Any Way You Want Me (3 page)

They reached the exit and Yasmine sighed as she held the door open. “What is going on with you?”

“Am I a freak of nature?”

“I thought that was a long-established fact,” she said, but her smile softened the statement.

They walked out into the bustling sidewalk traffic outside the downtown mall and headed west toward the little upscale sex shop where Yasmine was sure to find any and every sexy gift imaginable. At the corner they stopped to wait for the light to change.

“I mean, aren’t women of a certain age supposed to, you know, start wanting to settle down and be normal and stuff?” Cass said.

“There’s no such thing as normal, and you’re way too young to be worried about settling down, anyway.”

Cass felt a stab of guilt for ever having lied to her own best friend about her age, but it was a lie she’d told years ago, when they’d first met, and she’d never quite gotten up the nerve to tell the truth until today. Anyway, it was sweet of Yasmine to still put her in the young category, even if it wasn’t true.

Still, Cass felt liberated by having told the truth. And honestly, she was a little surprised to realize she was fine with turning forty.

“I guess you’re right,” she said as they crossed the street.

A cold breeze blew between the tall buildings, and Cass wrapped her long red scarf a few times around her neck and buttoned her white wool coat. They picked up their pace, and in a matter of minutes were at the sex shop.

Inside, seventies dance tunes played over the speakers, and aisle after aisle of every sex toy, accessory and undergarment imaginable stood on display. Yasmine hesitated at the entrance. Cass grabbed Yasmine’s hand and tugged her toward the vibrator section.

Cass picked up a large, nubby hot-pink one from the top shelf and weighed it in her hand. “Might not be the greatest gift for a guy, but I, for one, would love to find this baby in my stocking.”

“I’m not buying you a sex toy for Christmas,” Yasmine said.

“And that’s the difference between you and me. I
would buy one for you,” Cass said as seriously as if she were offering to donate a vital organ.

“That’s touching.”

“No, honey, that’s vibrating.” She clicked the on button, and the toy in her hand hummed to life.

At practically the same moment, a new song came on, and suddenly Donna Summer was singing about her last dance of the night. Cass adored Donna Summer. In fact, it was pretty much a rule that no matter the time or place, if any of her songs came on, Cass felt compelled to launch into a full-fledged lip sync and dance routine.

Yasmine cast a wary look in her direction and started edging away toward the lingerie section. “You’re not going to—”

Too late. “To-
night,
” Cass belted out in time with the song, the vibrator held to her mouth like a microphone. Screw lip syncing. She knew this one by heart, so she could sing along for real.

She shimmied her hips to the music, dancing down the aisle, singing, the star of her own impromptu concert. This was the kind of craziness that had been missing from her life lately. This was what she needed to reclaim. It felt good…and right…and utterly silly.

Across the store from her now, Yasmine was trying hard to pretend they weren’t together, but deep down, Cass knew Yasmine was loving every minute of it. The laughter she was struggling with told the real story. In a different life, without that old shadow of her year in juvenile detention hanging over her, she might have been the one belting out Donna Summer tunes into a dildo right now, and that was one of the things Cass
loved about her. Yasmine had the heart of a wild child, even if she was living the life of an old lady.

Around Cass, other customers were taking notice. How could they not? Some smiled, some pretended she wasn’t there, and some bee-bopped a little themselves as they shopped. The clerk who was working the store knew Cass and therefore understood her performance wasn’t cause to call the cops.

As the song wound down and her routine came to an end, Cass replaced the vibrator on the shelf and went on shopping as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. Really, nothing had. She’d just gotten in touch with her true self, the side of her personality she loved most.

Yasmine was still across the store inspecting a rack of S & M apparel. But Cass was by herself and happy.

Happy, damn it. So what if she was happy? Could that ever really be a bad thing? So what if her boyfriend had dumped her and she’d had to pretend to not care about it?

She had her vibrator, her friends, her yearly trips to Cancun and her job, which she adored. Maybe there wasn’t even room in her life for a serious relationship, and maybe…maybe she needed to stop feeling guilty about that.

Maybe she needed to accept, finally, at the age of almost-forty, that she was happy in every sense of the word.

A
LEX FELT LIKE
losing his lunch. For months he’d been preparing for this night, and he couldn’t let a case of nerves blow his chance to gain Yasmine’s trust.

He sat on the couch with his laptop and stared at his notes on Yasmine’s case, the details of which had be
come as familiar to him as if they were events from his own life. But he needed to review them again to help himself remember why he was doing what he was doing. He had to keep his focus on her criminal record and off her more alluring attributes.

