Close To The Edge

I stared at the name, searched the corners of my mind and came up empty as the guy witnessed the document.

As she walked him to the door I allowed myself a second, more intimate look.

Hell, she was stunning.

No one deserved to be stalked, online or in real life, but fuck, looking at her, I understood why she could become an object of some psycho’s obsession.

The moment the thought crossed my mind, I froze, rejecting the idea of her being in danger, even while my cock stirred to life, excited by the magnificent vision crossing the room toward me.

She moved with understated but sexy awareness, a woman who acknowledged her considerable attributes but didn’t need to flaunt them. A woman who knew the power of those curvy hips, her plump lips and generous breasts.

Despite her combat boots adding a couple of inches to her height, she barely came up to my chest. Petite, perfectly proportioned, she was the epitome of a filthy, decadent Pocket Venus.

She probably weighed no more than a hundred and ten pounds. On a good day I bench-pressed twice her weight. My mind reeled with images of how she would feel in my arms.

Easily pinned against a wall, her naked, delicious weight trapped between my greedy hands.

Easily tied down to a bed with silk ropes if that was her thing, her skin flushed pink as she straddled the fine line between preorgasmic tension and a screaming climax.

Easily subdued and tossed into the back of a van by some unhinged asshole with entitlement issues.

I yanked myself away from lurid sexual scenarios and adjusted my stance to ease the constriction in my pants as the most gorgeous creature I’d seen in a long time stopped before me.

“Who was he?” I nodded at the door.

“He came with the house rental. I asked him to stick around to witness the document.”

“Okay, now that I’ve signed your document, let’s start again. I’m Caleb Steele. Fixer.”

She stared at the hand I held out. “Lily Gracen, chief coder for Sierra Donovan Media.”

Despite what was happening to her, she had more than a little sass. And if she was a coder, she had brains, too. A lethal combination on any given day. Packaged in that body, I got the strongest suspicion I was in for an exhilarating ride.

After several moments she took my hand.

The second I felt the warm sizzle of her flesh, experienced an extra shot of testosterone through my system and watched her eyes widen in mutual acknowledgment of the rush, I accepted my reality. Signed NDA or not, the unholy fire spreading through my bloodstream had only one destination.

I was going to cross a helluva lot of lines, all of which started and ended with one fact.

I was going to fuck Lily Angela Gracen.

CHAPTER TWO (#udea9900a-deea-5404-b610-7f92341bf7a4)

Caleb

WHOA. TAKE IT down a notch or six, cowboy.

Getting involved with Lily Gracen while she was my client had bad idea written all over it. I’d learned that lesson the hard way.

Which was why I broke my rules for no one.

A fixer’s first and last defense against failure was his neutrality. Starting out I’d disregarded that by getting involved with Kirsten. A young actress on the precarious rise, her cultivated vulnerability had slipped beneath my guard, triggered emotions she’d expertly manipulated to suit her purposes. Emotions that had turned me into a laughingstock and nearly tanked my reputation.

Never again were two words I abided by.

Already, my sexual attraction to Lily Gracen was getting in the way of that neutrality. And that bite of protectiveness the moment I saw her? That needed to go, as well. My task was to find her stalker without messy emotions getting in the way.

But...once that was done, there would be nothing stopping me from rewarding myself with a taste of her.

Yeah, I wasn’t perfect. At no point in my life did I try to be. You can’t go countless rounds in the boxing ring of life without emerging with a few scars both inside and out.

I’d dragged myself from the rougher parts of South Central LA and into the twenty-thousand square feet of a Malibu mansion via some seriously rocky terrain, experiencing every imaginable facet of human nature along the way.

It was the reason I now lived by three simple rules:

Protect the innocent and vulnerable at all cost. Always.

No sleeping with clients, no matter how tempting.

No sleeping with the fucking clients, no matter how fucking tempting.

The foundation of rule one would never waver. I feared for the foundation of rules two and three as I held on to Lily’s hand, drifted my thumb across one satin-smooth knuckle. She gratified my touch with a sharp catch of her breath.

God, I wanted to hear that sound louder, preferably preceding a scream as I buried my cock inside her sweet little pussy.

But first, I needed to get down to business.

She beat me to it by tugging her hand out of mine. “Shall we discuss the details?”

As she walked away, I caught the scent of her perfume—earthy, evocative of rain-soaked heather, the kind that invited you to roll around in when the sun came out. I wanted to follow that scent with my nose. And then with my hands and my mouth.

Down boy, I cautioned my cock when it jumped in agreement.

“Sure.”

She sat down at one end of the sofa, crossed her legs and waved me to the seat next to her. “Sit down, Mr. Steele.”

The take-charge attitude from such a diminutive person was an unexpected turn-on. I let her have the leeway. For now.

I sat, dragging my gaze from her shapely calves and thighs. “One thing you should know—I won’t be managed. If you want me to catch this...person, you’ll let me do my job.”

She stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “We’ll get to that in a moment.”

Again, I tried not to react like a horny teenager to the sound of her voice, but God, it was something else. Hell, from the top of those roughly chopped locks to the tips of her boots, she was something else.

“Is Steele really your last name?” she asked abruptly, her slender arms folded.

I raised an eyebrow. “Do you always go out dressed like that?” Okay, not how I’d wanted to start, but it was a pertinent question. I didn’t have a problem with the way any woman dressed, but some guys out there were sick enough to form vile opinions about women based on the way they dressed.