Pledged To Him 17 (His Sorority Harem)

Chapter One

I walked back into the green room like a man who’d just been handed a bomb.

Samantha was on the couch where I’d left her, quietly scrolling the list of risqué things she, Heather and Eva had come up with to say during the podcast on her phone.

Caroline stood behind her, doing a couple of last-minute fixes to my wife’s hair.

Mona paced in the corner next to the little fridge of bottled water, her fingers tapping out a response to one of the probably half-dozen text threads she was currently juggling.

All three of them looked up as the door clicked shut behind me.

And all of them knew.

The news was bad.

Caroline lowered her brush. Mona tucked her phone into her pocket.

And Samantha Avery—my babygirl, the former sorority queen of Delta Rho, the wife who shared me with Yukiko and Marcie and was fifteen minutes away from the most important interview of her life—looked up at me and went very still in a way I recognized from our wedding.

“Daddy?” Samantha asked. “What’s going on?”

Mona was at my side in the blink of an eye. “Hell. What is it now?”

Caroline didn’t say a word. She just went to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water, half-frozen, from the back of the case and pressed it against the base of Samantha’s neck.

Smart woman, that, I told myself. But all three of them could see the storm coming.

Mona glanced at Samantha. “If you’re dead set on preserving the surprise, we can step out into the hall,” she said, studying my face. “But I’m guessing we’re past that now. So what’s their trick? What have they got planned?”

I looked at Samantha and said a little prayer this wouldn’t break her in half.

“Babygirl, Fiona’s got a surprise guest joining the interview at the halfway point,” I said, anger filling me at having to say the words. “It’s your mother.”

I waited for the explosion.

We hadn’t seen Dawn Lowry since the wedding.

Neither Samantha’s mother nor her father had been invited—they’d just shown up anyway, the way they’d inserted themselves into my babygirl’s business for her entire life without being asked.

Warren started a fight, I’d laid him out, and Samantha had had Tasha and the Stillwell PD eject them both from the premises after giving them the speech she’d been too timid to say until I gave her the confidence to name their crimes.

We were no-contact with both of them for many reasons.

Chief among them the fact that they’d slept with my babygirl’s best friend on two completely separate occasions: her swim team partner Chloe, and her Delta Rho mentor Jessamyn Fawkes.

They’d ruined those relationships, and they would’ve tried to ruin her marriage if she’d let them.

She hadn’t.

I would never forget the moment I’d been forced to tell Samantha her parents had gate-crashed our wedding.

I’d been blindfolded so I wouldn’t see Kiki, Sam or Marcie before the big moment, but the sound of it—that heart-breaking moment when the wail burst from my babygirl’s lips and she was suddenly as scared of them as she’d been when she was a girl—still occasionally echoed in my ears to this day.

God damn it! Samantha had been a fan of Call Your Daddy for years—I knew how much she was looking forward to getting raunchy about our unconventional marriage with Fiona Hall. Why did she have to deal with her mother on today, of all days?

I watched the news sink in. Tears beaded in Samantha’s eyes, but she refused to let them fall. Behind her, Caroline put a steadying hand on my babygirl’s shoulder, the crystals dangling from her neck sparkling in the green room lights.

“Jack?” Samantha asked.

That single word from her lips startled me more than anything else. Samantha didn’t call me Jack: I was Daddy, the same way she was babygirl. That was what we really were, even more than we were husband and wife—and I considered Samantha my wife in every aspect, the same as Yukiko and Marcie.

“Yes, babygirl?”

A long, awful moment passed. Samantha’s bottom lip trembled.

“Is my… is my dad here, too?”

It clicked.

Now it made sense why she’d refrained from the D-word. She didn’t want the specialness of what we were anywhere near what Warren Lowry was.

I was already shaking my head. “It’s just your mother, babygirl,” I assured her. “I promise.”

She’s more afraid of him than she is of her mother, I realized.

That… that made a certain kind of sense, actually.

Dawn Lowry was a narcissist—one who wielded tears and guilt the way a medieval knight used a sword and shield—but she wasn’t the predator Samantha’s father was.

She wasn’t the one who’d corrupted Chloe. Who’d stolen Jessamyn Fawkes away.

She wasn’t the one who’d hit Maria nearly hard enough to kill her, either.