At the age of sixteen, going by the cybername Digital Diva, she’d broken into military computer databases and gotten caught, resulting in a one-year sentence in a juvenile detention center and a two-thousand-dollar fine.

For several years after her release, her Internet activities were under close watch by the FBI, but as she proved herself reformed, they’d backed off. As far as Alex could tell, she’d walked the straight and narrow path her entire adult life.

And while she’d stayed clean technically, during her senior year in college, she’d been targeted by the FBI as a possible member of a hacking ring known as The Underground that was suspected of being based at her university campus.

Alex had headed up the investigation of the group’s illegal Internet activities, which had started out as petty vandalism but had escalated to more serious system intrusion jobs over a two-year period.

He’d never found any solid evidence that Yasmine was involved, but several of his colleagues, including his partner, Ty, had been sure she was a suspect to watch, and so he’d kept her on his radar.

Just as he’d thought he was making headway in the case, all of his files had been stolen, the FBI network had been hacked into and disabled and messages had been sent to all the top FBI authorities saying, “Down with the feds. Stop sending your hounds to sniff us out.”

With his case against the hacker ring gone and headquarters in a huff, Alex had been the whipping boy. And when one of his co-workers reported comments he’d made about finding Yasmine attractive, his integrity had been called into question. He’d been accused of being lax in his investigation because of his attraction to her, and in the cloudy uncertainty of hindsight, he often feared the accusation could be true.

In the fallout, he couldn’t stop thinking about Yasmine, couldn’t stop wondering if he’d been right or wrong and couldn’t resist putting himself in a position to investigate her up close and personal.

The case was basically cold now—for him, anyway, since he didn’t have access to FBI files anymore. But his investigator’s instincts told him he’d missed something big, and he couldn’t go about his normal life in peace until he knew for sure what it was he’d missed. The case haunted him, or perhaps more accurately, Yasmine haunted him.

Now what? He glanced at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. Still fifteen minutes before she was due to arrive at his house. He was keyed up about his first real chance to get close to her, to possibly gain her confidence. The only complication was his all-too-real attraction to her.

He needed to keep his mind off her physical beauty and focused on the fact that she potentially had the moral conscience of a reptile. She’d cost the government thousands of dollars with her juvenile crimes alone, and she’d never shown the slightest remorse for her actions.

He scrolled down the page of notes to a photo of her imbedded in the document. Yasmine, at seventeen,
newly released from the detention center, caught on film by a local journalist. Her story had been plastered all over the news, mainly because she was young, brilliant, female and beautiful, as opposed to the typical gawky male hackers the public expected.

But one glance at her wide mouth, her soulful eyes, her satin skin, and his groin stirred. He was in a world of trouble if that’s the amount of self-control he could muster for her. An image of her strutting around the office in slim-fitting pants came to mind, and he got a full-on erection.

Maybe he needed to go into the bathroom and take care of himself before she arrived, make sure his self-control was intact for his first evening with her.

But then the doorbell rang. Alex scrambled to save and close his document, then shut the laptop and went to the door. A glance through the window confirmed that it was Yasmine.

He adjusted himself in his pants, willed the woody to disappear—no luck there—and opened the door.

He’d dressed earlier in his best black suit and tie, but had been surprised to discover that his jacket had gotten a little too tight from his recent haunting of the gym. So he’d been forced to settle for a black vest instead. In the land that invented California casual, he was pretty sure no one would give a damn.

Yasmine surveyed his appearance and smiled. He hoped like hell she hadn’t spotted the erection. His life had turned into a bad sitcom.

“Hey,” she said. “Sorry I’m a little early. I had good traffic karma.”

“Hey, yourself. You look great.” His gaze dropped
straight to her cleavage. She wore a crimson velvet dress that dipped in a low vee at her chest, exposing the lush upper halves of her breasts, surprisingly full for her small frame. Yeah, he was being crude by staring.

He surveyed the rest of her, from her narrow waist to her long, firm legs exposed below her knee-length skirt, then lower to her feet adorned by a pair of do-me high heels. When he met her gaze again, she looked amused rather than annoyed.

“Thanks,” she said. “Are you ready?”

Was he? If he could establish, at the very least, a friendship with Yasmine, eventually he could find out what he needed to know. But his body ached for a hell of a lot more than friendship.

“Yeah.” He took off out the door with her.

Outside, the night had grown cool, and the sounds of the Inner Sunset neighborhood where he’d lived for the past five years filled the air with a cacophonic music he’d learned to love. He’d moved to San Francisco from Virginia for his first FBI assignment, and now he never wanted to leave.

He crammed himself into the passenger seat of her red Volkswagen Cabriolet, and when she got in on the driver’s side, she looked at his knees pressed against the dashboard and laughed.

