Risky Business

  RISKY BUSINESS

  A Reverse Harem Romance

  by

  Bethany Jadin

  BOOK FOUR of THE CODE

  Copyright 2018 Bethany Jadin. All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced or distributed in any form by any means, without the authors’ permission, except for reviewers, who may quote short excerpts for the purpose of review only.

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations and action come from the authors’ imaginations and are presented as fiction. Any resemblance to real individuals, alive or deceased, as well as events or locations, is coincidental. All characters depicted are over the age of 18. This book is intended for mature audiences only.

  Subscribe to Bethany Jadin’s newsletter for exclusive content such as sneak peeks of upcoming books, and to be notified when the next book releases! You’re also invited to join the private Facebook group Jadin’s Maidens, for readers who enjoy reverse harem stories and other unconventional romance.

  THE CODE SERIES

  1 Vested Interest

  2 Hidden Agenda

  3 Broken Process

  4 Risky Business

  5 Perfect Design

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  Authors’ Note

  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

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  THE CODE SERIES

  Authors’ Note

  Risky Business is book four of The Code, a reverse harem continuation series of five full-length novels with an action suspense storyline that builds in intensity with each book.

  Each book in the series picks up where the previous one left off and they must be read in order for the story to make sense. The entire series will be released by the end of Spring 2018 and all of the books can be purchased or preordered on Amazon.

  We hope you enjoy this story of Emma and her five smart, sexy men.

  1

  Emma

  I swear to God, it’s not my fault this time.

  I haven’t been cooking anything today — my kitchen is clean and peaceful, everything tidied up from the massive batch of parmesan-encrusted pork chops and the two blueberry cobblers I made for all of us last night. No, today the fire alarm isn’t because I burnt the hell out of something, and it isn’t just screeching in my own apartment; the harsh shrieking noise is resounding through the thick walls from the apartments on either side of me and penetrating through the door from the outer hallway.

  Instincts kick into gear, and I move to grab my things — planning to quickly stuff a bag with my most important documents then evacuate. But I haven’t taken more than three steps when the power goes out in the apartment. I’m thrown into darkness for a moment and almost stumble into one of my new chairs as I make my way out of the dining room. I’ve kept all my curtains and blinds drawn to reduce the creepy feeling that BHC has telescopic lenses pointed at my windows, watching me around the clock. So, it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the faint glow coming from the foyer, where a battery-powered light over the doorway has come on. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I realize this means the entire building has gone into emergency mode. Just as I start down the hall to grab my go-bag, the door to the apartment opens with a fast swoosh, and three members of my security team rush inside.

  Desmond, the team leader, stretches out his arm, beckoning me toward him. “We need to move, now.”

  I switch course, checking to make sure my phone is in my back pocket, then head for the living room, where my purse is. “What’s going on? It sounds like the alarms are going off for the entire building.”

  He strides forward, and his unyielding hand takes me by the arm, steering me directly for the door. “They are. Let’s go.”

  I point into the living room, where I can see my purse sitting on the side table where I left it after coming in from grocery shopping yesterday afternoon. “But my—”

  “No time. Leave it.”

  He sweeps me out of the apartment, and the door is closed behind us before I can blink an eye. Desmond and the other two men hustle me down the hallway, and I find myself nearly breaking into a jog to keep up as they rush me along, their firm hands on my arms ensuring we move as one unit. The apartments on this floor are spacious and spread out, but practically all of the inhabitants are spilling out into the hallway. Some are milling about in small clusters of worried conversation, others are exiting their apartments with bags in tow. The team pushes us through the throng of people as emergency lights flash and the high screech of the fire alarms continue relentlessly. We pass a cluster of people waiting at the elevator, and I want to call out — to tell them they’re waiting in futility — because I know from all my time of apartment-living that only the building managers and firefighters can operate the elevators once emergency mode is activated. But we’re past them in a second, moving rapidly to the end of the hallway.

  Instead of turning right to go down the stairs, Desmond unlocks a door on the left, and we enter a small corridor I’ve never seen before. We turn a corner, and the narrow path ends at a service elevator. Desmond punches in a code, and the LED panel lights up, counting off each floor as the elevator passes it, moving up the building toward us. A moment later, the doors sweep open.

  “This will take us directly into the parking garage.” Desmond still has ahold of my arm as we move inside, the three men surrounding me in a triangle pattern as the doors slide shut and we begin our descent.

  My stomach turns, and it’s not just because of how fast the elevator is descending. “Desmond? What’s going on? It’s just a fire alarm, isn’t it?”

  He shakes his head, eyes fixed forward on the doors. “I don’t believe so, ma’am. Cell services are jammed.”

  Reflexively, I fish my phone out of my back pocket and hold my thumb across the biometric button to wake it up. Sure enough, No Service is displayed across the top where I should have five bars of strong reception. I know better by now than to question if it’s a coincidence that I’ve lost cell phone signal at the same time the building is in the middle of a five-alarm meltdown.

