Boss: Romantic Thriller Read online

  The attorneys fed him morsels of information. In his gut he knew there was a lot more. So he set his plans into motion. The meeting was scheduled Kovalevsky’s hot tempered son Yegor in the coldest place on earth.

  Tarek heard a door close somewhere in the suite and knew she’d gone to bed. Though it wasn’t night for them it felt as if it were. She would need her rest. And he needed his. Still part of him wanted her company. He pushed up from the bed and began to empty his pockets at the dresser. Tarek stared at his wallet. He picked it up, opened it, reached inside and found the small picture he kept tucked between two credit cards. A tattered old image taken many years ago.

  In it a young woman was in his arms. Her raven hair was blown into his face and she was doubled over with laughter. He kept her standing in time for the photographer to snap the image. A picture they took at a carnival in Crystal Beach. She was only nineteen. He was twenty-two. The first and only woman he’s ever loved. After all these years of hating her and himself he’d never parted with the picture. He rarely looked at it. But having it close kept a part of him he knew no longer existed. Tarek stared at her image. He rarely let himself remember her this way. Hating her was far stronger of an emotion. She was beautiful then, before her betrayal turned their lives into a living hell. He tucked the picture back into his wallet and then tossed it to the dresser. He glanced to the door and thought of the woman pretending to be Angela Brown. She was the reason he was thinking of Clarissa again. Women were deceptive, liars, and if a man wasn’t careful they could easily become his biggest weakness. He wasn’t sure what her real name was. His people were continuing to dig for that information. But he’d uncover the truth soon.

  Tarek sniffed the bait that night he opened his eyes and saw her sneaking around his room. It took him two weeks to decide what to do about it. He knew the only person dumb enough to try to use a woman to get next to him was his brother Dale. Just as he had with Clarissa, Dale tried to defeat him with his emotions. That was not a weakness his brother could leverage against him any longer. Clarissa’s death forever cured him of the savior role he once wanted to play. He was a predator now. And he put that woman and his own life in jeopardy by sending her to him.

  He didn’t know who she was, but soon he’d get the truth out of her. One way or the other.

  6.

  Kassidy heard a noise. A loud shatter of glass crashed against the wall or the floor. She sat upright in bed. She snatched the sheet back prepared to take flight if need be. The small digital clock next to her said it was three in the afternoon. She waited and listened. The noise never surfaced again. Kassidy eased out of bed and went over to the phone that was on the charger near the door. On the screen she saw several missed text messages:

  Daniel: Where are you in Alaska?

  Daniel: What job did he give you?

  Daniel: Call me ASAP!

  Daniel: Kassidy! Why Alaska? What’s going on!

  Daniel: I’m worried. Call me. Your phone is off?

  Daniel: Call me immediately.

  “Calm down,” she mumbled. She didn’t bother to text him back. Daniel never slept. If she started texting he would call and she was in no mood to hear once again how reckless and crazy her decisions were. Or how she needed to stay on the script he laid out for her. She was done with answering to him on this. She was the one in charge.

  There was another sound of glass breaking outside of her door. Kassidy plucked her thin sheer robe from her open suitcase and covered the camisole she wore that stopped just past the curve of her hips. She went to the door and opened it slowly. She peeked out. Tarek was on his knees with a towel. He mopped up dark liquid and picked glass from the towel to toss into the trashcan near him.

  “What happened?” she asked and left her room.

  “Go back to bed,” he mumbled.

  “Did you drop something?”

  “No. I threw it.”

  She glanced to the bar and then her gaze trailed along to the distance of the disaster. “Either you have terrible aim or you’re not a fan of Alaskan bourbon.”

  He looked up at her and frowned. She smiled. He shook his head and smiled. “Go back to bed, we have to get up in another two or three hours and leave. There won’t be much opportunity to sleep in the camps.”

