Indecent secrets, p.1
Indecent Secrets, page 1
Indecent Secrets
Erika Wilde
Copyright © Erika Wilde, May 2023
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eBook Cover design: Maria at Steamy Designs
Cover Photo by Wander Aguiar with Wander Photography
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the Author.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
Indecent Secrets
Bryce Rivers is gorgeous, arrogant, and nothing like I anticipated. That’s okay, because I’m not going to be what he expected, either.
* * *
Seducing him should have been a piece of cake, until I discover he’s hiding a few indecent secrets of his own.
* * *
Secretly infiltrating myself into this land development company wasn’t about the money, it was about making a difference. When I heard that the head of the organization had died and his nephew had inherited the entire corporation, I thought I finally stood a chance to persuade him to my way of thinking.
* * *
The new guy wasn’t at all what I’d expected. For a reported “recluse”, he was surprisingly charming, intelligent, and had a rapier wit that matched my own. Our attraction was mutual and scorching hot, which made it incredibly easy to seduce my way into his life and hopefully use that influence to steer him to make changes.
* * *
The man knew how to set my sheets on fire, but he wasn’t easily swayed. This might have started out as something impersonal between us, but the more I got to know him, the harder I fell for him, which wasn’t the plan.
* * *
I could only hope that once I made my true motives known that I wouldn’t end up destroying something more valuable—us.
* * *
And then I discovered that I wasn’t the only one hiding secrets . . .
Chapter 1
Bryce
* * *
This was going to be my most interesting case yet.
Unlike certain anti-social cranky-pusses who were my beloved friends but could still do with a spa day or something more relaxing—naming no names here, Vaughn—I liked the cases we received that involved a human touch.
Most of our security stuff at Elite Protection and Consulting—EPC for short—was divided into four categories: the kind where you needed brawn, the kind where you needed a good security system, the kind where you needed someone eliminated, or the kind where you needed a human-to-human investigation.
The last one was the kind of case that I liked to take on. I wasn’t much into tech like Seth—our computer guru and partner—although I appreciated it. I could handle myself in a fight as well as any of us, but what I really liked was getting into people’s heads. I liked to see how I could manipulate them into giving up the secrets that they held so dearly. It was why I loved to seduce women, to watch them slowly crumble until they were putty in my hands, and mine to mold as I pleased.
Unfortunately, most of these cases I actually just ended up questioning people and feeling like a bored cop, which was annoying.
This current mission I’d been assigned, however, wasn’t going to be boring. In fact, it might end up being a lot of fun, I thought, as I read through the file and gathered all the information I could.
Jack Lawton was a recent multi-millionaire. Not through some startup or through social media popularity, but the old-fashioned, generational wealth way: he had a rich relative who’d died and left everything to him.
The Lawton family had been in the land development business for a couple of generations but the last guy in the business and his sister had some kind of major falling out. So, she’d left the company, married some dentist, and they hadn’t spoken much in the years since. Both she and her husband had died in the past few years, one from cancer and one from a stroke.
However, despite the sibling rivalry, her brother—also very recent deceased—hadn’t wanted the family business to go purely to the shareholders when he’d passed. He’d never married (although rumors had persisted for years about his young attractive male secretaries) and never had kids, so he’d left his entire fortune and majority stock in the company to Jack, his nephew, the only son of his dearly departed sister.
I was pretty sure this whole newly-rich thing was a bit of a shock to the poor guy. He was a recluse, an academic at some tiny liberal arts college in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, the kind of place where they set books like The Secret History.
The guy didn’t even have a picture of himself on the college’s website. That was the kind of hermit he was.
Jack Lawton liked his privacy and he liked living alone to do his birdwatching and write his papers on philosophy. When I had done some chatting with his colleagues in order to get an idea of the man, I’d been informed that since he’d received tenure he would spend most of his time sitting in his office staring out the window, making the university board tear their hair out.
Of course, apparently the guy also liked to write a book every five years that blew everyone’s balls off with its brilliance so hey, his staring outside the window was earned, I guess.
But this introverted guy was really not suited for a life running a massive company. Or being a society darling, attending the various functions that would now be expected of him. He didn’t want to live a public life. And he really, really didn’t want to deal with the hangers-on that would now be crowding around him to try and get money out of him.