  “Where are we going?” I ask as the elevator begins to slow.

  Desmond responds, “Away from the city center, immediately.”

  A chill runs through me. That does not sound good. At all. “What? Why?”

  The elevator does that slight bounce thing as it comes to a stop, and I feel the tension increase in each of the men. Without looking back at me, Desmond answers, “We have a failsafe plan in place in case of a situation like this where the building is compromised and comms are down,” he says. “We’re headed to a safehouse.”

  He exits cautiously as soon as the doors slide open, and I go to follow him, but the other men throw their arms across my chest, blocking me. The one on my right signals for me to wait, a finger to his lips. A moment later, Desmond reappears and motions for us.

  We proceed into the cavernous underground area, the men surrounding me on all sides, their eyes sweeping in every direction. Each of them have a hand poised to reach for their concealed weapons. They walk cautiously but q
uickly, with me in the center taking long strides to keep up with the pace.

  The parking garage below the building has sprung to life with people sprinting to their cars and families being herded into minivans all across the expansive space. Engine after engine roars to life, and there are panicked voices echoing and rebounding off the walls. We move directly for the row of cars nearest the exit, and a nondescript sedan’s taillights flash to life as one of the men triggers the unlock button on his key fob.

  The man on my left hops into the driver’s seat, and Desmond turns to survey the parking garage as he opens a rear door for me. The third man strides directly into the path of an oncoming car, halting the line of automobiles making their way to the exit. Several car horns honk in protest, but he holds his palm out to the car at the head of the line, his shoulders squared as he looks back to Desmond and nods.

  As soon as I’m in the car, Desmond scoots in beside me, and the driver has the car in reverse. We pull out of the parking spot before Desmond even has a chance to completely shut the car door, and we don’t even roll to a stop as the third man opens the front passenger side door and hops in. I buckle myself in quickly as the car speeds up the ramp, and a second later daylight hits the windshield and we’re out of the underground parking area.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” I ask Desmond.

  The driver’s attention is focused on the road as he quickly whips the car out onto the street, but Desmond and the third man — Ben, I think — are busy scanning the street and twisting to look behind us, taking everything in.

  I look back as we pull away, and there is a crowd of residents amassing outside of the apartment building. The loud horns and sirens of emergency vehicles are sounding in the distance, and I can see flashes of blue lights as police rush to the scene ahead of the fire department.

  “Five o’clock,” the man in the passenger’s seat says.

  I picture a clock and try to figure out which direction to look, but Desmond has already swiveled his head and is staring out the right side of the rear window. “I see him. Evasive maneuvers.”

  The driver jerks the car left, cutting across traffic with a sudden turn, causing half a dozen horns to blare. I grab for the hand grip above the door and hang on as the car jostles, bouncing over the edge of a curb, a pedestrian jumping out of the way. The car straightens for a second, and he floors the gas, the vehicle launching forward like a rocket. I’m plastered to my seat from the g-force and barely have time to catch my breath before he brakes hard while turning the wheel rapidly, the back of the car sliding around as he takes a sharp corner, my shoulder slamming into the window beside me.

  Clutching the handle with my right hand, I fish my phone out of my pocket with my left, wanting to check to see whether I have cellular reception yet. Another quick jerk of the steering wheel, and I swing sideways, the seatbelt straining to hold me as I lose my grip on the phone and it drops to the floorboard at my feet. I watch with dismay as it slides out of sight under the seat in front of me. No way I’m unbuckling to retrieve it.

  No one has answered my question, so I ask again, “Do you know what’s happening?”

  Desmond peers out the back window. “No, ma’am. We’re just following protocol. Ben?”

  The man in the passenger’s seat is scanning everything he can take in. “Nothing yet.”

  Desmond’s reply is quick. “They probably had spotters in place along the major routes before they launched the attack. Stay sharp.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The driver takes a swift right, and we dive into a narrow alleyway, steep walls of the buildings hurdling by us at lightspeed. I cringe, hoping no one decides to step out a back door in the next few seconds.

  We exit the alley with a hard turn, the driver joining the flow of traffic with blindingly fast precision. He swerves around a truck that’s slowing to a stop and hits the gas. The engine roars, and we fly through an intersection, the light turning red just before we pass under it. We zip through traffic, and even though the driver is clearly an expert at high-speed maneuvering, my stomach is in knots, and I’m trying to fight the stem of panic flooding into every nerve.

  He grabs the parking brake and lifts it, sending us into a drift, the rear end of the car swinging around, the tires squealing as he takes a left, punching us into another narrow alley.

  “Jesus,” I gasp as I right myself from nearly head-butting Desmond’s shoulder. “Is someone following us?”

  He shakes his head as he continuously monitors the situation out the back window, his eyes focused intently. “Not so far. But we’re not taking any chances, ma’am.”

