Chapter One
Kadir al Mussad watched the gorgeous blonde with the swaying, tight ass walk by and wondered if there was something wrong with his dick. She was lovely and obviously available. No ring on that finger. Wearing a gray skirt that barely covered her essentials and red stilettos, she was definitely dressed to attract a man. As she passed, she turned slightly, her eyes widening as she took in his thousand dollar custom-made suit and handcrafted Italian loafers. He could see the hot blonde silently itemizing him, doing her best to estimate his wealth down to the last dollar.
And she would fall short by a few billion.
“Hi.” She carried a few folders, but not where they’d hide her breasts. At least a D cup and, from the placement of those large globes high on her chest, he would bet she’d purchased them herself. Like the rest of the blonde, they were magnificently constructed and hard as a rock.
His dick practically yawned. “Hello. I’m looking for Mr. Townsend.”
Her painted mouth curled up in a sex-kitten smile. “He recently changed his last name to James.”
Good for Dex. A little warmth flooded Kade’s system at the thought of his friend finally finding his true place beside his two biological brothers, along with their shared wife, Hannah. “Excellent. Then where is Mr. James this morning?”
Dex was the head of security. He would be the one to talk to about the little problem Kade was having. He needed information on one of Black Oak Oil’s employees. Little things like where her office was and whether or not she had all her teeth. All the things his eldest brother, Talib, hadn’t seen fit to mention when he’d ordered Kade and their middle brother, Rafe, to fetch this girl and bring her home to Bezakistan. The sheikh could be a bossy asshole at times.
God, if Talib didn’t settle on a wife soon, Kade was going to lose his bloody mind—and a lot more. Of course, the problem was that once Talib settled on a wife, Kade and Rafe would have to settle for her, too. One wife for all brothers. God bless Bezakistan.
He had to hope this candidate looked better than the mousy pictures included in Talib’s dossier. It wasn’t that she was ugly, merely plain and deeply somber. And the photos were grainy, a driver’s license picture and a little black and white image that looked like it had come from a school yearbook. Neither had been promising. And her background was so bland he’d forgotten most of it already. Grew up in a small town. Apple of her parents’ eyes. Graduated from college with a degree in economics. Yep. He’d gone to sleep just after reading that tidbit.
“He’s in a meeting, but you can wait in his office.” Her eyes softened, an obviously practiced move. “Or you could buy me a cup of coffee.”
Nothing. Not even a stir. His cock was still completely flaccid, despite her less than subtle come-on. Damn it, he was barely thirty. His dick should be standing up and shouting “let’s party!” Kade would rather take a nap. He sighed. Maybe his dick’s lack of responsiveness didn’t matter since he’d likely soon be chained to some boring, dull-as-dishwater intellectual because that was Talib’s type.
Maybe he should try to convince his cock to take the blonde up on her offer.
Before he could, a flurry of chaos walked by, her brown hair caught at the back of her head in a messy bun. She quickly rushed down the hall, barely containing a haphazard stack of files in her arms that stuck out this way and that, the edges poking at all sorts of odd angles. She was talking on a cell phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder, her face animated. She plowed right into the blonde, who dropped the two little folders she’d been carrying. The stack in the brunette’s arms exploded, paper filling the air like a ticker-tape parade.
“Goddamn it,” the blonde cursed. “Fucking researchers.”
“I am so sorry, Amanda.” The brunette spoke in a soft Texas twang as she dropped to the ground on her hands and knees, phone tumbling across the office carpet as she began wrangling the wild herd of papers. “I was talking and I wasn’t looking where I was going. I’m really sorry.”
“Here, let me help you,” a deep voice said. Rafiq, his brother, always the gentleman, hurried up the hall and got to one knee.
“Thank you,” the blonde purred. Then she realized Rafe was talking to the little brunette and frowned down at her. “There’s a reason everyone around here calls you Pandora.”
Pandora. Goddess of Chaos. The messy bun on the back of the brunette’s head looked like it would unravel at any moment, unleashing a cascade of brown curls lit with strands of honey blonde and warm red. She turned her face up, and Kade nearly cheered.
