Any Way You Want Me - By Jamie Sobrato Page 0,10

the vibrator on the shelf and went on shopping as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. Really, nothing had. She’d just gotten in touch with her true self, the side of her personality she loved most.

Yasmine was still across the store inspecting a rack of S & M apparel. But Cass was by herself and happy.

Happy, damn it. So what if she was happy? Could that ever really be a bad thing? So what if her boyfriend had dumped her and she’d had to pretend to not care about it?

She had her vibrator, her friends, her yearly trips to Cancun and her job, which she adored. Maybe there wasn’t even room in her life for a serious relationship, and maybe…maybe she needed to stop feeling guilty about that.

Maybe she needed to accept, finally, at the age of almost-forty, that she was happy in every sense of the word.

ALEX FELT LIKE losing his lunch. For months he’d been preparing for this night, and he couldn’t let a case of nerves blow his chance to gain Yasmine’s trust.

He sat on the couch with his laptop and stared at his notes on Yasmine’s case, the details of which had become as familiar to him as if they were events from his own life. But he needed to review them again to help himself remember why he was doing what he was doing. He had to keep his focus on her criminal record and off her more alluring attributes.

At the age of sixteen, going by the cybername Digital Diva, she’d broken into military computer databases and gotten caught, resulting in a one-year sentence in a juvenile detention center and a two-thousand-dollar fine.

For several years after her release, her Internet activities were under close watch by the FBI, but as she proved herself reformed, they’d backed off. As far as Alex could tell, she’d walked the straight and narrow path her entire adult life.

And while she’d stayed clean technically, during her senior year in college, she’d been targeted by the FBI as a possible member of a hacking ring known as The Underground that was suspected of being based at her university campus.

Alex had headed up the investigation of the group’s illegal Internet activities, which had started out as petty vandalism but had escalated to more serious system intrusion jobs over a two-year period.

He’d never found any solid evidence that Yasmine was involved, but several of his colleagues, including his partner, Ty, had been sure she was a suspect to watch, and so he’d kept her on his radar.

Just as he’d thought he was making headway in the case, all of his files had been stolen, the FBI network had been hacked into and disabled and messages had been sent to all the top FBI authorities saying, “Down with the feds. Stop sending your hounds to sniff us out.”

With his case against the hacker ring gone and headquarters in a huff, Alex had been the whipping boy. And when one of his co-workers reported comments he’d made about finding Yasmine attractive, his integrity had been called into question. He’d been accused of being lax in his investigation because of his attraction to her, and in the cloudy uncertainty of hindsight, he often feared the accusation could be true.

In the fallout, he couldn’t stop thinking about Yasmine, couldn’t stop wondering if he’d been right or wrong and couldn’t resist putting himself in a position to investigate her up close and personal.

The case was basically cold now—for him, anyway, since he didn’t have access to FBI files anymore. But his investigator’s instincts told him he’d missed something big, and he couldn’t go about his normal life in peace until he knew for sure what it was he’d missed. The case haunted him, or perhaps more accurately, Yasmine haunted him.

Now what? He glanced at the clock in the corner of his computer screen. Still fifteen minutes before she was due to arrive at his house. He was keyed up about his first real chance to get close to her, to possibly gain her confidence. The only complication was his all-too-real attraction to her.

He needed to keep his mind off her physical beauty and focused on the fact that she potentially had the moral conscience of a reptile. She’d cost the government thousands of dollars with her juvenile crimes alone, and she’d never shown the slightest remorse for her actions.

He scrolled down the page of notes to a photo of her imbedded in the document. Yasmine,