He thought about the check in his pocket. Grace Hawthorne might not know it, but she’d been laundering his ill-gotten gains for years. She knew an awful lot about his banking practices. If his ex-handler ever caught up to him, she was a weak link. If Eli Nelson found him, he was screwed, and what Grace knew or didn’t know wouldn’t matter. Still, maybe he should think about taking her out. An accident. Yes, that could be arranged. He pulled out his cell and quickly called one of his loyal soldiers.
Grace taken care of, Evan tossed the cigarette aside, not bothering to put it out. He didn’t care. He had a check to cash.
* * * *
Sean stared at Grace over the empty plates. She was flirting with the waiter. The young idiot was new to his job and had fumbled his way through taking their orders until Grace had turned her vibrant hazel eyes on him and starting talking to him in that ridiculously sexy twang of hers. He’d almost immediately calmed down, and the rest of the meal had been smooth sailing.
She was something else. The photos of her didn’t come close to doing the woman justice. In the photos, he’d seen a woman approaching middle age. The clothes she’d worn had made her seem a bit plump, and the expression on her face had been a little sad. The pictures didn’t show how her skin glowed in the late afternoon light. Her hair, which had seemed a flat brown before, was actually more red than anything else. It was pulled back in a ponytail, but Sean was sure it would reach far past her shoulders when he it took down. Little tendrils, waves of auburn, kept escaping from the brutal captivity of the scrunchie to frame her face. He was fascinated with her throaty laugh. When Grace Hawthorne smiled, she could light up a room.
Sean found himself slightly jealous of the attention she was fawning on the waiter until he realized she didn’t mean a thing by it. Years of training as a Dom had taught him to read a woman’s every nuance. She viewed the waiter almost as a little boy she was being kind to. There was nothing truly sexy about the way she flirted with the server. She wasn’t thinking about finding a quiet place and tangling herself around the kid. She wasn’t considering wrapping that gloriously glossed mouth around the kid’s cock to see how fast she could make him come. She certainly wasn’t wondering how to get the damn waiter’s mouth to close over her wet pussy.
Sean was thinking about all of those things, although he’d placed himself as Grace’s partner instead of the waiter, and it was making it very hard to concentrate. The way Grace smiled at the waiter and patted his hand put Sean at ease. Then set him on edge when he figured out she viewed him the exact same way.
He needed to fix that little problem and damn soon.
“You need to think about moving a good portion of your project development to Chile.”
Matt Wright’s declaration had Sean’s mind wrestling control back from his cock. It reminded him he had a job to do. “Chile? I hadn’t considered it. I thought most IT offshoring went to India these days.”
Wright’s hand came out in a negligent gesture. It was sloppy, and his speech was becoming slurred. “It does, but South America is trying to get into the game. There are a lot of highly-educated South Americans looking for good work. Many of the people at the location I’m thinking of actually have degrees in programming from American colleges. I can give you the numbers and backgrounds, of course.”
Grace dutifully made the note, but Sean hadn’t missed the slight tightening of her jaw when her boss had introduced the topic. She had misgivings about the South American projects. He would remember to question her about it later. She wouldn’t say anything in the middle of a meeting, he guessed. She seemed very loyal. Sean wondered if her loyalty would transfer from her boss to her lover.
Sean played hard to get. He needed to be a bit elusive to draw out these negotiations. “I don’t know. We’ve been pretty happy with the Indian offices.”
Wright waved a disdainful hand and took another drag off his drink. He was halfway to stone drunk. “I can cut your labor costs by fifteen percent and keep your workers in the same time zone.”
Sean nodded and pretended to consider it. It was interesting that Wright was trying to sell him on the idea of Chile. According to his research, Wright’s agency had brokered several deals to offshore IT departments to India. Chile had only come up in the last year. “I’d like to see those numbers.”
Sean’s hand curled around the margarita he’d been nursing for an hour. He noticed that Grace had finished her raspberry swirl, but politely declined a second. Wright began to extol the virtues of cheap South American labor, and Sean allowed himself a moment to ponder the problem of Grace.
He wasn’t going to be able to keep his hands off her. He didn’t see why he should bother. It was clear to him that she wasn’t the boss’s mistress. She behaved much more like his long-suffering wife than a mistress. Wright might depend on the lovely widow, but he wasn’t sleeping with her. He was almost sure of it. Sean had detected the slightest hint of jealously from Wright when he’d led Grace to the elevator. It had been little more than a flaring of his eyes when Matt noticed the courtly way Sean was leading her. It was gone by the time they reached the lobby. Ever since, Wright had called her babe several times and taken the seat beside her in the booth as though it was his right, but he didn’t touch her. Sean had been happy to slide into the booth across from the object of his study. It gave him the chance to really observe her.
He had many questions for Grace, but they would have to wait until he had her in a much more intimate setting. He would give it a day, and then invite her to dinner with him tomorrow. He’d watched the pleasure she’d taken in her food and the sweet drink she’d ordered. She’d savored every morsel. Her eyes had roamed the large platter of decadent desserts, but finally she’d said no. It was clear to Sean that she hadn’t wanted to say no. She was most likely giving in to the pressures of social constraints. She probably thought she needed to diet.
If they had been alone, Sean would have ordered the chocolate cake and fed her himself. He would have convinced her that taking pleasure in the dessert would please him. He would have watched the way her tongue came out to taste the bittersweet frosting before enveloping the cake in her mouth. Then he would kiss her, long and slow, the sweetness transferring from her mouth to his.
Better yet, he would simply cook everything for her, each course another level of his seduction.