MICAH (A California Dreamy Novel Book 3) Read online

  “And I just might have a clean first draft completed with my book.”

  “That fast?”

  “I have momentum,” she said. “And it feels good.”

  And he thought about the provocative words he’d read on the page of her open laptop and his blood thickened. But he steered himself into calmer waters.

  “Why give up gaming, though?” he asked.

  “I was writing the same storylines. Always a strong female. Always the rescuer. I wanted to go deeper than that.”

  “You couldn’t do both?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Computer characters are not complex. Not the way characters in a book are.” Which so closely mirrored real life. And the job she had loved had become somewhat boring. “I couldn’t get any deeper in the software and writing a book while working for Cyclical was a big no-no.”

  His eyes flared with interest. “Why?”

  “Gamers have no creative freedom beyond the company.”

  “Explain that.”

  “While under contract anything produced creatively belongs to the company.”

  “Even if it’s not software?”

  She nodded decisively. “But they pay well for that exclusivity.” Just not enough for her to stay. Not enough for her to give up a dream when she’d found she could no longer ignore her desire for more.

  “So if you wrote a song or a poem—”

  “Belongs to the company.”

  “A greeting card?”

  She snorted. It wasn’t a delicate gesture and Micah laughed in response. “Company,” she assured him.

  “So you sold your soul.”

  “It felt that way.” And as it got closer for her contract to renew, she’d felt the stranglehold. By the time she tendered her notice she was gasping for breath.

  “I didn’t know it worked that way.”

  “It’s standard in the gaming world.”

  Their food arrived and Micah tucked into his. She noticed that he used every drop of dressing from the small carafe that accompanied his salad and that he preferred to keep each food—tomatoes, avocado, bacon bits, bleu cheese—to itself rather than mixing it all together. He seemed to prefer order, trusted boundaries. And that got her thinking.

  “How are you a cop but not a cop?” she asked, going back to their conversation earlier that morning.

  He looked at her over a piece of speared chicken. She could tell he was thinking about how much to tell her and waited him out. “I was an intelligence officer in the military.”

  Which didn’t tell her a whole lot.

  “What branch?” she asked.

  “Army.”

  “What did you do exactly?” she persisted.

  “Investigated wrong-doing.”

  “Foreign or domestic?”

  She’d surprised him. She could see both that and a healthy amount of respect in his face. “My brother was a Marine. My father, too.”

  He nodded. “Domestic.”

  “You were a cop,” she stated.

  He shrugged. “I didn’t like it.”

  “Arresting your own people?”

  “Basically.”

  She suspected it had warred with his natural respect for right and wrong, had screwed with his ideals of loyalty, and maybe even led him to believe, as his sister did, that life was played out in shades of gray. “But it led to your current career.”

  “Yeah. It was an easy transition.”

  “And lucrative?”

  “Combatting commercial espionage pays well,” he agreed. “And it’s easier to deal with than domestic violence and men killing each other.”

  She nodded. No wonder he got out.

  “What do you know about commercial pirating, Emme?”

  And she would swear his tone was tainted with suspicion.

  “Plenty,” she admitted. The stealing and sale of intelligence in the gaming world was a huge problem. Not that it happened everyday—she didn’t think it was that prevalent—but when it did happen it cost companies billions in revenue and Emme knew several software designers were serving prison sentences for their duplicity. “Cyclical, the company I worked for, held a mandatory awareness meeting every six months.” More like warnings, she thought, and her mouth twisted with derision. “‘What does theft look like? Are you committing it? Is your colleague?’ That kind of thing. And what happens if you sell company secrets.”

  “Prison,” he said, his mouth flat and his eyes boring into hers.

  “Definitely.”

  “Have you ever thought about it, Emme?”

  ‘Stealing?” She laid down her fork and sat back. She knew her voice was frosty, even downright brittle, but the question was absolutely filled with insult.

  “To some gamers, it’s not stealing. If you created it. If it’s your baby—”

  “That’s just it, you don’t own it. You may birth the idea. Nurture it. Build it into an empire, but it’s not yours.”

  “And you built an empire,” he pursued. “In four years at Cyclical you created seven games. All very popular.”

  “Eight games,” she corrected. She felt the frown forming on her face, drawing her brows together. “The newest has yet to launch. You get all this off a Google search?”

  “I did some poking around,” he admitted. “You interest me, Emme.”

  Her neck was stiff. In fact, outrage seemed to make every one of her joints feel set in cement. Privacy was important to her and she didn’t like him prying into her life.

  “Time magazine called you the ‘master of marvel,’” he said and Emme could tell he was suitably impressed. She’d like that, too. But that was a different life. It’d been like marrying for money and then falling in love—and it wasn’t reciprocated. She’d gotten a taste of what her creativity could really do and she wanted more.

  “Big deal,” she said and she tried to sound bored but it didn’t fool him.

  “It meant a lot to you.”

  “So?” she challenged. “You think I developed a big ego and feelings of animosity toward my company? Because that’s what it would take, to steal from them. That and a compromising morality.”