  She watched him mop the spill with the second towel. She liked the way his muscles flexed in his arms and shoulders. He’d look even sexier if he had tattoos. She had two. One on her inner thigh that was the Mandarin Chinese symbol for the words ‘you only live once’. And a small lady bug behind her left ear. A man like Tarek Marshall would probably consider getting ink on his body beneath him.

  “What if I said I couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

  “I’d text you a bedtime story, how’s that?” he asked and tossed the soaked towel into the can next to him. When she didn’t respond he sat back on his haunches and stared up at her. Kassidy smiled. He was trying to stay away from her. She found that interesting. But considering what happened between them in her home, she sort of understood.

  She turned and went back into her room but she didn’t bother to close her door. She sat on the bed and waited. She expected him to weaken. Most men did. Tarek only thirsted for power. That’s why he tossed Clarissa aside and destroyed their lives. She was giving him the power. He’d taken the bait every other time. After an awkward wait he never appeared.

  Kassidy sighed and put her face in her hands. What was she doing? The doctors had a name for it when she was a kid. They called it addictive personality disorder. She called it anger, frustration, and a need to settle an old wrong that was done to her. Either way she was bored with the slowed pace of things between her and Tarek. And that spelled trouble.

  As a little girl she suffered severe trauma after witnessing the death of her entire family and nearly dying in a car fire. And that very same year she lost her childhood friend Clarissa. That’s when her problems started. When she changed. The nightmares, and terrors made sleeping hard. She lashed out at anyone who wanted to help her. She refused to eat. She could never sleep for more than an hour or so at a time. She even tried to hurt herself more than once. And she was only six.

  Clarissa’s parents took her off her aunt’s hands and adopted her. They didn’t change her name. The therapist said it was best she kept her identity. But she became their daughter. They’d lost their own daughter at the age of nineteen to suicide, and felt partly responsible for Kassidy’s suffering. They tried to get her help.

  She saw many doctors. Each of them studied her grief and pain to put a name to what troubled poor little Kassidy. And then finally a doctor pulled a diagnosis out of his ass like a magician performing a rabbit from a hat trick. She suffered with Addictive Personality Disorder, he proclaimed. Which typically affected drug users or alcoholics. But on the spectrum of this behavior disorder her affliction was different. The doctor associated her actions with what he called ‘pleasure risks’. The only time she could feel happy or even normal was after extreme behavior. Some people liked to binge eat food, some liked to gamble, or over indulged in video games and the internet. Kassidy loved to take risks. And the stakes just kept getting higher and higher.

  At first it started innocent enough with her needing an outlet for her anger. The best thing Jesus Garcia could come up with was extreme sporting events. So she enrolled in everything a young girl wouldn’t want to do. Sports like karate, motocross, rock climbing, competition skateboarding. Jesus Garcia always wanted a son, and his daughter Clarissa, who used to babysit Kassidy when they vacationed in Crystal Beach, never showed any interests. So whatever Kassidy wanted he signed on board for. He even hired an instructor to teach her how to surf some of the dangerous currents along Crystal Beach. But when she got older those sports were too easy, repetitive, mundane. And she abandoned them all.

  Kassidy needed something bigger to fill the void in her. And after puberty her developing body brought the attention of boys. She lost her virginity at fourteen. Tossed it away li
ke it was yesterday’s trash. And explored sex as if it were a first time drug. She soon learned that young boys could be controlled by sex. She didn’t swap partners. That wasn’t fun, that was stupid. What she wanted was the manipulative freedom to have complete control over the boy she selected. It was the complete surrender of his will to hers that she craved. Which was why most men found it hard to break up with her.

  But that thrill and chase fizzled fast. So she sought other pleasure risks, like shoplifting, or stealing the Garcia’s car to race it along the deserted resort roads with her friends in Crystal Beach. She was arrested twice for drag racing and once for disorderly conduct.

