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  S. E. Lund

  Acadian Publishing Limited

  Copyright © 2017 by S. E. Lund

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-988265-19-3

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Disclaimer: The material in this book is for mature audiences only and contains graphic content. It is intended only for those aged 18 and older.

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  Created with Vellum

  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

  S. E. Lund Newsletter

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  INDIA

  TechCrunch Disrupt, San Francisco

  The first time I met Jon, he tried to pick me up.

  He almost succeeded. If he had, I doubt I’d be here at TechCrunch Disrupt today.

  Picture it – one of my first beach parties of the year, Friday night before a week of midterms, and I'm with my best girlfriends. We're crazy in the way that only geek girls can be crazy – letting our hair down when we're usually buttoned up tight. Tequila shots, pitchers of beer, nachos. Music blaring, we're all half-drunk sitting on stools at the beach bar, and up walks this gorgeous hunk of a man I recognized from my English class.

  I watch as Marina's eyes widen when he stands next to me.

  "Hey, India right?" he says, his arm on the back of my chair. "You're in my English course. Great name, by the way."

  "Thanks," I say, used to getting ribbed about my name. "I recognize you." I turn to him, my drink in hand. "Professor Gardner's class. We're reading Tess of the D' Urbervilles."

  "Yeah," he says and gives me a brilliant smile. "Or at least, we're supposed to be. I'm a bit behind. It's a romance, right?"

  I shake my head. "Oh, it's not romance, believe me. More like a tragedy, and a warning about Britain's crumbling feudal system, the decay of the rural way of life due to industrialization and the oppression of women."

  "Whoa." He makes a face of horror. "Deep. There was a movie made about it," he says. "With Nastassja Kinsky. Didn't Polansky direct it?"

  "He did."

  Jon nods his head thoughtfully. Then he smiles. "Wanna dance?"

  Now, you have to realize that Jon Anders Thorson is perhaps the hunkiest hunk on campus. Not only is he a bit older than the rest of us, due to his having been in the Army for five years, he's beautiful in a masculine way.

  That night, he wore a pair of swim trunks because he’s been surfing and he’s tanned and ripped.

  He’s gorgeous.

  The three of us are sitting there, practically drooling over him, and he asks me to dance.

  I glance over to the small space beside the DJ's table and sound system.

  "There's no one dancing.”

  He holds out his hand, smiling. "Then we'll be the first."

  "I don't dance very well," I say, making a face.

  "Neither do I. We'll be a pair."

  "Are you sure?" I hesitate, chewing on my bottom lip. "It might be more of a comedy routine than a performance…"

  "Come on, India. Live dangerously."

  That did it. It was something my brother Steven used to say to me when I was too afraid to try out new things when we were growing up together.

  Come on India. Live dangerously…

  Jon couldn't know that's what my beloved brother used to say to me before he died during a deployment in Afghanistan, but it worked.

  I took Jon's hand and he led me to the middle of the small dance area where the two of us moved our bodies in ways that would worry a chiropractor and make Elaine Benes proud. He purposely danced like a robot and I couldn't stop laughing – partly from embarrassment and partly because he was hilarious.

  And so uninhibited.

  He was fun in addition to being swoonworthy with that sun-bleached dark blond hair and pale blue eyes. Square jaw, scruff and built. Six foot three or four, his biceps bulging and tatted.

  I almost succumbed to his charms after several shots of tequila, bites of lime, and licks of salt. At the last minute, I came to my senses when he slipped his hand under my sweater and ran his fingers up my back during a blistering kiss in the dark behind the beach shack.

  God… He was gorgeous. But he was dangerous. I could see that the first time I laid eyes on him.

  I wasn't offended that he hit on me that first night. He tries to pick up every attractive woman who catches his eye. Marina calls him a manwhore. I call him a bonobo.

  He prefers to think of himself as a woman's man.

  I can't help it if I love women.

  So, I knew the moment I saw him, he was not only out of my league, he was dangerous. With that easy smile, drop dead looks, and smoking hot body, it would be hard not to fall for him but he wasn't the type to see someone on a steady basis.

  No. A quick hookup, great sex and then on to the next flower.

  Not my thing. I'm all about meaningful and long-term so we were wrong for each other right from the start.

  Still, he was a hard man to resist but I resisted him and that made all the difference.

  He still is hard to resist.

  Five years later, we're business partners. I'll be giving a talk at the Tech Crunch Disrupt San Francisco on the business we started with several other friends from Stanford.

  Jon is CEO of Pacifica Technologies Inc. I'm CTO.

