Hot Imports (Book 3 of "The Consortium")

By Blair Erotica

Working uncover isn't for the faint of heart.

When she takes a job clerking at an export firm, Tara finds herself in the middle of smuggling, high finance, treachery, sexual madness and outright greed. The people she works for are up to something, and they aren't all in it together.

The man she is hot for isn't what he seems to be either, but his passion is honest. If only he isn't a crook.

~~~~~ PG Excerpt ~~~~~

On Monday morning Tara stared at her clean desk and empty in-basket. Most of her work assignments came directly through Barry, and he'd gone to Panama on Thursday.

With him out of the office, once she finished the work he'd left her, there wasn't much to do. He'd been so busy getting ready for his trip that he hadn't bothered to reschedule their after-work get-together.

After what had happened with Jake, she was just as glad.

Jake was still a mystery. A sexy, amazing mystery. She wondered if her abrupt leaving that night was why she hadn't heard from him since.

Of course, he was a busy person too, so there could be any number of reasons he hadn't called, hadn't suggested another meeting.

When it came to that, she could have easily called him. She still had his card with his mobile number. But spending one night with him had her perilously close to compromising her investigation.

When it was done, if Jake was in the clear, then she'd worry about picking up where they left off. If he had any interest, that is.

"Barry is flying back this morning," Nina told her.

Nina had seemed unusually chipper since Jake came around. There had to be a connection, but Tara couldn't imagine exactly what it was. Still, there was an awful lot of commotion going on over Jake's small order. She and Barry were really rolling out the red carpet.

"I'm picking him up at the airport in an hour." Nina was still talking about Barry. "Juan has a checkup this morning, so he is leaving too. You'll need to answer the phones while I'm gone. Not that they are ringing off the hook. If anything important comes up, call me on my cell."

Once Nina left, Tara collected her thoughts and called Barb to report. She didn't have much new to tell her, but she had a hunch that things might start happening once Barry was back and Barb needed a heads up.

She made her call, then went to lunch. Shortly after she returned, Nina and Barry came in. Looking at them, Tara felt certain they'd stopped somewhere for a personal encounter of the sexual kind. They both had that languid look as they wandered back to their offices.

A bit later Nina came over to Tara's desk waving some papers. "We need to modify the paperwork for that big shipment right away. Here are the notes of the changes Barry made in Panama to consolidate Jake's packages into it. It's going off shortly, so the paperwork needs updating right away."

Tara gave her an appropriate worker-drone grimace as she looked through the papers. "Okay. It will take a little time to do all this."

Nina shook her head and Barry came out of his office to stand behind Nina.

"It has to be done today," Nina said. "The shipment has to go out on a cargo ship tomorrow afternoon and the paperwork has to be done today or it won't get loaded in time."

"I'll be around if you have any questions," Barry said cheerfully. "Get this done for us and there's a bonus in it for you."

"I haven't done changes like these before," Tara said.

"There's not much to it with the new program I installed," Barry said. "Reship, is the name of it. It lets us access the customs database."

"They let us do that?"

"We are beta testing it for them. If this works, everyone will have it."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Boruma Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Nov 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463806920

Book preview

Book 3 of The Consortium

HOT IMPORTS

Blair Erotica

Copyright 2014 Blair Erotica

All Rights Reserved

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~~ All characters in this book are over 18. ~~

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CHAPTER ONE

Barry let his gaze run over the lithe figure of the new girl as she walked back to her cubicle in the center of the room. Everything about the girl, especially the way she moved, excited him.

Tara. Her name was Tara, he reminded himself as he stared at the delicious movement of her ass under her tight skirt.

Unconsciously, he licked his lips. That ass deserved a much closer inspection. In fact, he didn't see anything to dislike about any part of her lovely body.

He forced himself to be patient. He needed to move slowly, give her a little time-time to settle into the job before he made a move. She'd only been working there a few days and if he pushed too soon, came on too strong, not only would she probably back off, he risked having her haul his ass into court.

Sexual harassment suits were the rage these days. If he upset her, she could say he'd hired her just to get her into bed. He found that supremely unfair. It was true, of course. That was exactly the reason he'd chosen her over the other candidates. But unfair.

After all, the job qualifications were fairly minimal, and he did think she could do the job. On that basis, he could have hired any one of three candidates. So, the fact that he'd hired her for her sex appeal shouldn't be an issue.

He had to make a decision, pick one of them based on something — why not because she was hot?

But that was the way things were, and a smart man who worked in management learned to play the game. Besides, waiting, biding his time, gave him something to look forward to.

Every day he'd see her in the office and fantasize about seducing her, getting her into his bed and spreading those lovely legs.

Or maybe he'd imagine she got down on her knees in front of him to take his hard, throbbing cock in her mouth. She'd be smiling up at him with those beautiful eyes when he came.

These and other arousing thoughts helped relieve the boredom of being in that damn office all day, especially when nothing was happening. They took his mind off the reality that the plan wasn't working the way he'd expected.

At that moment, things didn't look at all promising. New clients were hard to come by. Maintaining a network that made it possible to do the work was expensive and frustrating.

The biggest problem was that they had to move cautiously when looking for new clients. The authorities were getting good at sting operations. That meant he had to check clients out carefully.

Still, by this time, he'd hoped to have more work in the pipeline, more money in the bank. All they seemed to have more of was problems. Just two weeks ago he'd learned that his main contact at customs had retired, and that had to get fixed immediately. Without someone on the inside to ease the paperwork, the risks went up exponentially.

