Their Virgin Concubine, Masters of Ménage, Book 3 (2 page)

That pretty pale skin flushed right up again. He liked that he would be able to tell so much just by looking at her. He would know when she was lying, when she was happy, when she was aroused. He was used to jaded women, but his little Pandora was far from that.

“Sorry. I guess I’m a little naïve. I only have the one degree, and it’s from Hale University in West Texas. Go Bullfrogs!” She gave a charming little laugh and seemed unable to stop speaking. “Dumb mascot. Really. You do not want to be in that costume in August in Abilene. Hot. And cramped. It’s the only mascot uniform that forces you to hop. They told me it was because they wanted realism, but I think they just wanted to torture me. Terrible way to try to find your school spirit. Though it built strong quadriceps. That’s the thigh muscle. Wait. You know that because of Oxford and stuff. I’m going to stop talking now.”

“Hello!” A muffled feminine voice called out from the proximity of the floor.

Pandora pulled her hand out of his with a grimace and started shuffling through papers, looking for something. “I dropped my phone. Dang!”

Then she went right back to her hands and knees, frantically searching. Now Kade wasn’t the only one looking at her ass. Rafe was practically drooling, his eyes travelling from the graceful curve of her spine to the round cheeks of her backside. Rafe’s gaze cut over to his with an interested gleam.

Kade raised his eyebrows and pointed at his watch. It was early, but if they took her to lunch, maybe they could be in bed by twelve thirty. Their condo wasn’t far. Feed her a little. Maybe a nice bottle of wine. Then, before long, they’d hopefully sweet talk the glorious little bundle of chaos into getting in between them.

Rafe frowned and held up his folder, the one that contained the name of the woman they had come here to see. Piper Glen. The supposed savior of Bezakistan. Hopefully not some cold-ass intellectual.

Fucking Pandora would have to wait.

Rafe nodded regretfully and mouthed, “Dinner?”

Yeah. If they weren’t on a plane home with their future wife in tow. He longed for the old days when no one thought a sheikh should be faithful to one woman. They could have married whoever and kept little Pandora as a treat on the side. But no. Now he had paparazzi and tabloid rags and Sunday news shows commenting about where he put his dick.

Which still hadn’t gone down.

He sighed and started cleaning up again.

“Mindy? Are you still there?” Pandora scrambled to put the phone against her ear. “Did you get the check? Good. Buy your books and don’t forget to save some. I can’t send anything else until next payday. I love you. No. I don’t want to hear about him. Unless he’s dead. Then I do. Darn it. No, I don’t wish him ill. Thank you. You’re a good sister.” She shut her phone, a ridiculously old contraption that Kade was surprised still worked. “Sorry about all this. I was talking to my sister and I got distracted.”

She pushed the last of the papers into a haphazard pile that would likely make Rafe crazy. His brother was fastidious, but Rafe simply smiled as he handed her the perfectly placed pile he’d gathered.

“We all get distracted at times,” Rafe said, the smooth words coming out like he’d never ogled her ass. He bowed politely. “I wish you a good afternoon.”

She smiled, pushing her glasses back up. That smile was fatal. Kade just stared because she lit up the fucking room. “Thank you so much. Good afternoon to you, too.”

She turned and walked away, her flats shuffling as she tried to balance the papers and her phone.

“Oh, we have got to have that, my brother.” Rafe stood beside him, his head angled to one side as he watched her walk away.

Kade silently thanked the heavens because Rafe had been as out of sorts as he’d felt the last few months. “Yes, we do. Let’s find Dex and get this over with so we can take Pandora out for happy hour. Then we’ll make her even happier. We should find out her name before we fuck her.”

An arm slapped around his shoulders suddenly, and Dexter James shoved his six foot five inch, two hundred twenty pounds of pure muscle between Kade and his brother. “Her name is Piper, and I’ll kill you both if you lay a hand on her.”

“Piper?”
That
was Piper Glen? That gloriously messy little fuck bunny was the drab girl in the pictures that Tal wanted to marry?

