Can't Stop the Feeling (Sinclair Sisters 2)

“Oh,” Donna said. “Keir’s brother.”

“Keir’s brother.” Mairi nodded as she dialled him. “He hacked my life without being asked, now he can do some hacking for us that we actually want.” She held up a finger to tell them he’d answered. “Sean, it’s Mairi. I have a job for you. Come over to the flat above the garage. Bring your laptop and don’t tell your brother why you’re here.” There was a pause. “Of course it’s legal.” She snapped the phone shut and then looked at Agnes. “It is legal, right? Sort of. I mean, we’re hacking an art school. It isn’t like we’re hacking the government.”

“Hacking is hacking. It’s all illegal. There aren’t shades of it.”

“Yeah, but nobody’s going to send us to jail for hacking an art college. Right?” Mairi looked at her sisters. “I mean it. I can’t wear orange. It clashes with my hair.”

“No,” Donna said with a certainty she didn’t quite feel. “We won’t go to jail. The worst that will happen is that I’ll get fired.” Maybe. Or he might keep her around to make her suffer.

“Good.” Mairi sounded relieved. “I mean, not good you’ll get fired, but good I won’t have to wear orange. Okay then, I’m running over to the shop. We need more chocolate if we’re going to hack people.” She headed for the door.

“That sounds so wrong,” Agnes said as she watched her go.

Chapter 4

Duncan sat in the kitchen’s breakfast nook, in the dark, waiting for his housekeeper to sneak back home. Why he didn’t put on the light and leave a politely worded request that she meet him in his office in the morning, he didn’t know. Sure he was annoyed, but even he could see this wasn’t the way a man treated his employee. But then Donna didn’t quite feel like an employee. She felt...more. And he couldn’t quite figure out what that meant. Nor did he have the time to spend on it because his prey had just sneaked in the back door and was currently tiptoeing across the kitchen to the fridge, muttering to herself as she did so.

“Stop calling him master,” she said. “He isn’t my master.”

Duncan cocked his head while he watched her. Maybe she wasn’t talking to herself after all. Maybe she had an earpiece for her phone. It was hard to tell under that thick mass of hair sitting around her shoulders. And who the hell was this master?

She took a carrier bag over to the fridge and opened it. The light surrounded her like a halo, and the contrast of the dark kitchen and the stark light from the refrigerator, made him think of Caravaggio’s paintings. He could see this scene on a canvas, only she wouldn’t be dressed in slacks and a shirt, she would be wearing a white cotton men’s shirt—his shirt—and the light from the fridge would shine through it, showing her curves in shadows through the cloth...What was he thinking? With a shake of his head, he refocused his attention on Donna and the issue he needed to resolve with her.

“I’m not taking advice from you,” she said as she put food from the bag onto a plate, then headed for the microwave. “You were given your freedom, and you’re still wearing a sack. Why don’t you put on some decent clothes?”

Master? Freedom? A sack? This was one weird phone call. It sounded like some sort of master/slave sex game. His stomach clenched. Donna? Sex games? He blinked hard at her. Donna in her buttoned-up clothing and her meek attitude? Meek? He felt like a weight had been dropped on his head. Another word for meek was submissive. This was getting weirder and weirder. Was she talking about having a master? Was she into BDSM?

Donna?

For two years, he hadn’t looked at her in any way other than as the woman who smoothed out his life and let him focus on missing Fiona. He definitely hadn’t thought of her as a sexual being. But now, hearing this, there were all kinds of sexual images in his head.

He shifted in his seat as his body reacted to the images. A reaction he hadn’t had in years, followed by a sharp, but short-lived, pang of guilt over betraying his wife. His long-gone wife. And for once, that thought didn’t bring him to his knees. It only produced a dull, throbbing ache in the region where his heart used to be—before it had been taken out of his chest and buried with the woman he loved.

“I don’t care what Harry Potter would say,” Donna snapped. “I don’t live to please a master. I don’t have a master. And I don’t need someone to free me with a sock.”

Okay, they’d passed weird and entered completely bizarre. He shouldn’t be listening in on Donna’s freaky phone calls. It was none of his business if his housekeeper was into kinky Harry Potter sex games. Although the thought of her with a man he didn’t know disturbed him. Actually, the thought of her with any man was disturbing. Who was looking out for her? Who was making sure she was safe? Protected? What if this guy took advantage of her? His eyes narrowed. Just like his ex-employees had taken advantage of her. He needed to remember why he wanted to talk to her and not get distracted by anything else.

As she took the steaming plate from the microwave, Duncan cleared his throat. “Donna, I need a word with you.”

She screamed. The plate flew into the air, then landed with a crash on the kitchen floor.

“Duncan?” she whispered as she leaned against the counter with her hand over her heart.

Maybe he should have put the light on after all. “Who else would it be?”

“I nearly had a heart attack. What are you doing sitting there in the dark?”

“Waiting for you. You’ve been ignoring my messages, and I need to talk to you.”

Her brow puckered as she frowned. “I didn’t ignore you, I told you I had a family situation to deal with.”

“What was it this time? Did Agnes’ flat blow up? Did Mairi fall off another cliff?” Donna’s sisters didn’t have normal emergencies—they had epic ones.

She ignored him, her eyes on the floor. “The chicken pie is all over the place.” She sounded so mournful that he almost felt guilty.

“Maybe if you’d come to talk to me like I asked, instead of avoiding me, you’d be eating your dinner right now instead of staring at it on the floor.”

Her eyes flashed luminous green in the low light. “And maybe, if you hadn’t scared me half to death, I would have eaten my dinner and then come to find you.”