Chapter Four
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Jude
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She is not what I expected after stepping out of the shower, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around my waist following our thirteen-hour flight from Tokyo.
But man, she’s fucking gorgeous. All prim and proper in her neat, ankle-length brown skirt that conceals her curves, a white blouse that barely hides her full breasts, and those dainty heels—not too high or too low, just enough to mess with your mind as you try to figure her out.
Her lips resemble strawberry marshmallows, and I want to lick them until they melt in my mouth or swell around my cock.
Not a single strand of hair is out of place on her head.
Her dark chocolate-brown mane pulled back into a knot at her nape makes me wonder what her silken tresses would feel like cascading through my fingers as I hold her between us. Well, damn.
The deep, flustered blush settling on her cheeks does nothing to detract from the way her golden, gleaming eyes pin me down.
The question of who she is and what she’s doing in our apartment during the same week our entire world was turned upside down seems to have been asked and answered.
I glance at the other two men, clearly as affected by her appearance as I am. There’s not much Alexander Pierce, Levi Hayes, and I don’t feel the same about, but we’ve never been this fascinated by the same woman all at once. The way I’m looking at her is mirrored in their eyes.
Yet here we are. The more I look at her, the more vividly I envision her shared between us. What the fuck is going on?
I’ve known Alex and Levi nearly all my life. We were each adopted at the age of eight, coming from different family backgrounds. Since then, we've been closer than brothers, always having each other's backs without question.
But back to the beauty in our apartment.
Who is she—
Then it hits me.
Carver. Of course, it’s Carver. He said we needed a good fuck after our adopted sister, Tanya, dropped a fucking bomb in our lives in the form of a fifty-pound six-year-old.
Yes, Tanya promised the man who raised us—her father, our adopted father—on his deathbed that she would domesticate us one way or another.
Since we refused to marry—there just isn’t any woman around we want to spend the rest of our lives with, and commitment scares us—she came up with something even more diabolical.
To keep her promise, she made us guardians of her son for three months while she and her husband, an entomologist like her, went to some swamp in a jungle off the southeastern coast of Africa to study the mating of two beady-eyed insects.
I mean, I have no clue what they’re doing there exactly, but it might as well be for all the fuck I know.
But the real kicker in Tanya’s grand scheme is that if we mess up—meaning if she comes home and finds her son covered in tattoos and playing the stock market—that’s what she thinks we do all day, with tattoos under our bespoke suits—she’d take back the land on which one of our first and biggest tech manufacturing plants sits, because technically, the land belongs to her.
She doesn’t even need it; she’s just using it as leverage against us.
It’s so fucking stupid; normal people wouldn’t care about it, but we damn well do.
It won’t hurt us financially, of course.
We didn’t turn our adopted father’s business into a multi-billion dollar conglomerate by being stupid.
But because we’re so fucking finicky about numbers and patterns, losing that plant will put a kink in the order we like to maintain, and it would irritate us to no end to see the gap when we looked at the map showcasing all our plants.
Tanya could have held a gun to our balls and threatened to shoot, and the effect would be the same. We still discuss her evil genius every other minute of the day, which means we’re doing what she says.
This all unfolded in a matter of hours. We had to leave Tokyo to get home in the middle of a very precarious takeover and finish the meeting on the jet.
In between that, Tanya emailed us our nephew’s itinerary. The kid is busier than we are. First thing on the list: Movie day, bring extra snacks for the class. What the fuck.
We delegated that task to our PA with instructions to get the best. If the kid is ours for the next three months, everyone and their mother has to know what he’s about—a mini-billionaire in the making. We felt very proud of ourselves after that. Take that, Tanya.
This might be a piece of cake. Besides, we love the kid. The rest is going to be so fucking easy.
Which brings us back here again to the beauty whose subtle floral scent seems to have penetrated my pores and infused my blood. Alex and Levi’s too, I can tell.
Carver, Jasper Carver. A guy we went to school with and remained friends with through university up to now. While we studied business, Jasper followed in his father’s footsteps and is studying to become an entertainment lawyer.
Once we learned we’d be responsible for our nephew for the next three months, Jasper decided we needed one last hurrah before we became domesticated.
Why? One stipulation Tanya set is that we not see any women at all for the next ninety days.
She didn’t want us setting a bad, reckless example for Jake unless we were marrying the girl.
That’s never going to happen for as long as we live.
So we opted for celibacy for twelve whole weeks.
His idea? While we still had the freedom of our penthouse, for at least an hour while Jake was still at swimming practice, he’d send us a couple of call girls to fuck until we were replenished.
We said no. No time. By the time we landed, we had an hour before Jake was home after swimming practice.
But Carver never did listen to us. And clearly, Oscar—more our friend than the concierge—was in on it too, or he wouldn’t have let her into the apartment at all.
But instead of a couple of girls, Carver only sent one.
With an uptight teacher act down to her art form, and fuck if we didn’t realize that was our type all along.
Three of us. One of her. Forty minutes to make her scream in that hot schoolteacher voice of hers.