Pushing her limits, p.1
Pushing Her Limits, page 1
Titles by Sparrow Beckett
Masters of Adrenaline
Stealing His Thunder
Fueling His Hunger
Pushing Her Limits
Masters Unleashed
Finding Master Right
Playing Hard to Master
To Have and To Master
Pushing Her Limits
Sparrow Beckett
INTERMIX
New York
INTERMIX
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Sparrow Beckett
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN: 9780451488374
First Edition: March 2017
Cover art: Kissing couple © Peopleimages/Getty images
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Titles by Sparrow Beckett
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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
Epilogue
About the Authors
To our friend Holly Roberts—you know what you did.
Chapter 1
From the other side of the street, the little shop looked pristine and unassuming. Mila watched the door as she chugged the rest of the black coffee in her to-go cup—a disturbing addiction her father had warned her about. Before graduating from the academy, she’d been a paragon of health and fitness. Now, five years later, that naïve, idealistic rookie was a distant memory, replaced with a jaded, caffeine-addicted bitch. And at just twenty-seven, she’d found her first silver hair that morning.
She set her coffee down in the cup holder and pushed back her hair. The jeans and T-shirt felt unfamiliar, but were necessary to keep her cover. She was far more at home in business attire, which felt like part of her shield.
Sighing, she opened the door and climbed out of the car, taking her messenger bag with her. Her badge and gun were stashed in her purse. Today she wasn’t Detective Palmer. She was Mila Tanner—and completely clueless about technology.
A faint chime sounded when she opened the shop door, but a scrawny kid already sat behind the counter. Between the baseball cap pulled low over his face and the way he was hunched over his phone, she couldn’t get a good look at him. His shirt had the store logo on it, but she doubted he was the owner.
Like most computer repair shops she’d seen, the place was cluttered, but tidy, and held an assortment of cords, gadgets, and accessories. The sign behind the counter said she was in the right place, but there was no way this kid was Atlas Larson, who was supposedly about six foot four and two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle.
When she cleared her throat, the kid startled then looked up at her.
“Oh. Hi.” Sheepishly, he tucked his phone into his pocket and stood up from the stool he’d been perched on. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
His baby face matched the awkwardness of his body. A teenager.
“What’s up?” He smiled then stopped himself and grimaced. “Wait. Let me try that again.” His shoulders straightened and he took a more professional tone. “Welcome to Larson Computer Solutions. I’m Austin. How can I help you?”
She held up her messenger bag. “My laptop froze.”
“Did you try turning it off and on again?”
With a glare, she gritted through clenched teeth, “Yes.”
“Did you try plugging it in?”
“Is there a manager I could talk to?”
Austin unfolded himself from the stool then patted the counter. “I’ll take a look. It’s probably something easy to fix.”
The bored condescension was already getting on her nerves. She felt like spewing a few tech words just to throw him off balance, but she resisted. She had to stick to the part.
“Okay,” she managed to say, then withdrew the computer from the bag and placed it on the counter. “It’s fully charged. It starts up fine but then the screen either goes blank suddenly or it freezes in the middle of what it’s doing.”
“Probably got a virus.”
“I have antivirus software.” It was an old laptop that had broken down years ago and had been dropped several times. Hopefully, it’d stump the kid long enough for her to meet Larson. It’d be a pretty big waste of her afternoon if the kid managed to fix it in only a few minutes.
He opened the laptop and pressed the power button. “Antivirus doesn’t protect against everything. I’ll run some diagnostics and see what’s going on.”
“How long will that take?”
“Depends.” He shrugged. “Could be half an hour, could be a few days. You can leave your number and I’ll—”
“I’ll wait,” she blurted.
His brows rose.
“Like you said, it might be an easy fix.”
Two days ago an anonymous tip had come in about the increase of high-end car theft. The precinct knew there was a ring working somewhere in the city, but there hadn’t been a lead since someone had died last year—a man called Marcel who’d had a shady history with the law. After that, reports on stolen cars had diminished for a while but in the last two months, there’d been a steady increase. Anonymous tips were usually made by ex-lovers looking for revenge but when she’d looked into the Larson brothers’ backgrounds, there were definitely some red flags. The fact that they moved every year or two was suspicious. Of course, there were always other reasons. If she could get a conversation going, she could push for information and a reasonable explanation. Being a detective was a lot about intuition. Once she got a good read on the guy, she’d dig for proof to back it up.
A door behind the desk opened, and a large figure filled the entire doorway. She craned her neck to see his face.
