Stormy Night Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

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  STORMY NIGHT

  Jade Stratton

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  STORMY NIGHT

  Copyright © 2016 by Jade Stratton

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  JadeStratton.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  The weather outside reflected Anne’s mood. Rain hammered down on the roof from the storm that was sweeping through the area, punctuated by flashes of lightning and peals of thunder. It had been pouring all day, and the weather channel didn’t give any encouraging news for the coming weekend.

  Not that I had any plans, she lamented. It was Friday evening after a twelve hour day at work and she was sitting at home, alone, watching the TV from the comfort of her bed, letting it lull her into a world that seemed better and more interesting than her own. She’d recently broken up with her boyfriend of almost a year to the day, finally coming to the realization that he was a complete jerk. Actually, being a manipulative, self-centered weasel had been one thing, but cheating on her was something else. Sure, they hadn’t been married, but Anne had made the mistake of assuming that Carl shared her view that their relationship was a monogamous one.

  “I never told you I wouldn’t see anyone else,” had been his lame response when she had confronted him with the pair of panties — not her own — that she’d found under their bed. Correction: her bed. It was her apartment, it was her furniture, and here Carl had been, fucking some other woman (and probably more than one over the year they’d been together) between the sheets that Anne had bought and paid for.

  Carl had made the mistake of thinking that he could just take her in his heavily muscled arms and give her his Hollywood smile to smooth things over. The smile had transformed into an “O” of surprise and pain when she rammed her knee into his crotch, sending him sprawling through the still open entry door right back out into the hallway before she slammed the door on his mewling protestations.

  Even now, nearly a month later, the memory brought a smile to her lips. Looking back on it, she had a hard time imagining why she’d dated Carl in the first place. Sure, he had been a complete hunk, which would have been a decent excuse for a one night stand or a short-term affair for the sex, for Carl had been good in bed. But beyond that, once you scratched his well-muscled skin, he was all about Carl. He had been living off of her, parasitizing her, and hadn’t even held a job for the six months.

  Forget him, she scolded herself. He’s gone. And now her bed and her life were empty of companionship. She sometimes wondered if being with a philandering jerk was better than being alone. Some of her friends counseled one way, some counseled another. All Anne knew was that she wasn’t happy, but she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Get a kitten and start down the road to being a cat lady.

  Pushing those thoughts aside, she sipped on a glass of wine and watched her usual shows, wishing she could be one of the glamorous, sexy women parading across the screen, doing interesting things with interesting people. Being in love and being loved.

  As the last of the shows ended, she paused for a moment to take stock. She admitted to herself that she knew some interesting people and, if push came to shove, would admit that she had been to some interesting places. But the bitter truth was that she didn’t have many real friends, people she felt comfortable going out with, and had no prospects for boyfriends among the men with whom she was acquainted. Not that they weren’t interested in her, of course: she was a buxom brunette with beautiful dark brown eyes and fair skin, with a 36D chest that never failed to catch attention wherever she went. But it seemed that all of the men who expressed interest in her fell into two camps: ones who were already married and were just looking for a fling, and ones in whom she wasn’t at all interested. There just didn’t seem to be anyone left who was in between.

  Groaning in frustration, wondering idly if she shouldn’t try a lesbian relationship just for something different, she got up and began to undress for bed. She normally slept naked, and in keeping with her nightly ritual, she sloughed off her remaining clothes – just a long T-shirt and thong panties – and dumped them on top of the pile of clothes in the corner of her bedroom. She wrinkled her nose in disgust: she didn’t consider herself a sloppy person, but she just didn’t have the motivation to keep the house clean all the time. It was just too depressing to face. I need to get a maid, she thought. You are a maid.

  Feeling tears well up in her eyes at that bitter thought, she crawled between the cold sheets (they were new; she had thrown away all the sheets Carl had ever touched) and turned off the light, hoping she’d have some wonderful dreams that would take her away forever.

  Instead, just as she was starting to fall asleep, the phone rang.

  “Fuck,” she cursed. The only number on her phone that she had set to ring after 10PM was work. Groping for her phone, she managed to knock her alarm clock off the nightstand. “Fuck!”

  At last, she grabbed the phone and hit the answer button. “Hello?” she growled.

  “Anne?” said a male voice on the other end. It took her a second to recognize it: it was Jack, one of the department’s computer dweebs.

  “What is it, Jack?” She threw back the covers and got out of bed.

  “Well,” Jack said, a little breathlessly, “Bob was here late and said I had to call you in.”

  Anne fought to rein in her temper as she turned on the light and began digging through the heap of clothes for some jeans. Don’t take it out on Jack, she told herself. It wasn’t his fault; he was just the messenger. Bob was the problem. He was one of the junior partners of the firm, and technically her boss. He wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, and was held in uniformly low esteem by everyone in the company who had a clue about how things were run. But he was unquestionably proactive: if he thought someone up the chain would look adversely upon his department, he started calling people in the middle of the night, usually starting with Anne. One of these days, Bob, she had promised herself more than once, I’m going to have your job and your corner office.

