His hair was mussed.
“I’d love to, but you don’t have the time.” She finger-combed his hair. “We didn’t even have sex, but somehow you have after-sex hair.” Which just pissed her off more. It really sucked getting caught before they did the deed.
He let her straighten him up, then bent to press a quick kiss to her lips. “Be careful when you’re leaving here, Harm. The tabs think they’re onto a story. Someone at Dead Shot took a picture of you dancing on the table and another one of Heath punching the bartender. The world is getting an eyeful of football’s cutest couple acting out. Not only are the tabloids claiming that you’re Lyric, they’re all going on about how Heath and Lyric are meth addicts who frequent biker bars. One even suggested that you—Lyric—have turned to prostitution to pay for your drug habit.” Dalton sighed like the weight of the world was on his shoulders.
Oh, shit. Why hadn’t Heath or Lyric said anything? Ruining her reputation was one thing. Messing with Lyric’s was something else all together.
But worry wasn’t productive, so Harm did what she always did—went from concerned to pissed off in six seconds flat.
“Double standard much? You run an NFL football team not the Boy Scouts. Your players break more laws in an evening than Lyric and I do in a lifetime. But one small bar brawl makes headlines? Why don’t y’all tell them to fuck off and mind their own goddamn business?”
She was pissed as hell. How dare people judge her sister and make up lies about her? Screw Heath, she didn’t care what happened to him, but Lyric deserved better than that.
She smoothed out the wrinkles in her dress. “Let me talk to your boss. I’ll straighten things out.” By the time she was done with him, he’d regret ever meeting the Wright girls.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I like my job and Heath likes his.” He kissed her cheek. “I would like to finish what we started, though. Say, after we have dinner?”
“You can’t stop me from talking to your boss or the press.” She wasn’t backing down.
“What exactly would you tell them?” He nuzzled her ear.
“To fuck off and mind their own goddamn business.” Hello, that was enough … wasn’t it?
“Yeah, I’m still gonna have to go with no.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“Wanna bet?” He sucked on her earlobe.
“Stop that. I’m not about to be distracted from this.” Still, she tilted her head back and let him nuzzle at her throat a little. Just because it was calming and she needed a little bit of—
She froze as something cold clamped around her left wrist and tightened.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, pulling against the handcuff.
But Dalton tugged her forward and locked the other handcuff to a metal rail under the window behind his desk. “You need to cool off a little. You aren’t going to talk to the press or to my boss or to anyone right now. You’ve caused enough trouble.”
“Son of a bitch! You haven’t even seen how much trouble I can cause.” She grabbed for his jacket, but he stepped out of the way. She was going to scratch his eyes out. He could not do this to her. He could not. “Unlock these right now. This isn’t funny.”
He grinned. “It’s a little funny.”
Screw him, she had the key in her purse. She dove for it, but he was there a millisecond sooner. He snatched it up and set it on a chair well out of her reach.
“If you leave me locked in here, I swear I’ll scream so loud even the Dallas Cowboys will hear me.” She was going to kill him in some particularly horrible way. Maybe acid or boll weevils or flesh-eating bacteria. Whatever it was, it was going to be painful. She would make sure of it.
“Go right ahead. The walls are made of concrete. The only one who will hear you is you.” He blew her a kiss. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. By then you should have calmed down enough to face the world in a civil manner.”
Civil manner? Was he British? Who talked like that?
“You really think that’s how this is going to go down?” she demanded. “Because I promise, you’re going to pay for this … big time.” It was a wonder her teeth didn’t grind to dust, she was so pissed.
“I’m counting on it.” He raised the hand that she’d slid between her thighs not two minutes ago and licked his index and middle fingers. “Believe me, baby. I am so looking forward to you making me pay.”
“Don’t call me baby.”
He just blew her a kiss and then disappeared.
“Bastard. You no-good, rotten son of a bitch. Get back here and unlock me!”
