5. Dog Rose
5
DOG ROSE
MEANING: FEROCITY; HONESTY; PAIN AND PLEASURE
CAMERON
________
M y assistant was waiting at the elevator for me. Which honestly wasn’t a good sign. “Oren?”
The male Omega made a face. “Yeah, I know you hate it when I meet you at the elevator.”
“But you’re still doing it, which means it’s important or you have a death wish.”
He chuckled, but held out a hand to stop me from going closer to my office. Micah and Everett’s offices were on different floors. It made it both easier and harder. Easier since we all did slightly different things. Harder, since we constantly needed each other’s feedback.
Our assistants were very good friends.
“You have someone waiting for you in conference room B.”
I frowned. “I don’t remember having a meeting scheduled this morning.”
The look on his face told me I wasn’t wrong. “Nope. You didn’t have one. But he was here this morning before I arrived, and said you’d agreed to meet with him. All three of you, actually. And he refused to leave or reschedule. I put him in the conference room so I could talk to you, because I didn’t want to make a scene with security.”
My phone was already in my hand, ready to call security or the others. “Who is it?”
“Frank McCabe.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
I sighed. “Thanks. Let’s take the back way to the office.”
“Fine by me,” Oren muttered. “Man’s annoying as shit.”
Allowing my smirk to shine through, I was glad we weren’t the only ones that found Frank generally insufferable. “Did you get him coffee?”
“You mean did I make his overly particular and pretentious coffee order? I did. With a smile on my face. I didn’t even put salt in it like I was tempted.”
“Oren.” I choked on a laugh.
He sat at his desk and gave me a look. “What? I’m allowed to be tempted.”
“Well, get off your ass and be tempted to get my particular and pretentious coffee order, will you?”
He saluted and did as I asked. Good thing too. Because coffee really was the only thing that was going to hold me together today. I hadn’t slept well, and I didn’t think I’d be able to focus for five straight minutes in a row today. The only thing on my mind was getting to her.
Ocean .
Ocean Elise Correa Caldwell. We’d looked her up last night on arriving home. There wasn’t much about her publicly. But the few photos I saw of her reminded me of just how stunning she was, and a couple of the stories told me what I already knew: our Omega was beautiful on the inside too.
Shaking my head to clear my thoughts of dark eyes and her warmth under my hands, I dialed both of my packmates. Everett picked up first. “Miss us already?”
“Frank McCabe is in my conference room.”
Micah made an annoyed sound. “He must be desperate. Has it even been twelve hours?”
I checked my watch. “Barely. Did Aiden find anything more?”
“Not that I know of. He’s fast, but not this fast. The things he found were just surface level, but I looked into the actual financials he sent a little more. They’re behind on paying most of their suppliers. A couple warehouses are in danger of eviction. The whole thing looks like it’s a house of cards about to topple.”
Dropping my briefcase by my desk, I sank into my chair. “What do you want me to do? Send him away until later this week?”
“I don’t love going into the meeting unprepared,” Rett said. “But if he’s this desperate, we’ll have an advantage. And that’s something we want right now.”
Yes. It was.
My cock went hard again at the mere thought of her. The whole last night had been torture, thinking of her sweet curves under my hands and see how much more I wanted to touch them. Worship them and her. Get inside her mind and figure out why those dark eyes felt so sad. Tell her how I felt after being drawn to her from across the room and then being slammed with the best, brightest, hottest scent of my life as soon as I was near her.
We’d talked about Everett’s idea, and it would work. Granted, we thought we’d have a little more time to implement it, but he was right. This was to our advantage. It would solve our problem and get us closer to our sweet Omega.
I didn’t know much about Frank as a person, but if he was as insufferable in his personal life as he was in business, I wanted Ocean as far away from him as possible. Already, my protective instincts were going crazy after I’d almost had to pull that creep off her.
Still up on the balcony, I’d seen her face, and I’d moved before I was fully thinking. The others backed me without question. We were a team and always would be.
“Well, get your asses down here and use the back way to my office,” I said. “Let’s get this done.”
