Ruthless Temptation Read Online Free Page B

quietly, secretly, and then she’d
slink away and leave him alone. Otherwise she’d be out of a job.
    Her
plan had been impulsive and not well-thought out. Absolutely true. But that
didn’t mean she deserved to be blackmailed into having sex. She wasn’t going to
let him get away with it. She’d go over there tonight only to tell him she
wasn’t going to become one of his conquests. Let him call Ralph’s supervisor.
She’d call him herself and tell him everything she’d heard Ralph say on the
phone. If she was going down, at least she’d do so with a clean conscience.
    ****
    Viggo didn’t find anything in Madison’s
background that gave him any reason to suspect she’d shown up this morning for
a different reason than she gave him. Her family had not survived the move
underground, like the families of so many people he knew. She’d been born in a
small town close to San Francisco, had graduated from high school with a high
grade point average, but hadn’t been a standout in any sports or other
activities.
    She
was only twenty-five now, which meant she must have been forced to move
underground the year she’d graduated. He couldn’t imagine what life had been
like for an eighteen year old kid in the midst of that chaos. She was a strong
person to have made it this far on her own.
    She’d
found work at a fast food place and earned both her undergrad and graduate
degrees at CentralWest university, having finished
the MBA just last year. This job at HCS was the first job she had outside the
food service or merchandise retail industries. She didn’t even have any traffic
tickets.
    What
little he could find on her family hadn’t turned up any criminal activity. Her
mother had been a registered nurse, and her father had worked in construction.
She was an only child, and he hadn’t been able to find much on her extended
family, but he did find a job application for a clothing store at the mall here
in CentralWest where she’d listed no living relatives
that were known.
    That
wasn’t uncommon, either. Plenty of people he knew had lost track of family members
once they’d moved underground, and had spent the past seven or eight years
trying to find them without any luck. So many records had been lost in the
aftermath, online included. Small towns that had once existed and didn’t
routinely back up their records online had been decimated, and the paper
records had gone with them. Online servers had crashed and data was lost.
Madison’s story wasn’t much different from countless others, and he had no
reason to think it wasn’t true.
    The
more he read, the more uncertain he became about what to do. If he called Ralph
or his equally moronic supervisor and told them what this girl had done, she’d
be out of the only decent job she’d ever had . Not
to mention he had every reason now to suspect Ralph was in touch with someone
at HCS who had betrayed them.
    Her
story about why she’d done it and the resulting confusion she’d exhibited once
he’d hammered away at the reasons behind her actions made more sense now. This
wasn’t a question of her searching for fame or glory. She’d been trying to make
sense of her idyllic perception of HCS, versus the reality she’d been hit in
the face with, courtesy of Ralph. He’d have to tell the others about Ralph, but
only after he learned more from Madison.
    Which
brought him back to the present.
    What
the hell was he supposed to do about tonight? Sure, he could seduce her, but to
what end? She was too young for him, for one thing. Eighteen years between them
was a lifetime. She’d want something stable. Something permanent. Marriage and
children. Not a month or two of lavish parties and having her picture taken
everywhere they went before she became too clingy and he broke it off.
    The
women he usually dated wanted one thing from him. His money. They talked a good
talk, but when it came down to it, they only cared about what he could give
them in terms of material