  “Who else is in?” Anne asked as she started to put on her thong.

  “Nobody, just me. I managed to get Bob to lay off calling in anyone else until you got here. It’s a problem with the Lanning account, I think the same issue that cropped up two weeks ago. You know, when you had me write a program to help you analyze the data.” He paused. “Anyway, I reminded him about that and convinced him to go home.”

  “Thanks, Jack,” she breathed. “I appreciate you doing that.” With Bob gone, she could actually get some work done without him breathing down her neck every five minutes. “Okay,” she said, forcing herself to relax a bit. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  “Sorry, Anne,” Jack said.

  “Well, it’s not like I was doing anything, anyway.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Anne got to the office she was in an even fouler mood than before. On the walk in from the parking lot, her umbrella had decided to give up the ghost, flipping inside out with a gust of wind, and then the keypad entry terminal at the building’s front door had refused to let her in. She’d had to wait a full five minutes in the pouring rain until a guard, who’d casually explained that he’d been on the pot, arrived to open the door for her. She was soaked to the skin, her hair plas
tered to her head and her T-shirt glued to her ample breasts, which the guard had taken his good old time ogling. She had wanted to stab him with the remains of her umbrella.

  “Jesus, Anne,” Jack said as she came in. “You’re soaked!”

  Feeling like a wet wolverine, she was opening her mouth to bite his head off when Jack shot up from his desk and headed toward the storage room before she could say a word. Momentarily puzzled, she decided to ignore him, but gave him credit for his instinct for self-preservation. She flung open the door to her office and sat down behind her desk with a squish on her expensive executive chair. Then she logged into her computer with angry keystrokes. What a fucking night. She decided that she would just have to kill Bob, just strangle the living shit out of him.

  She shivered as the screen came to life. The office was usually cold during the day when everyone was here. At night, the building manager didn’t turn down the air conditioning and it was like an icebox.

  “Here,” Jack said from behind her as he put a shipping blanket around her shoulders. It was scratchy, but clean. “It’s not much, but it should help a little.”

  Shocked, she turned from her work to look up at him. He stood there with an unsure, awkward expression on his face. Jack had always been the quiet guy in the office, the dedicated nerd with a wry sense of humor who fixed the computers, the brainiac who helped folks like Anne figure out problems that went beyond simple IT support. Anne had never really paid him much attention except when she needed something from him, and like most of the other folks in the office had generally taken him for granted.

  In this one tiny act of chivalry, getting her a blanket to help keep her warm, without her even asking, he’d shown her more consideration than any of the men she’d ever dated. She had expected him to say something idiotic about what a mess she was from the storm or ogle her breasts like the guard had, as if she were some piece of meat in a wet T-shirt contest.

  But he hadn’t. His eyes were on hers, not looking down at her chest and the nipples that were standing tall and proud from the chill. As she thought about Jack in that brief moment, she couldn’t recall a time when she’d caught him checking her out or mentally undressing her as every other man in the office had. Well, except for the few who happened to be gay.

  “Thank you, Jack,” she told him, her foul mood evaporating like a deflating balloon. She reached out and touched his hand. “That was very sweet of you.”

  Behind his glasses, Jack blinked. “Uh, you’re welcome,” he replied. “But you’re still going to freeze with all those wet clothes on.” Then he shifted his gaze over her shoulder, toward the computer screen.

  Turning around, Anne saw that all the data windows were gone and the screen was black except for a blinking error code. “Perfect,” she growled, the frustrations of the evening returning in a rush.

  “I know what’s wrong,” Jack reassured her. “The system update this afternoon was a total bug-fest. That’s why I’m here so late. I already patched your machine, but didn’t have time to finish before you got here. While I’m doing that, why don’t you go back to the storage room and see if you can do something with those clothes? I saw some packaged paint coveralls back there the contractors left behind from the redecorating last month.” He offered her a shy smile. “I know they’re not exactly your style, but they might fit you.”

  “Okay,” Anne said, getting up from her chair, which now was wet from her soaked jeans. “But you should find something to put on my seat so you don’t get…wet.”

  Jack had already jumped into her chair and was battering away at the computer keyboard.

  With a bemused smile, she shook her head and headed back to the storage room. She found the coveralls he’d mentioned, still in a plastic wrapper. She took them off the shelf, then paused. Through the doorway of the storage room, she had a direct view to her office and could see Jack, still madly typing away. She paused there for a moment to watch him, surprised by what she saw.

