Any Way You Want Me - By Jamie Sobrato Page 0,4

her teen years, after she’d learned she was the object of an FBI investigation. Probably she was just being paranoid for no good reason.

Whatever the source of Yasmine’s discontent, she was pretty damn sure Kyle could be a fun distraction.

SOON, IF HE WAS LUCKY, he’d find out the truth about Yasmine Talbot.

Alex DiCarlo, otherwise known as Kyle Kramer for the extent of his employment at Virtual Active, watched Yasmine from across the room. She stood up from her desk and walked down the aisle between two rows of cubicles, then disappeared out of the office. She was even prettier up close than she was from afar, and so much more a woman now than she’d been the first time he’d laid eyes on her over ten years ago.

Her long black hair hung nearly to her waist, glossy and straight. Her huge, baby-doll brown eyes belied the fact that she was a wild child, a woman who’d once spent a year in a youth correctional facility, while her skin, pale café au lait thanks to her Indian mother and her English father, was unbelievably flawless.

And she had a way of wearing tight clothes that could plant dirty thoughts in the head of a priest. Today, her black pants and stretchy red sweater had nearly made Alex forget the real reason he was watching her—not purely for her aesthetic appeal.

But there had always been that conflict inside him where Yasmine was concerned. The desire to see justice served versus the sexual desire she stirred in him. Years ago she’d been utterly forbidden, an underage teen and the subject of his investigation. He never would have acted on his attraction, never would have even admitted it existed—not even to himself. Now, though, she was a grown woman, and the temptation was much greater.

She didn’t know he’d been watching her every move for the past two weeks—couldn’t know—or that he knew all the details of her criminal past.

Most important, she couldn’t find out his real identity. So far Yasmine hadn’t shown any sign of recognizing him. Unless she’d illegally accessed employment files that showed his FBI photo, she hadn’t laid eyes on him in nine years. Not since he’d testified against her in the trial that had sent her away to juvenile prison.

He’d gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to get close to Yasmine now—using old contacts to obtain a fake ID, fake job references, and he’d brushed up his slightly creaky programming skills.

He’d also changed his appearance to ensure she wouldn’t recognize him. Six months of growing his hair had left him looking less like the FBI agent he no longer was and more like the obsessed surfer he was fast becoming. The tan he’d acquired from countless days on his surfboard added to the look, and the many hours he’d spent at the gym working out his career frustrations on the weight machines had taken his body from thin but fit to admirably bulky.

A pair of colored contact lenses had completed his transformation from clean-cut FBI agent Alex DiCarlo to California surfer Kyle Kramer.

Now all he had to do was get close enough to Yasmine to answer once and for all the question of whether or not she was still a hacker. But if he got close enough to find that out, would he then be too close to resist asking for more from her? She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and the most intriguing.

But he couldn’t let that temptation deter him. He had to know the truth.

Then he’d be able to get the hell away from this tedious programming job and get on with what was left of his normal life. He may not have his career in the FBI to go back to, but he did have a fledgling information security business that he would never be able to get off the ground until he put this obsession with Yasmine’s case behind him.

In the past two weeks he’d cultivated his programmer persona while settling into the new office, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, and so far he’d been a success. With the technical skills he’d acquired while working to stop cybercriminals at the FBI’s San Francisco field office, he blended right into the offices of Virtual Active, Inc.

But he wasn’t sure how much more of this charade he could take. He hated lying to people, hated pretending to be someone he wasn’t. He didn’t want to be in this place deceiving an