It was perfectly understandable if you asked me. I had worked with the rich for long enough to know that those businessmen could be more ruthless than any shark in the ocean. They’d sense that Jack was new to this world and they’d bleed him dry if they could.
But until such time as Jack Lawton could figure out how to possibly get the company off his hands and return to his life of solitude and contemplation, he needed to make public appearances. He needed to act the role of the heir and make business decisions.
That was where I came in.
I was used to schmoozing people to give me information. I liked puzzles that involved my brain. So while Jack Lawton was snug in his home in the middle of nowhere, I’d been hired by him to do reconnaissance—pretending to be him and getting the information he needed to figure out who among the board members and others might be suitable to take over the company.
The man was a philosophy professor. He didn’t want to hand it over to just anyone. I supposed I was lucky he wasn’t also a damn ethics and morality professor or we’d probably spend forever debating who was the least evil of his uncle’s cronies. He wanted the person at the helm to be someone who’d handle the company responsibly so that Jack wouldn’t feel like shit for destroying his uncle’s memory, and I was the perfect man for the job.
Unlike the real Jack Lawton, I could be charming and sociable. I could slowly pick apart everybody’s needs and goals, see if anyone had a skeleton in their closet, and get rid of all the hangers-on and conmen. I’d deal with all of it, let Jack be in peace, and then we could settle who would take over from him based on the information I gleaned.
Easy-peasy.
But fun.
I had never impersonated someone before. Yes, nobody knew what Jack Lawton looked like. But I had to know things about my ‘uncle’ and the family, the fallout, all of that. I had to make sure that I didn’t give anyone a reason to suspect I was an imposter, or both Jack and I would be in massive trouble.
There was also the small matter of the senior Lawton’s death.
Jack suspected—and I was inclined to agree—that the death of his uncle Byron hadn’t been… natural. Nobody had known that he would want to keep things in the family and would pass it all on to his reclusive nephew. Most people, or so the grapevine went, had assumed he’d leave it to his latest secretary or someone on the board of directors.
Now I had to keep a look out for a possible murderer as well, someone who would try to get in good with Jack and then kill him. Jack’s uncle Byron might be rumored to enjoy men, but that didn’t mean that one of his secretaries or board members or anyone else might not deploy a good-looking woman as an accomplice to help them in taking Jack down. And that was on top of the usual parasites.
This was going to be interesting for sure, and I couldn’t wait.
“You’re unusually excited about this case,” one of my partners, Vaughn, noted as I checked myself out in front of the mirror.
&nbs p; “You only get one chance at a first impression,” I noted.
Although how Vaughn managed to snag his girl despite one of the worst possible first impressions ever, I would never know.
Vaughn wrinkled his nose. “You’re wearing baby blue.”
I smirked at him. “Not all of us get by on plaid alone.”
I looked pretty damn good in a baby blue suit, if I did say so myself. I had only one chance to make an impression, it was true—but especially just one to make an impression of who Jack Lawton was.
I needed people to think that Jack was high on his newfound wealth and being a bit of what in Victorian times they’d call a ‘dandy’. The kind where you were excited to show off yourself and your wealth, pushing the boundaries of fashion a bit. I needed people to underestimate Jack—and show their hand.
“I do not wear just plaid,” Vaughn pointed out.
“You’re right, that leather jacket of yours gets a lot of use, too.”
Vaughn flipped me off. “I’m going to dinner.”
“With Claire?” I drew out the name because I couldn’t resist teasing him. Claire was the first woman Vaughn had ever wanted to have a proper relationship with. I had to give him shit over it.
“Fuck off,” Vaughn snapped at me, which was a yes.
I let him leave, then double-checked all of my equipment. I had a small recording device in one of the buttons of my jacket to film whoever I spoke to, so that I could replay everything from the evening later in my hotel room and make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I’d rented out this room at one of the fanciest hotels in the city and was planning to drop my need for a swanky penthouse at the party tonight so that I could get recommendations for people’s realtors (everything was done through referrals, through friends of friends, in this world). But the reason I’d done it was so that I could set up a base of operations here that wasn’t suspicious.
I looked good, and there was no reason for me to delay now that Vaughn had dropped off my equipment. It was time to rock n’ roll.
Chapter 2
Leigh
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You knew you were desperate when you were ready to stop holding protests and calling politicians and instead adopt a honeypot scheme. Desperate I might have been, but I wasn’t going to let it be the end of me. I knew I could pull this off if I was careful and smart enough.