  While everyone considered Jack a nerd, as she looked at him now he didn’t really fit the nerd stereotype. Sure, he wore glasses, but they were nice looking, if not fancy; they certainly weren’t the dreaded “Birth Control Glasses” that some of his colleagues wore. His dark hair was clean and well-cut, combed back neatly from his forehead. His face, observed from the oblique angle she had from the storage room, was not at all unattractive: his eyes, she knew, were an intense blue-green; his nose perhaps a bit large, but it fit his features well; his lips, which moved now as he spoke to himself, were full but not pouty. They were lips that looked like they could kiss.

  Looking over his body, she saw that he wasn’t the gangling string bean that her memory seemed to recall. The muscles of his arms were well-proportioned and defined, not in the stringy fashion of men who didn’t exercise and ate very little, but of someone who ate well and worked out on a regular basis. He leaned back, stretching while waiting for her computer to do something, and she saw the faint outline of his abs through his shirt. He stood up, continuing his stretch, which looked like some sort of martial arts pose, with practiced grace. That gave her a good look at his legs, which were muscular but not bulky, and his nice, tight ass.

  Drawing the blanket closer around her shoulders, she wondered how this could be. How could he look so different now? Then she realized that he, like her, was only wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Normally at work he wore an ill-fitting suit that concealed his true appearance and gave a very deceptive impression to those around him. She idly wondered if it wasn’t an intentional ruse, sort of like Clark Kent wearing his silly glasses to disguise his true identity as Superman.

  The thought made her smile. She was seeing a different Jack now, and found she liked what she saw. She also thought back over their conversations. Never once had he been anything but kind toward her and, as far as she had ever seen, toward everyone else, as well. He had always been a genuinely nice guy, something that had been a terribly rare commodity in her life.

  She leaned against the doorframe and tightened her grip on the blanket over her shoulders. A shiver suddenly ran down her spine, but it wasn’t from the chill of her wet clothes.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jack was typing away at Anne’s terminal, biting his lip as he did so. He did that anyway when he was concentrating, but this computer problem didn’t require concentration.

  No, he was concentrating on trying not to concentrate on Anne. She was smart, attractive, and sexy, and no doubt had a line of men already waiting to be her boyfriend. I mean, he thought, what man wouldn’t want to be her boyfriend? He remembered the day that he’d fallen under her spell, precisely one week after he’d come to the office. The interface for the client account management software had undergone a major upgrade, and he’d had to work closely with everyone to bring them up to speed as quickly as possible. He remembered sitting beside Anne, going over the new features, breathing in her perfume as he leaned close to occasionally tap something into the keyboard. He had made her laugh, a sound he’d come to love to hear. Word around the proverbial office water cooler had it that she was unattached at that point, but he couldn’t even think of asking her out. He’d been every bit the stereotype of a pencil neck geek.

  But that had changed. He’d started working out at the gym every day and ditched the junk food diet, determined to make himself into the kind of man a woman like Anne might find attractive. That flame had flickered and almost died when he’d found out that she’d taken up with a new boyfriend, but the fire had rekindled after he’d learned from sparse bits of office gossip that her relationship with Carl wasn’t exactly ideal. Glancing down at his arms and chest, he couldn’t help but be proud of what he’d accomplished with his body. He’d even caught a few women checking him out in the bistro where he usually ate lunch with looks of unabashed interest.

  He didn’t want any other woman. He wanted Anne. But wanting her and building up the courage to approach her were two different things. In the two months since Anne had broken
up with Carl, Jack had vowed a thousand times to ask her out, and a thousand times he’d chickened out at the last minute, retreating to his cubicle in self-inflicted humiliation. When it came to computers and tech, he was a boss. When it came to women, especially someone like Anne, he was hopeless. He hadn’t exactly given up, but he didn’t know what to do to overcome his Chicken Syndrome.

  He sighed as he typed in the last of the commands to bring Anne’s computer back to life. “Okay,” he called, secretly relishing the feel of the water that had soaked through the seat of his jeans from where she’d been sitting, “it’s ready.”

  “Thanks, Jack,” Anne’s voice floated softly over his shoulder from very close by, startling him. He hadn’t heard her approach. He made to get out of her chair, but she motioned him down with one hand while her other hand held the blanket tight around her. It was obvious that she wasn’t wearing the coveralls he’d suggested she put on, for her legs were bare below the hem of the blanket. He couldn’t help but wonder just what she might be wearing. Or not wearing. The thought brought a rash of heat to the back of his neck.

  Pulling over a nearby chair, she curled up on the seat, tucking her legs under her. She hadn’t so much as glanced at her now functional computer. She was looking at him, a pensive expression on her face. She was so close that her bare knees were nearly touching his.

  He stared at her, taking in the still damp hair that was a tangled mess; the shape of her body under the blanket; the perfectly manicured fingernails of her hands; her face, washed clean of makeup by the rain. He could smell a trace of her perfume, along with her true scent, the smell of her skin. And her eyes, those deep pools of dark walnut that he could fall into forever, the eyes that now held his gaze prisoner. He was overcome by a sudden wave of vertigo. He tried to look away, but couldn’t.