Ishq Factors Read online

  Ishq Factors

  an erotic collection

  Suleikha Snyder

  Copyright

  © 2017 by Suleikha Snyder

  Cover art by Romanced by the Cover

  “Surrender With a Twist,” originally published in Suite Encounters by Cleis Press, 2012

  “Heart Murmurs,” originally published by The Wild Rose Press, 2012

  “May the Force Bewitch You,” originally published in Geek Lust by Ravenous Romance, 2012

  “Matinee,” originally published in The Big Book of Orgasms by Cleis Press, 2013

  “Quake,” originally published in Still Hungry For Your Love by Riverdale Avenue Books, 2013

  “Spice and Sand,” originally published in Winter Rain by Pink Kayak Press, 2014

  “Leo Rising,” originally published in Begging For It by Cleis Press, 2016

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  May The Force Bewitch You

  Now You See Me

  Surrender With a Twist

  Quid Pro Quo

  The Test Flight

  Steal Away and See Me

  Leo Rising

  Indian Summer

  Quake

  Matinee

  Last Call

  Heart Murmurs

  Spice and Sand

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  About the Author

  May The Force Bewitch You

  The basement lab was dim, lit only by the glowing screen of her office-issue PC and the status lights on all the ancient, currently dormant, analysis equipment. You’d think that a private security firm would be making enough money to shell out for a) decent lighting and b) the latest technology but wherever their funds went, it definitely wasn’t towards forensics and research. The tight-fisted financial funneling was probably why Dr. Beatrice Jordan, nerd of all trades, was currently serving as their one-woman crime lab.

  Beat scowled, turning up the volume on her iPod as her fingers flew across the keyboard. Rob Zombie pounded against her eardrums, rough-voiced and angry. Music to break laws by, one of her exes used to say. As a rule, Beat didn’t consider herself a criminal — particularly not when she worked for a firm that tried to help people. Hacking into the FBI’s fingerprint registry and facial recognition database was chance-y, but necessary. They were working against a bitch of a deadline, and the boss didn’t want to waste the time it would take to go through official channels. If there was anything that every employee of Garuda, Inc. knew by heart, it was that whatever the boss said was law. Matthew Sarkar didn’t suffer fools.

  A former Marine who’d come into family money, Sarkar hadn’t done the usual things a guy did when he was suddenly flush. No new sports car, no fancy house, no posh wardrobe, no trophy girlfriend… or trophy boyfriend. Instead, he’d started Garuda, naming his agency after a Hindu demigod and gathering together a small group of former military personnel, ex-cops…and her. With seven tattoos — the tribal design that crawled from her shoulder to halfway up her neck was undeniably the most visible — tortoiseshell glasses and short hair she’d streaked white ala Rogue from The X-Men, Beat was literally the odd woman out. It didn’t help that she was ghostly pale from spending most of her time indoors and constantly wired on Red Bull. She was the person that most of the heavies avoided in the hallway and only communicated with via terse text messages. Freak. Geek. Weirdo. She’d heard it all. But most of what she heard was silence. Everyone up top liked to pretend she didn’t exist… unless she was giving them results.

  “I got your results right here,” she muttered.

  “Do you?” The question brushed against her ear like a physical touch, sliding underneath the music flowing from her ear buds. She practically jumped out of her casual slouch, every muscle approximating standing at attention as she shut off her iPod.

  Matthew Sarkar moved like a cat. She hadn’t heard the door open or heard him cross the room, but she hadn’t seen him either. That was just creepy.

  “Oh my God. What the hell? What, are you wearing an invisibility cloak or something?” she sputtered.

  She certainly saw him now. Six foot two, built like a Dothraki horse lord, with his straight black hair just dusting his shoulders, Matthew Sarkar was the kind of guy who could make her glasses fog up. The kind of guy who did set her off balance just by standing too close, crowded up against the back of her chair like a big, brick wall.