Fortunately, he'd gotten some good responses from feelers he'd made to Donna. The cute brunette who worked in the customs office had finally agreed to meet him for dinner. A business dinner. She talked of her frustrations with her job and the slow pace of promotion.

He'd sensed she was greedy, and they'd exchanged hints about how they might help each other. Yesterday she had told him flat out she was available for extra work — consulting on documentation. The documents weren't complicated, and the company had a lot of experience in doing documentation, so that was a promising offer and they'd work out what that meant, exactly, in detail, over dinner.

He looked forward to the dinner and establishing an important new business contact. Even more, he looked forward to seeing how close he could make that relationship.

Her smile, her flirty ways, hinted at more than dinner and business. Barry preferred to mix business and pleasure whenever possible. Donna exuded pleasure.

Slightly plump with luscious full breasts, her body promised pleasure. She was attractive, but no raving beauty and she exuded eagerness.

Maybe she'd be the kind who'd been ignored, overlooked, and therefore was ripe for an invitation to romp. Whatever the source, he'd seen hunger in her eyes. Recalling the look she'd given him, the way she'd licked her lips, making it casual, got him hard.

Yes, his guess was that Donna would be fun in the sack, even if she wasn't the kind of girl you wanted to be seen around town with. If she knew her way around a man's body as well as she knew the ins and outs of customs documents, he was in for a hell of a time. Anticipating finding out if he was right made him smile.

Thinking of Donna as he watched Tara walk sensuously back to her cubicle made the two women swirl together in his mind — two quite different people, but both juicy targets for conquest that made his pulse race.

When Tara's desirable body finally disappeared from sight behind the maze of office furnishings, Barry sighed softly and turned his attention back to business matters.

Nothing to see here. Move along. Well, his mind went back to supplementary business at least. The routine shit that Juan thought was important.

He looked at the printout of a message that had just arrived. A first read, it sounded promising, if straightforward enough. A guy from Mexico needed some special help in getting a small shipment of goods to Europe. Although that was exactly the kind of request Lowell Import/Export LLC handled every day, this one sent up two red flags that got Barry's juices flowing almost as much as the anticipation of bedding Donna later that night.

The first hint it was something special was the simple fact that the message came straight to him. The potential client had bypassed the sales department, sending an email to the in-basket of his private email account.

Barry was not big on the cyber world. It wasn't, in his opinion, particularly trustworthy. Things could be easily faked online, and as someone intimately familiar with cons, he resisted playing on turf he didn't know — intimately.

More than that, he found online shit too fucking impersonal. Dealing with the world through the screen of a computer, or worse, a telephone, didn't suit him at all. He didn't even like webcam girls or online porn. He couldn't understand anyone being into that shit when there were plenty of real women around who wanted to play.

So he paid minimal attention to what went on in his computer and the only people who had his email address were a small group of special clients and, much to his dismay, a horde of Nigerian scam artists and people offering products guaranteed to make his dick bigger.

Well, as Donna would find out, his dick was plenty big enough to do the job. And concerning the money... he had his own scam going, thank you very much Mrs. Charles Taylor, African bank managers, and company.

The second red flag that he had noticed was that the message gave a personal reference — a name that figured prominently on Barry's all too short and extremely private client list. This individual had been a good client, with a growing business. Unfortunately, he had run into legal problems that would take him out of circulation for some time.

Even when he was back in business, associating with him would be a liability. Reluctantly, Barry had deleted him from his contact list and erased all the emails between them.

Thinking about the man gave Barry a twinge of sadness. Not that he'd liked him particularly, and they were never going to be drinking buddies, but before his sudden fall, Barry had made a fair amount of money in aiding and abetting the growth of the man's business.

The future had looked bright. The man's bad fortune, combined with the new message made Barry suspect his client might have been set up, fingered by a competitor. Such things had been known to happen.

Even crooks did market research, and someone might have felt that the market was insufficiently robust to accommodate the number of competing businesses in it. The message from this Mr. Silva could be the desired result of the elimination of one competitor and a desire to take his place.

It could even be that Silva had noticed the void and was stepping in to fill it. Crime hates a vacuum.

Whatever the truth, Jake Silva would be in town for a few days and had expressed interest in taking up the slack in their shipping schedule. Someone so knowledgeable was always potentially dangerous, but it was the risks that made the work profitable.

With new clients, the courtship had to start slowly. As exciting as a new client might be, the prospect of vetting a new operation made Barry's gut hurt a little. That prospect of being set up for a sting always hung overhead.

Now Barry decided he would wait a bit before answering to not seem too eager. Later, maybe tomorrow, he'd compose a cautious but optimistic reply. He'd say that he'd love to consider the ways they might be able to help Mr. Silva. He'd say that if he had a shipment that needed expediting or required special handling, he could, all things being equal, meet his needs.

Barry smiled at the way the straightforward jargon of the business could sound as much like vague bullshit as when you were deliberately trying not to say too much. Sort of like the few contracts he'd read. A lot of words that seemed to go nowhere but could be as nasty as a bear trap if you got the wrong way of them.

Another reason Barry disliked doing business electronically is that he put a lot of stock in what a person's face and body told him. They often expressed things they didn't know they were saying.

He was proud of his ability to read people. So, before he did business with anyone, he'd propose that they meet face-to-face. That let him take the measure of the person.

To keep things totally on the up and up for the moment, he wanted to arrange a time for this new client, this Silva, to come to the office. Until Barry was sure of Mr. Silva and until he had a chance to let