She got no response at all. Not even Eleanor peeked her head in the door. Damn it, maybe this office really was soundproofed after all.
Just the thought sent her from seriously pissed off straight into a towering rage. She kicked the desk and jerked at the cuffs, even pounded on the window, and still no one came to her rescue.
She tossed his desk, looking for a letter opener or screwdriver or something she could use to get the damn cuffs off. In the movies, all you needed was a paper clip, but she couldn’t even find one of those. What kind of office was he running here?
Bastard. He’d better believe she was going to make him pay.
She sat down hard in his chair and tried to think through the fury.
Her eyes landed on his computer. It was a very powerful tool, and he’d left it in the hands of a sexually frustrated, angry-as-hell woman. That was his second mistake, right after locking her in these damn handcuffs to begin with.
At least now she knew how she was going to make him pay. He’d made a serious tactical mistake, and she was totally going to take advantage of it.
She hit the space bar and a screen popped up asking for his password. Of course he’d have it password protected. Bastard. So what were the chances he’d be one of the thirty percent of people who actually wrote down their password and left it on their desks? She didn’t think the odds were great, but she checked anyway. She started by looking around the monitor for a password written on a sticky note, then pulled out all of his drawers and dumped the contents on the floor.
She kind of hoped she’d find something kinky, but the only weird thing was the alarming amount of pencils he had. How could she possibly be thinking about having sex with a man who had that many pencils?
She forced herself to stop counting the things at sixty-five, and finally, written on a sticky note taped to the underside of the bottom left drawer, she found what looked like a password.
She typed it in and bam, she was in.
So much power … so much time alone. Clearly, Dalton wasn’t half as smart as he thought he was.
She could email the police and tell them that she was being held against her will, but that really wasn’t painful enough.
She pulled up his contacts and smiled. Starting with Hank Alfred, she cut his cell number and pasted it into Cory Almoni’s cell. For the next thirty minutes she played musical cell numbers so that when he linked his phone and his contacts updated, he’d try to call Marco Heinz and get Julie Jetter. There were three groups in his contacts, groundskeeping, support staff, and catering. Harmony pulled up his email and created a new message to groundskeeping, support staff, and catering. They were all getting a pay raise effective immediately of a thousand … no, five thousand dollars a year. Manual labor was hard work—they deserved every penny.
After pulling up his web browser, she signed him up for several prison dating websites, turned on the parental controls so that he could only surf the web from midnight to four thirty in the morning, and turned on Windows Narrator and set it to “echo user’s keystrokes” so it would read along as he typed. Then she took a screenshot of his desktop, hid his icons, and put the screenshot up so it looked like his desktop. And finally, she changed his password.
But that only took fifteen minutes, and once it was done, she was bored again. She was sifting through the pile of junk she’d dumped out onto the floor, contemp
lating what she could do to all those pencils to really make him hurt, and that was when she found the dime. Her eyes went to the screws holding the pole she was handcuffed to to the wall and then back to the dime. It was almost too easy.
Slowly, she used the dime to work the screws loose and popped them out. Then she slid the cuff off the pole and she was a free woman again. She grabbed the key off the chair where Dalton had left it and unlocked the cuffs, letting them fall onto his desktop. A parting gift for him. She should slash his tires, but he probably drove a Maserati, and she really liked Maseratis. Plus that poor car hadn’t done anything to her. The same couldn’t be said for its owner.
It was time for Dalton to learn his lesson the hard way—no one handcuffed her unless she wanted to be handcuffed. On her way out the door, she gathered up all those sharpened pencils and stabbed them—one after another—into last year’s Super Bowl winning football. Or at least that was what was engraved on the tag outside of the clear plastic box it was displayed in.
Dalton Mane deserved everything she’d done to him and more. She hoped he was man enough to come after her and get what was coming to him.