  “I think your contract was suffocating you.”

  “And so I quit. It was the better part of valor,” she said pointedly, referring to his military career. “Some of us have it.”

  His cheeks colored, so the man wasn’t completely without grace. “I have a naturally suspicious mind,” he said. “Nature of my work.”

  “It doesn’t make it less offensive.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She snorted. “You sound full of regret.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Sarcasm,” he said as though it surprised him to find she was capable of it.

  “You have to know a theft of the magnitude you’re suggesting is felonious. It’s not like going home with a pocketful of paperclips—and no, before you ask, I’ve never done that either.”

  She watched his face soften and this time when he delivered the apology it seemed more sincere, though did little to untwist the knots in her mood.

  “What about you, Micah? What have you stolen? What secrets have you sold?”

  “Never happened.”

  Two words, quietly but firmly spoken, but in them the truth rang loud and clear.

  Still, she refused to believe the best of him out of hand, not after he’d insulted her. “I think your questions are as much personal as professional,” she challenged.

  “Maybe,” he relented. His eyelids dropped, masking some of what he felt, but not all. Emme recognized regret and betrayal. “I was involved with a woman who was less than

  scrupulous.”

  “She gave away your secrets?”

  “She stole them from me and used them to hurt innocent people.”

  Wow. That was a serious misjudgment in character. Emme sat back and tried to digest that. The betrayal lent a certain amount of understanding to his questions.


  “Yeah. I was duped.”

  “You were in love.”

  “Or something.”

  She considered his words, his revelations, and offered an olive branch.

  “I gave my notice,” she said. “I followed protocol to the letter. And I left behind a body of work that’s still pulling in millions of dollars in revenue every quarter.”

  “So Cyclical shouldn’t be complaining?”

  “Of course they should,” she returned. “They banked on me. But they’ll find new talent.” Outsiders had trouble understanding this, but the average career length of a gamer didn’t make ten years. “New blood, a fresh perspective, a younger approach are all necessary in that world.”

  He nodded and then made an obvious attempt at switching the topic and Emme let him.

  “Your father was a Marine?”

  “Yeah. Career, in fact. He put in his twenty and when he got out he went back to college.”

  “What for?”

  “Physical arts.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” she said and smiled, because it was always surprising, that a decorated Marine would find great inspiration working marble and copper into intricate sculptures.

  “Your family is big on following your dreams,” he said and the observation gave Emme pause. Not that he obviously knew about Ethan and his Hollywood presence—she figured he’d stumbled upon that when he was searching for her on the net—but that it was astute. She’d never stopped to consider it, but Micah was right. Her father, Ethan, Emme, they’d all pursued the things that made their hearts beat.

  “What about you, Micah? Are you doing what you love?”

  He shrugged. “What I do helps people.”

  And that was important to him, despite his assertion that he was no longer in the business of rescuing people.

  Chapter Seven

  Grocery shopping with Emme was a wonder. She dove in without a list and selected items according to her feelings. That was the first thing he needed to correct. While watching her spontaneity was very revealing, and even pleasurable, she wouldn’t develop muscles or endurance with—he took another glance at her basket—honey ham, thousand island dressing, jasmine rice and bran muffins, among other offenses.

  He put a hand on her cart to stop her—she’d been moving at a steady clip, disgruntled, still, from his offensive questions. He wasn’t sorry for them. He’d needed to feel her out and he was happy with her responses—not so much the words she’d used but her body language, which always told him more. Her anger and insult had not been contrived. He wondered if she knew that about herself. Emme Montgomery was transparent. From her relationship confessions to her physical outrage, Micah was coming to believe that Emme was not capable of telling a lie. Not even a small one.

  She wasn’t capable of subterfuge, either. They had finished their meal in near silence. Micah had tried. He’d asked her other questions, more innocent—even went through the remnants of some half-forgotten get-to-know-you date list he’d followed as a teen—What kind of music do you listen to? Do you have a favorite vacation spot? Her replies had been single syllable when possible.

  “What?” she demanded and followed his gaze to the contents in her cart. She relented a little as her shoulders loosened. “I didn’t look twice at the pound cake and left the raisin bread on the shelf.”

  She thought she was making a sacrifice settling for the loaf of potato bread. “The fastest way to slim down and build lean muscle mass is to give up all the white stuff.”

  “What white stuff?”

  “Refined sugar, white flour, rice, pasta, baker potatoes.”

  As he listed her offenses her face grew long and her eyes sad.

  “All of it has to go? What about moderation?”

  “Moderation is the best way to go, but you seem in a hurry.”

  Her lips pursed as she thought about his advice. “So the angel hair goes?”

  “Bye-bye,” he agreed. “You can replace it with wheat pasta.”

  Emme frowned and shook her head. “I’d rather go without.”

  “Wheat is a healthy grain,” he pointed out.

  “But I don’t like the taste of it.”

  “How do you feel about brown rice?”

  “The same.”

  “Let’s focus on proteins then,” he suggested.

  “What’s wrong with my ham?”