  We're a spunky little startup that's challenging Lockheed Martin's dominance of the aerospace industry.

  With my BSc in Engineering, and our dual MBAs from Stanford, Jon and I, along with three other friends, built Pacifica from the ground up. Now, we've moved past the initial attraction to being great friends and business partners.

  There's too much at stake to risk it on a night of sex, no matter how great it might be.

  Still, there are moments when I look at Jon and wish we could get together. We're great as a pair, fantastic as leaders of our team. We have honest-to-goodness fun working together. I never get bored with him and always look forward to going to the office because Jon will be there, in the background of my day, making me laugh or challenging me to solve some problem.

  Sometimes when I'm feeling lonely, I imagine what it would be like to be his lover, but most of the time, thoughts of Jon as a sex partner are forbidden. I do not permit myself to go there -- at least, not often.

  We have a beautiful relationship. It's the envy of all our friends.

  I won’t let anything ruin it – especially not something as commonplace as sex.

  But it's hard to watch him leave the clubs or parties with women he picks for a quick and dirty hookup.

  Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night in the throes of an orgasm and it's always Jon who's involved, pumping away, or with his face between my thighs…

  I really really ne
ed a man…

  Marina, my best friend from grade school, is working on that for me.

  She's a crackerjack coder, expert with algorithms and statistics and is working on a dating app that she plans on releasing this month, if the beta goes well.

  Maybe, just maybe, she can find me a man.

  It's been over a year since I split with my ex-boyfriend Blaine, who asked me to come with him to Manhattan and help him with his own startup.

  When I asked him what I'd be coming as – a girlfriend or a business partner – he said the wrong thing.

  "Whatever."

  Not exactly the resounding endorsement of the depth of his feelings for me.

  I couldn’t just pull out of Pacifica and move to Manhattan as a whatever… So, I cried my eyes out and said goodbye to him.

  One day, when Pacifica is big enough and my shares are worth enough, I'll cash them in and move to Manhattan on my own. I have ambition. I'm not hoping that Blaine and I will re-unite or anything, but the future is not carved in stone and you can never know what lies ahead.

  Jon and I are at the TechCrunch Disrupt convention together waiting for our session.

  "Ready?" Jon asks, standing up from his chair in the room outside the venue and slipping his laptop into a briefcase.

  "As ready as I'll ever be." I grab my own bag and follow him to the main conference room, getting high-fives from some of the techies who are standing outside the door looking in.

  We stand at the back of the room at catch the last few moments of the session before ours. Being claustrophobic, I need to see a clear exit or I get the heebie jeebies. But with Jon by my side, who was a paratrooper when over in Afghanistan, I'm brave.

  He puts a hand behind my back and propels me forward, up to the front of the auditorium so I can climb the stairs to the stage to give our presentation.

  It's wonderful what we have together. We won’t let anything as crass as sex get in the way of our beautiful relationship.

  Now, if only I didn't want him so badly, I might be able to get through this next hour and the coming presentation without imagining us together one more time…

  Marina has got to come through with a match for me.

  I need a man – badly.

  Chapter 2

  JON

  We fist bump before she walks up the stairs and onto the stage and she gives me that smile – the smile that says, "I got this, Jon. Watch me blow their minds."

  That's my girl – India Louise Ward. Girl wonder at twenty-five years old. BS (Engineering) Stanford. MBA Stanford. My CTO – Chief Technology Officer. She's also my communications lead for the company. She's our public face, because why not put your best face forward and India is definitely Pacifica's best face.

  She's fucking beautiful.

  We’re at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and India is the speaker, talking about our experiences as a startup and how we went from my parent's garage in Pacifica, CA to a hundred-million tech business in Palo Alto. I'd be up there instead of India but I love seeing the audience when they realize that besides being smoking hot, she's smart.

  Really smart.

  Super smart. You can see it in her eyes. They're hazel with flecks of green and violet behind thick lashes. There's just so much going on behind them, besides being pretty.

  Not that I'm obsessed with her eyes, mind you. But I'm a man. I notice those things.

  Back to India – you have to be whip-smart to be successful in this business and she's a fucking rocket scientist. She's one of the few women in a position of power in the aerospace industry.

  Pride fills me as I watch her step up to the podium. There's polite applause, and the faces I can see in the crowd are all interested. They've heard about the girl wonder with the flaky name at Pacifica Technology, Inc. Now they can see her in person, and she's an eyeful.

  India.

  I mean, who the fuck names their daughter India?