  “Matches for the target,” he reminded, as if her invisibility cloak comment hadn’t even been uttered. “Do you have them?”

  “No.” She tried to keep the peevish tone out of her voice, but ‘peevish’ was sort of second nature for her. “I’m working as fast as I can.”

  “Is that so, Dr. Jordan?” His dark eyebrows arched and his lips pressed into a firm line. The man wore disapproval like some women wore make-up: artfully applied, down to the very last detail. “Then you’ll just have to work faster.”

  “Oh, really? And what kind of incentive would you give me? A pay raise?” She snorted in disbelief…even as her traitorous brain conjured up all kinds of options; ninety percent of them involving her big bad boss with his clothes off.

  Matthew, whose tight jeans and black t-shirt were definitely staying on for the moment, stepped back a few inches and stared down at her with a perplexed expression. “Most of my team members are scared of me, but not you. Not even at the start, when I brought you in. Why is that?”

  Oh, that was an easy one. Beat grinned at him. “I’m only scared of three things, Mr. Sarkar: Daleks, any time George Lucas tinkers with the Star Wars trilogy and my grandmother.”

  To her surprise, he actually laughed. It was a full, rich, sound that echoed off the concrete walls of the lab. “Should I be offended that I actually rate below Jar Jar Binks on a list of something?”

  “Who’s Jar Jar Binks?” she countered, blinking innocently. “You do realize there are only three movies, don’t you?”

  “Oh, you’re one of those people, are you? A purist?” Matthew crossed his massive arms over his equally massive chest. “I’ll tell you what, if you can get me a match for the prints within the next twenty minutes, I will get you copies of the unsullied, original trilogy. The one where Han Solo shot first.”

  She clicked her tongue, swiveling so she was at least paying partial attention to the hack-in-progress…and not revealing to Matthew just how much hotter he’d become with that single offer. “Boss, don’t you think I already own it? You’ll have to do better than that,” she dismissed.

  His laugh rumbled through the room again, like a roll of thunder. Beat wondered just how many of the Garuda team got to hear it. Whenever she left the basement, the goings-on seemed incredibly serious. All the time. A lot of reflex salutes and “Sir”s and people thumping around in steel-toed boots. Not that she didn’t appreciate a good pair of boots.

  “Dr. Jordan…”

  “Beat,” she corrected. “Most people call me ‘Beat.’”

  “Beet? Like the vegetable?” He looked both fascinated and horrified.

  “No, as in ‘Beat It.’ It’s short for Beatrice,” she elaborated, although he no doubt knew it from her personnel file. She got the feeling that Matthew Sarkar knew everything about his staff, from their full names to which side of their beds they slept on.

&
nbsp; “ ‘In faith, lady, you have a merry heart.’ “ His hands came down on either side of her, curling around the arm rests, effectively trapping her in her chair. “Shakespeare’s Beatrice or Dante’s?”

  She had no intention of trying to escape. He’d had her at Star Wars, but quoting Shakespeare…oh, that was just plain dirty. Practically a come on. “Both,” she murmured, in a voice that sounded distinctly breathy to her mortified ears. “I had very literary parents.”

  “Well, I had very literal ones, who knew the value of a job well done. So, Beat, I want a fingerprint match ASAP.”

  “And I’d like to see you naked ASAP. We can’t always get what we want, bossman.” As soon as the words were out, Beat clapped a hand over her mouth and started blushing like the vegetable she was not named for.

  Matthew didn’t look particularly scandalized. Maybe he had experience with other people who were a fun combination of socially awkward and terminally outspoken. Beat didn’t have much experience with men like him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sar—”

  “Matthew,” he interrupted. “It’s Matthew. No vegetables, no Michael Jackson songs. Just the Gospels.” There was an unseemly, dark glint in his eye. One that made her blush for reasons that had nothing to do with her big mouth.

  And then he stripped off his shirt.

