Chapter Eight
Adrienne was either going to pass out or have a serious tantrum. Both were not appropriate for someone her age. She forced air into her lungs and took deep, measured breaths.
“You’re Obsidian Inc., aren’t you?”
She asked, more in shock than in an accusatory tone.
Adrienne had no idea what to make of her deduction. How had she gone through life being completely confident in every choice she made and handling every challenge thrown her way with the assurance that a response or solution would come to her soon, only to be completely put off course by three ridiculously attractive guys... who had taken her virginity.
“So?”
Austin asked, and the expression on his face made it clear it was no big deal to them.
It was a damn big deal to her.
“You’re Obsidian Inc., and you paid the ten million dollars bid I had pledged toward animal welfare?”
“Again, so?”
“Okay. Maybe I need to put this into words you’ll understand, but what the actual fuck?”
She cried frustratedly.
“First of all, we do speak fuck, yes,”
Darien said, grinning at her.
“And secondly, if you thought you were going to foot the bill for having sex with us, you’re wrong,”
Emerson added.
“We might not look like it, but we’re gentlemen. Our mother raised us the right way. Never let a lady pay,”
Austin said.
“You said ‘our’ mother?”
She queried. They weren’t brothers, were they?
“Yes, we were adopted,”
Darien said proudly.
She didn’t know that, and it bothered her that her heart constricted at the thought that these powerfully authoritative men standing before her were once just kids, babies. ...given up for adoption.
No, Adrienne admonished herself. She had to stay focused.
It embarrassed her that they could so easily knock her off the path by being hopelessly distracting. They did the same thing when all she wanted was to feel the weight of a man inside her and nothing more.
Instead, they’d stripped her, kissed her until she couldn’t stand, tied her up, and made her come in their mouths, which made her beg them to put their cocks inside her.
Oh, and then they made her watch as they made themselves come while looking at her pussy from between her spread thighs.
She shook her head to get back on track for at least the third time, but she was still struggling to successfully dislodge the staggeringly lascivious thoughts swimming through her mind.
Their mother raised them to never let a lady pay. How was this even the same thing? It was ten million dollars. How could three SEALs possibly have that kind of money?
“But this wasn’t just a dinner you paid for—”
“Want to come right out and ask us how we could foot the bill in the first place?”
“How?”
She asked with no hesitation.
“Our adopted mother came from an English aristocratic family. Trust us when we say ten million dollars hasn’t made a dent in our bank balances. Happy?”
Darien asked, grinning at her and corrupting her thoughts again.
They just kept surprising her.
“Still unacceptable. I’m writing out a check right now, and then you can leave.”
“You’re wrong on both accounts.”
"Clearly, you weren’t listening to how we were raised, and we’re not going anywhere.”
“Yes, you are. Like I said, if I had known Peter was going to send you three, I would have demanded he send someone else. Anyone else, for that matter. So please leave. I changed my mind about needing protection. In fact, it was Peter’s idea from the start.”
“Not going to happen, sweetheart,”
Austin said, planting his boots into the thick carpet of her living room and folding his arms across his wide chest.
“Out of curiosity, why do you want us to leave?”
Darien asked, picking up a framed photo of her and her father.
"Why?" she frustratedly asked as she plucked the photo out of his hands and put it exactly the way it was before.
“Because I’m not going to spend the next few days with men I just ... I just fucked, acting as my bodyguards.”
“Again, firstly, we’re the only men capable of protecting you in the whole world, and secondly, we have no problem spending the next few days protecting the woman we fucked."
Adrienne covered her face with both her hands. When she said the word fuck, it was just that. But when Emerson said it, a dizzying reel of everything they had done to her played in her mind again, leaving a sultry sheen on her skin.
Not good.
She dropped her hands and shook her head. There was absolutely no way this was going to work out.
“No. I need you to leave.”
“Not when your safety is at stake.”
"I'm not in any danger. Peter was overreacting. And if I am, I can handle it myself. So, again, please leave.”
She walked to the door and opened it, fully intending to usher them out, but a brutal gust of wind and cold hit her full force. There wasn’t just a subtle change in the weather. Within minutes, it had gone from cozy, pretty snowflakes to the relentless force of nature on a warpath.
They were so distracting that she hadn’t even noticed the weather changing before it should, from an approaching storm to a full-on storm.
Well, fuck. She couldn’t send them out in that weather.
Fine.
She couldn’t get the door to close, and just when she thought she was going to fly out into the storm, Austin pulled her in with one arm while he shut the door with the other.
“Thank you,”
she said stiffly.
Yes, under Austin’s touch, it became even clearer they all couldn’t stay in the cabin together.
“Well, you can’t stay here. There’s only one other bedroom and I didn’t expect you to be so... big.”
That was all she could come up with as an excuse?
“Don’t worry about us,”
Darien said as if that solved their sleeping arrangements.
“Well, you can stay here for the night but by tomorrow I need you gone.”
“Doesn’t work that way. We’re here to protect you,”
Austin said.
“I don’t need protection.”
“I don’t know what you know, but the people after you are not the convivial kind,”
Emerson warned.
“There’s no one after me. Peter is just being paranoid and overreacting.”
“We’re not taking any chances, Adrienne,”
Darien said softly.
“Did you know who I was when you saw me at Cassie’s charity event?”
she asked instead.
“Yes,”
Emerson’s succinct reply colored her cheeks.