  Hippies, that's who. Her parents are old hippies, professors at Stanford, which explains India's brains. Her mom waited until she was forty to have children. Her father plays bongo drums, for fuck's sake. Her mother has all these crystals lying around their house and is into yoga and eastern religions and took India to Machu Picchu when she was eight. You'd think that being exposed to all that airy-fairy stuff would warp a young mind.

  Not India's. She's a straight arrow. Workaholic. Capitalist straight down the line.

  Her parents must be so torn. They're typical flaky humanities professors. As a result, India didn't go to regular schools. No, she went to Montessori. She went into Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth and was doing a fucking engineering degree when she was six-fucking-teen. India’s beautiful and she's probably one of the smartest people in the room.

  Today, she’s wearing a knee-length navy skirt and a white silk blouse. Over top is a blazer that hides curves like you wouldn't believe. Her dark auburn hair is pulled back into a bun and she's wearing black-rimmed reading glasses and not much makeup.

  It's her disguise, as she calls it. She puts forward a totally professional demeanor but underneath, she's as crazy and geeky as the rest of us.

  Here's the other secret she's trying to hide: She's five-foot-five-inches of babelicious woman. You should see her in a bikini.

  Scalding hot. I mean, burn your retinas hot. Curves that would make a man kill to grab onto them and pump hard.

  I know that each and every one of the men in the audience – the straight ones, at least – want to bang her despite the disguise. Their puny brains get all mixed up when they see a beautiful woman like India. They can't keep two thoughts in their swelled heads because all the blood's drained down to their dicks.

  They all want to fuck her. Every straight guy I meet wants to fuck her.

  Unlike them, I don't want to fuck her. I mean, sure, I could fuck her if the opportunity arose because she's sex on legs and beautiful, but it never does. On purpose.

  I need her to do her job.

  We need each other to be totally professional.

  We're practically best friends and have known each other since our freshman year at Stanford.

  I was an Army Ranger just returned from Afghanistan and was on the GI Bill, attending college to study business. Six-foot-three of hard-muscled killer. She was this pretty little brainy girl with a big laugh doing her engineering degree, and she stole my heart – in a brotherly-sisterly way – and put me in my place when I got too wild.

  We took the same intro English class and the friendship began over coffee, and then beer in the student pub. We did our MBAs the same year. Now we're business partners.

  I rely on her to run the technology department of Pacifica so I can focus on the financial side of things.

  We're business partners and more importantly, we're friends.

  People joke and tell us we should just give up the pretense and fuck each other's brains out, but no.

  We don't go there.

  I know what people think – they think I'm in love with India.

  I'm not.

  We're best friends. People say a man can't be best friends with a woman, and especially not a beautiful woman like India, but we are the exception that proves the rule.

  She's not into relationships either. She looks up to me like the big brother she lost in the war. What we have is unique, and I'm determined to not let anything get in the way of our beautiful friendship, or Pacifica's success.

  I listen with half an ear as she wows them with our latest roll-out, knowing her presentation on our latest satellite like the back of her hand. This one's destined for the military and will help soldiers on the modern battlefield. The contracts we're busy negotiating are huge. Huge.

  Looking out over the audience, I can see the moment she finally wins them over and they're actually listening, their tongues rolled back up into their mouths. Behind her on the huge screen is her presentation, showcasing our technology.

  I'm happier than ever. Stoked about the future
. Going into business with India was my best idea ever, but if I'm honest with myself, there's this tiny smidgen of doubt in my mind about her. Lately, she's been distant – too busy for our usual chats, coffee breaks, and the occasional dinner out.

  She seems preoccupied. I heard her talking about Manhattan and how she wants to move to the East Coast one day. Maybe open up another office there.

  Manhattan is where her ex lives.

  The jerk who broke her heart.

  I thought she was over him, but I've heard a few of her girlfriends talk about how she hasn’t had a date since they split over a year ago. I was glad to see the back end of him. He wasn't good for her. I knew that from the time they met until he left her, breaking her heart in the process.

  The music flares at the end of India's presentation, startling me back to the present, and there's a huge round of applause for her. She smiles and bows to the audience, then leaves the stage, her face lit up, her cheeks flushed.

  She's fucking amazing.

  We fist bump again. "You rocked it, girl," I say, a huge smile on my face as she steps behind the curtain, grabbing the bottle of water I have ready for her.

  "I think I did," she says and opens the lid, drinking down half the bottle. "They seemed to like it."

  "Listen to them," I respond. I take her by the shoulders and turn her around so she can see the audience through a crack in the curtain. I bend down so that my face is beside hers. "They loved you."

  The audience is still clapping, because the presentation was a combination of technology and patriotism. It was stirring, talking about mission and performance and making the world a better place and rah rah USA.