Naughty Temptations

Chapter One

Chapter One

Lois McCubbin was doing her best to ignore the chatter of her best friend, Bree. Bree stood in the corner of Lois’s shoebox-size office at work, staring out the window over the miniscule parking lot to the road in front of Optimized Design, their current employer. Although maybe not their employer for much longer. Lois, the company bookkeeper, was absolutely sure there was something hinky going on in their accounts but didn’t have enough facts to pinpoint the problem. Or, possibly, she just didn’t know enough about accounting to see what was wrong.

But damn, it itched at the back of her mind. She knew—absolutely one hundred percent certain—that something wasn’t right with the company books.

Her parents had seen no reason to pay college fees for a girl. Or that was what she’d finally come to realize anyway. They’d spent years saving up for, and then paying off, her brother Don’s college fees. He was thirteen years older than her, and some of her earliest memories involved her begging and wheedling for some toy or game that “everyone else” had and being told she had to be good and go without it because the money was needed for Don’s college expenses.

Don had always seemed completely grown up to her, and the argument had inevitably made her feel as though she was somehow trying to steal from her older brother. By the time she was old enough to think about wanting to go to college herself, Don was married with a kid of his own. By then the story had changed to, “We couldn’t send Stacy to college so it’d be terribly unfair if we sent you.”

By the age of eighteen, Lois was old enough and smart enough to realize the argument was a load of bullshit, but she’d also known her parents would never change their minds. So she’d used her own savings from her vacation employment, gotten herself a part-time job, and gone to community college for two years to complete her bookkeeping course. Every now and then, like right now for example, she considered going back to school and upgrading to a degree, but she hadn’t done that yet.

Maybe she would, just to find out where the f*****g glitch was in these accounts!

“Oh my God. Someone’s going to be in so much trouble,” Bree squealed.

“What? Why?”

“He’s parked his SUV in Mr. Mallory’s parking space.”

“He’d better be a good customer then, or Mr. Mallory’s going to go bananas.” Lois looked up at Bree, but her friend was still peering out the window.

“There’re two of them.”

“Huh? Two of what? Two cars won’t fit into that parking space.”

“No. Two men. Getting out of the SUV. Two really good-looking men.”

Lois ignored Bree. She thought most men between the ages of eighteen and forty were good looking.

However, if the s**t was about to hit the fan, she needed to stop trying to solve an insoluble problem and get back to dealing with the invoices. Bree must have come to much the same conclusion because she slid out of the corner of Lois’s room and squeezed around Lois’s desk. “I’d better get back to work. I don’t want to be away from my desk when Mr. Mallory returns.”

“Thanks for dropping by, Bree.”

“My pleasure.”

Lois had finished the accounts receivable and was well along with accounts payable when a deep baritone she didn’t recognize said, “Ms. McCubbin, I presume?”

She jerked upright in her chair, automatically saying, “Yes, sir,” before her brain had time to process the extremely good-looking stranger in her doorway. Well, damn. Just this once Bree was right. He’s a mighty fine figure of a man.

“Come along, come along, this way. The board room is down here.” The testy voice of Mr. Mallory was followed by the clomp of his shoes on the hardwood floor and the disappearance of the tall, black-haired, blue-eyed man who’d been standing in her doorway. She still had no idea who he was or why he was here or even how he’d learned her name, but he was panty-drenchingly good-looking. Right now she longed to pinch her n*****s. Her breasts were aching, and that was from seeing him in her doorway for all of ten seconds.

Lois still stared at the doorway, but she was trying to count back to how long it had been since she last went out on a date. Possibly not since her sister Stacy’s thirty-fifth birthday more than a year ago. The party was in a classy restaurant, with dancing, and Lois had succumbed to the lure of the new security guard at the parking lot. He was a very handsome man, well-built with powerful muscles, and an excellent dancer as well. But he’d only been interested in one thing, and Lois didn’t jump into bed with anyone on a first date. Not that they made it to a second date after she refused to let him inside her apartment when they got home from Stacy’s party.