Two ideas struck Kade as Dex started to lead them to his office. First, his oldest brother’s taste had come up in the world. And second, he better knock out Dex now because he planned to get a lot more than his hands on that sweet woman.

*  *  *  *

Piper Glen managed to make it to her teeny-tiny office without another catastrophe. Except now, she couldn’t open the door.

“Allow me.” Gina Jacobson twisted the handle with a smile and eased the door open. “Here’s your kingdom.”

An eight-by-eight cubby hole was hardly a kingdom, especially with its glorious view of a dumpster in the alley behind the building and its location as far from the elevators as possible. The little room had been given to the lowly researcher. Anyone else would have run. Piper merely sighed as she put her files down, grumbling a bit.

“What happened now, hon? Did that guy from the mailroom plow into you? I swear, I can take him. I have two toddlers. One skinny twenty-year-old is no match for me.”

Piper slumped down, the last couple of minutes washing over her like a bad horror film. “Nope. It was just me. Pandora struck again.”

The employees of Black Oak Oil had christened her Pandora, unleasher of evil on the world, because she’d caused a complete building-wide blackout on her first day. It wasn’t her fault that dumb fuse had blown because her coffeemaker was from the sixties. Some days, she was like one big pitfall waiting to happen.

But she was smart and a darn good researcher.

Gina groaned in sympathy and leaned her hip on the side of Piper’s desk. “Tell me all about it, hon.”

The older woman was a gossip, but a sweet-natured one, unlike Amanda who was a raging… something Piper knew she shouldn’t even think because her mom would turn over in her grave. “I was talking to my sister and ran smack into Amanda.”

Gina waved that off. “Oh, hon, that’s inevitable. And I bet you bounced right off those fake tits of hers. I’ve often thought that she should rent those boobs out as a bouncy house for bored babies.”

Piper looked down at her own chest. They were probably as big as Amanda’s, but hers were real so they sagged a little. Even at twenty-five. And her clothes wouldn’t fit right. She sighed. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t here looking for love. She was done with that. Johnny Tyler, affectionately known to his friends as Cooder, had proven that men were just dogs with a bone. If she couldn’t keep someone like Johnny happy, she probably never would find a decent man. And that was fine. She was going to have a career. See the world. Her female parts had been put into hibernation long ago.

Except they had hummed back to life the minute Hottie Number One had laid a hand on her. Her heart rate had tripled and her skin had sizzled with life. Too bad her mouth hadn’t stopped working. She talked way too much when she was nervous. “Hey, do we have a couple of new guys around? Tall, maybe Middle Eastern but talk with British accents?” Hottie Number Two had been just as beautiful as his brother. She was sure they were related.

Gina’s eyes widened. “Are you talking about Rafe and Kade al Mussad? Yep. You are. Every woman who meets them gets that glazed look in her eyes. They’re here a lot. I’m surprised you haven’t met them before.” Her voice dropped to a gossipy whisper. “They’re filthy rich. They represent all the business interests for Bezakistan. Aren’t you working on their green project?”

Yep. And all the paperwork was in a giant heap that she would have to painstakingly reorganize. She could do it tonight. It wasn’t like she had anything else to do. This job was her gateway to bigger and better things. “Yes. I’m getting all the numbers ready for the guy on the other end. Tal.”

Gina stared at her. “You just sighed when you said his name.”

“I did not.” Except she kind of had. Tal was her counterpart in Bezakistan. Black Oak Oil was working with the government of Bezakistan to start a green energy project, and Piper was in charge of putting together all the research. She’d been e-mailing and talking on the phone to Tal for several months. “He’s just nice.”

“Tal, huh? In Bezakistan? I don’t think I’ve heard of him. What I do know is that the sheikh, Talib, is just as gorgeous as his brothers. Have you met this man you’ve been talking to? You might want to take a look because I’ve heard they grow them hot over there.”