  “It’s not a lean meat, and this particular kind is basted in brown sugar.”

  “Another no-no.” She accepted it with a little more grace. “How about roast beef?”

  “A better choice.”

  “The best?”

  “Chicken breast,” he returned. “And not from the deli section but cooked at home and sliced for salads.”

  “Not sandwiches?”

  “No bread.”

  “Not even half a sandwich?”

  Her face looked so hopeful that Micah laughed.

  “Do you want results in two weeks or two months?”

  She put serious thought into that and Micah remained poised with the potato bread in his hand.

  “Go ‘head,” she said. “Put it back.”

  He felt like he was taking candy from a baby. “You can keep the bran muffins,” he offered.

  “They were in question?” she was surprised.

  “This brand is made with white and wheat flour and sucrose. You can find them healthier.”

  Emme put them back herself.

  “This is only during the tightening stage,” he told her. “Once you’re at maintenance, you can indulge a little so long as you make up for it with sweat. Remember that.”

  “So, as soon as I look the way I want to I can have jasmine rice with my orange chicken so long as I run three miles afterward?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I can have a Christmas cookie?” she posed. “Or two?”

  He nodded and couldn’t stop himself—he lowered his head toward hers and watched her eyes flare with awareness and her lips part on a soft breath. Damn, taking Emme would be a treat. She was so open and honest with her responses. That alone would guide him straight to her sweet spot. “You could probably have three,” he whispered. “And no one will even know about it.”

  He smiled even while he felt his skin heat with her closeness and his muscles clench with want.

  “Have you ever eaten an entire bag of Oreos?” she asked.

  He couldn’t ignore the husky timber of her voice or its meaning—even pissed, Emme wanted him. That was an exciting discovery but also a burden. It meant, even in the midst of a heated argument, she’d never shut him out. It also meant, even if she didn’t emotionally want him, she’d surrender easily to her need. And then hate herself afterwards. As bold as she’d been with him earlier, Micah knew she was the ever-after kind of woman.

  “In one sitting?”

  She nodded and he reached for a strand of her hair that had shifted with the movement. Such a pale shade of blond and he wondered about her coloring. And damn if he didn’t strip her naked with his imagination, standing in the middle of the bakery aisle in the grocery store, with her looking right into his eyes. He grasped for control as an image of her voluptuous curves taunted him, with golden pubic hair and pale rosy nipples. He knew in that moment he would taste her. Every sweet inch of her. He’d just have to wait until this job was over, when he could come clean with Emme and they could step into that deeper relationship together.

  She saw the sex in his gaze or felt his body heat ramp up because her cheeks colored and the pulse at her throat quickened. She tilted her head and that placed her in the perfect positon for a kiss that would rock her back on her heels.

  “No,” he whispered, even as he lowered his head. And that snapped the tension. Hearing his own denial was like a stop sign. With scant inches between them, he noted the golden flecks in her crystalline blue eyes and the freckle almost hidden in her hairline. He cleared his throat and repeated, “No. Never a whole bag.”

/>   He stepped back and pushed his hands into his pockets. Emme watched the movement so she must have noticed his wood. Still, he wasn’t going to adjust himself in public, with her looking on. And on.

  It was a long moment before she met his gaze. He braced himself for her candor, but it came in another form.

  “I have. After Alan.”

  The mention of the man’s name bothered Micah. It beat in his temples and made his hands curl into fists. Yeah, he’d like to beat the guy into the ground.

  “Actually, I did it a lot after Alan. That’s one of the reasons I’m in this shape.”

  “Your shape, Emme, is womanly. You have curves. You should embrace them.” And why the hell was he helping her to eliminate what he found so attractive?

  “I don’t want boulder butt when I get older,” she admitted.

  Micah laughed and it loosened up the tension in his shoulders and really put a zing in his blood. “That’s a change of lifestyle, honey. Make exercise a part of your regular routine. Make better food choices.” But leave nature alone.

  He moved her cart along. They needed out of the bread aisle. He’d never realized that loaves of French bread and prepackaged buns could heighten sexual temptation.

  They turned into the next aisle, bottled water and soft drinks, when she said, “You were going to kiss me.”

  It wasn’t an accusation, but she wondered about it.

  “Definitely.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Kissing you wouldn’t be enough,” he said. “And nothing’s changed.”

  Her lips pursed as she thought about that. “You’re not looking for a relationship.”

  “And you’re a woman who doesn’t do it any other way.”

  “But you’re lusting after me,” she said. “I saw it in your eyes.”

  He stopped and used the side of his fist to lift her chin. Damn her eyes were beautiful, clear and revealing. “Will you use it against me, Emme?”

  “Probably.”

  Emme watched Micah load his groceries onto the belt: two packages of fresh chicken breasts, arugula, a container of feta cheese, a dozen eggs, vine-ripened tomatoes, split-top cracked wheat bread, whipped butter, a case of bottled water, bananas, Kashi cereal, whole wheat pasta and a bag of oranges.

  “The butter,” she said and sought his gaze. “That’s your weakness?”