She gave herself a little shake. This man was likely just as dangerous. Besides, if he wasn’t a very good customer, she’d never see him again. Mr. Mallory wouldn’t take kindly to anyone parking in his reserved space out front. All the staff had to walk three blocks to the nearest parking lot, which was a hellish trek in the middle of an Ohio winter. Only the CEO, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Mallory were permitted to park in the tiny lot out in front of the building. The other parking spaces were strictly for customers, which was ridiculous because the CEO hadn’t been seen in the building in months, ever since he had a heart attack. Even before that, he seldom appeared more than once every two or three weeks.

Also, very few clients arrived here in person. In these days of cell phones, emails, and text messaging, hardly anyone conducted business one-on-one anymore, except possibly for sales staff. Optimized Design was a design company. Their work was almost completely computerized. But that didn’t make Mr. Mallory ease up on the rules for the staff, no matter how many inches of snow might have fallen.

She shook her head, trying to settle her scattered thoughts. Unfortunately, bright blue eyes and a square jawline kept intruding. Resolutely, Lois clicked on the next document needing her action.

*****

Drake Kelekona had felt the pull of attraction to Ms. McCubbin, the bookkeeper. The way her head had snapped up to look him in the face had sent her mass of black curls bouncing, and her deep chocolate-brown eyes had opened wide, all of which had woken his c**k to stretch and grow inside his suit pants. Unfortunately, someone at Optimized Design was creaming the profits off from the company and hiding them somewhere, and as the bookkeeper, chances were she was either doing it or complicit in its happening. That was a f*****g shame because he’d very much like to get to know her better. It’d been far too long since a woman had excited his blood instantly the way she’d done.

Poor old Frank Wilson had suffered a major heart attack four months ago, and his recovery was very slow and likely never to be one hundred percent. He was close to seventy and ought to have retired at sixty-five instead of trying to continue to manage a company that needed to be at the forefront of technological advances instead of stumbling along a year or more behind all the competition. The old man was beyond coping, which was why he’d agreed to sell to Drake and his brother, Dragun.

They owned and managed DDK Design, and DDK Design was at the forefront of new innovations, and they planned to keep it there.

The attorneys were sorting out the final details of the contract, but Drake, Dragun, and old Frank knew it was a done deal. Frank had begged them to resurrect the company, and Drake was happy to promise to do that. The first thing was to locate the criminal and retrieve the missing money, so Drake and Dragun, who were identical twins, had insisted the change of ownership be kept secret for now. Since Wilson was still too unwell to visit the office, that shouldn’t be a problem. Besides, the old man was still pretty much in denial. He refused to believe any of his “wonderful, wonderful team” would do anything to harm the company.

Creaming money off the top might not precisely be harming the company, but it sure as hell wasn’t helping it any.

Right now, Karl Mallory was doing a good job of driving Drake crazy with lack of information. It was time to put a stop to it. Drake stood up. “Karl, you’ve been talking steadily for ten minutes, and you haven’t even attempted to answer my questions.”

“My dear boy, of course I’m answering your questions. While poor Frank is so unwell, as the CFO, I’m effectively running this company, and even if I do say so myself, Optimized Design is coming along swimmingly. All our updates work perfectly, and I can give you a list of satisfied clients—”

“I’d be horrified if your updates weren’t working perfectly. You haven’t brought out a new one for over twelve months. The computer industry operates much faster than you might be aware, Mallory. Technology is considered to be completely out of date in three years. Updates are expected every few months, not once every year or more. You’ll be losing clients in a steady stream if you don’t get with the trends.”

“Nonsense. We at Optimized Design set the trends. We don’t follow them. We were the very first to meld CAD with—”

Ruthlessly Drake cut him off. He’d heard this line twice already. “That all happened ten years ago. Technology won’t wait that long nowadays. You don’t even have a company app, much less your updates on apps.”

“There’s no need to be rude, young man. I don’t understand why Frank sent you here. As it happens, one of our designers is working on a company app right now.”

Drake ignored the comment about his age. That just showed how out of touch Mallory was. Drake was thirty-five. In technological design terms, that was ancient. The bright young people of technology were designing apps in high school.

“Ah, please take me to meet this designer. That sounds like the kind of thing I need to learn about.”

“First, tell me why you’re here.”

“Frank asked me to come and check a few things for him,” Drake replied easily. It wasn’t completely correct, but it was close enough. He didn’t plan to say anything about taking the financial records home with him tonight until the moment he was about to leave. He didn’t need Mallory, if he was the criminal or working with the criminal, to have time to alter or hide any data. For now, Mallory could assume he was only interested in the product, not the finances.