Piper shook her head. Not Tal. Tal was sedate and very polite. His voice was soothing and intelligent. She couldn’t imagine him looking like the two movie-star gorgeous men she’d just met, and she kind of liked it that way. “I seriously doubt it. He’s really…smart.” And organized and creative. And she didn’t even know how old he was. Probably older. And married. With lots of kids. But she could dream a little.

Gina hopped off the desk. “I don’t need a smart man. Give me a dumb hot guy any day of the week. My Matthew couldn’t find his head in his ass, but his chest is a work of art. Are you coming to lunch with us?”

Piper forced a sunny smile on her face. “Can’t. I have so much work.”

Gina shrugged and walked out, the door closing behind her.

Piper’s stomach growled, and she wished she hadn’t left her bagged lunch on the train. It hadn’t been much. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a few baby carrots, but it would have been better than nothing.

She thought about her tiny studio apartment. She’d sent the last of her money to Mindy to pay for her school. There wouldn’t be more for another week when her modest check from Black Oak came in. She took mental stock of her fridge. The next week didn’t look good.

She glanced at the calendar, her stomach taking a dive. Well, at least she wasn’t hungry anymore. Tomorrow was supposed to have been her first wedding anniversary, if she’d managed to get down the aisle. She could still feel the white satin on her skin as she tried on her wedding gown. She’d looked at herself in the mirror and, just for a moment, she’d been a princess.

Tears filled her eyes. Turned out, her prince preferred strippers to nice girls he’d met at church. She’d been left at the altar with a note and the judgmental stares of everyone in her small town. And she’d still had her sister to put through school since Mindy’s scholarship had mysteriously dried up the minute Piper was no longer connected to the mayor’s family.

Piper took a deep breath. She couldn’t go back there. She was here now. Granted, she had a job that paid next to nothing and an office she could barely move in, but this was her kingdom. It wouldn’t be forever; it would grow. Until then, she would make it work.

With a deep breath, she put aside thoughts of shattered romances and beautiful men with sun-kissed skin. Piper reached for the stack of papers in front of her. She had a job to do.

Rafe fidgeted. The plush chair he sat in was comfortable, but his brain wasn’t on the supple leather and masculine elegance of Dex’s office. His knee bounced—a sure giveaway that he was deeply impatient. Kade gave him a wry smile, reminding Rafe why he refused to play poker with his clever younger brother. He didn’t have Kade’s poker face. Dex would likely see right through him, but hell, he wanted to go find Piper and take her away.

That’s what his ancestors would have done. His own mother had been the latest in a long line of beautiful captive brides, each selected, abducted, and blissfully married after a whirlwind courtship designed to sweep her up and make her fall madly in love forever. Rafe wasn’t unaware that they had a big task in front of them. Oh, they could romance Piper. They might even be able to get the innocent little thing into bed. But finding the right path to ensnare her heart would be more difficult. That was, of course, if Talib still wished to proceed after hearing whatever Dex James had to say and meeting Piper himself. The way he felt about her now, Rafe would be hard pressed not to kick in his older brother’s teeth if he didn’t.

“Are you two insane? She’s not your type.” Dex closed the door behind him with a resounding thud.

Rafe was curious. “Why would you say that, friend?”

Dex raked a hand through his hair and frowned, as though putting off the moment when he had to speak. “She’s a very sweet girl.”

Kade’s lips flattened to a hard line. “And you think we do not like sweet girls?”

“You might like them, but you should damn well stay away from them, especially Piper.” Dex didn’t hesitate now, clearly in full-on big brother mode. “That girl is one of the nicest women I’ve ever met. She’s smart and funny, and okay, a complete klutz, but on her it’s endearing. She’s Hannah’s friend. They came from the same small town. When she was looking for work, she called Hannah, and we gave her a job. I would have given her a better one, but she insisted on this research position even though it’s entry level. She wants to be involved with this project and learn everything from the ground up.”

Because she had a core of integrity. Rafe had already discerned that. He had been following her up the hallway before she’d accidentally run into the very plastic Amanda. He’d stopped to get a drink from the water fountain when she’d walked by, all curves and hips. In an instant, his thirst had changed.