All Through the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

anyway.
“It’s okay,” she told him, “I’m ready . Lead on, fearless guide. Take me where you will, but be gentle. I bruise easily.”
She actually wasn’t kidding, and maybe he could hear the sigh of resignation in her voice. She had ducked and dodged and avoided this adventure as long as she could, primarily because it had become personal. It wasn’t about testing the game anymore, although she certainly needed the job, and the money. It was about self-discovery and why that seemed to frighten her so. Was there something about Kerry Houston that she didn’t want to know?
“Kerry, if I’m to be your guide, there are two conditions. First, you will have to entrust yourself to me for this journey,” he told her. “And while we’re on the subject, how do you feel about that?”
“Entrusting myself to you?”
“Yes, does that make you feel warm or cold?”
Warm or cold? What an odd question. Still, all those receptors he was talking about on the surface of her skin were registering a chill in the air, but the blood flowing through her veins felt hot.
“A little of both. I think I want to shiver.”
“Exactly. That’s how it’s supposed to feel when fear and excitement go head to head. Don’t fight those feelings; they’re completely natural and the perfect alchemy in which to create… something combustible.”
Oh, good, she was going to explode. At least she’d be warm.
“I think you’re ready for the tour,” he said, “but let’s try a little experiment first, if you’re willing. I sense some romantic pain in your past, and I think that might be getting in your way.”
He had to be kidding. Some romantic pain? She was riddled with it. She didn’t know where to start. All her life she had seemed to invite men who were users and takers. They took advantage, took her for granted, took her for a ride, took her for everything she was worth, emotionally speaking. She was Velcro for the jerks of the world. It was so bad, she’d sworn off the opposite sex three years ago, at just twenty-five. The only exception had been a certain CEO of Genesis Software, and he’d been the biggest jerk of all.
“Is it anything you could talk about?”
“I could talk forever. Got a minute?”
“Let’s go for the most painful or the most recent, whichever is shorter.”
Maybe he was sarcastic? That was probably not a bad thing. She wasn’t sure she could relate to a man who wasn’t at least minimally sarcastic, not given her affinity for meanies.
“That’s easy, they’re one and the same,” she said. “Picture this, a brand-new software designer for a major company—that would be me—being blown off by the guy who runs the place—that would be him. He flirted with me, at least I think he was flirting, and then he subjected me to the worst kind of public ridicule and humiliation. It was awful.”
She shuddered.
“Tell me about the public ridicule part.”
So she did. She told him how Joe Gamble had surprised everyone at Genesis by showing up at a company picnic. But it was Kerry who got the biggest surprise because she had no idea who he was when he joined her at a bathtub filled with iced beer and congratulated her on Women-Wealth, her idea for encouraging women to storm Wall Street with a game that simulated trading real stocks. Gamble was notoriously reclusive, and all Kerry, and most of the other employees at Genesis, had ever seen of him was a ten-year-old snapshot in the company newsletter.
He arrived at the picnic fresh from a climbing expedition in the Italian Alps and he was still heavily bearded. Plus, he was wearing sunglasses. How was she supposed to know that the guy who flirted with her and gave her a card with only his E-mail address on it—[email protected]— was the president?
She’d sent him an E-mail that night, and maybe it was a little suggestive. She’d said, “Let the games begin, but beware, I’ve been known to play dirty. Naked at dawn, weapons drawn? Let’s see how big