  Beat had to blink several times and adjust her glasses before she believed it was actually happening: her boss taking off his shirt, tossing it onto the countertop of her lab bench. When she was finished processing the image, he was still half-naked…and definitely a little smug. Justifiably smug. “Results,” he said, simply.

  This was Beat’s cue to be a good little forensic scientist and turn back to her machine. But how could she when Matthew was such a sight to behold? His torso looked like it had been sculpted from bronze. Forget being a Dothraki horse lord, he was the Khal, the freaking king of the warriors. A Song of Ice, Fire and Nuclear Hotness.

  Before she knew it, she was out of her chair, closing the few feet between them. Even with the heels on her Docs, she barely came up to his collarbone. She was eye level with his perfect pectorals. “Half naked, half assed report,” she pointed out, surprised by the husky note in her voice. It usually took no sleep and a pack of clove cigarettes to make her sound remotely seductive…but her boss was apparently a game changer. In all kinds of ways.

  “Extortion in exchange for doing your job?” The unholy heat in his eyes blazed. “That’s not how employment works, Doctor.”

  She matched his charge with one of her own. “You missed a Beat,” she chided, before leaning forward and pressing her lips to his chest.

  There was something to be said for being a basement-dwelling weirdo, for not giving fuck-all about social niceties. Especially when it opened her up to the taste of his skin: salt, heat, and something that was alien and familiar all at once.

  Her tongue traced the ridge of his nipple. The noise that issued from his throat then…it wasn’t a rumbling laugh. No, it was a growl, an animal sound of pleasure. He grabbed the back of her head, fingers threading into her short hair…making her wish it was long enough for him to really get a grip on.

  “Beat, what is this?” he demanded, thickly. “What are you doing?”

  She licked a slow line towards his throat. “The purist’s version.”

  “Is that so?” He tilted her face upwards, and then swept her up against him with his other hand palming her ass. His mouth came down on hers with complete confidence and purpose. Like the only deadline that mattered involved getting her clothes off.

  It was an assignment she could definitely get behind.

  Beat hooked one leg around his, using the momentum to sway them into the lab bench. He automatically boosted her so she was sitting on the edge of the counter and moved between her thighs. All the while, he kept kissing her. And beyond the mechanics of it all, there was the sensation. The heat of his lips and tongue, the stroke of his touch. He tasted like power, and the forbidden, and felt like determination wrapped in silk.

  He took off her glasses, carefully setting them out of the way, and then he was back at the campaign, attacking her with military precision. He took a direct line to the vulnerable spot behind her ear and the ink-wrapped hollow of her throat, while his fingers marched up her bare thigh and beneath the flimsy barrier of her plaid schoolgirl’s miniskirt. Beat’s only defense was to snake her hand between them and undo the button fly of his jeans. She popped each button with painstaking precision, until his erection was rising against her fingers, freed like some mythical beast.

  He breached the elastic of her panties, finding her hot and wet for him, and sinking two of his fingers deep. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. There was no denying it, Matthew Sarkar was a pro at just about everything…and she matched him stroke for wicked stroke.

  “The target is a known associate of a major arms dealer,” He whispered, making the intel sound like words of seduction. “We can’t afford to let him slip away.”

  “I’m going in through backdoor channels,” she panted against his ear, going straight for the filthiest possible implication. Letting him draw his own conclusions. Paint his own dirty pictures. “You know that takes finesse. Patience. Prep.”

  He groaned, bucking against her palm. “I need this from you.”

  “I need this,” she countered, gripping him tight as she felt for the drawer handles with her left hand. She managed to jostle the top drawer open and reach inside, pulling out an entire row of foil-wrapped condoms.

  And, just like that, Matthew’s laugh was back. Hot and sexy, tickling the surface of her skin. “We used to put these on the barrels of our weapons when it rained. What’s the application here, Beat?”

  “What can I say, boss? Maybe I was saving them for a rainy day?”