Drake followed Karl Mallory down a second hallway, past several tiny offices, each with a person sitting at a desk working, and past a spacious empty conference room. Karl had taken him to a conference room when he’d arrived. It had huge picture windows out to the road in front of the building and an enormous mahogany table that would easily seat twenty people, all with luxurious matching armchairs.

This second conference room they past looked almost identical. He stopped at the open double doors. “What’s this room for?”

Karl looked at him as if he were a rather stupid child. “It’s a conference room.”

“I see that, but didn’t you take me to a conference room when I arrived?”

Mallory sighed. “I took you to the new conference room. It’s all wired up for Internet so we can display our work to our clients. This is the old conference room.”

“Why didn’t you just wire Internet into here?”

“It was much cheaper to convert a group of old offices into a new conference room.”

Drake didn’t see how that was possible, and he also wondered how the people kicked out of their offices had felt about it. Oh well, it was all water under the bridge now. Mallory was already walking on, so he hurried after him. Fortunately, his legs were a lot longer than the older man’s so it only took him a few paces to catch up to him.

Mallory pushed open a door at the end of the hallway. Drake stopped still at the threshold. He’d never seen such a crowded room in his entire life. Facing him was a wall of shelving piled high with boxes and tins and odd-shaped parcels. To his right was a desk shoved against the wall with two computers taking up almost all of the flat surface. Beside the desk, also against the side wall, was a second table covered with printers, scanners, and God only knew what else, surrounded by an open tool box and a teetering wall of computer manuals and other technical books.

Underneath the table were more boxes and containers of all shapes and sizes. Mallory had moved into the room, standing right in front of the desk, so Drake inched a little father inside and saw that behind the open door was a second desk with a man of about his age, standing upright, a shocked look on his face and his arms full of paper files.

“Rodney, tell Mr. Kelekona about the app you’re building for Optimized Design.”

Rodney swallowed, bobbed his head, seemed about to choke, swallowed again, and said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Mallory, sir,” before launching into a description of an extremely basic app that could be put on iPads and cell phones to enable them to look at some Optimized Design products.

“How close is this to production?” Drake asked.

The enthusiasm Rodney had shown faded out of his countenance. “The work is all done, sir, but Mr.—er, um—management hasn’t approved what items would be displayed on it.” Rodney turned and looked at Mallory, seemed about to say something, looked at the floor, and remained silent.

“What do you think should be on it?” asked Drake.

The question seemed to terrify Rodney and told Drake everything he needed to know about management. Any good ideas were being stomped on at the top, which was why the company was stagnating. Fortunately, that was easy to fix. He’d sack the dead wood at the top and let the workers loose to try out their new ideas.

“The silly boy seemed to think giving a free trial of our newest products was a good idea. No one will buy anything if we do that. Even giving free trials of our older products is a dangerous move,” said Mallory, shaking his head.

“Whereas all our new products come with a two-week free-trial period. Two weeks is long enough for customers to decide they like something and that they don’t want to go back to the old one,” said Drake coldly. He glanced from Mallory’s shaking head and frowning face to Rodney and was just in time to catch a gleam of hope in his gaze before he looked down at the floor again.

“Can I meet the rest of your design team?” Drake asked.

“Rodney’s all we have. We don’t need any more people. We had a girl as well, but the stupid female went and got herself pregnant. She was always feeling sick, wanting to work from home, that sort of thing. Rodney can handle everything we need, can’t you, Rodney?”

“Yes, sir.” Rodney’s voice was barely a whisper.

Drake was developing a positive dislike for Karl Mallory. Since the other designer had been willing to work from home, Mallory should have held on to her with both hands. Once she was feeling well again, she’d have been willing to work hard to catch up, and then when her child arrived, she could work from home part of the time on the development of new projects, which was what Optimized Design so badly needed. Mallory, or whoever had made the decision, had dropped the ball badly on that call.

He stepped back out of the overcrowded room. “Perhaps you can show me around the rest of the building now,” he suggested to Karl.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the tour simply reinforced his low opinion of the management of the company. Members of the staff were treated like dirt, as property that was easy to replace. Whereas studies conclusively showed that training new staff to a business’s preferred methods cost thousands of dollars and it was a much better business decision to cooperate and help staff adjust than to go looking for new members to join the team.