* * *
Chapter 11
* * *
Dalton threw open the double doors to his office expecting the worst. He and Heath had just had their asses chewed out by the team owner, and returning to find Harmony in his office might have taken the sting out. But of course, he was right. She wasn’t there. Not that he’d expected her to be. She wouldn’t be the woman he thought she was if she’d just sat idly by and waited for him to return.
But good God, what a mess she’d made.
He walked to his desk, shaking his head as he saw the disaster that was his floor. Then again, he figured he’d had it coming. Locking Harmony up had been a big risk, but one he hadn’t felt like he’d had a choice about. An angry Harmony was a liability. Having a coach involved in a bar fight really wasn’t that big of a deal, but if Harmony had burst into Dalton’s meeting with the team owner and Commissioner Goodell, things would have gone downhill in a big damn hurry.
Barry Lamont thought women were put on this earth to decorate it and should be seen but never heard, and, well, Dalton didn’t know Commissioner Goodell’s stance on women, but he was pretty sure that a pissed-off Harmony could have turned Gloria Steinem against her own kind.
He picked up the drawers and fit them back into his desk and then knelt down and scooped up all of the junk he’d collected over the years. He pulled the trash can over. Now was as good a time as any to spring-clean the hell out of his office.
An hour later, he couldn’t get Harmony out of his head. He didn’t feel the need to apologize to her so much as he just wanted to see what horrible things she had planned in retaliation. Besides the pencil-stabbed football, which—he wasn’t going to lie—hurt a lot.
Figuring the least he could do was send her a balloon bouquet—or maybe some high-end jewelry—he hit the space bar to bring his computer screen to life. Flowers seemed a little too cliché, and no baked goods on earth could compare to what Harmony whipped up with ease. But he wasn’t really sure where to look for biker chic in balloons or jewelry—he’d been too broke to afford either when he was a member of the Bastards, so he figured he’d mess around on the Internet, see what he could find.
When he clicked the icon for his web browser, it didn’t come up. So he clicked it again. And again. And again. Still nothing.
He clicked the icon for his monthly financial reports.
Nothing.
He clicked the icon for the team roster.
Nothing.
He clicked on the Apple icon to restart the computer, but no Apple menu dropped down.
What in the hell had Harmony done to his computer?
Pranks were one thing, but now she was messing with his job.
He grabbed his cell to call IT, but it was dead, so he grabbed the charging cable hooked to his computer and plugged in the phone. He hit the intercom button on his desk phone.
“Yes?” Eleanor answered.
“Can you have IT come up here? My computer isn’t working.” Shit. He’d known Harm was smart, but he hadn’t taken her for a computer genius. Maybe he should have, considering who her sister was.
“Absolutely. And thank you so much for that raise. I feel very appreciated, and so does the entire support staff. You’re very generous.” Eleanor sounded extraordinarily happy.
What raise?
“Yes, well, you deserve it.” He let go of the intercom button as his mind whirled with possibilities.
The entire support staff? Harmony had given a raise to the entire support staff? Jesus. Just how generous had she been? He banged his hand on the keyboard, but all he got was a headache. He reached for his phone, but it still wasn’t charged enough to check email. Damn it. Five-Alarm Harm had struck again.
An hour later, IT still hadn’t fixed his computer.
“No way,” Jess Carlyle, head IT tech, said under his breath. “Whoever did this is a diabolical genius.”
Yeah, Dalton had already figured that out. But he wasn’t feeling nearly as warm and fuzzy about it as Jess seemed to be. “What do you mean?”
“The reason you couldn’t click on the icons is because your desktop is a picture of your desktop. Your actual desktop is underneath it. See?” He hit escape and the picture minimized. “I’m going to restart your computer and it should go back to normal.” He hit a series of buttons and then the log-in box came up. “Enter your password.”
Dalton leaned forward to type it in. Instead of opening to the desktop, the screen flickered for a second before saying he’d entered the wrong password. He entered it again and still nothing. She’d reset his password too. He’d give her points for creativity—right after he turned her over his knee and spanked that luscious bottom of hers.