  Together, they managed to tear one free and sheath his decidedly non-Marine issue piece…and then she angled upward, sliding onto his cock inch by glorious inch. Holy fire of Mount Doom, but he was big. And strong. And hard. When he started to piston inside her, Beat was glad for the steadiness of the counter at her back, because he made her weak. Not just in the knees but all over. She was roughly the consistency of lime Jell-o. She tried to rally, wrapping her arms around his neck and keeping pace, meeting him thrust for thrust. Matthew held her steady with a good, firm, grip on her hip that would probably leave bruises. Delicious bruises she’d look at later in the mirror as she reran this insane encounter in her mind. His free hand, finished with its thorough plunder of her pussy, edged up her t-shirt — Doctor Who, from a comic convention, and obviously not a deterrent to getting laid — and bared her breasts. As if his exquisite artistry of the penis wasn’t enough, Matthew drew intricate, damp, designs on her skin with his fingertips, making her nipples pebble and causing what was left of her air supply to escape her lungs in frantic little gasps.

  Her belly coiled with tension, tighter and tighter, and flashbulbs were going off behind her eyes. She sank her teeth into the tender skin over his pulse, determined to leave her own mark. To make him replay this later. He groaned her name, her whole name, making “Beatrice” sound sexier than humanly possible. And when she again took him in hand, feeling where they were joined, stroking the underside of his shaft, he stiffened, following her name up with a string of expletives in English and Hindi. She felt his climax rip through him like it was her own. Epic. Earth-shaking. It was like being filled with latex-wrapped lava…not the most erotic of things to think at a moment like this, but oh, God, was it accurate. Beat whimpered, and then let her own pleasure burn her clean through.

  By the end of it, they were clinging to each other, practically sprawled across the countertop as her PC’s alert noises wailed at them like they’d offended its sensibilities while it was trying to work. While it had worked. The hack was done. She was in.

  Matthew raised his head, following the path of her gaze to the computer screen. Still filling her, still heavy and wonderful and satisfying. “I’ll be damned,” he marveled. “I gue
ss you do have me Beat.”

  Oh, yes, she did. In more ways than one. “See? I told you: purist’s version.” She smiled against his jaw. “Han definitely shot first.”

  Now You See Me

  His hands skim her back, fingertips trailing across the ties of her choli like a man balancing on a high wire. The pallu of her sari beckons, and Ishika knows it’s coming but she still shivers when he tugs at the cloth and it spills loose from her shoulder and flows down over her arm.

  Blue silk. Like water. They are selling the clothes and the illusion.

  The camera shutter clicks on repeat. She closes her eyes against the flash. Behind her, against her, Akash breathes in and breathes out, ruffling the fine hairs at the nape of her neck. They’ve only just met and are suddenly intimates.

  Ishika turns halfway, as choreographed, and begins with the top button of his high-necked shirt. Perfectly at level with her eyes, but still her fingers fumble. The material is slippery and feels almost wet. He’s been matched to her, another swell of the same ocean, and the lens keeps record as she strips back the blue and reveals his brown skin.

  Sell the dream, she tells herself, simply sell the dream.

  He traces a line down her spine with his knuckles. Down and back up. Soothing her even as she renders him bare from the waist up. Not part of the breakdown for the shoot, but he isn’t called to stop, isn’t chastised. No one tells Akash Mehra what he cannot do. He’s released a thousand doves in a five-star hotel, flown on invisible wings from the top of the Qutb Minar, come unchained and come undone. He could touch her all over and the world would simply watch.

  Ishika’s dressed and undressed in front of countless strangers. In crowded rooms just off the runway, in the middle of railway platforms converted into studios, in trailers and loos and showers and gardens and fields. She’s never stripped with a magician. And, still, it surprises her when the strings binding her choli come unknotted…when he spreads his palm across her naked back and the blouse gapes in front, revealing the tops of her breasts. Only to him. The camera sees silk, sees fantasies, but not this. The way his head tilts. The secret curves at the corners of his mouth. It’s okay, he seems to tell her. This is for us.