His dick was back in top form now, standing tall and eager. Oh, yeah.
There was nothing at all artificial about Pandora. She was soft and feminine, with bee-stung lips and blue eyes that were nearly hidden behind a pair of big glasses that might have been fashionable in the eighties. She wore a shapeless blouse, but as she moved, she popped a button, and he caught sight of creamy white cleavage flushed with a hint of pink. Clearly, she was flustered and embarrassed.
“They don’t call me Pandora because I unleashed evil on the world or anything,” she explained. “I’m just clumsy. I apologize to you, too, sir. So sorry.”
Then Pandora bit her lip in a way that made him wonder how she would suck a cock, provided that she’d ever sucked a cock before. Her air of innocence had him wondering. He could teach her how to suck a cock. His cock. His brother Rafe’s cock. She looked back at him.
She was far more polite than the blonde, who impatiently tapped her stiletto, palm outstretched, as she waited for Pandora to organize and return her folders. Clearly, Amanda wasn’t going to lower herself to help. So the sweet brunette picked up the blonde’s folders and carefully placed the documents inside before handing them up to the other woman. Kade watched her every move. Poised on all fours, Pandora’s ass stuck up in the air. Even encased in an ugly khaki skirt, there was no hiding those curves. That ass was made to take a cock, her hips perfect for holding on to as a man drove inside and made her howl with pleasure.
There was a vicious swat to his knees, and he looked into Rafe’s impatient eyes. “Are you going to help or not?”
Kade heard the unspoken end to that sentence. Or are you going to stand there and stare at her ass?
He wanted to stare at her ass. A single grunt from his older brother made him sigh and drop to the floor. Folders were scattered everywhere, paperwork spread out around her like a multi-colored quilt of chaos. Pandora, indeed. She’d shaken up his day. He wondered if she could also rock his world.
“What about that coffee?” Amanda asked him, her voice dropping to a seductive murmur.
He didn’t bother to look up at the blonde. “I’m not thirsty right now. I’ll just wait for Dex.”
She tsked, huffed, and stomped off. He smiled.
“So, once we’ve cleaned up this little mess, would you like to get a drink?” Kade asked Pandora in his smoothest voice.
His brother’s head came up, his mouth dropping open. Rafe’s expression silently said “idiot.”
Why were Rafe’s panties in a wad? Could he not see the bounty in front of them? Now that Kade was close, he could smell her shampoo. Citrus, orangey and tangy. Delightful. He took a deep breath. What the hell would her pussy smell like? He would just rub his nose all over and keep that spicy, feminine scent with him all fucking day long. Damn, it felt good to be horny.
“Are you all right?”
He opened his eyes and stopped sniffing the female. Fuck. The good news was she didn’t seem to know what he was doing. The bad news? His brother was looking at him like he was the world’s biggest moron. Oh, well. Rafe often had that look on his face. Kade tried not to take it personally. “I am very well, thank you.”
“He’s a bit slow, if you know what I mean,” Rafe said with a sharp bite to his words.
Pandora’s eyes widened with sympathy. “Oh. Really? Okay. I’ll just show you where everything goes. It’s so nice of you to help me.”
Rafe sat back on his heels, a brilliant smile crossing his face as he held back laughter. Kade wanted to punch the asshole in the face, but it was so good to see his brother smile again that he let his violent impulses go. Still, he had to repair the damage wrought by Rafe’s insult. He didn’t want pretty Pandora to think he was slow. Except in bed, where he would go very slowly and savor every inch of her.
He caught her hand in his. Soft skin, warm, slightly calloused on the side of one finger where she’d hold a pencil. He flipped her hand over, his thumb tracing the blue lines of her veins before covering it with his other hand. He wanted her to feel surrounded by him, a little taste of what he and Rafe could give her. “My brother is teasing you, habibti. I have two degrees from Oxford University. He thinks I am slow because he has three.”
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.
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