“Guess my ride wasn’t made for tall people.”

He tried to adjust his legs but couldn’t. “Most cars aren’t.”

“You can move the seat back with the levers on the side.”

A minute later he had enough leg room and had adjusted the seat until he was comfortable, or at least as
much as he could be in Yasmine’s presence. She drove like a woman with a serious case of road rage, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from insisting she pull over and let him take the wheel.

“You’re being awfully quiet,” she said, glancing at him at the same time she was tailgating a Toyota.

“You’re scaring me,” he said, grinning. “Anyone ever tell you that you drive like a lunatic?”

She laughed. “Um, yeah. I’ll try to restrain myself.”

So would he.

“So are you spending the holidays with your family?” she asked.

“Actually, no. My brother and parents rented a place in Hawaii, but I couldn’t get the time off to join them, since I’m the new guy in the office.”

She seemed about to say something, but didn’t.

“How about you?” he asked.

“My parents are the only family I have around here, and they took off on a trip last week, so I guess I’m spending the weekend solo.”

Alex’s body tensed slightly. Could he take advantage of this opportunity? He wouldn’t be acting exactly in the spirit of the season if he did whatever it took to find out the truth about Yasmine. His guilty conscience nagged him for all of a few seconds before he decided, screw it—if she was guilty, the time of year didn’t matter.

If tonight went the way he hoped it would, he’d have her confessing all the details of her life—criminal and otherwise—by the end of the weekend.

“So if you’re all alone, and I’m all alone…”

“Doesn’t seem right, does it?”

“We could keep each other company—maybe go out for a movie and Chinese food?” And maybe, if he played his cards right, something more.

“S
URE
,
WE COULD HANG OUT
tomorrow. That sounds like fun,” Yasmine said, and Alex heaved a silent sigh of relief.

One hurdle crossed, countless more to go.

Fifteen harrowing minutes later, they’d arrived miraculously unscathed at the downtown hotel where the party was being held. Alex loosened his death grip on the door handle and tossed Yasmine a look as the valet parking attendants came to open their doors.

“What?” she said as she checked her hair in the rearview mirror, Miss Innocent all of a sudden.

“I’m driving us home.”

She shrugged. “Okay, if you know how to drive a stick.”

“I know how to do all kinds of things,” he heard himself say. It was unplanned, stupid and tacky, but instead of slapping him, she looked him up and down.

“I’m looking forward to a demonstration,” she said, a smile playing on her lips, a note of flirtation in her tone, right before she got out of the car.

He walked with her through the lobby to the event room where the party was already well under way. Yasmine turned to him and smiled as they stood inside the entrance. “Looks like we’ll be the main topic for office gossip tonight.”

People he recognized and others he didn’t turned to stare at them.

Alex shrugged. “Glad to add a little interest to the evening.”

Christmas Eve was tomorrow and they had Monday off, so no one was scheduled to return to work until Tuesday. Not a chance anyone would forget in that short time, but whatever. He didn’t exactly give a damn.

Not giving a damn meant he could endure the winks and nudges of his male office mates, most of whom considered Yasmine to be the catch of all catches.

Being a programming genius and having a reputation as a former hacker only added to her mystique. In their eyes, bagging her would make him a god among programmers.

Yasmine slipped her hand into his and led him across the room to an empty table. “Hope you don’t mind if we sit alone,” she said.

“Want a drink?”

She nodded. “Champagne would be great.”

Alex made his way through the crowd to the bar, then returned to the table with the drinks and sat down next to her.

Yasmine took a sip of champagne, then said, “Tell me about yourself. How long have you been programming?”

“Too long. Probably since before you were out of diapers.”

She rolled her eyes. “Please. We’re the same age, aren’t we? How old are you?”

At thirty-five, he was nine years older than her, but he didn’t see any reason to point that out. “Thirty-one.”

That’s how old Kyle Kramer was, anyway.

“Oh. You
are
an older man then,” she said, grinning.

He raised his eyebrows. “Do I have to ask how old you are?”

But he knew. She was twenty-six as of July 15.

“I’m old enough,” she said, leaving the unspoken question “For what?” hanging in the air.

“I’ll bet.” Old enough to know better, but that had never stopped her from breaking the rules before. Alex found himself hoping she’d continue to be wild for at least one more night.

“Mind if we sit here?”

Alex looked up to see Drew Everton, sans Santa hat, and a woman who must have been his date standing on the other side of the table.

Much as Alex wanted to be alone with Yasmine, he couldn’t think of any polite reason to say no. “Sure, have a seat,” he said instead.