“Give me fifteen minutes to put something together,” Everett said. “Glad I couldn’t sleep and was already working on it.”
“Done.”
Oren put my coffee down on my desk and raised an eyebrow. “Satisfied, my liege?” The sarcasm dripped through.
“You’re lucky you’re good at your job.”
“And you’re lucky you pay me so well.” He flaunted his walk all the way back to his desk, earning a laugh from me. Oren was the best assistant I’d ever had. Plus, he was a character. I’d have him out on his ass if he didn’t do good work, but half the time he knew what I needed before I needed it.
Everett and Micah walked in together, and the former looked at me. “Ready?” He held a couple of paper folders in his hands.
I grinned and grabbed my coffee. “Born ready.”
Frank sat at the large conference table with his phone in his hand and a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Given what his financials looked like, he should be nervous. I still didn’t understand what had happened, but for the next few minutes, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he could give us what we wanted.
Micah was the first one through the door. “I thought you said next week, Frank. I didn’t think you meant this morning.”
He laughed nervously. “Right. Sorry to intrude.”
It was Thursday. Whatever he had in mind could have waited until Monday. Ours, however, couldn’t.
“You’re here now.” Everett unbuttoned his suit jacket with one hand and sat down. “Why don’t you tell us what brought you this kind of urgency?”
Frank cleared his throat and took a sip of his coffee. “Some poor decisions.” Then he sighed and his shoulders wilted. I glanced over at the others to see what kind of read they were getting, but they gave nothing away. “It’s always been my intent to expand beyond textiles. I hoped that in doing some strategic investing I might have the capital to move past that sector.
“But the firm I hired to make the investments didn’t manage the funds well. And with things in the market being how they are…” he shrugged. “I’m?—”
“In the red in every possible way you can be?” Everett finished the sentence. “We’re aware.”
Shock rolled across the man’s face. He was an Alpha, but he’d never felt that way to me. Not that I put all the stock in someone’s designation. “How?”
“We have our ways. But you know, never kiss and tell.” Everett mimicked his words from last night. “What I really want to know is how you let it get this bad?”
He had a point. Everett was the business mind among us. There was a ruthlessness in him that served us well in these deals. And Frank should have pulled these investments long before now.
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know ?” Micah sounded incredulous. “How?”
“They assured me things would bounce back. I didn’t realize how deeply the market had shifted.”
I frowned. Our own investments were doing just fine. So what had caused this? For the moment, it didn’t matter, but it needed to be looked into.
“And what are you hoping we’ll do about it?” Everett asked.
Frank winced and pulled his hands off the table. They were shaking. He was nervous, and he should be. Still, I gave the man credit for asking for help instead of blindly driving the company into the ground out of pride.
“I was hoping for a partnership. I’m aware the Firefly deal is private. But if you’re willing to purchase a company like them, perhaps you’d be willing to work with us.” Leaning down, he retrieved a small folder from the briefcase beside his chair. “I brought this.”
I caught it when it slid across the table and glanced through it. Yeah, that wasn’t going to work. All this did was give him money and gave us essentially nothing. I passed it to the others and Everett snorted a laugh. “This is your offer?”
Frank said nothing.
“As I said, we have our ways too.” Everett tapped the folders he brought with him and then set them side by side. “And I took the liberty of putting these together. This,” he pushed one of the folders forward, “is the normal offer you would get.”
He didn’t ask us why we had proposals ready. Frank took the first folder and scanned the contents, his eyes going wide and anger taking root. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“We don’t joke about business,” I said. “So no.”
“No. The answer is no. I’d rather lose my company than that.”
Everett smiled. “Which is why I prepared this. Much of it is the same, but with a few key differences. McCabe Fabrics will still be brought under the umbrella of Zenith Incorporated. We’ll buy you out of the majority of your shares and leave you as the minority holder. You’ll also be allowed to remain in whatever position you want, with supervision, of course. We’re not going to let this happen twice.”
Snarling, Frank reached for the folder. “Doesn’t sound particularly generous.”
