had a feeling it was his attempts to contain his rage that was responsible for it, not lust.
Maybe a little lust. He thoroughly examined what he’d exposed before he lifted his gaze to meet mine again. "We tracked the IP to your place," he said, an odd mixture of anger and complacency in his voice.
I blinked at him. I didn’t have a fucking clue of what an IP was, but I had a bad feeling that Jimmy and I were in serious trouble. "IP?" I echoed cautiously.
"The hacker that breached our system and transferred eight mil to a bank in the Caymans."
I blinked a little more rapidly. "Eight mil?" I asked weakly.
"Million dollars."
I stared at him in disbelief. What the hell were they thinking to keep that much money in one place? Wasn’t that just asking for trouble? Sure it was a bank, but people knew banks had money.
"Let’s go," he growled.
I tried balking, for all the good it did. "Where?"
"Downtown."
My belly cramped. Everything had happened way too fast for me to fully assimilate what was going on, particularly when I’d hardly had two sips of my damned coffee! But I was beginning to put things together and I didn’t like the picture that was emerging. "Like this?" I asked weakly.
As if he hadn’t noticed before that I was half naked, he paused and looked me over thoroughly. Instead of commenting, he escorted me across the hall to my room and shoved the door open. "Put some pants on."
Scared as I was by that time, I sent him a resentful glance before looking around for the jeans I’d been wearing the night before. I spied them in a pile by the bed where I’d dropped them before climbing in and shrugged his hand off. "Do you mind?" I asked tightly when I’d picked the jeans up, waiting for him to leave or at least turn around.
"I do," he retorted grimly, "but I think it would attract a lot more attention than I want at the moment if you waltz into the bank in your panties."
I gaped at him. My belly clenched again, but a tiny flicker of hope came to life. Was it better, though, that he meant to take me to the bank? Or was that just the first stop? Or were the cops waiting there?
Deciding that it might be best not to antagonize him any more, I shook my jeans out and stepped into them, slipping my feet into a pair of flip flops that had been lying beneath the jeans on the floor. He was studying me intently when I looked up from fastening the jeans, wondering if I could talk him in to stepping outside while I searched for a bra and clean shirt.
He met my gaze. "That’s good enough. Let’s go," he said as if he’d read my mind.
It wasn’t good enough for me. I still felt exposed and disadvantaged, but it occurred to me just then that Jimmy was downstairs with his gorillas and probably scared shitless.
As if I wasn’t!
Of course he should be, the little shit! I knew in my heart he’d done something he shouldn’t have or we wouldn’t be in this mess. I didn’t want to believe it. I was still hoping it would all turn out to be a huge mistake and I could threaten the Thornes with a lawsuit, but I wasn’t betting on it.
I would’ve liked to at least comb my hair, but I had a feeling that part of Luke Thorne’s determination to drag me out of my house half dressed was to keep me off balance and I wasn’t about to ask him. Shoving my hair out of my face, resisting the urge to glance at the mirror to see just how hellish I looked, I stalked past him and down the stairs. He caught my arm as we reached the foyer again, manacling one hand around it.
I glanced at his hand, flicked a look at his hard face, and then decided to ignore it. He walked me out to one of the black cars and opened the back door. Jimmy, owl eyed, his freckled face flashing first white then red, was already seated in the car.
Resisting the urge to reassure him, I gave him a look that promised retribution if I managed to talk our way out of this, settled beside him, and fastened my seatbelt.
"Mom?" Jimmy whispered in a croaking voice as the car pulled in behind the bank and Luke and the driver got out.
At least he’d held his silence during the trip from our place to the bank and waited until Luke got out before he even attempted an explanation. I shook my head at him. "Don’t talk now!" I hissed at him. "We’ll discuss this later."
I wasn’t entirely certain of when that might be. Clearly, they intended to question us at the bank before they called the police in.
Maybe I could figure out a way to talk them out of pressing charges, I thought hopefully?
Then I saw that the men who’d followed us in the other car had gotten out with Jimmy’s computer and my heart sank. I had a bad feeling that whatever it was that Jimmy had been up to was in there, just waiting to hang us.
