Page 190 of Protective Heroes

Red Hot Dirty Bosses

One

Abigail Torres tapped her pen on the mahogany table that took up half the small conference room, staring out over the Los Angeles skyline. From the sixteenth floor of the Re-Con Securities building the entire city spread out beneath her like a tapestry of multicolored patches pieced together by an interlocking grid of asphalt. Ripples of heat emitted off the top of the surrounding building made everything appear as if caught in the shimmering web of a mirage.

She bit back a nervous laugh. There was one thing about this morning that definitely wasn’t an illusion.

Abigail wet her lips and passed her thumb across the smooth glass surface of her cell phone and recalled the photos from her email earlier this morning. She’d been checking her work email while waiting for coffee and damn near choked on her first sip when provocative snapshots of herself splashed across the small screen. Intimate pictures of private moments at her home. Images no one could have or should have of her in their possession.

Cold chills worked the length of her spine and forced a shiver to ripple through her body. The idea of how those ill-gotten images were taken tightened her stomach with fear.

If someone saw those images her short time with Re-con Securities would end before she had a chance at digging her and her sister out of debt.

Abigail tried to swallow, her throat suddenly dry.

Several scenarios ran through her head at the reasons behind someone shooting those images, much less sending them to her work email. What if her bosses had opened the email before she could delete them?

Fear washed through her like a tidal wave at the thought. What if they had received a copy in their emails? No, couldn’t be she tried to reassure herself. They wouldn’t be sitting so calmly in their meeting.

No one had contacted her. Stranger yet, there had been no email to mark who the sender was. Anonymous or otherwise. How was that even possible?

Some blackmailing son of a bitch would sooner or later reach out. Right?

Her fingers flexed around the hard case of her phone. And when they did, what? What would she do? She had nothing anyone should want. Maybe she had a stalker. Some peeping tom that got their rocks off scaring the living hell out of women who lived alone.

Her sister never did like the idea of her living outside the city all alone. She, on the other hand, loved star gazing and skinny dipping in her lake behind her house. Something easily done when your closest neighbor was five miles down the road.

She mentally ticked off who said possible stalker could be. At the top sat her slimy ex-fiancé, but why condemn the man without proof? After so long would he still be angry with her for walking away? And if it wasn’t him? Who else could it be? Her life began and ended with her job. No going out for drinks or rowdy weekend parties or hookups to etch into her bedposts.

Sweat trickled the length of her spine and her foot danced in place beneath the table.

A deep masculine voice and a gentle hand on her right shoulder brought her out of her turmoil with a jolt. She swiveled in the office chair, and her attention flitted between the two sets of dark, inquisitive eyes locked on her. She stifled the urge to blurt everything out before they could question her, but a shot of common sense sent her misplaced need for comfort running for the hills. This was not their problem.

Heat flushed her cheeks. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sterling, Mr. Hunter. Did I miss something?”

She peered up into a set of dark, piercing eyes and read the answer as if he’d spoken the words.

Yeah, that was what she thought. She’d been so wrapped up in her thoughts, the entire meeting zipped by unnoticed.

When she first started working for them, she’d thought both men to be uncaring and as cold as their names suggested. She quickly learned the opposite. Nothing about these two former Marines was frigid. Quite the opposite, in fact. More like, warm, inviting, and accommodating to their new personal executive assistant.

Like now. Not an ounce of anger showed in their expressions.

Both Reece’s and Caden’s signature expressions were set firmly in place. Their lips quirked up in that half-grin, bad boy tilt that drove her wild. The amount of energy it took to keep that fact under lock and key during her eight hours, sometimes more, of working side by side with these tempting older men left her exhausted come closing time.

Not that they knew she found them both as tempting as sin on a Sunday though. They probably didn’t even have her on their radar.

She couldn’t prove it, but she bet every guy that signed on Uncle Sam’s dotted line received a handout on how to rock the intimidation with a side order of sexy. She tightened her hold on the pen she clutched a fraction more and steadied her bouncing knee. Reining in her thoughts, she turned a bit in her chair.

She might fantasize about having the two battle-hardened men at once, but reality really sucked when it shoved the truth in her face. What did she know about having two men? That little admission stung.

Reece, who stood with his hand still resting firmly on her shoulder, was the first of the two men to speak up. “Miss Torres, you might say you missed the entire day with how distracted you’ve been since keying in late this morning.” Reece released her shoulder and stood back, waiting.

His deep voice invited her to answer his unspoken question. Abigail didn’t miss the eagle sharp stare of her other employer from the head of the table either.

The fine print of her employment had been clear. They operated under a strict zero-tolerance policy. If she failed to complete her duties or misrepresented their company in any fashion, her contract with them would be terminated.

Abigail winced. Without her Re-con Security's job, her student loans alone would eat through the little savings she had put away within a couple of months. But if she was honest with herself, she’d feel worse about letting both men down. They’d stuck their necks out for her by hiring a woman with a freshly inked diploma and no experience out of so many applications. She loved her job, being part of a team and working to build one of the country’s most successful security companies.

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