Page 4

Chapter Four

Luke

The world seems bright and full of color, but it has nothing to do with the champagne. I’m drunk on Sera, her heat, that expression in her eyes: half confident, half withdrawn. When I tell her she needs to show me her delectable body first, her eyebrow shoots up in that tempting, sassy way.

“That wasn’t the deal,” she says. “ You need to prove you’re not wearing a muscle suit, remember?”

I shrug, standing up. She keeps her eyes fixed on me, as if unable to look away. My body vibrating with excitement, with hunger. She bites her lip as I unbutton my shirt.

When I slip it off, she looks up and down my body, her chest rising and falling in quick succession as she grows excited.

“Now, your turn,” I groan, walking over to her and reaching down, taking her hands and pulling her to her feet. “Wait a sec – I remember from that excerpt. You want your man to take control.”

She gasps as I spin her around, pushing my body against hers, getting the angle just right so that my imprisoned rock-hard cock presses against her perfect curviness. She grinds against me as I reach around to her front and begin unbuttoning her shirt.

“You’re fucking perfect,” I growl against her ear. “You make me feel like I’m going to explode.”

“Oh, Luke…” she whimpers.

I strip off her shirt, then turn her to face me, gazing in awe at her luscious mounds pressed together in her bra.

“Perfect,” I groan, sliding my hands to her hips as I bring my lips closer to hers.

She gasps when we kiss. It’s like all her pleasure has been building for a long time. Every reading session, she’s been dreaming of this: making her fantasies come true. Being the one who makes her fantasies a reality means I’m the luckiest man alive.

We kiss, our tongues clashing heatedly. I glide my hand up her body, hungrily massaging her breast. When I slip my hand into her bra and find her needy nipple, she touches my wrist, leans back.

“Luke, you need to know…”

“Don’t get shy on me now, Sparkplug.”

She moans. “I haven’t got much experience.”

“Are you a vir?—”

“No, not a virgin,” she cuts in. “But I’ve only had a couple of experiences… they were quick and awkward and not very fun. And it’s been years.” She laughs shakily. “So not a virgin, but I might as well be one.”

“Then I’ll take it slow,” I whisper, peppering her lips with kisses again. I move to her neck, kissing down toward her breasts. “I’ll suck and own your perfect nipples, make your body tingle all over, before I even touch you where you need me most. Hmm, Sparkplug? How does that sound?”

“Ah, ah,” she whimpers when I unclip her bra and push her tits together.

I take a moment to stare with appreciation at her curves, the size of her, the beauty. Then I take one of her nipples in my mouth while massaging her other breast. She slides her hand through my hair, making a gorgeous gasping noise.

“What we do together, Sparkplug, it’ll be better than any half-baked experiences you’ve ever had before,” I say, kissing her luscious mounds. “We’ll roleplay any scene from any book you want. I’ll be the hero you need.”

“Oh, fuck,” she whispers as I glide my hand up her thigh.

“I’ll make you come over and over…”

“Luh-Luke,” she moans when I push my hand down on her heat through her pants.

I guide her to the bed. She falls back and I move atop her, sucking on her nipples, loving how I can read her lust through the shudders in her body. Her breaths grow ragged when I rub my hand up and down her crotch over her pants, lavishing her with attention.

“I love your tits,” I growl. “So big, so curvy, so perfect.”

“It feels… so… good,” she moans.

“You feel perfect,” I groan. “Every inch of you.”

“Kiss me again,” she says breathlessly.

I kiss up her neck, find her lips. She grips my face and kisses me heatedly. I rub her pussy, pushing the heel of my palm against her clit through the fabric of her clothes.

Soon, I can’t take it anymore. I can feel her heat even through her pants, but I need to feel her wetness, too. I need to feel how badly she wants, needs this. I want to experience her lust, the fantasies she eagerly wants to bring to life.

“I need to taste you,” I whisper between kisses.

“Taste me?”

“Don’t act innocent, Sparkplug. I need to taste your pussy. To kiss your hungry clit. I need to make you shiver all over as the orgasm builds inside of you and pushes you over the edge. I need to own your perfect body. Own you, Sera.” I need to cement our connection, emotionally and physically.