“Kyle, Yasmine, this is my friend Hannah Filarski,” Drew said as he pulled out a chair for her.

She sat down and beamed across the table at them. “Hi!” she said a little too loudly.

“Hi,” Alex said. “Where did you and Drew meet?”

He caught the wince Drew gave at that question as he sat down next to Hannah.

“We met through an online dating service. Drew’s my twentieth match so far.”

“Wow, that’s a lot of dating,” Yasmine said.

“I’m on a mission to find Mr. Right before the end of the year.” She glanced at her watch. “And I have exactly eight days, four hours and twenty-two minutes to find him.”

“She’s joking,” Drew said, then forced a laugh.

“No, I’m not.” Her wide smile took on a brittle quality. “I had my cards read at the beginning of the year, and they said I’d definitely find my one true love this year.”

Yasmine glanced at Alex, then quickly looked away, amusement twinkling in her eyes. “Maybe that just meant you’d
meet
him this year. But you might not realize he’s the one until months or years later.”

This apparently was not the answer Hannah was looking for. “No, I definitely have to know it’s him right away. Biological clock and all,” she said, as if Yasmine, at twenty-six, understood such things.

Alex, oddly enough, was beginning to understand the ticking of the clock. Not that he felt as if his time would run out at midnight on the thirty-first, but he did find himself wondering when and if he’d ever have the chance to test that all the equipment was working properly.

And Yasmine’s words kept echoing in his head.
You might not realize he’s the one until months or years later.
A nagging voice in his head wanted to know why Yasmine had lingered in his mind all these years. Why, of all the cases he’d worked on, of all the women he’d known, was she the one he couldn’t forget?

Was it possible that only now, nine years after she’d first laid eyes on him from across the witness stand, Yasmine might realize he was The One?

And where the hell had that idea come from? He knew whatever he started with her would be doomed, so there was no point in imagining a future. Women generally didn’t fall for the men who’d sent them to prison.

He’d managed to tune out the conversation that had been happening at the table. He started paying attention and found Drew still looking uncomfortable, and Han
nah discussing how she’d eliminated all her former matches through a careful and insane process of critiquing their shoes.

“So, let me get this straight,” Yasmine said. “You can sum up a guy by the shoes he chooses to wear on a first date?”

“Absolutely,” Hannah said.

“But what if your dream guy is on his way to the car to pick you up for your first date, wearing the right shoes, and he steps in a pile of dog crap, then goes back in and changes into the wrong pair of shoes?” Drew asked.

Hannah seemed caught off guard by the question, but after a few awkward moments she recovered and answered, “If he’s Mr. Right, then the second pair of shoes he chooses will also be the right shoes.”

Alex was beginning to wish Hannah would go off in search of a pile of dog crap instead of staying here to inflict any more of this conversation on him.

“So you must have already sized Drew up based on his footwear,” Yasmine said. “How does he fare by your shoe standards?”

“I never do the analysis while
on
the date,” Hannah said.

Of course not. That would be crazy.

“So when do you do it?”

“I simply take detailed mental notes during the date, and then afterward I write it all out and decide what his shoe choices mean for my destiny.”

“I personally think it’s what’s in the shoe that counts. I could never love a guy with bad feet,” Yasmine said, her tone teasing as she cast a glance down at Alex’s Bruno Magli’s.

“Ew, I hate feet! They’re just so gross.” This, from Hannah of the shoe-analysis method of dating.

“I think they’re sexy,” Yasmine said, then sipped her champagne. “Our company recently designed an interactive software program for foot fetishists.”

Hannah didn’t seem to know what to say to that. “So…you guys make sex software? What, exactly, does that mean?”

“Have you ever heard of the game Virtual Bimbo? It’s our bestselling product.”

“Virtual
Bimbo?
” Hannah looked horrified. “As a woman, don’t you find that offensive?”

“I actually think it’s hilarious. The game allows you to design your own bimbo, and then you take her out on the club scene and try to get her laid.”

The look of horror grew.

“It’s supposed to be funny,” Drew added.

“You win the game if she scores with the hottest guy in the club,” Yasmine said, seeming to enjoy Hannah’s discomfort, “and you lose if she has to go home with the weenie guy. The final video sequence shows her having sweaty, multiple-orgasm sex if it’s the hot guy, or boring rabbit sex with the weenie guy.”

“Oh my God, that’s awful.”

Drew made a throat-clearing sound and said, “So, Kyle, what did you do before you came to Virtual Active?”

Alex had rehearsed his answer a hundred times in his head, until he could spout it as if it were the truth. And it really wasn’t that far from the truth. “I worked as a programmer in Virginia for a while, then got burned out on that, came to California and started a survival training business.”