Oh god. She couldn’t even blame them for setting her up. It had all been on her. She’d been the one to spiral out of control after receiving news that Desmond Morton had been released from prison. How could that have orchestrated anything if she’d been the one to bid on them—ten million dollars—then demanded they fuck her which was a ruse for basically getting rid of her virginity.
Oh god. She was going to be sick. She couldn’t look them in the eye anymore. Who did things like that? She’d paid them to sleep with her and they’d merely been there to protect her. She didn’t even give them a choice to say no.
She nodded once, then without another word, she straightened her shoulders and marched to the bedroom. She was just never going to leave the room. Ever.
But three hours later with her pacing holes into the floor, she’d worked herself up into such a frenzy, that she wanted the world to swallow her up. Of all the men she could have picked, she picked the three she really, truly shouldn’t have.
She slapped her hands to her face. They’d known she was a virgin. Could she be more pathetic? Probably not.
Absolutely mad at herself, she crawled into bed. She really was determined to stay there forever.
After restless bouts of sleep, her mind overwrought with images of their naked bodies, she kicked the covers off and lay there until she started to feel cold. How was she going to get through this? Why did she choose them? Why was she behaving like some clueless teenage girl?
Her stomach decided at that moment to growl. Great. Now she was hungry. And hadn’t she promised herself that she could eat anything she wanted as soon as she got away?
It took her another hour to work up the courage to go out into the wild, also known as her kitchen, which wouldn’t have been a bad thing if it weren’t an open-plan set-up. In other words, they would see her. Well, she planned to keep her head down and not so much as breathe in their cologne.
Angrily, she yanked a thick winter gown off a hanger, slipped into it, and fastened the belt so tight that she wondered if she would make it to the kitchen after all without passing out.
She’d grab a packet of cookies and as much as she wanted a cup of hot chocolate, she’d settle for a soda and sneak back into her room.
But the sight and the smells that assailed her when she opened the door ruined her.
They’d taken over her kitchen. And she had no idea what to make of Austin retrieving what looked like a cooked-from-scratch lasagna from the oven, while Emerson set plates on the table and Darien broke a French loaf into chunks. She had zero ingredients in the cupboards to make anything that even remotely resembled a lasagna. Had they brought their own food supplies? Yes, they did.
“Sit. Eat,”
Austin said, bringing the lasagna to the table. Emerson pulled out a chair for her.
“No, thank you. I’m on a diet.”
Why did she have to say that? Now she couldn’t snag that one box of cookies she’d brought. Instead, she would have to take the rice cakes. Fuck her life.
Grimacing at the packet of tasteless snacks, she held her head up high and exited the kitchen, only to make an instant U-turn back into the kitchen. Emerson was still holding the chair out for her. She sat down, helped herself to a modest serving of lasagna, and proceeded to eat three more times after that, all without saying a single word.
By the next day, she was at her wits end. She hadn’t slept a wink. How could she when they were just there.... The men who knew what she tasted like. The sounds she made in her most intimate state. But even worse than that, she couldn’t handle the fact that they knew other things about her now.
Her humiliation wasn’t built for the extent of this kind of thing, not when her pride was all she had. The mammoth embarrassment she felt made her want to cry.
The worst mistake she had ever made in her life was marrying Desmond Morton. Peter would have had to tell them who they had to protect her from. They knew about her colossal fuckup—colossal fuckup was the only way to describe it.
She had been weak. Desmond had caught her just when her father had died—she kept repeating that to justify her actions, baiting her with what her father had held in his hands the moment he died until she fell for his ploy.
They knew her one big mistake, and she hated that they might be pitying her. Her fierce pride was not going to allow it. She detested showing weakness to anyone. But somehow, them—Emerson, Darien, and Austin—knowing she had been duped made it infinitely worse to bear.
And they knew what she looked like when she came, to add insult to injury.
Her phone buzzed and she looked at it, thankful for anything to divert her thoughts. Except what she read made her shudder in shock.
Peter: Fuck, Adrienne. Bodyguards in a small accident because of bad weather. Fuck. Can’t get to you until the fucking roads clear. I shouldn’t have let you go to the cabin. Do not open your door for anyone. Check-in hourly.
Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.
Who were the men in her cabin with her then if not the bodyguards Peter had dispatched?
Whirling around the room in a new fresh panic, Adrienne came apart at the seams. Had she opened her door to Desmond Morton’s men? Were they going to kill her? Why hadn’t they killed her yet?
Dammit, the bedroom door didn’t even have a lock. Maybe she could push the dresser against it and then what? Shaking terribly, she typed a message to Peter. It wouldn’t go through. She had no signal. She frantically tried to call him. Couldn’t get through.
When were they going to take her to her ex-husband?
No, she needed a plan. First, they could never know she knew that they were not who they said they were. Then she had to make an escape.
And honestly, how stupid was she? They said they knew who she was at the charity ball. How could they? Why did they know who she was?
Okay, stay calm.
She had to keep up pretenses.
She showered, got dressed, gathered up her things, stuffed them back into her suitcase, put on her thick winter coat, and, rolling her bag behind her, marched straight for the door.
She bit her lip to stop her quivering.
Play it cool.
They’d made themselves at home yet again, sitting around the cozy fire, the scent of their soap and cologne lingering in the air. She hoped they had as miserable a night sleeping on the sofas as she had. What was she saying? They were going to kill her or worse take her back to Desmond.
But by the sound of it—she’d walked in on them quietly talking amongst themselves before she entered the living room, and the relaxed way they looked, it was clear they slept perfectly fine.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,”
Darien said. Her hand stopped midway to the door knob.