Page 2

W ith the Bale brothers out of the way, I can finally book a vacation.

In my two-week tenure as Chief of Security for Tyng Enterprises, I’ve thwarted two attempts on Chiara’s life and now one on Kez’s, so I figure I’ve earned a vacation. But more importantly, I promised Kez, and I never break my promises to my kitten.

She’s kneeling between my feet at the moment, her head in my lap, toying with the closure on my pants in a way that’s making it difficult for me to concentrate.

She’s concealed by the pseudowood monstrosity of my desk.

When I took this office, there was a sleek glaz and metal desk that matched the rest of Tyng Tower’s sleek glaz and metal decor.

But it disappeared on the second day and this beast replaced it.

When Myhre forced a weekly calendar on me, I discovered that Kez had booked a repeating appointment with me every day at thirteen hundred labeled: ‘Sex on Desk.’

I’ve kept my aesthetic objections about the desk to myself.

Whether the woman sitting on the other side of the desk knows about Kez’s presence is hard to say. She’s not giving it away if she does, but Myhre’s extremely hard to read. There’s nothing on her smooth oval face. Nothing in her dark brown eyes. But she knows my calendar better than I do.

Which means she’s making me late on purpose. And that’s beginning to piss me off.

She taps the holodisplay that surrounds her special chair and a column of figures hanging in the air between us rotates so I can read them.

“Blue Fox Clan doesn’t have a hundred hard credits to spare, much less a hundred thousand,” she tells me.

I scan down the column. Shake my head. “How the fuck d’you find out how much they spend on holopaint?” I ask, pointing at one line-item in the column.

“Their supplier’s data is not as secure as it should be,” Myhre answers.

But even in her response, there’s that element of inscrutability.

She doesn’t tell me whether she hacked the data or got it from some other source.

Myhre’s fucking hard to read, which makes me distrust her. But I have to respect her methods.

“Could they get it?” I ask.

“Doubtful.”

“So that leaves the crew out of Shyl. Nelly Simone’s boys.”

“And the threat from Eastern Colony.”

“Which we don’t know anything about.”

“All I have is a name,” she says. “Drogan.”

I grunt with irritation. There’s too much we don’t know. “That name didn’t crop up last night.”

“You said Reginald Bale didn’t know who hired them.”

“I only got the one name. Jaxon. He set up the meet.” Between my feet, Kez stiffens and her fingers, which have slipped down to stroke my balls, press hard enough that I shift in my chair. I reach under the lip of my desk and flick her on the ear. She muffles her chuckle against my knee.

“It’s a place to start,” Myhre says.

“You get workin’ on that while I meet with the rats.”

Myhre’s soft, full mouth tightens. Not wholly inscrutable. She doesn’t want me meeting with the rats. Whether because she’s figured out the real purpose of the meeting or because she just disapproves of Acker’s genetically modified crew, I don’t know.

“Is that meeting necessary?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“May I ask the agenda of the meeting?”

“Dinner.”

Myhre’s too controlled to roll her eyes, but she does lift one perfectly-arched eyebrow.

I tap the holopanel on my desk, which has started blinking since the meeting with Kez should have started three minutes ago. “That all?”

Myhre nods. “When do you leave?”

“Eighteen hundred, give or take.”

“Very well.” Myhre powers down her displays and slowly unfolds from her chair. She drifts to the door and gives me a smile over her shoulder, partially masked in the midnight fall of her hair. “I’ll have a preliminary report ready before you go.”

Not something to look forward to, one of her preliminary reports. They can suck down whole days. But I don’t want her to know how much I dread them.

“Sounds good,” I say.

When the door snicks closed behind Myhre, I reach down and run my hand over the soft shag of Kez’s hair.

“Hey, kitten.” I’m not sure whether she’ll want to talk or fuck. I’m open to either. Or both.

She rolls her cheek against my thigh and smiles up at me. “Music,” she says.

She wants to fuck. I smile back as I reach across to the holopanel and tap up a playlist of the Zunkfunk she’s got me listening to, to cover the noise we’re about to make.

I also turn up the room’s airvents, to get rid of Myhre’s hot jasmine perfume.

Last thing I want while I’m fucking my kitten is to smell another woman’s scent.

Afterwards, Kez sits in my lap, her face in my neck, arms around my shoulders. My desk chair ain’t the best for post-coital cuddling. I’ll need to get a couch if we’re gonna do this every day. But for now the chair will have to do, because there’s no way I’m giving up this time with my kitten.

