His lip curled around the sneer in his voice at the thought. Carolyn paused. Surely Grange wasn’t jealous?
“There’s nothing easy about that,” he informed her.
His normal cool tone held such intense male frustration that she found herself grinning and tried to school her features into a more serious expression before he saw it. His black brows snapped together in a frown, and Carolyn knew he had seen her reaction.
“Well, you don’t need to be so damned pleased about it,” he grumbled as she stepped back from his loosened embrace. He ran his hands down her arms as she moved, and the feeling gave her goose bumps.
The lock clicked and the door opened. Isaac, the third partner in DIG Security, took in the situation at a glance, lingering on Carolyn’s rumpled skirt and tumbled hair.
“Starting without me?” he asked lightly, but the smoldering look in his dark eyes was anything but casual.
Carolyn flushed. There were rumors that Grange and Isaac shared their women as they shared their large estate. Nina had started one of those rumors herself, telling anyone who would listen that the men had shared her and pleasured her until she was too exhausted to scream. In fact, the third member of the business partnership, Dash Williams, had also been said to share women in wicked threesomes with Grange and Isaac.
That part of it couldn’t be true, Carolyn thought, because Dash had just recently found his soul mate in her friend and colleague Sara, and had wasted no time in moving her into his home on the shared estate. Still, the two men standing before her were formidable on an individual basis. She could hardly imagine any woman being able to handle them together.
Even though the thought of being with both of them caused her womb to clench deeply, she was certain that she could never handle such a relationship. As a fantasy, the idea of being sandwiched between those two hard bodies was incomparable, but the reality would be far from satisfying in the long term. As intense and delicious as it would be to take both men as her lovers, when the relationship ended and they left, as they always did, Carolyn would be devastated. She certainly didn’t want to end up bitter and vicious, like Nina, with her incessant bragging about her night with DIG’s owners and her schemes to get them back in her bed, as if her entire life centered around the three men and had no meaning without them.
Isaac stepped into the office and shut the door softly behind him.
“I do hate to interrupt,” he said, forestalling any comment by holding up one hand, “but Carolyn’s father is here. I put him in Room Two with a cup of coffee, but I don’t know how long that will hold him. He’s determined to see you today and won’t take no for an answer. Says we’ve kept you so busy working that you can’t return his calls.”
Isaac’s tone was sardonic. It announced that he was fully aware of how Carolyn was avoiding her father, even though he didn’t push for an explanation.
Carolyn took a deep, calming breath, trying not to show on her face how much she was dreading this confrontation with her father. She knew what he was going to demand of her, and she had no intention of going to the charity dinner her mother was hosting. Her parents would spend the entire evening either listing her many shortcomings or trying to introduce her to every eligible man of their acquaintance. It was a grueling experience. It never changed, always turning out the same way until one party ran into the next in her mind, one long line of champagne buffets and pointless conversation.
Her parents had always made it perfectly clear that the only way she could win their approval was to marry a well-connected man and produce the appropriate 2.5 children. An ex–Army Ranger would not fulfill the numerous conditions set out by R. J. Winston III and his perfect wife, Annalise, San Antonio’s most celebrated hostess.
Two
ex–Army Rangers would be even worse.
Something about her rigid posture must have sent a message to Isaac, because his gaze became searching. “You don’t have to see him, Carolyn,” he said slowly. “I’ll tell him you’ve got meetings all day.”
“We’ll tell him to get the hell out,” Grange corrected, already moving forward as he seemed to read the depth of her reluctance.
Carolyn straightened her spine. “No, I’ll see him,” she said. Her pride wouldn’t allow her to hide behind these two men, as tempting as that idea sounded to her.
She turned on her heel and walked out with the air of someone on her way to face a firing squad.
Chapter 2
Grange watched Carolyn leave the room then looked over at Isaac.
“Man, what did I miss?” Isaac asked. “And if it was as good as it looked, why the hell didn’t you wait for me?”
Grange shrugged. “You keep telling me that you are going to keep your hands off Carolyn as long as she’s an employee. She’s still an employee.”
Isaac ran his hands through his hair and swore. “Grange, man, I want her, but it’s a mistake to mix business with pleasure. Look what happened with Nina. That situation is bad, and it’s getting worse daily. She follows you, she follows Dash, and yesterday, she cornered me in the men’s room. In the damned men’s room!” He sounded outraged. “I barely escaped those long red claws.” He shuddered.
“She wasn’t our employee when we shared that night,” Grange said through his teeth, an observation that he had voiced many times before. “She wasn’t even a client any longer. The fact that she is an employee now is a problem, but only because of the type of woman she is.”
“The type of woman is an insane woman. Crazy.” Isaac dropped onto the big leather sofa.
“But Carolyn isn’t anything like Nina.”
“Thank God.”
Grange grabbed for his faltering patience. “What I mean is Carolyn is not pursuing us. Nina wanted bragging rights—”
“And our money.”
“—as much or more than she wanted us. Carolyn is attracted to both of us, has been since that summer at the lake when we were all teenagers, before we left to join the service, before we ever had money, but she’s stubborn, and she’s fighting it. That makes her different.”
Grange looked at his friend. “I’m serious about her, Isaac. I know down to my bones that Carolyn is the woman who could handle both of us. I’ve known it for a long time. But if you don’t want to take the risk, then step aside. I’m willing to share, but I’m not willing to wait for you any longer.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Isaac asked angrily, sitting upright.