“Can you reset my password?”
“Sure.” Jess typed and a series of screens came up. He typed and typed. “Enter your new password.”
Dalton typed in a new password and made a mental note to add it to the password list in his phone as opposed to the sticky note under his desk. He had no doubt he’d do something to piss Harmony off again soon, and he was a man who learned from his mistakes.
“What in the holy hell is going on here?” Barry Lamont boomed from the doorway. He stabbed the air in front of him with his tablet. He touched the screen, pulled something up, and waved it like Dalton could see it from fifty feet away. “You gave everyone a raise?”
“Jess, can you please excuse us?” Dalton shoved his hands in his pockets and tried not to think of all of the ways he was going to kill Harmony.
“You bet.” The computer guy left his laptop on the desk and strolled out of the office. “I’ll just see if Eleanor has any of that pie left.”
Wait a minute. Harmony had brought his assistant a pie? All he’d gotten were chocolate chip cookies, and Harm had taken those with her before he’d even gotten one. Which, come to think of it, didn’t seem fair considering all the havoc she had wrought.
“A raise …?” Barry was a domineering control freak who liked to think that he ran the world. “Son, what were you thinkin’?”
“My computer was hacked and an email was sent out without my knowledge or consent.” He’d gotten and kept this job by not backing down. “I’ll fix it.”
He couldn’t exactly say that he’d handcuffed Lyric Montgomery’s evil twin in his office and it was payback. Especially not after the meeting they’d just had with the commissioner.
“You’d better, or start looking for a new job.” Barry stormed out just like he’d stormed in.
Dalton took a couple of deep breaths and pulled up his sent emails. Harm had given everyone except the players, coaches, and cheerleaders a five-thousand-dollar-a-year raise. He scrubbed his face with his hands. With a few keystrokes, she’d added six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to his annual budget. How exactly did he revoke an almost company-wide raise without
angering his employees?
Yes, he could send out another email explaining the situation, but people were funny about their money. They wouldn’t care that it had all been a joke.
What a big fuckin’ mess.
It looked like he’d be spending the rest of the afternoon finding a way to squeeze an additional six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars out of the budget—which was not at all what he’d had planned.
Then again, nothing had gone as he’d planned since Five-Alarm Harm had walked into his life. The woman was a force of nature, and trying to control her was proving was fruitless.
What surprised him the most was that he didn’t want to control her. Even after everything she’d done, he wanted to sit back and watch her in action.
* * *
Chapter 12
* * *
“I still don’t understand why didn’t you tell me about the tabloids running with the bar fight?” Harmony was having a hard time making eye contact with her twin because Lyric had her eyes trained on her laptop. When Lyric was working, the world around her stopped spinning.
It was high school all over again. Harmony raised hell and Lyric got blamed for it. What did a girl have to do to lose her good reputation?
“Because it’s stupid. Everyone is making a big deal out of nothing.”
Lyric was super smart, like genius smart. Because her brain was too busy solving the mysteries of the universe, she tended not to notice or care about things like pop culture, tabloids, and social interaction. Sometimes it was hard to impress upon her that other things besides astrophysics actually mattered.
“Are you sure?” Harm watched Lyric for any sign that her twin was taking fallout because of her. The last thing she wanted was to hurt Lyric in any way. They might be as different as two twins could be, but she would do anything for Lyric.
“Yes, I’m sure. It’s dumb and I don’t acknowledge dumb.”
It was a familiar refrain, one Lyric had been spouting ever since they were sophomores in high school and Brent Neuhaus had spread rumors that he’d slept with Lyric. It had made no sense to Lyric what the big deal was. She knew she hadn’t slept with him, so what did it matter what the rest of the world thought? She hadn’t realized what people were saying about her behind her back and what was getting back to Momma. But Harm had. She’d cornered Brent outside of the band hall and kneed him in the nuts hard enough to raise his voice three octaves.