He peeked through the doorway of Ms. McCubbin’s poky little office and noticed her wearing a thick overcoat and fingerless mittens as she sat at her desk. He kept walking but frowned. Was she on her way out to lunch? Had she just returned from being outside? But why hadn’t she removed her outerwear before sitting at her desk? He was aware that the building wasn’t particularly warm, but then he and his brother were hot-blooded men, as most dragon shape-shifters were, so they seldom felt the cold even in winter.

Even though he’d passed her office, he once again felt a strong pull to the woman. She hadn’t looked up this time, so he’d only had the one quick view of her face and felt deprived that he hadn’t seen her again. Weird. He needed to keep his mind on task. Right now he was about to burst the happy little bubble of Mallory’s world.

He summoned his twin, Dragun, who’d been talking to the sales team out back while Drake had been with Mallory. Back in Mallory’s huge office, he declined to sit on the couches beside the glass-topped coffee table, preferring instead to remain standing near Karl’s desk while Dragun stood near the door. Drake pulled a flash drive out of his pocket and held it out to Mallory.

“And now, if you please, I’d like you to copy all the accounts for the past three years onto this flash drive for me.”

“What?”

“I’d like a copy of the financials for the past three years, thank you.”

“That’s impossible. I can’t do that.”

“You’re the chief financial officer, aren’t you? Why can’t you give me the data?”

“But that’s proprietary information. It’s confidential. The only person who can see it is the owner.”

“And the IRS and your auditor and tax agent. However, in this case, it’s the owner himself who has asked me to get a copy of absolutely everything, so if you’d please do that now?”

Drake firmed up his voice. If necessary, he’d call Frank to enforce his request, but he’d rather not. Mallory knew Wilson had arranged this visit.

Huffing and puffing, Karl stomped around his desk and sat behind his computer, took the flash drive from Drake, and began copying across files. Drake stood a little back from the desk but on an angle where he had a good view of what Mallory was doing. In particular, he tried to make a mental note of the files Mallory accessed. For the previous years he copied off files called “Completed Tax Paperwork” with the date, but for the latest information, he picked and chose between a range of files. All of that seemed reasonable to Drake, as the data wouldn’t have been fully compiled as yet.

The big question was whether or not it’d give him and Dragun enough information to find out where the company was losing money. He already had plenty of ideas about how to revitalize the company, starting with giving the workers some independence and better workspaces.

When Mallory’d finished, he handed over the flash drive and picked up the landline telephone on his desk.

“Lois, come and show our guests out please,” he ordered.

To Drake’s surprise, it was Ms. McCubbin who appeared at Mallory’s door, not wearing the coat anymore but with the mittens still in place.

“This way please, sirs,” she said softly, walking them down the hall and out through the entry foyer to the front door. When they reached the entry area, even Drake felt the blast of cold air coming from outside. Lois’s teeth were chattering, and her entire body shook with cold.

“Go back upstairs where it’s warmer. We’ll be fine now,” he said gently.

She gave him the most beautiful smile but remained at the door, watching as he and Dragun climbed into the SUV and pulled out of the parking lot. He stared back at the building, where he could see the outline of her figure still at the front door, and frowned at the empty parking lot. It wasn’t a big lot, but this wasn’t a big company. As he waited for a break in the traffic to exit onto the road, he did a quick count of the parking spaces. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, he couldn’t be sure. And now that he’d left, only one car was parked there, right next to where he’d stopped beside the front door to the company.

Since the space next to his was marked for the CEO, he supposed that was where Mallory had parked. The lot had been empty when they’d arrived a few minutes early for his appointment with Mallory. As he drove away, he counted up the number of staff he’d seen in the building. Maybe ten. Did they all come by public transportation? If not, where did they park? Was there a second parking lot out back for staff?

But what he really wanted to think about was Lois McCubbin. Damn, he sure wouldn’t mind warming her up in the most primeval way possible. He could just imagine her all hot and sweaty and satiated in bed with him and Dragun. There was nothing like two dragon shape-shifters to warm up an icy-cold woman and teach her about love.

Love? Didn’t he mean s*x? Besides, he had a business to sort out. That was his priority right now, not a sexy woman.

“How did your meeting with the sales staff go?” he asked his brother.