  The Garcias had finally had enough. They turned her over to the State. Kassidy avoided juvenile detention at sixteen by being placed into a reform program with do-gooders. Save the world kind of people. And they planned to start with earth and all its creatures. She’d passed out flyers, cleaned up the areas left trashed by tourists along the beach so no sea turtles or sea birds got caught up in the litter. She didn’t care for the plight of wildlife. What she liked was the drama that followed activism. The protests, the breaking into medical facilities she and her friends believed were doing illegal or legal drug testing on animals. And breaking into animal shelters to free the dogs, and cats who were scheduled to be euthanized. They even hit a mall once and stole fur coats to spray paint with tags of ‘animal killers’. If she had been caught she might have suffered even greater penalties. And that would have been fine with her. But she wasn’t caught. And that too bored her after a while.

  By the time she was seventeen she had a lover who was twenty-two. Andrew, was his name. Andrew knew how to write programming languages that cracked codes to everything. And he introduced her to the ‘dark web’. Kassidy met so many people with even darker urges than her. It scared her. Scared her real bad. And for a short time she stopped. She quit cold turkey and tried to clean up her act. But the urge to self-destruct was always there. So she hooked up with a pot dealing biker and became his golden calf. She had learned how to skim from ATM machines and credit card readers. She’d even developed little slider gadgets to be sold to the biker friends and family so they could be used at retail stores or fast food drive-through. It was a lucrative business and risky.

  Kassidy disappeared from the Garcias life completely. She submerged herself into the underworld. And with her IQ matched up with unimaginative criminals she navigated it expertly. But even that thrill dulled. Not the money, not the risks from her illegal activities, not the wild passionate nights of sex with men who were in bands or rode Harleys. Nothing silenced the memory of Clarissa or her family. She never forgot the reason they were dead—and the people responsible.

  The Marshalls were at fault. They were the responsible for her fucked up and broken life. So naturally her tastes for high-stake risks with a touch of vengeance lead her to Daniel who finally got her face to face again with Tarek Marshall.

  When he fought with her in her townhome she liked it. When he put the knife to his throat and dared her to cut him it made her heart race and body warm for him. And the sex left her tingling for hours afterwards. She was pushing it as far as she could go and she intended to push it even further. And now she had a new fear. What if taking down Tarek and the Marshalls wasn’t enough? What if this void in her was forever? For all her bullshit she’d never learned the reasons for the emptiness she carried inside. The reason for her fears. And Kassidy had plenty of fears. Sometimes she was paralyzed by them. Which was part of the thrill. She went further because she didn’t know how to stop. And that was something she would never be able to explain to Daniel.

  “Angela?”

  Kassidy lifted her face from her hands. Tarek stared at her. He leaned against the inside door frame with his arms crossed.

  “You still can’t sleep?”

  “No,” she said.

  He walked inside her room. He closed the bedroom door.

  “I can help.”

  Kassidy removed her robe. Tarek lowered his pants. He didn’t have on boxers underneath. She scooted back on the bed and he crawled over her just as she lifted her red silk camisole over her head and tossed it to the floor. She touched his face and brought his lips to hers. He forced her thighs to part with his own. He entered her after a single thrust of his hips. Another risk—bare cock. He didn’t use protection and she didn’t ask him too. She had just raised the stakes of the game. Tarek fucked her. He worked his body over hers and drove inches of his manhood deep and deeper. She moved her bottom and their pelvis bumps made each thrust even sweeter. She licked his tongue and he licked hers. They devoured instead of kissed. He pinned her hands down and began to fuck her harder and she only sighed with submission. Tarek lifted his face and stared into her eyes. He gave her a hard fuck, his dick jerking during blow after blow. She gave him an eye flutter in return. He groaned with passion and she knew his strength weakened. But as soon as she wanted to claim triumph and force him into a premature release his energy surged again. He rolled to his back and put her on top. She started to move.

  “My face, sit on my face,” he grunted at her and stopped her hip thrusts.