“Survival training,” Yasmine said. “You mean like living in the wild and killing your own food?”

“Those are a few of the skills I taught.” In truth, he’d spent summers in college teaching survival training in the mountains of Virginia, so it was a natural choice for his fake previous career.

“So that’s where you got the big muscles and the tan,” she said. “Certainly not from sitting at a computer all day.”

“Please don’t tell me you killed actual animals,” Hannah said, the color gone from her cheeks.

“We tried hunting teddy bears, but no one could bring themselves to eat the polyester stuffing.”

He didn’t see any point in getting into the whole issue of killing one’s food to eat. It wasn’t something he’d ever enjoyed doing—matter of fact, he’d hated it—but it was an essential element of survival in the wild.

Under the table, Yasmine’s foot nudged his, and she was trying hard not to smile.

Hannah pushed herself away from the table and stood. “I can’t sit here with someone who kills animals for sport.”

Drew looked at her without making a move to stand as well. “Um…would you like a ride home?”

“I’ll take a cab!” she said and walked away.

Drew sighed as he looked from Alex to Yasmine. “And that is the official end of my adventures in online dating.”

“So I guess her dream guy’s shoes would be made of cruelty-free materials,” Yasmine said.

“Sorry, man, I didn’t mean to open a can of worms,” Alex said.

“I’m sorry, too, but she had to go,” Yasmine said. “You can do a hundred times better than her.”

Drew made a face and shrugged, then downed his drink. “I knew it was a doomed date when she made a big fuss over my driving a car with a gas-powered engine. Apparently, she prefers guys who use electric.”

“I told you, I’ve already got the perfect woman for you. I just need to figure out a way to hook you up,” Yasmine said.

“Well, whatever. I think I’m going to grab some chow over there at the buffet,” Drew said as he stood up from the table.

Across the room, the band transitioned from playing holiday music Alex had been ignoring, to an up-tempo dance number, and people began to fill the dance floor. He craned his head to watch, unable to resist the spectacle of a bunch of techno-geeks dancing without rhythm.

“Want to dance?” Yasmine said.

“Um…” He didn’t especially, but he loved the idea of watching her dance. “Sure.”

A few seconds later that’s exactly what he was doing, and Yasmine’s moves were even hotter than he’d imagined. Mesmerized by the sway of her hips, he forgot about everyone else in the room.

They danced through one song, then another and another. Finally a slow song came on, and they moved close together.

Her hands slid up his chest, around his neck. Their first real physical contact. Her body pressed against him, moving to the slow beat of the music, coaxing him into an intimate dance with a promise of something more.

Where their bodies met, he burned.

He wanted her, no getting around it, no ignoring it for a second; his body wouldn’t let him. And as he grew hard against her, she couldn’t help but know it too.

Then she did something unexpected. She pressed her abdomen more firmly against him, against his erection, stoking his desire. Her gaze sparked with daring.

“I’ve got a thing for you, you know,” she said into his ear.

“You do?”

“And it has nothing to do with your feet.”

“I’ve got good feet, just so you know.”

She smiled. “I’ve been having trouble concentrating at work.”

“Because of me?”

She nodded, her eyes locked on his.

“I’d hate to affect your job performance.”

“Then I think we need to come up with a fix for this.”

The last shred of Alex’s will to resist disappeared. Whatever fix she proposed, he was all over it.

What the hell. Didn’t he deserve one night without self-control? He wanted Yasmine, she wanted him—what was the harm in giving in to their urges? If anything, it would help him get closer to her, right?

Right.

The music changed to an Elvis rendition of “White Christmas.” Alex took Yasmine’s hand and led her off the dance floor.

Who needed mistletoe and chestnuts roasting on an open fire? They’d started a fire of their own, and it was time to put it out.

As they passed a huge, twinkling Christmas tree at
the edge of the dance floor, she tugged him behind it and pinned him against the wall, where they were concealed from the crowd. Her hand grazed his thigh, then traveled across his pelvis, barely missing his cock. A smile played on her lips, and he knew she was teasing him.

“Am I being too forward?” she asked.

“I like a woman who knows what she wants.”

“So you’re getting my message loud and clear?”

“I think so,” he whispered as he traced his finger along the neckline of her dress, brushing the soft flesh of her breast as he did so.

“Let me spell it out for you,” she whispered. “I want you to take me home and have hot, nasty sex with me all night long.”

He went from half-mast to full in an instant. This didn’t feel like an investigation. It just felt right. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than Yasmine naked in his bed.

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“What about dinner? Aren’t you hungry?”