Page 27 of Taming Achilles

My Pippa was lying to me. She was keeping secrets. And I hate secrets. I started hacking because I was tired of people not telling me what was going on. And like most things, it all started with that woman.

She was eating her croissant by picking off a tiny portion, then delicately placing it between her lips.

“Who were you talking to?” I pulled out the chair in front of her, and leaned forward, grabbing my coffee.

She continued to eat. After she swallowed her bite, she finally deigned to give me a bit of her attention.

“I was talking to Hugo,” she tried to look at me like I was some kind of eejit.

“In the washroom,” I enunciated. “Who were you talking to in the loo?”

“What?” She said her brows came together into an approximation of concern. “Are you feeling alright, Geordie?”

She didn’t answer my question. She was deflecting.

“Who were you talking to?” I said again.

She dropped her hands and stared at me, her face a mask of total indifference. “No one.”

Then she resumed eating.

Hugo looked between the two of us, observing but not commenting. He sipped his coffee with a wince each time. I had long suspected that Hugo was one of those supertasters, with a tongue that could pick out ingredients from a drop of soup. Coupled with his French snobbery, everything he ate was always a dreadful disappointment to him.

“You’re lying, love.” I told her. Not a question. A statement. I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat.

She rolled her eyes. She lightly pushed her croissant, on its paper bag towards Hugo.

“Would you like some?” she offered.

A kind gesture, of course, if you didn’t know her. She was offering a piece to Hugo, and not to me, to let me know the pecking order of her regard. She was letting me know that of the two men she was sitting with, she preferred him.

Challenge accepted. She’d be begging for me before the day was through.

Chapter 12

Pippa

“Hello?” My phone rang as soon as we got back to the penthouse. I knew this place belonged to Cal. I could tell. The old world furnishings looked so out of place in a city like Los Angeles. He was trying to bring a bit of his Scottish home out to this modern city, and his friends flitted freely in and out of it.

But what was Cal’s belonged to Caledonia Security. His partners were what passed as his family. Geordie was at home here, and he had made love to me in the middle of the living room, then on his bed.

No. Not made love. He had fucked me. Used me. And I had liked it. Every coerced whimper had made my body quake. I wanted him even now, in the middle of the afternoon.

I was glad for the buzzing of my phone, and the unknown Hollywood number that appeared. I didn’t want to look at Geordie. Couldn’t speak to him. Hell, I could barely breathe when he was near me. The lies were harder, because he was more observant now than he had been five years ago.

“Hello?” I answered as Geordie’s head popped up and looked at me, before he looked down at the screen of his phone.

I tried to suppress a smile, because I knew he had bugged my phone. I didn’t know when he did it, but every time I got a text, or even the random marketing call that was the plague of the era, he’d look at his own screen, instead of looking at mine.

Geordie may be a former Commander in the SAS, and an adroit little security specialist. But I was Pippa Briseis Fox, one of the best spies in His Majesty’s Secret Service. Roll over James Bond! Major George Campbell was no match for me.

“Is this THE Lady Fox?” A high-pitched, excited, masculine voice answered.

“Speaking.”

The man squealed and I had to pull the phone from my ear! Geo was across the room removing his tie, his thick forearm threatening to break the cuffs of his Kiton blouse.

I tried not to look at his expansive shoulders, so wide and strong. Stronger than what they had been five years ago.

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