Her initial impression was height and muscle and danger. His expression was friendly, but it was hard to tell if it stayed that way long. This had to be Atlas Larson, and he was a huge motherfucker. Sure, she’d read the brief description they had on file, but none of that prepared her for a man who was built like he beat the shit out of people for a living, and dragged women off by the hair as a hobby. This bastard had criminal written all over him. It wasn’t proof, of course, but it was a good start.
Mila wasn’t intimidated by much, but this guy made her want to reach for her gun, just to reassure herself it was there. Years of keeping pace with the guys on the police force had hardened her, but it took a few seconds to compose herself. There were no reports saying these guys were violent, but even though she was good at hand to hand, she didn’t think she’d get far with this Neanderthal.
“What have I told you about the baseball cap?” he asked Austin as he walked behind the counter. Before the kid could move, Larson had flicked the hat off his head.
Austin scrambled to catch it, then tossed it under the counter. “Sorry.”
“Mm-hmm.” He arched a brow at his employee, but his mouth quirked at the corner, with fond familiarity. Family maybe? “Is Austin figuring things out for you?”
“Yeah,” Mila said, trying to sound more casual than she felt. Then again, he had to be used to women getting flustered around him. “It’s an old laptop, so I don’t know if he’ll be able to save it for me.”
Atlas looked over the kid’s shoulder, and then at Mila. “If we can’t fix it, we can probably retrieve the information off of it, Ms. . . . ?”
“Oh, uh. Mila. It’s Mila Tanner.” She could feel her cheeks heating and she wished she could plant a fist in what looked to be his very hard torso. Okay, so her feeling flustered wasn’t his fault, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to blame him.
“Mila,” he repeated. A lazy grin spread across his face, and it made her shiver. A man this built shouldn’t be hot too. By all rights he should have looked as if someone had taken a shovel repeatedly to his face. Instead he was all stubborn jaw, strong cheekbones, and hard blue eyes. And damn it, he was blond.
The man needed to be licked. A lot. But not by her. She was a cop, and not at all attracted to possible criminals.
But wow . . . yeah.
He w
Austin shrugged and wandered into the back, his phone in his hand before he’d gone two steps. The break room was probably going to have to clean itself.
Atlas dragged the stool closer and sat, then motioned for Mila to take the stool on the other side of the counter, which she did. The longer she could keep the man talking, the more she could learn about him.
“Like I was saying, I can get the information off of it, but I’m not sure I can get it running reliably again.” His lips pressed together, and Mila did her best to stop checking him out. “It might be time for a new laptop.”
“That’s going to have to wait a few months.” She grimaced. “So . . . you must do this all the time, right?”
“Yes, we get several jobs like this a day. Why?”
“Do you have, like, a confidentiality clause?” She forced herself to look away, trying to seem embarrassed, but she still knew it when he leaned his muscular forearm on the counter between them. When she glanced back up at him the corner of his mouth twitched.
“Why? Forget to clear your browser history?”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with watching porn,” she teased, smiling. Was she flirting or just playing the part? Maybe a little of both.
He arched a brow, and the look made her insides shivery. “No. You just have to watch what sites you use, or your computer will suffer the consequences.”
Consequences? The way he said the word gave her a brief flash of being pulled down over his thigh and his hand coming down on her ass.
It was official. She absolutely needed to get laid as soon as possible. Leering at the creeps she investigated was ridiculous. So far, her detective instincts weren’t tingling one way or another about his innocence. For car theft anyway. She doubted very much he was innocent in . . . other ways.
They stared at each other for a long moment, and he cleared his throat. “I’m Atlas Larson, by the way.”
“Larson? Are you related to the owner?”
“Yeah, he’s a bit of an asshole, but family’s family.” The gleam of amusement in his eyes made her wonder what he was thinking.
“You’re the owner.”
“Yes,” he admitted, closing her laptop. “But I stand by what I said.”
She found herself smiling at him and wondered if he could tell she was fantasizing about him shoving her down on the counter and . . .
“Um . . . how long have you been at this location?” she asked, trying to banish the pornographic images from her mind.
“We just opened a storefront about six months ago. Before that we were mainly doing contracts for businesses, and some work from home, but it’s easier to advertise if you have somewhere to hang a sign.”
She nodded, wondering how far to push the conversation on the first contact. If she seemed too interested in his business it would look suspicious.
“We?” she asked. “Is that the royal ‘we,’ or is that wife ‘we’?”
