Chapter Six
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Cove
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“I had to postpone your meeting with Tim Northam. Your grandmother and your two aunts are coming up to see you.”
“What?” I ask, because surely I misheard.
“You heard me, Hollister,” says our PA, Denise Angers, also a member of our grandmother’s army. She’s fifty-five, served our adopted fathers before us, and has no plans to retire, so she’s basically been bossing us around forever.
“Rafe and Tylan are on their way to your office as we speak.”
Ah, fuck. This is not good.
“What the fuck? Did you do something wrong?” Rafe asks as soon as he enters my office. “Because it isn’t me or Tylan.”
“No,” I say almost defensively, narrowing my eyes at Rafe Winslow and Tylan Carver. I’ve known these two men my whole life. We were each adopted by a couple in the Thomas family and raised to one day take over Acclivity.
That day arrived two years ago when the reins of the multi-billion-dollar company were handed to us. We’re formidable, feared, respected, and revered around the entire world, except when it comes to our adopted grandmother.
She doesn’t care how much money we’re making. What she wants is for us, at the age of thirty-two, to get married and give her grandbabies.
We’re just too busy turning our multi-billion-dollar company into a triple-billion-dollar company. We don’t date. The women we take to bed know this. Our grandmother and her entourage––our aunts––not so much.
“What do you think is going on?”
“Guess we’re going to find out.”
As soon as the words are out of Tylan’s mouth, Denise opens my office door and ushers in the matriarchs of our family.
Our grandmother, Esmeralda Thomas, at seventy-five, still cuts an imposing figure. Dressed in her signature shade of blue, with her eyes still glittering with youth, she allows us to kiss both her cheeks.
Our aunts, Louise and Jane, whom we kiss the same way, are replicas of her, only twenty years or so younger.
“To what do we owe this unexpected visit?” I ask, although it doesn’t feel like a visit.
More of a summoning... in our own domain.
I groan silently on the inside. We have major deals closing, takeovers pending, new negotiations to handle, and merger meetings to attend.
Just because it’s the holidays doesn’t mean we stop making money.
What are they up to?
“So, Adalynn Miller?” our grandmother says. At least she got straight to the point.
“Never heard of her.” We chorus because it’s true.
She gives us a pointed stare, then glances at our aunts sitting on either side of her.
“Are you saying you aren’t engaged to be married to this lovely girl?” Aunt Louise says, pulling out a sheet of glossy paper from her large handbag and placing it on the desk.
With Rafe and Tylan standing on either side of me across the desk from our grandmother and aunts, I pick up the sheet.
A woman stares back at us. The image looks to have been taken with a powerful telephoto lens from another building across from hers.
Wearing what seems to be a tattered robe, the belt untied to reveal a bright green t-shirt and overly baggy track pants, she was caught bringing a cupcake to her mouth with her left hand.
On her ring finger, what appears to be an engagement ring sparkles brightly. Her glossy chocolate-colored hair is messily tied up into a knot that barely holds; a stream of curls on one side and pin-straight tresses on the other side escaped and frame her face.
Zoomed in, her gaze shimmers with gold and diamonds, her eyes a rich brown flecked with specks of gray. Her eyelashes are thick and silky, her cheekbones prominent, her jaw perfectly curved around a mouth that is cushioned with lush lips, slightly parted in a bite-size pose.
But it’s the perfectly shaped slope of her breast that the robe reveals under her t-shirt, so ample she would fit into the palms of our rather large hands, the tip of her pink tongue peeking from those lovely full lips that sends blood roaring through my body down to my cock as I envision her completely naked on my bed, legs parted.
Fuck. What the hell is this?
But I’m not the only one with the same reaction.
Rafe, Tylan, and I have been purposely raised with a bond thicker than blood. We have each other’s backs. I’m the serious one. Rafe the thinker. Tylan the doer.
We don’t have the same taste in women, yet it’s clear from the glance we give each other that we’ve been punched in the cock by a messy dark-haired girl the instant we laid eyes on her. Which is fucking ridiculous.
We don’t do things like this. And that brings us right back to reality. If we want to get laid, there are less complicated ways to do it than with this unknown woman called Adalynn Miller.
But who the fuck is she?
“We don’t know this woman, Grandmother,” I say firmly, flexing my hands to physically shake off whatever the mere image of this woman has done to me. Unsurprisingly, Rafe and Tylan do the same.
“Well, apparently, she’s your fiancée. Are you going to deny that?” Our grandmother drags her gaze across all three of us, from Rafe on my right, to me, to Tylan on my left.
Who the hell is she speaking to?
“Who? Mine?” we ask simultaneously, then look at each other as if we’re in some skit in a comedy show. What the actual fuck is going on?
“Oh. All three of you. All three of you are engaged to this girl, Adalynn Miller.”
Accusing, yes, we take it as an accusation that one of us is engaged is one thing; all three of us being engaged to the same woman who looks like that quite another.
I shake my head.
“Nope,” Tylan says, a grin breaking out on his face. “How did you even come to the conclusion that we’re all three engaged to one woman?”
“We have our means.”
“So you hired a sniper photographer to spy on her?” Rafe asks.
“Well, we needed to observe her in her natural habitat for a bit,” Aunt Jane says.
“But we have some interesting evidence,” Aunt Louise adds.
She pulls out another glossy photo.
What the hell. Is that real? She could have meant some other Cove, Rafe, and Tylan, right?
“Still want to deny it?”
It’s a damn coincidence, nothing more.
“Yes, because we didn’t even know she existed until five minutes ago,” I say forcefully.
“I don’t know... this feels different,” Aunt Jane says, but not to us; she’s talking to the other two women.
We don’t bother to ask how it feels different. We already know Aunt Jane is going to give us some woo-woo crap. About destiny and fate and meant-to-be-togethers.
Okay, it’s time to wrap this up.
“Grandmother, aunts, this has been fun, but we have work to do.”
Our grandmother does nothing for a few minutes. She stares us down, looking for what I don’t know.
“Hmm,” she says at last, then gets up. Using a perfectly manicured nail, she taps on the image of Adalynn Miller. “I don’t buy it. I’m going to start planning your wedding.” With that, the three ladies march out of my office.
Well, fuck.
We don’t say anything for a few minutes; our gazes, though, are continuously drawn to the picture of the jewelry maker, and apparently our fiancée.
“She deserves to be spanked for using us as a ruse for whatever scheme she has going on,” I say.
“I agree,” Rafe nods. “She can’t go around spreading rumors like that. She brought the matriarchs to our door and now they’re planning our damn wedding.”
“Imagine if we turn up at her door as her future husbands,” Tylan grins like the devil he is. “What do you think she’ll do?”