“It means Carolyn is a beautiful woman, and she’s been without a man for over a year. She’s ready. I’m ready. If you’re not ready, then step out. I’ll take her myself, and keep her myself. I’ll buy out your half of the house and you can have your own life. You can have whatever you want.”
Grange watched as Isaac jumped to his feet.
“No fucking
way
I’m giving up my house and standing back so you can have Carolyn all to yourself!” Isaac’s thick brown hair was in disarray, his face contorted as he struggled internally.
Grange’s voice when he spoke was firm. “Then join me,” he said. “We’ve always been partners, Isaac, since the first night we spent in the woods as kids hiding from our drunken fathers. We’ve kept each other alive in the Rangers in places that would make the devil himself sweat bullets. Forget about all the reasons why we shouldn’t do this and think about how you would feel if Carolyn married someone else. Some ordinary guy who works nine to five, never takes a risk, and has no idea how to read the fire in her soul. No idea how to give her what she needs, what she craves. Watching that woman’s soul die from neglect would kill me.”
Isaac swore luridly. “Yeah,” he finally said, “it would kill me, too.”
Grange ruthlessly hid his deep satisfaction. “So,” he said, “what are we going to do about it?”
Chapter 3
Carolyn stopped in the ladies room to straighten her skirt, button the top button of her blouse, and pull her hair into some semblance of order before going to see her father. R. J. Winston was a man who would pounce on any perceived weakness, so she was determined not to show any.
As soon as Carolyn opened the door to Room 2, her father started talking.
“Carolyn Jane, your job is too demanding. It’s a man’s job to begin with, and it’s about time you started acting like a female.”
Robert Joseph Winston III looked every inch the distinguished businessman that generations of family money had made him. He was the envy of many of his friends and associates in every aspect but one—he had no son to carry on his name and his fortune. It was a constant disappointment to him that his only offspring was female, and a disobedient female at that.
His daughter had no interest in augmenting his reputation through the charity work that her mother did so well. The fact that she risked her life working in the security business when she could be attending society dinners and working to attract the perfect husband to join the family firm was a source of puzzlement and concern to her parents.
Carolyn repressed a sigh. She had heard this lecture many times, and it always preceded a demand to return to the family home and take up a series of inane hobbies designed to keep her fingers occupied and her mind blank.
“At least you’re wearing a skirt today,” her father continued, smiling as though he had paid her a great compliment. “Your mother will be glad to hear that you haven’t lost all sense of being feminine. And Randall will be glad, too. You remember Randall, Senator Wells’ son, of course. He is my junior vice president of marketing, soon to be promoted again. The boy has an absolute genius for making money.”
Her father sounded so proud. Carolyn had a vague recollection of Randall Wells from several years ago at a particularly uncomfortable family dinner. She thought he was a nice young man, blond like his own father, who had winced in sympathy when she had come in late for dinner and attracted her father’s ire.
“When you come to the estate for the charity dinner Friday, be sure to wear a long gown. Your mother can help you pick out something appropriate for an engagement, in case some members of the press are invited. I can never keep track of all the people your mother invites to these parties.”
Carolyn shook her head and refrained from asking which of her brainless, boring peers had “caught” some rich young man with perfect teeth so that her parents could have the pleasure of announcing an engagement.
“I already let Mother know that I won’t be coming,” she said instead.
Her father continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “And if you can bring yourself to be nice to young Randall, he might be persuaded to marry you. It would be the match of the decade. Everyone in our circle would be thrilled. I’ve got it all arranged with Randall’s family. All you have to do is be there.”
Carolyn froze in shock as her father’s words rolled over her. He had arranged her marriage? Like some feudal lord from the Middle Ages, giving his daughter away in an alliance marriage to increase his own lands. It was barbaric. She could hardly believe that even her father, with all his faults, could do it.
“No, Father,” she said, trying to sound firm, though her hands were shaking with anger. “I will not be attending the charity dinner, and I will not be marrying a man chosen by you. If I decide to marry, I’ll choose my own man.” She turned on her heel and headed for the door. “I’m sure you know the way out.”
Her father’s booming voice followed her into the hall. “Carolyn Jane, don’t you walk away from me!”
She walked out and closed the door behind her.
She moved quickly down the hall, rounded the corner leading to her office, and ran straight into Nina.
“I need to talk to you about our bosses,” Nina began, flinging her long blonde hair over her shoulder in a practiced move.
“Not just now,” Carolyn said, wanting nothing more than to be alone.
“Don’t brush me off,” Nina warned, her soft magnolia accent doing nothing to hide the venom in her voice. “We need to come to an understanding. I had him first, and I—”
“I said not now, Nina.”
Carolyn’s hands were shaking, and her stomach threatened to rebel as she brushed past Nina and made her way as quickly as possible down the hallway and into her cluttered office.
She moved through the open door and, placing both hands on her desk, leaned heavily against it, feeling the room revolve slowly around her. She tried to focus her eyes on the desktop, but even the familiar items looked wrong somehow in her distress. Her knees shook, and she felt her ankle twinge as she lurched gracelessly to a chair and almost fell into it.
The feeling of betrayal was nothing new after a conversation with her father, but this…It was too much to believe: an arranged marriage, a joining of fortunes and bloodlines, an entire life lived with her needs and feelings masked by a blank, cool smile. That was her mother’s life. God forbid it should become her own.