Her Protector: a novella

By Annabel Joseph

From award-winning BDSM author Annabel Joseph, a spanking romance novella:

Rowan Park works in a secret, hyper-secure area of the government, defending the homeland from malicious hacking attacks. That doesn’t mean she can’t entertain lustful fantasies about Chad, the hunky custodian at her workplace.

But Chad isn’t who he says he is, and Rowan isn’t as safe as she believes. When a kidnapping attempt threatens her life, she’s forced to seek shelter—and comfort—in an unexpected protector’s arms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Annabel Joseph
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370940080

Annabel Joseph

Annabel Joseph is a NYT and USA Today Bestselling BDSM romance author. She writes mainly contemporary romance, although she’s been known to dabble in the medieval and Regency eras. She is known for writing emotionally intense BDSM storylines, and strives to create characters that seem real—even flawed—so readers are better able to relate to them. Annabel also writes non-BDSM romance under the pen name Molly Joseph.You can follow Annabel on Twitter (@annabeljoseph) or Facebook (facebook.com/annabeljosephnovels), or sign up for her mailing list at annabeljoseph.com.She's always working on something new, so stay tuned!

Book preview

Her Protector

by

Annabel Joseph

Copyright 2017 Annabel Joseph/Scarlet Rose Press

Smashwords Edition

License Notes

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All characters depicted in this work of fiction are 18 years of age or older.

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Contents

Chapter One: 7pm

Chapter Two: 10pm

Chapter Three: 12am

Chapter Four: 11am

Chapter Five: 8pm

Chapter Six: 3pm

Chapter Seven: Four Days Later

Melt for protective types?

About the Author

Chapter One: 7pm

Rowan Park tossed her black hair, then looked at her black-polished fingertips in disdain. The hacker in black was such a stereotype, and she was a white hat, a good guy. She couldn’t do much with her hair since she’d been born with it—aside from adding a few indigo stripes to her long, feathered bangs. But she’d choose a brighter nail color the next time she went to her salon. That, or she’d ask for some rhinestones or moons to break up the black.

At least her clothes weren’t black. She’d dressed up today, since she was having drinks with friends later. She definitely hadn’t dressed to impress because of the hot custodian who chatted with her every day when he came to empty her trash can.

Okay. Yes, she had.

She waited for his visits, which weren’t really visits, just forays into her office space to do his job. Some days he stayed to vacuum, a real thrill because of his ridiculous arms. She was into hands and arms, and strength. And, well, being spanked, which went with all of it. She wondered if he’d ever spanked any of his girlfriends. He wasn’t married—she’d checked on the first day for a ring.

She shook her head and looked back at her computer screen. She needed to stop fantasizing and focus. National security was at stake, and if she’d worn this particularly flirty pale blue dress and matching cropped sweater to impress Chad, as well as her friends, well, who cared? If she’d been thinking about his opinion when she pulled on her best leather boots, it didn’t matter, because she was having drinks after work with Blake and Serena, not Chad.

Chad. What a perfect fucking name for a hunky custodian.

She looked back at her computer screen, scanning the latest hack attempt via a server in Indonesia. Each hacker had a recognizable style, a signature that gave them away. When hackers breached systems with criminal intent, they were called crackers. When the target was government secrets, well, that was where she stepped in.

Why, hello there, Team Cicada, she murmured, picking up a stylus to isolate and enlarge the lines of code in the breach alert. Are you alone? Having your way with the Pentagon networks? Not anymore.

She recognized her adversaries by now, knew their style of attack and their most-used strategies. Team Cicada worked for North Korea, and while they were great at hacking into systems, they were awful at covering their tracks, even more awful than the Russians, who were notoriously terrible.

She leaned forward, tapping the stylus on her desk, then on her keyboard’s left-arrow key, so the cursor blinked across the low-glare screen. She scanned through lines of Korean computer language—backwards, so she wouldn’t miss anything—and returned to a troubling line of code. What are you looking for? She tsked. Nope. You can’t have that information, my friends.

She added a few neutral characters, scrolled down, and added a few more for good measure. That would keep him and his team busy for a while, and when they found the errors, she hoped they would understand the message she’d left.