ything except a few days of sex before she went her own way again.
Except Ava wasn’t on the pill. If there was a baby, she wasn’t getting rid of me. Hell, even if there wasn’t a baby she wasn’t getting rid of me.
But first, I had to meet with Okada and do the job my partners expected me to do.
“Okay, nerd,” Ava said, tapping something on her phone. “Let’s test your knowledge. What is Kaito Okada’s birthplace?’
“Osaka,” I said, sipping my coffee. She was right—her coffee skills had improved. When she was nineteen, you took your life in your hands if you let Ava anywhere near a coffee maker.
“His first business?”
“Sushi restaurants in Tokyo train stations.”
“And then?”
This one I knew. “He invented a program for air traffic control systems. It speeds up the delivery of data and provides comparative analysis so air traffic controllers can make better on-the-spot decisions without their network slowing down. It’s fucking brilliant, and it was adopted by nearly every air traffic control system in the world. Okada programmed the entire thing himself, working on a single computer in a rented apartment. They estimate he made four hundred million dollars on it the first year.”
There was a pause, and Ava stared at me. She bit her bottom lip. “Okay, first of all I didn’t really understand that. Secondly, I think you like him more than you like me. And third, even though it was nerd-speak, that was kind of hot.”
I put my coffee cup down. “I don’t like him more than I like you. I just admire his programming skills.”
“And he admires yours.” Ava rolled her eyes. “So it’s going to be a nerd bromance. Great.”
“Next question.”
She looked at her phone. “Um, what’s the new thing Okada is working on?”
“No one knows,” I said. “It’s been kept so far under wraps, even my contacts can’t tell. And I know a lot of hackers. All I have are theories.”
Now she looked curious. “What do you think it is?”
I scrubbed a hand through my damp hair. “Well, Okada never does any press, but one of my contacts found out that Okada’s mother died of cancer a year ago. He wrote the aviation program after taking a flight that had to get rerouted because of an error, so he tends to invent things he has personal experience with. There was no coverage of his mother’s death at all, so it’s personal to him. I think whatever he’s doing next has something to do with cancer treatment.”
Ava blinked. “So you think your nerd brother might actually be working on curing cancer.”
I shrugged. “It’s just a theory.” I walked to the sofa and sat down next to her. I didn’t miss noticing how her gaze stuck to me like glue as I walked, since I was only wearing a towel. We’d had sex just this morning, and Ava already looked like a hungry woman being shown a steak.
She lifted her feet, making room for me as I sat down. “Okay,” she said, sitting up and putting down her phone. “If you’re going to meet the man curing cancer, you should definitely cut your hair.”
“No.”
She got on her knees and moved closer to me. Her gaze dropped to my chest, my shoulders, and she made it move back up to my face. “How can I convince you?”
“You can’t.”
“I can.” She swung a leg over and landed in my lap, her hands on my shoulders. “I can convince you of anything, Dane Scotland.” She leaned in close to my ear, so close I could smell the sweet scent of her skin. “I’m not wearing any underwear,” she whispered.
And just like that, my pulse sped up. This was the effect she had on me. I may be thirty-four, but in the past three days I’d outdone even my most vigorous sessions as a newly devirginized twenty-three-year-old. Apparently, it was all about motivation.
Ava lowered her ass—bare under the T-shirt—onto my thighs, rubbing her bare skin over the towel. Undoubtedly she could feel me getting hard under there, since by now she’d felt it enough times. “Cut your hair,” she said again. “I could call Tyrell and he’d take you if I begged him. He’s the best in town.”
“You like the long hair,” I said, putting my hands on her waist over the tee and running them over her curves. “Admit it. You think it’s sexy. You always put your hands in it when I fuck you.” I moved my hands to her belly. “Besides, you’re not going to beg anyone but me.”
“You’re an animal,” she said, and I knew she intended it to sound critical. Instead, she sounded turned on.
This was how it was with us: a few words and we were ready to go again. I moved my hands up and cupped her breasts over the tee, covering up the X-Men graphic. “Your turn for a quiz,” I said. “Name one of the X-Men. No looking and cheating.”
She tried to look annoyed, but it wasn’t working. Her eyes were going hazy with lust as I cupped her. Ava’s tits were her kryptonite—which was a coincidence, because they were also mine. “Um,” she said, the word coming out slowly and sounding like porn. “Claw-hand guy.”