Page 34 of Lukas

Chapter Thirteen

Reina wasn’t even so much astempted to wait for Lukas to come back. She had to get out of here.

First, she needed to finish the software patch. It would only take a couple more minutes, especially now that she knew where the server room was. As long as that guard didn’t check it again.

But more than that, she needed to be gone before Lukas returned. Everything they’d done tonight had been sexy and overwhelming. If he came back and continued on his quest for oral sex with her, it would ruin everything.

There was a reason they called her the Ice Queen, and her lack of response to oral sex had been the start of it. Everybody knew it was supposed to be the be all and end all of great sex. For her it had always just been uncomfortable and a little gross.

There would be no way Lukas could help but think of her as unresponsive if he came back and wanted to do that. Tied wide open to the bed would be even worse. He’d definitely know she wasn’t responding the way a woman should.

Her face burned with mortification at the thought. She hadn’t really cared when the rumors had flown about her in the past, but somehow the thought of Lukas confirming it—not that he would ever talk about her to others, but just the fact that he would know—made her cringe.

If she left now, he would remember her as passionate. How the things he did to her had turned her on. How she’d screamed and all but gushed all over him.

And she would definitely remember how he’d shouted her name as he came down her throat. She had made Lukas Rinaldi lose control with her mouth. God, that had felt good. Who would’ve thought she would feel the most powerful she’d ever felt while she was down on her knees?

That’s how she wanted them both to remember this night: driving each other crazy with passion.

Despite what he’d alluded to, she wasn’t foolish enough to think he’d really want more than one night with her. She’d known the Rinaldi brothers most of her life, and they’d never had a shortage of women around them, especially Lukas. Gorgeous, sophisticated, sexy women who probably regularly made men come with a shout.

Reina was well aware of her assets and strengths, but none of them involved the words gorgeous, sophisticated, or sexy. She was smart, thorough, and detail-oriented. And, tonight notwithstanding, conventional and, well, boring.

Getting out of here was for the best. She slipped into her clothes and peeked out the door. Once Brax was busy doing something behind the bar, she eased out and dropped into the shadows.

The great thing about a sex club was that it allowed plenty of low lighting for sneaking around in.

She kept her gaze down, praying she wouldn’t run into Margo or the guard. She walked as fast as she could without drawing attention to herself. Only after she reached the hallway closer to the less-used area of closets and offices did she slow down.

She picked the electronic lock again, not the most sophisticated to begin with because who would want to break into a server room? To most people it would just look like a bunch of large computer systems that couldn’t be accessed because there were no monitors or keyboards. Just some computer towers and a huge maze of cords of every different color.

Yes, someone who knew what they were doing could do harm here, but no one in their right minds would steal from the mob, unless they had a death wish.

Reina ignored the lurching in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t have any other option. This was the only way to prove what Peter was doing. She wasn’t taking enough that it was going to trip any of the firewalls the Rinaldis’s companies had in place. Then the money, little as it was, would be replaced.

She could do this, would be in and out again in a couple weeks. No one—particularly Lukas—would ever need to know she’d hacked into the system. She would have the information she needed to confront Peter and get him to step down from the company.

Then maybe she’d take over Torres Software herself. She hadn’t wanted to—her father had known that, which was why he hadn’t left the company to her to begin with—but maybe she’d revisit it. Growing her own company instead of constantly fixing problems for others... The thought was appealing.

It would mean living in New Orleans full time. That was a much more conflicting thought. This town’s heat was making her do crazy things. Like Lukas Rinaldi.

She couldn’t even process everything that had happened tonight, but she would when she was alone. She’d reason through all of it and why it had turned her on so damn much. And then she would move on.

She had a job to do. Lukas was at the center of that. She couldn’t afford to let him close any other way.

She finished up the software patch, double checking that she would get what she needed, then left the server room. She couldn’t go back up the service stairs she’d come through—that would take her right by Lukas’s office in Triple Threat—so she casually made her way to the front entrance. Fortunately, the man guarding the door was only watching for people coming in, not trying to exit.

Once she was finally upstairs and out the door, into the humid NOLA early fall air, she finally breathed a sigh of relief. A little bit more of the tension in her shoulders relaxed as she grabbed a cab and gave her address.

But it wasn’t until she made it all the way to her apartment, through the door, locking it behind her, that she truly felt safe. She’d gotten away without him catching her.

It was after midnight. She brushed her teeth, took out her contacts, and changed into the oversized shirt she slept in, resisting the urge to check out her butt in the mirror to see if it was still red from the flogger.

She got into bed, ignoring the aches on places in her body that had never done so before, resisting the urge to replay the past few hours in her mind.

The kinky ball was over, Cinderella. Time to go back to the boring old pumpkins.

She wanted to fall asleep, knew her body had been through enough that she shouldn’t have any problems falling asleep, but couldn’t. Which was why she heard her phone chirp softly signaling she had a text. She slipped on her glasses to read it.

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