The bank was dead quiet and gloomy when we were escorted inside—tomb-like, I thought. It sent a shiver through me, almost as if it was an evil omen. We were escorted down a corridor that I’d never taken before and then up a narrow flight of stairs and along another dim corridor. It didn’t make me feel any better that it wasn’t in the basement. It still felt dungeon-like.
Or maybe that was only because I had every expectation that the next stop was going to be the modern equivalent of a dungeon—jail?
Jimmy and I were pushed into a small cubicle of a room and the door shut behind us.
We turned to look at each other questioningly once the door closed.
"The bank has security cameras all over the place," I said as casually I as I could in warning.
Jimmy’s eyes rounded again. He tipped his head up, surveying the ceiling, and finally nodded, turning his attention to examining the room. There was a small table, or desk, and a couple of chairs. Ignoring the chairs, he moved to one corner, planted his back against the wall and slid to the floor, huddling in a knot.
I studied his posture for several moments, struggling with the urge to go to him and comfort him as I always had. He wasn’t a little boy anymore, though.
He wasn’t a man either.
After a moment, I crossed to where he was sitting and claimed a place on the floor beside him, patting his knee reassuringly. I wanted to ruffle the unruly tangle of blond hair standing up all over the place on his head, or finger comb it into some sort or order, but he’d established his independence before he was even five and made it clear that he didn’t appreciate being treated like a ‘baby’. At sixteen he was six feet tall, even if he didn’t look, or act, like a grown man and it had been years and years since I’d either cuddled him or spanked him.
I felt like doing both at the moment, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t up to the task.
I felt a knot of emotion well into my throat. "You’ve been hanging around with those people again, haven’t you?"
He lifted his head from his knees long enough to give me a look that was a mixture of guilt, resentment, and remorse. "I didn’t do anything wrong, Mama. I swear it."
I released a shaky breath. It was just as I’d feared. My heart sank.
He didn’t have to say anything else. I knew exactly what he’d been up to.
I should have known he couldn’t be trusted with a computer, I thought with rising anger aimed mostly at myself. He hadn’t denied hanging with the hacker crowd that had nearly landed him in juvenile detention several years earlier, which meant that that was exactly what he’d been doing. It took all I could do to keep from bursting into an angry tirade. The only thing that kept my tongue firmly between my teeth was the certainty that we were under observation and the fear that anything I might say in my anger could and would be used against us, or at least Jimmy.
We were left waiting for over an hour. I wasn’t certain if that was a deliberate attempt to break us down with anxiety or if it was because they spent that time going through Jimmy’s computer and collecting evidence, but it certainly put me on edge. I was a nervous wreck by the time the door opened again.
Luke summoned me. "You wait here," he said to my son when Jimmy surged to his feet.
I was about to point out that they couldn’t question my son without me present, but Jimmy bowed up at Luke, dropping a possessive—or maybe protective?—arm across my shoulders. It was a side of my son I hadn’t seen, but he obviously didn’t like the way Luke was looking at me.
Although in all honesty, and with a good deal of disappointment, I have to admit I certainly couldn’t see anything in Luke’s demeanor myself that might have brought out Jimmy’s male need to protect and stake his prior claim.
Regardless, it forced me into the position of switching gears.
"We should stay together," Jimmy muttered mulishly.
I gave him a quick hug. "It’s alright. You wait here. I’ll find out what this is all about and then call a lawyer if I think it’s necessary."
I could feel Luke’s speculative gaze as he walked me down the corridor. "How old is your son?"
I felt my face redden. I’ve no idea why but something about his tone brought out a sense of defensiveness. "Sixteen."
He escorted me into the offices of the president of the bank, Gavin Thorne. I forgot all about my defensiveness as we crossed the reception area. I’d lusted over Luke, but it paled beside the fantasies I’d entertained about his elder brother, Gavin.
I instantly began to suffer agonies about my appearance when it should’ve been the furthest thing from my mind. There was something completely demoralizing about having to face Gavin Thorne looking like a bag lady, though.
I slunk into Gavin’s office when Luke ushered me in and settled in the interrogation chair that awaited me, wishing I could dig a deep hole and crawl into it.
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