Chapter 1
Gabe
Ladies, whips and chains better be your thing if Gabe O’Keefe is your current crush. Our sources tell us that not only is he a big player at Afterglow—he’s the sex club’s owner!
Years I’d spent ensuring my sex life stayed out of the tabloids. I’d been careful, cautious, and inconspicuous. Now not only is my sex life detailed in the grocery store tabloid Gotcha! but the world also knows that I own a sex club.
The tabloid’s sudden interest in me had been a long time coming. It all began with an article in Gotcha! a little over a month ago, and as each successive week ticked by, tabloid reporter Penelope Burke did her best to rip apart the lives of my longtime friends. First, the magazine attacked my Harvard roommate, billionaire real estate mogul Micah Holt, printing stories that held a ring of truth to them. Next the magazine focused on business-savvy billionaire Darius Bennett and printed stories detailing private conversations we’d had at my bar, O’Keefe’s Pub. That’s when we realized that someone had planted a recording device in the one place we thought we were safe. But that wasn’t the end of our trouble with the tabloid. In fact, things only got worse.
When Gotcha! turned the spotlight onto Ryder Blackwood, owner of Blackwood Security, a private security detail company, he dug deep into who could be our mole. When he discovered the truth, it was even worse than anyone had imagined. What we learned was that the governor of California, Tobias Harrington, was trying to bury—literally—one of Ryder’s clients, Senator Gary Winters. Tobias was using the bugs in my pub to get intel from Ryder’s private conversations. But the greedy son of a bitches that planted those bugs weren’t only taking money from the governor. They were also selling the things they heard on the recordings to a trash magazine. And the person whose betrayal ran that deep is the only person on my mind today.
I grit my teeth against the rage burning inside and shift the gears of my MV Agusta F4 sports bike, the engine roaring beneath me; the power is a much-needed comfort as the control I’ve kept on my life spins away from me. Determined to get that control back, I tear through the streets of San Francisco, weaving my bike in and out of traffic. Last night I slept a total of two hours, and this morning I’d spent hours at the gym, trying to piece together my next steps.
An hour ago, on this gloomy Friday morning, a plan solidified.
I breeze through the T-intersection, and then I stop at the curb in front of the original location of what is now my chain of Irish pubs across North America. Pushing out the kickstand of my bike, I slide my leg over the seat as I remove my helmet. To the right is an alleyway which leads to the back lot where my Audi is parked, and where there are stairs that lead to my apartment above the pub. There’s a lot on my mind as I walk around my bike and then enter my pub.
The most important thought is finally putting this tabloid shitshow behind me and moving on with life. Usually, I don’t mind a little attention. I enjoy the way women openly gawk at me. What I don’t like is people knowing about my private life and ripping it apart as if it’s something to (a) talk about around the water color and (b) laugh at. Some things are private, and who I fuck and how I fuck them are most definitely in that category.
The pub is empty as the door shuts behind me, not that I’m surprised. It’s ten o’clock in the morning, and we don’t open for another two hours. Wood panel walls surround me, with the bar off to the right and tables scattered throughout. There’s a good reason I’m here today, and that reason is standing behind the bar in a pair of skinny jeans and a tight black T-shirt with O’Keefe’s burgundy Celtic knot logo across her great pair of tits.
McKenna Archer.
My body reacts instantly to her nearness, swelling my cock and kicking up my heart rate. She’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman and more. She’s beyond beautiful with long blond hair, captivating amber eyes, and she’s got just the right amount of curves to remind me how much I hunger for her. Though if she was just looks I could easily walk away from her, but she’s so much more than a pretty face. She’s clever and witty and strong when she needs to be, but she’s soft the rest of the time, making me yearn to protect her.
For the entire year that she’s worked for me, I’ve battled against breaking my one rule: Don’t date employees. In fact, the push-and-pull game between us had built so heavily over the past three months that before this tabloid shit happened I was days away from helping her find new employment elsewhere so we could finally date. Because if I was sure about anything in my life, it was how I felt about this woman before me.
That’s why my life is suddenly complicated. Because McKenna is the woman selling me out.
She hasn’t noticed me yet, and heat roars through my body, tightening my muscles. Maybe it’s my anger at her betrayal, but my cock is hard and throbbing. I jerked off twice last night, and it did nothing to ease the hardness, driving me mad. In fact, with McKenna on my mind so much I’ve had a hard-on for days, ever since finding out she was our mole. Which is all the more confusing. I want to hate her, but I still want to be inside her.
Even now as I approach her, watching her wipe down the top of the bar, she still feels like mine. My affection toward her had not been instant but had built up slowly over the year she’s worked for me. She’d gotten into places in my heart no one reached before, and I’d let her in there because I could not refuse this woman anything. Because I implicitly trusted her.
I’m not blind any longer. She is a liar.
My boots scuff against the hardwood floors as I enter farther into the pub, watching her take the beer bottles out of the box and restock the fridge. She notices me then and gives me a little smile, but I won’t fall for her innocent act now. She’s the reason my world’s being ripped apart.
“Come here, McKenna,” I call, striding by her, approac