  “Yes, I want too.” Kassidy smiled that she would. He scooted down and she crawled over to his head. She dropped her pussy on his face and grabbed the headboard. Tarek’s tongue did things his cock could not. Kassidy capitulated into her quiver zone. The shocking jolt of pleasure from her pussy to her consciousness was more powerful and sudden than a frozen icee brain freeze. Tarek parted the cheeks of her buttocks and licked her core from one hole to the next. She was grinding and rubbing her pussy all over his face with his tongue lapping and her breath catching deep heaves and sudden releases before she came for him harder than she had ever before.

  He drew her down. His lips, chin and nose wet with her essence. “Now ride it,” he told her.

  She grabbed the root of his cock and guided it back to her opening. She eased down on him slow and steady. Tarek arched his back in response. She could see his head sink deeper into his pillow as his jaw went rigid with clenched tightness. Kassidy closed her eyes and moved in ways she knew enslaved men. Not for him. She did it for her. He felt that good. Tarek had little self-defense. He gripped her hips and squeezed painfully tight but she kept moving. She refused to give him a moment of release. He panted. She wheezed. He groaned. She sighed. She scored his chest with her nails and moved faster and faster. Before long he was trembling hard and she could feel the convulsions all through her channel. But the stubborn bastard wouldn’t come. She dropped on him and kissed his neck with her ass and pussy bouncing on his dick and the last of his strength snapped like an over taxed rubber-band. He locked his arms around her tight and held her hard to his chest as he exploded inside of her.

  Tarek rolled her to her back and kissed her face and mouth like a man in love. She kissed him back and the black void in her heart was temporarily filled with contentment. It was a needed rush to soothe her pain. Inexplicably Tarek Marshall had become the cure.

  Tarek moved off her and dropped over to his back. He deflated physically and emotionally. All of the fight in him was gone. Kassidy scooted in close. She put her arm around his waist and kissed his chest. He opened one eye and looked down at her. The act of tenderness wasn’t something he expected. But he clung to the feeling all the same.

  “What happened to the bottle?” she asked.

  “I told you. I threw it.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  He didn’t know why. He wanted a drink. And then he didn’t. And the next thing he knew the bottle went sailing across the room. It happened. Flashes of rage from nowhere that he’s never been able to control since he was a boy. He almost attempted to explain his torment but he held back. She’d either equate his irrational behavior with weakness or insanity. He didn’t want to be labeled as having either.

  Chapter 6

  Tarek had dressed and left the room before her. Men arrived to take their luggage soon after. She wo
rked tireless on her makeup. At some point during sex he’d given her a hickey. She wasn’t sure when but she made sure to cover it.

  “Ms. Brown, are you ready mam?”

  “Yes! Yes!” Kassidy grabbed her purse and her phone. Just as she lifted it from dresser, the cellphone rang. She answered.

  “Hello?”

  “What the hell is going on! Tell me you aren’t in Alaska?” Daniel said.

  “I’m in Alaska,” she laughed.

  “Are you fucking insane!” he yelled in the phone. He was so loud the man in the elevator looked over at her.

  “Stop yelling at me or I’ll hang up.”

  “Listen to me. Get out of there. Come back to Texas. Make up an excuse. Tell him that you have a family emergency. We stick to my fucking plan Kassidy! Mine!”

  “What? Why?” Kassidy asked.

  “He’s meeting with a dangerous man. His name is Yegor Kovalevksy. I don’t want any parts of that shit.”

  “How does that affect you? So what he’s having a meeting? He already told me.”

  “Everything you do is connected to me. Don’t forget that! Yegor is the son of a ruthless tyrant whose part of the Brotherhood. The Russian Mafia. I saw an email between Tarek and this man. We’ve hacked into his phone when you went missing. I’ve read his texts. These people are legit bad ass. And I don’t know what the fuck the Marshalls want with them but you need to stay clear of it. Do you hear me? Get out of Alaska!”

  The elevator doors opened. Tarek turned and looked at her.

  “Kassidy! You there?”

  “I’ll call you when I have something, it’s too late to turn back now.” She ended the call. Tarek observed her as she put the phone in her purse.