I smiled. This was the real Frank. He was nervous, and he was weak, but he also wasn’t the pussy-footing and subtle man who’d come into the office this morning. He was more like a dog backed into a corner.
That was fine. We preferred dealing with people who were honest.
Everett kept his hand on the folder, not letting him take it yet. “We’ll cover all your debts and make sure that the company is in good standing and ready to continue operating. That’s a hell of a lot more than what someone else would offer you.”
“So let me see the offer.”
“There’s one more thing,” Micah said. “And it’s not negotiable.”
“You see,” Everett smiled. “The only reason we’re not giving you offer number one, or letting your company fail so we can pick up the pieces, is because you have something we very much want.”
Frank’s fingers drummed on the table. He was getting irritated. “And what is that?”
“Ocean.”
Confusion clouded his face. “What?”
“Ocean,” I said, repeating her name. It tasted sweet on my tongue. “Your niece.”
“I know who she is.” His brow furrowed. “I’m just not sure what she has anything to do with this?”
Micah stood, stretching and moving to lean against the wall, the picture of ease. “The Zenith Board of Directors, for reasons I won’t go into now, has instructed us to marry. We want Ocean.”
The expression on Frank’s face went from blank to shock, and then he burst out laughing. “What? Why? Of all the people in the world, you want her?”
He stopped laughing when he realized we were all glaring at him. The table creaked where I gripped it, the point of contact the only thing stopping me from launching myself over the table at him.
“Ocean must agree to marry us for a minimum of one year,” Everett said, finally releasing the folder and sliding it across the table.
I glanced over at him, and Micah caught my gaze. I read the message there. One year is just the start .
“Either that, or it’s offer number one.”
Frank glanced through the folder and straightened. His sudden haughty attitude grated on me. “If I’m going to sell my niece to you, I deserve to know why.”
“Bringing Firefly Clothing into the fold requires us to look more wholesome than our previous exploits currently allow,” I said. “Marriage will help that.”
He glanced up at me briefly before looking down at the paperwork again. “I guess that makes sense. More sense than the three of you wanting someone who looks like her. And after the year is up?”
Everett was clenching his jaw so hard next to me I heard it crack.
“She is free to go her own way,” I said, even though the words burned. There was no way in hell we were going to let her go, and I didn’t doubt she would feel the same once she knew the truth. But it was a long road from here to there.
I saw him think it through as he looked at the paperwork. It wasn’t a good deal. Not for him, at least. But he wasn’t in a position to refuse. Sure, he could approach another company, but with the state of his financials, he’d be lucky to get something as good as our first offer, let alone this one. He knew it too. The resistance was all for show.
“I’ll need some time to talk to her,” he said.
“Listen to me very carefully,” Everett said. “You will not force her into this.”
Frank frowned. “I thought it was all or nothing?”
“It is,” I said. “But we’re not monsters. There are other people we can marry if we choose.” My mind rebelled at the very thought of it. “Ocean must marry us willingly.”
Not only because it was the right thing to do, but because if she were forced, it would be that much harder for us to show her how much we wanted her. How much she was everything.
One scent, and none of the world mattered anymore. Zenith Incorporated—our life’s work and our whole future—could burn to the ground tomorrow, and if we had her, I wouldn’t care.
She was ours. On the deepest level of our souls, she was meant to be ours. No one fully understood the power of a scent match. I certainly hadn’t until I put my hand on that man’s shoulder, caught her scent, and the entire universe shifted.
“Like I said, I’ll need some time.”
“You have until Monday,” Micah said. “At noon.”
Frank nodded and then left the room so quickly you would have thought the building was on fire.
Chuckling, Micah shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what he expected.”
“What happens if she says no?” I asked.
“Then we court her.”
I stared at the wall for a long second before speaking. “He’s going to try to force her. There’s too much on the line for him not to.”
Everett grinned, showing me the smile only our enemies saw. “Let him try. If he forces her hand, we’ll take him for everything he’s worth. And then we’ll court our Omega anyway, in the way she deserves.”
Taking a long sip of my coffee, I nodded and smiled. I couldn’t wait to see her again, but fuck, Monday felt like a long way away.