Insecure (Love Triumphs 1)

She got that way with anyone she wanted to. “Wasn’t happy with the way I set up the shareholder vote registration.”

“The keypads?”

“No, the, ah.” Crap, this is what he needed a cover story for. “The pre-vote polling.” The whole pre-meeting polling was his idea. Nolan was only going to want to own it if it was successful.

“Yes, well that was perhaps a little too innovative.”

Nolan hitched his pants. He wore a suit like it was a sack of cement. He managed to look dusty, and the pockets of his coat stuck out at odd angles. He didn’t wear the IT team’s usual jeans and shirt look any more sartorially, but he looked less awkward, less like he was his own father.

“But what was her problem with it? She signed off on it.”

Mace scratched his head. Nolan was a buzz kill at the best of times. He could probably blow him off, but that’d take more effort than humouring him. He knew he could do it by simply calling Jacinta a control freak—or a bitch. It’s what he’d have done fifteen minutes ago if she hadn’t looked him in the eye and told him she wanted totally out of the blue no strings sex that’d lit him up like hot neon. Now that felt wrong. Not that it’d ever been right to slander her, but now there was some kind of honour; the rough deference to a person he was about to one night stand with because she’d had a bad day, it was vaguely possible the world might end, and he was in the right place at the right time.

“She read me the riot act over the permission sign-off.”

Nolan jerked his head and added a sprinkle of dandruff to his shoulders. “Didn’t you have legal clear that?”

“She wasn’t satisfied I disclosed all the detail.” Nolan had no way of knowing if this was true but it sounded like the kind of cowboy stunt Mace would pull. It had the merit of being entirely bogus should he decide to check up.

“Mason, you can’t muck about with legal. They don’t like surprises.” Nolan scrubbed his face, his hair was natural electric shock and his five o’clock shadow was contributing to his just slept in look. “How many times have I stressed that? Good planning equals no emergencies.”

Mace rubbed his jaw. He’d snatched a shower and shave after a quick gym session at lunchtime before he’d had to swap into his suit and be at the meeting venue. He’d love to switch the suit for his jeans again but he had less than twenty minutes to ditch Nolan, finish the pack-down and make it to the car park, or he might as well go home and work on Ipseity. He didn’t feel like working tonight. He felt like shaking the severe out of the Princess to see if she was just as tense when she was naked and underneath him.

He wondered if she drank. God, he hoped so. He could do with a drink. Or two. It wasn’t only that weeks of work had gone to waste, it was why they had.

The shadow shock of the explosion still rang in his ears. He was having trouble processing it. It was like a scene out of a B-grade action flick: an enormous blast they’d felt in their feet, an unearthly quiet, and then the screaming and the sirens.

They said it was an underground gas main. Five killed, seven unaccounted for, scores hurt. According to the early news reports, the fire would wipe out a block of prime real estate before they got it under control. Half the city was cordoned off. It’d taken two hours for the cops to give the hotel the all clear to allow guests to move in and out. Two hours too late for the meeting to take place, too late to meet the takeover deal deadline. They were lucky they weren’t in the blast zone. It could’ve been so much worse. It could’ve been—yeah, best not to think about it. He needed to call Buster, and Jesus, he needed a drink.

The flashing red and blue lights of the emergency services team were still reflected in the hotel’s glass walls. The sirens had stopped but you could smell the smoke. It’d happened right in their change pocket, too close to grasp.

“Are you listening to me, Mason?”

It was an evolutionary miracle Nolan existed.

“Let it

go. She was upset about the meeting.” He didn’t know how much of Jacinta’s career was riding on the success of the takeover, but judging from the way the chairman and the rest of the board reacted, and the way Malcolm tore into her in public, Mace figured it was enough to make you feel like doing something stupid.

Something monumentally stupid—with him.

Nolan flapped an arm. “Do you think it’s safe out there? I mean, there’s no way the cops would let us leave if it wasn’t. Jeez, I still can’t believe how close we were.”

Mace snapped the lid shut on the last packing case. The useful thing about Nolan was he excelled at answering his own questions.

“Come for a drink, Mason.”

“Let me stow this gear.” He’d stow the gear for courier pick-up Monday, but he wouldn’t see Nolan again till he had to, and by the time he did, he’d have earned firefighter status of a whole new kind.

Or need a new job.

2: Girl on Fire

Jacinta leant on the hood of the roadster. She didn’t look up from her phone screen till Mace was in front of her. Without a word she pointed the fob at the car and the doors unlocked.

He lifted both hands; he needed the boot opened for somewhere to put his laptop and bag. She had the car started before he got in the passenger seat. It was a sweet ride, worth a hundred times what he had in the bank. And for that you got two seats, and not enough leg room for someone who scraped up against six two.

At the car park entrance, he got another look at the street. A kind of organised anarchy bathed in an orange glow, uniforms everywhere, police tape and barricades, foam, those flashing lights casting carnival colours. A cop in riot gear stopped them for no discernible reason then waved them on.