Shit. The idea had been to steer the conversation away from an interrogation about his business, but she hadn’t meant to sound as if she was interested. Stupid. This guy had her all flustered and he hadn’t even done anything. Hell, she’d gone toe to toe with some of the biggest badasses in town, and now she was completely botching this because the guy happened to be easy to look at?
His eyes narrowed. “It’s the royal ‘we’ but only if you’re referring to my cousin and my brother, who are royal pains in the ass. As for a wife, I doubt any woman would tolerate me that long.”
“No?” She’d been expecting bravado, not self-effacement. The latter was far more intriguing coming from a guy who was built and hot, and obviously intelligent if he fixed computers for a living. There was no way this guy could be a car thief. The other ones she’d met were ballsy fuckers, not nice guys. Although, maybe the nice guy thing was an act. Maybe her libido wanted it to be an act. If he was a car thief he was off-limits, but if the tip had been bogus and he was just a hot, gainfully employed man who may or may not know how to use all of those muscles he owned . . .
Bad Mila. Get your mind out of his pants.
For a moment it looked as if he was going to say something, but then he just smiled enigmatically. “It’ll be ready Sunday.” He pushed to his feet, and she got the distinct impression she’d been dismissed.
Damn it. Had she done something to tip him off?
Embarrassed, she rose, trying to gather her composure. She was going to have a serious talk with herself as soon as she got to the safety of her car.
“Thanks.”
She made it out to the car, not sure what the hell had just happened. When she went to pick up her ancient laptop and the useless files on it on Sunday, she had to make sure she had her head in the game. With effort she managed not to look through the store’s front window to catch a last look at him.
Sunday.
Maybe she’d softened him up for more conversation, but he wasn’t overly chatty. He hadn’t really told her more than she could have learned online. Talk about being off her game.
If she were lucky, she’d get laid after the wedding on Saturday. With those needs satisfied, maybe she could keep her mind on her work at their next encounter.
Chapter 2
Fox was pacing.
“You’re doing it again.” Luke smirked.
“Shut up.” Fox stopped moving, but his body was taut, ready to snap.
The photographer was setting up for some shots of Fox and his groomsmen on the bridge that spanned the ornamental pond, and although there was still time before the wedding, Atlas could tell his brother was getting impatient.
“Cold feet?” Atlas asked, just to piss him off.
Fox didn’t even dignify the question with a grunt, let alone an answer. If any two people were sure about getting married, it was Fox and Addison. They were one of those weird couples who always hung out together—no guy time or girls’ night out for them. Fox never enjoyed being away from her.
Then again, Luke and Ophelia were just as bad—maybe worse since Luke had put twins in her belly. She was only showing a little, but Luke had gone from doting, overprotective husband to doting, overprotective daddy. He was already reading her stomach stories at bedtime.
They’d both turned into weirdos. Atlas was alone in the world, but was too happy for his brother and cousin to be jealous. However, it did mean everything was changing. With the additions to the family, their lives felt less insular and guarded. And Atlas had to find things to occupy his time when they were busy.
Luke had all but left the business already, spending most of his time helping Ophelia manage her hotel empire. Although he’d stolen cars for a while after they’d gotten together—and still helped out here and there—getting caught would stain her reputation. Lately he’d been getting his thrills in business, which he had a good head for. Fox was still in denial.
Luke distancing himself had almost been like permission. Although he hadn’t really discussed it with Fox and Addison yet, he’d been working on strengthening their computer business. It had started as a front, but he’d grown to love it and find more satisfaction in the slower pace. Maybe he was getting old.
The tech side of stealing cars had always been his favorite part, and the excitement over hacking into things such as police files had been a big deal when he was a teenager, but now it was old hat. They didn’t usually need information from systems with higher security, so the thrill of new challenges was gone. Instead, he’d been setting up networks, arranging to have them maintained, and making sure they were difficult, if not impossible, to hack into.
There were other, non-job-related ways of getting an adrenaline high. Maybe it was time he found someone to get into a longer-term D/s relationship with again—or at least someone to play with. But not the pretty girl who’d come sniffing around the other day, no matter how she’d looked at him. She was so obviously a cop. She spoke like one, moved like one, assessed him like one. He’d been in the business long enough to recognize her for what she was. But with the big brown eyes, long hair, and those delicious fucking curves . . . It had been hard to walk away from her and her reactions to him, but when he slept with a woman, he preferred to be the one using the handcuffs.