“Five days, we’ll be doin’ this on a beach,” I murmur to her. The pleasure planet I’ve picked for our vacation is one big beach. We’ve got a private Hab and a one klick stretch of sand all to ourselves. I plan to fuck her on every centimeter.

She kisses my neck, the way she likes to during the afterglow. “You’ll get sand in your ass if we do it this way on a beach.”

“You’re assumin’ I’ll be on the bottom.”

“A gentleman would.”

I chuckle. “Then you’re definitely gonna be the one with the sandy ass.”

Kez rolls her cheek along my collarbone. “Can we talk seriously for a moment?”

I figured this was coming from the way she reacted to the name Reg Bale gave me.

I gave her the short version of the interrogation when I got back last night.

But since it was already after midnight and she was waiting in bed, it was the really short version.

And I got distracted before I finished even the really short version, so I don’t think I gave her any names.

I certainly didn’t give her Duncan’s. That’s a problem I intend to deal with myself. “Mmm, what do I get?”

“What do you want?” she counters.

I smile up at the ceiling. I love negotiating with my kitten. “Tonight. My place. Two toys.”

She hums into my skin. “I thought we were going to stay on the Clouds overnight.”

“Fuck, no.” The last time we stayed overnight on the Cloudlands, I really did end up with sand in my ass. And I didn’t get laid.

“Oh.” She loads that one little word with disappointment.

My kitten does inflection like no other woman I’ve ever known.

“I figured if we were staying on the Clouds overnight, we could go down to the Night Market. Meet up with Slip and Alb. Alb’s a really good drummer, and it’s totally different when you’re spinning to live music. ”

Now that is tempting. The only thing close to as much fun as playing with our growing collection of sex toys is throwing fire with Kez. “If we stay overnight, there’d have to be rules.”

She tightens her arms around my neck. “I’m good with rules.”

Yes, she is. “Rule one would be that I can put it anywhere.”

She shivers and smothers a moan in my shoulder. “Agreed.”

“You know rule two.” Rule two is our safe word. We’ve needed a safe word from our very first time together. And we’ve only gotten more adventurous since then. “Rule three is thirty seconds.”

A harder shiver. Maybe thirty seconds is too long. She was struggling at twenty seconds two nights ago. “Kitten, look at me.”

She does, lifting those big blues to me. Her pupils are hugely dilated. Whether or not thirty seconds is too long, the idea is getting her hot.

“You okay with that?” I ask.

“Absolutely.”

I smile and kiss her forehead. “So, talk seriously.”

“Why are we really going out to the Clouds?”

Not the question I expected her to ask, given her earlier reaction. But it’s a reasonable one. I only told Kez we were going out to the Cloudlands to meet with Acker, the leader of the Deep Whites. I didn’t tell her anything about why I arranged the meet.

“Sounds like we’re going so you can spin fireballs with your little friend.”

She bumps her forehead into my nose. Not quite a headbutt, but close.

“Okay,” I concede, before she really does headbutt me. My kitten has an aggressive streak. “I got a proposal for Acker.”

“A proposal?” She tilts her head to the side. “Are you going to offer him Kincaid’s job? ”

I chuckle and adjust her in my lap. My thighs are falling asleep. “You know me too well.”

She nuzzles back against me. Tightens her arms around my shoulders. She can feel the clock ticking on our cuddle just like I can. “That might be a really good solution.”

Yeah, it might. If Acker agrees. In hindsight, I killed Old Man Tyng’s lieutenant, Darra Kincaid, too soon.

I acted in haste, in anger. Retaliation for an injury to Kez.

If I had it to do again, I’d still kill him, maybe even slower than I did.

But I’d have taken some time to study his chain of command first.

Figuring out how to reshuffle his subordinates has been a real pain in my ass.

“Do you think the Tyngalings will accept him?” she continues, using our private name for the network of employees, informers and hangers-on that Old Man Tyng left us.

“Some will, some won’t.” There are a few heavy Mods among the Tyngalings, but none as extreme as Acker.

But it’s not Acker’s modifications that are at issue.

It’s his morals. Tyng had his fingers in a lot of pies, but the heart of the Old Man’s empire was, and still is, the Hex-trade.

Acker has less tolerance for the drug than Kez, and her tolerance is pretty low.

Kez scoots up my chest to rub the tip of her nose against mine. “Have you thought any more about divesting?”

“That’s a big word.”

“Hale, seriously.”