  Ben speaks up from the front passenger’s seat. “Right and then two blocks.”

  The driver silently nods as we exit the alley, and he spins the car right, bouncing onto a small side street. We pick up even more speed, and he weaves across the lanes, maneuvering around slower-moving vehicles. Desmond puts a hand on my shoulder. “Hold on.”

  Without slowing down, the car shifts sideways again, and I let out a shriek of surprise as the daylight disappears along with the road. I squeeze my eyes shut and feel the lift of weightlessness as the car goes airborne for a second, my body straining against the lapbelt across my hips. A moment later, the car bottoms out with a hard thud, and my body slams forward, the belt across my chest pushing all of the air out of my lungs. I open my eyes and blink. It takes me a second to realize we’re in some kind of underground structure — a vacant parking garage of sorts. “Are we here already? At the safehouse?”

  “Out, quick.” Desmond presses the button to unlatch my seatbelt and hops out his door.

  I barely have time to snatch my phone off the floorboards before Ben has my door open and is pulling me out. “We’re switching cars. Go.”

  There are only three other cars in the space — a beige family van, a red SUV with tinted windows, and a sporty blue thing, looking like it’s built to eat pavement at 150 miles an hour. My heart is beating a million times a second, and my legs feel like Jello as the team shuffles me around the sedan and toward the row of waiting vehicles.

  Just as we reach the blue sportscar, the van pulls out of its parking spot and takes the exit ramp on the far side of the garage. It merges onto the street and is gone from sight a moment later.

  I turn to Desmond. “Who was that?”

  “The other vehicles are decoys,” Desmond says, opening a rear door of the sportscar and waving a hand for me to get in.

  He leans down as I crawl into the backseat and says, “Someone will be driving the sedan, too. We’ll all leave the garage within a few minutes of each other. If someone attempts to track us through traffic cameras, they’ll have to follow four different vehicles. It will slow them down at least, giving us time to get out of the city limits and away from all the cameras.”

  In our little sports car, the other two men have switched places as they slide into the front seats, with Ben at the wheel this time. He slips on a pair of sunglasses, and the other guy puts on a baseball cap. Movement nearby catches my eye, and I see a man get out of the passenger’s side of the SUV and slip into the driver’s seat of the sedan we were just in.

  Ben’s already firing up the engine as I reach for the seatbelt, but Desmond blocks me from latching it. “What the—” I start to say, but he interrupts, pushing on my shoulder.

  “Down,” he says. “Ass on the floorboards.”

  I obey immediately, wedging myself into the foot space between the passenger seat and the rear seat. I hear the sedan and the SUV start up as Desmond slides into the car, holding his feet up to avoid stepping on me. As soon as the car door shuts, he lies down, tucking his big form across the rear seat, going as flat as possible.

  The car shifts into gear, and we cruise through the vast, empty space, exiting the parking garage on the opposite side in a slow, leisurely manner. Sunshine streams through the windows as we pull back onto the street. I can see Ben from where I lie on the floor, and his expression looks a
s though he doesn’t have a care in the world — just out for a casual drive. He even has a bit of a lazy smile on his lips. He looks unhurried and relaxed as he checks the rearview mirror and uses the turn signal to switch lanes.

  I whisper as though someone’s trying to eavesdrop just outside the car. “Now where are we going?”

  “We’re proceeding to the safehouse as planned. This is just an extra precaution, in case they tagged the sedan.”

  I don’t need to ask who ‘they’ might be. I know in my heart that BHC is behind the situation back at the apartment building — the only thing I’m not sure of is whether BHC has actually started a fire, or if they just set off the alarms to flush me out.

  But if there’s one thing the last twenty minutes has made clear, it’s that Jude’s careful pick of a security team is nothing short of exceptional. Being wedged into the footwell is somehow oddly comforting; the tight fit of the small space is wrapped around me like a protective hug. I take a few deep breaths as the car hums along at a normal speed, the tight grip on my stomach easing slightly. Patterns of shadows and light flash across the backseat as we pass by tall buildings then open breaks, moving away from the center of the city.

  I’m trying to hold it together, but I need to know where the guys are. I haven’t heard from any of them since this morning. They’ve been busy at Pentabyte all week, catching up on meetings and paperwork and a million other tasks that fell to the wayside when they took up the round-the-clock watch over Zoey and I.

  I remember the phone I have clenched in my fist, and I press my thumb against the button to wake it up.

  2

  Trigg

  Even though Jax is on his Harley, he hasn’t made it any further than me. The traffic on the road leading to our apartment building has become so congested from the inflow of emergency vehicles and curious people wanting to see what’s happening, he hasn’t been able to swerve in and out of traffic like he usually would during a situation like this. My patience is running out, and even though we’re still a block away, I decide I’m close enough. I dive into the nearest parking spot along the curb and ditch the car, setting off at a run to cover the last block in a fraction of the time it would have taken to drive.