Mona was already in motion. “Come on,” she said, extending a hand to Samantha. “Get up. We’re leaving.”

My babygirl’s eyes widened. “What? But the interview—”

“Is a trap,” Mona spat, anger radiating off her like heat.

“We have no idea what the hell Fiona Hall is trying to do here, but this is not what we were promised. This interview is supposed to be light and raunchy—full of stories about you and the other girls in Jack’s harem.

Intergenerational trauma is not welcome. ”

“Fiona talks about serious stuff sometimes,” Samantha murmured. She looked like she was still processing what she’d heard. “Those always end up being the biggest episodes, actually…”

“Not this one,” Mona said. “I’m going to kill that producer. The fact that they think they can do this after Morning Harbor is beyond the pale.”

“They saw the ratings that Morning Harbor got, is more like it,” I rumbled. “The producer said it herself: ‘Fiona Hall likes drama.’”

“They’re trying to pull the same stunt,” Mona said, nodding.

“We’re not falling for it.” She glanced down at the coed, frowning, even as her mind worked the angles.

“If they apologize for this, we can potentially negotiate a return later. But this isn’t happening.

We are not letting Fiona Hall engineer a mother-daughter reunion in the middle of your Call Your Daddy episode—”

“Can I say something?”

The words caught both Mona and I off-guard. Only Samantha seemed like she’d expected it.

It was Caroline. The makeup tech who’d decided to jump ship and join the team after seeing the way her employers treated Kiki on the set of Morning Harbor. The one who, despite having been in our employ for all of four days, seemed to have an almost supernatural bond with my wives.

“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to interrupt,” Caroline said, holding up a hand. “It’s just important.”

Before Mona could say another word, the makeup artist dropped to one knee next to Samantha on the couch, putting herself at eye level with my babygirl.

They made quite a pair: Samantha in her blazer and Mona-approved bodysuit, Caroline in some crazy get-up that looked like a skintight wetsuit from the waist up and a Catholic schoolgirl outfit the rest of the way down.

Only the glossy, high-heeled boots from the Morning Harbor studio were the same.

She’d tied a kerchief in her long, dark locks and her eyeliner had been drawn into points beyond her eyes, giving her an almost feline appearance.

Four days in and I’d already stopped trying to parse my newest employee’s fashion sense. She dressed like she was on the cover of an album people would call ‘ahead of its time’ fifteen years from now.

She locked eyes with Samantha, hers burning with quiet intensity. The corner of her mouth curled in a knowing smile, like the two of them were sharing a private joke.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Caroline said.

When she said it, I heard the young woman who’d casually destroyed Morning Harbor’s property to protect Kiki from having her traumatic moment broadcast to the world.

“You say the word, babygirl, we pack up and we go. That’s final. ”

“I know,” Samantha said. “But…”

Caroline was already nodding. “But you’re thinking of what’ll happen.”

I blinked. “Wait. What will happen?”

Both women turned to me as one.

“Samantha won’t be here,” Caroline said, like the answer was obvious. “And Dawn will.”

Oh. Oh.

“Christ,” I muttered. “You’re right.”

I could tell from the way she swore that Mona had just figured that out, too.

“Absolutely not,” she said, already heading for the green room door.

“We’re not letting them control the narrative.

Put me in front of that producer. I don’t care if I have to burn the building down, I’m protecting this family—”

“If I walk,” Samantha said, at least ten decibels louder than she needed to, “then Fiona Hall has Dawn on instead. My mom. She gets an open forum to spin whatever version of her story she wants, and there's no way Fiona's going to give her any pushback. Not when the story's this juicy.”

Mona's lips formed a tight little line. “I'm not going to stop Fiona or the Call Your Daddy producers,” she insisted.

“I'm going to march into whatever room they've got your mother waiting in and let her know the full force of the Avery Company's legal division will be in touch the instant that interview is over—”

“But the damage will be done,” Samantha retorted. “And mom doesn't care about the consequences. She never has.” My babygirl let out a bitter little laugh. “If she did, she and dad would never have tried to show up at the hot springs on my freaking wedding day.”

Mona's tone was ice. “I wasn't there on your wedding day,” she said, the shark in her words so clear I could almost smell the blood. “I'm here now. I can make her care about the consequences.”