Peyton Riley Read Online Free Page B

owner to let them use his rooftop garden several times a week for their surveillance. (Carson made it appear that he and Peyton were into outdoor sex among hydroponic produce. She wasn't sure Henrik bought it, but he was paid well for his suspicions.) The night before, their days of surveillance finally paid off when Anja Rubinstein welcomed a young man to her flat. Carson and Peyton scrambled onto the Glass Owl's roof, where they took out their cache of equipment (well, binoculars and a high-tech, newfangled camera with a telephoto lens that Carson wouldn't let her touch), crept behind the vertical planters and watched as Anja Rubinstein gave her visitor a very enthusiastic welcome.
    "Very flexible, she is," he said behind the newspaper in the morning light, voice shaking with constricted laughter.
    "Oh shut up." Peyton slid down her seat, watching the door across the street intently. "What the hell are you dicking with that newspaper for, anyway? Can you even read Dutch?"
    "I am a man of many talents and hidden depths."
    Irritation niggled at her, an ever present finger poking at the base of her skull. She didn't know why she'd been so annoyed at Carson, but she was, the moment he started enjoying the window show Anja had put on and began making appreciative comments.
    Anja was beautiful, she had to concede, with white blonde hair that hung like a silvery sheet across her athletic frame. Great tits, too; not too large, but well-formed and pert, and she felt her own nipples harden as she recalled the loving attention Ms. Rubinstein's got from her visitor.
    Damn, but Peyton was tense. She wanted to get laid. It didn't help that Carson slept with only a thin pair of boxers on, and she had to sleep every night to the sound of his pitched breathing, knowing he was just there, on the trundle bed, in the dark, half naked and divine.  Then she had to wake up and it was always to see him smirking at her with his bedroom eyes and tousled hair, walking casually to the bathroom as his torso muscles flexed and his morning erection swung with every step. It was like he was challenging her—daring her to make the first move, and Peyton didn't know just how long she could hold out.
    "I hate surveillance," she said for the third time that day. "Boring-ass work. Roi always outsourced it to someone else, someone dull. All I had to do was get the intel and execute."
    "Oh honey, I know, poor you, tell me all about it, girlfriend," he deadpanned. The newspaper pages shuffled for a few minutes. He sighed. "So. Tell me again! What it is you call your work?"
    She rolled her eyes but indulged him. On the fourth day of surveillance, a particularly boring day where they followed Anja around to get her nails done and pick up milk, he'd started asking her questions, and she, having had nothing better to do, started answering.
    "They're called takedowns. I go in, play a role, get the job done. Usually it's to stop something from happening—a sale, a merger, couple of times even a wedding. Roi's clients pay good money for that service, and I do it."
    "So…" he set down his empty coffee cup. "Like, a con artist?" 
    "Let's get one thing straight," Peyton bristled. "I'm not a con artist. I don't part people unwillingly from their money. I'm paid for what I do, and quite regularly, at that. Throw in health and dental and it could be a regular nine to five job."
    "Hmm," said Carson, and she could almost see the wheels in his head turning. "And does that job always entail sleeping wi—"
    "Don't even ask. No, I don't charge for sex. That I do when I want to, and for free, thankyouverymuch." She sighed at the suddenly animated expression on his face and tore a piece of the roll in her hand, her frustrations rattling all over her body. "But fine. Let's just say that it's easier to get someone to change course, when sex is on the table."
    "Is it?" he waggled his eyebrows.
    "Mm-hmm." She popped the piece in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. "Sex is a shortcut,