I’d used sex appeal plenty of times before when persuading people to my side of the cause, whatever it might be, and it had worked like a charm. It was amazing how quickly men fell all over themselves when they saw me in a low-cut top, staring at my breasts as I breathily asked them to please, please consider supporting…
My ability to seduce someone to sign whatever petition I wanted or pledge votes or money? That was one thing. But would it be able to stand the test of time to fully seduce someone into persuading them to dismantle their entire company?
I was going to find out.
Lawton Industries had been utterly destroying the natural forests in the area. They tried to claim they brought jobs, but that was a big fat lie. They did nothing but strip the land and destroy local businesses, only to redevelop the land out of pure greed. My work was with a grassroots organization that helped local businesses thrive in harmony with the environment. But the Lawton company liked to think we were still back in the days when coal companies owned entire towns and there was no such thing as a union.
Now, with old man Lawton out of the way and some greenhorn nephew taking his place, I had my chance to finally make a difference.
I had thrown together a fake backstory and identity using some contacts I had. Nothing crazy, but when you worked in environmentalism helping people go up against massive companies, you tended to make friends with some people on the other side of the law. I was now poised to infiltrate a welcoming party for the nephew inheriting everything his uncle had left behind: Jack Lawton.
Young and absurdly rich, I knew that a lot of women would be making a play for him. But I would stand out. I’d find a way to make him like me best and then I’d influence him to mismanage his own company into destruction. The man was a professor of philosophy, for crying out loud, at some obscure university that nobody had ever heard about. There was no way he knew anything about business.
He'd listen to me while staring at my tits just like every other man, and I’d have him eating out of the palm of my hand. Unconventional warfare? Yes. But as they said—all’s fair.
I dressed in my absolute best, then hurried to the party. It was being held at the mansion of one of the shareholders in the company, and they would be checking names at the door. Luckily, I’d gotten in touch with a friend who worked for a public relations company, and they’d added me to the list as one of the ‘fillers’.
Fillers were people, usually attractive women, who were paid to go to parties and fill them up. You usually saw them at Silicon Valley parties and other places that were going to have a lot of men but not many women. You’d be paid for your time, and there would be more of a male/female balance amongst the guests.
There weren’t a ton of fillers purchased for this party. There was no need for models or social media influencers here. But a few pretty women to spice up the party were always welcome, and so I’d been scooted onto the list.
The mansion was just that: a mansion. I felt like I couldn’t even afford to breathe in this kind of wealthy neighborhood. The driveway was wide and sweeping, big enough for three cars to park side by side, and the gardens that surrounded it—mostly lawn but with some rose beds and a fountain—were bigger than most houses I’d seen.
Light poured out of every one of the large glass windows, three stories high, with a sweeping front set of steps and double set of front doors through which a curling staircase and marble floor making up a foyer could be seen.
This was definitely way above my environmentalist paygrade. And I’d have to act like I actually belonged in this world. Christ.
I made my way up the driveway in my heels. I’d had my rideshare drop me off down the street so that I wouldn’t look suspicious—everyone else had either brought their own car or had a driver with a personal vehicle they used regularly. When I arrived at the front steps, a man in a suit holding an iPad checked my name at the door, then let me in.
Time to find this illustrious Jack Lawton. Not a simple task when the man had no social media presence whatsoever, and no photos of himself online to easily identify him.
Through the foyer you could enter into a large room with furniture to make it a living room, but the other room beyond it also looked like a living room. Rich people and their need for excess, I thought, rolling my eyes. But the place was packed to the gills and I made my way through carefully, trying to find the guy I sought.
“Leigh!” A busty brunette grabbed me and I recognized her instantly.
“Hey, Merilee.”
Merilee was often a filler, especially for the more elite parties. She was often dating the latest tech startup golden boy. “Fancy you being here!” Merilee said with a grin. “I’m so excited to see you!”
Merilee wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, God bless her, but she had a good heart and she was always persuading whoever she was dating to donate large sums of money to ‘save the whales’ campaigns and the like, including my work. We’d met through a mutual friend who’d gotten me onto this list, and I liked her. She was a sweet girl.
“You here networking?” Merilee asked.
This girl was going to blow my cover if I wasn’t careful. “I’m actually here to fill out the party,” I said. “And I thought it might be fun. Everyone’s always telling me I work too much so…”