“Yes,” she murmurs, nodding. “Oh, fuck, yes?—”

When my cellphone rings, I think about ignoring it. But it’s my work phone, and that can only mean there’s a problem. My team doesn’t call unless they absolutely need me.

“It’s okay,” Sera says, reading my hesitation.

“It’s not,” I tell her, sitting up. “But it’s unavoidable. Dammit.”

“Is something wrong?”

“If they’re calling me at this time, probably.”

“Who’s they ?”

“My team,” I say. “We’ve got an extensive project coming up.”

“And you’re the head of the department?”

“Something like that,” I mutter.

I force myself to stand up, somehow taking my phone from my pocket. It seems wrong when Sera is lying there with her breasts exposed, her nipples looking ready for more sucking, her legs open, tempting me to palm her sweet core again.

Turning away, I answer the call. It’s my assistant, Andy. “Boss,” he says.

“What’s up?”

“Something’s gone wrong with the AI.”

“What do you mean – gone wrong?”

“You need to come to the lab. The team thinks someone has sabotaged the prototype.”

“Sabotaged how ?”

“You need to come. I’m sorry.”

I sigh. “I’ll be right there.”

When I turn back, Sera is already putting on her bra again. She gasps when I leap on her, tear the bra away, and greedily palm her breast, kissing her. I must get carried away because she pushes against my chest.

“That sounded serious,” she murmurs.

“It is. Billions are at stake.”

“Then you should go. I don’t want you getting into trouble.”

“But I want to stay here with you so damn bad,” I admit with a sigh.

She’s right, unfortunately. What I want and what I have to do are two very different things. A CEO doesn’t always have the power people assume he does.

My cell phone rings again, punctuating her point.

“Fuck,” I mutter. “You’re right, Sera. But I’m not forgetting about you…”

Andy is my assistant and my fixer, acting as a go-between with me and everybody else at NeuroDrive. He’s in his mid-thirties, tall with thick-framed glasses and a tattoo of Michael Faraday on his left forearm.

The rest of the team is in the lab, crowded around our latest self-driving car. We’ve already launched several successful electric vehicles, but this is our first to use artificial intelligence for the self-driving function. In the tests, it has proved to be two hundred percent more effective.

“What’s the issue?” I say, striding across the room to talk with Steve, the co-lead designer.

Steve is a few years older than me, with a shaved head and a grimace that proves difficult to budge. Even for him, though, this is bad. He looks pissed even when there’s good news. This is nuclear.

“Talk to him,” Steve says.

“Who – Ally?” Ally is the name of the AI.

“Yeah.”

I climb into the car, swiping the touchscreen ignition. The car hums to life and a shimmering emoji appears on the display. “Ally, I’d like to take a trip.”

“Where would you like to go, Luke?”

“How about we circle the lab a couple of times?”

“Or we could drive straight through the wall, Luke. We could see if the car is capable of obliterating the wall, Luke. And then, Luke, we could test if your composition can withstand the collision. How does that sound?”

I look at Steve, who nods grimly.

“What the fuck?” I snap.

“I’d be curious to see if human beings can survive?—”

I turn off the car, and then step out, my heart thundering. “We’ve been working on this for years,” I snap. “All the tests – all the safeguards – what the hell was it all for? How did this happen?”

"It has to be sabotage," Steve says quietly, moving closer to me. "Something buried in the code, something we somehow missed… And now it's been switched on. If there was a problem this catastrophic, we would've noticed it long before now."

"I've vetted everyone on the team."

"We've outsourced some of the code, remember?" Steve points out.

"The backend stuff: the easy stuff."

Steve shrugs. "Could be something hidden in there. We need to do some digging."

"The keynote speech is in two days, dammit."

"I know, boss. I know. But what else are we supposed to do? If you get up there and show Ally acting like this, it's game over. People won't care if it's just a prototype. They'll never want to use Ally if they hear him behaving this way."

"You're right," I snap. "Fuck. Right. We're pulling an all-nighter. Comb over the code line by line to see if your theory is correct. This is officially a lock-in."

Steve nods. "I'll tell the troops and get some coffee."