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Chapter Two
Alone in her sunny bedroom, which didn’t reflect her mood at all, Paisley dropped her whole body onto her bed and fumed. First silently, then loudly.
It wasn’t even Hannah’s fault. She had been minding her own business and being a great, great friend to Paisley until... until they arrived on the scene. She could hardly blame Hannah for not having the same resilience against them as she did. Eww, she would rather kiss a baboon’s ass than them.
And then what did they do? Hannah put her heart out there for them—granted, it wasn’t love, not as far as Paisley was concerned—and they trampled on it like cold, callous bastards. What was wrong with them? Wasn’t it in their very DNA to screw anything in a skirt?
She couldn’t believe she’d arrived at the point where she was mad at them for not even offering Hannah a one-night stand after she declared her eternal love for them. At least her pride wouldn’t have suffered as much because now she thought she was just not pretty enough for them. Again, they were the worst.
Huffing and puffing, with her hands fisted tight, she sprang from the bed and trailed a warpath straight to the kitchen. The madder she became, the more chocolate she needed to consume.
All she could afford to give Mrs. Tillison, affectionately known as Tilly to everyone, who was currently polishing off the island in the vast kitchen, was a grouchy growl before she snagged a bag of chocolates and then stuffed two into her mouth. A noisy sigh escaped her lips as her level of fury tapered down a little. It was a temporary fix, but at least it was a sweet one.
Wait, was that coconut cream pie Paisley could smell?
Arg!
Of course. She should have known there was only one thing that would bring their ex-housekeeper, Tilly, out of retirement and back into their kitchen. Three things, actually, and she wanted them all dead.
Tilly, a petite woman with stark silver hair, kind but authoritative eyes, warm cheeks, and a comforting voice, had been around in Paisley’s life since the moment Paisley was born. Getting her to retire so she could enjoy her life with fun, travel, and maybe meet a new companion had been four years in the making and the result of countless campaigns by Paisley’s mother.
Tilly just refused, vowing she would die with a feather duster in her hand before she chose a soft life. Her family came from a proud line of domestic service attendants, and her heritage routed back to butlers and maids who worked for English aristocracy.
Finally, at the age of seventy-two, Tilly handed over her apron, but she was also a long-time victim of the charms of Paisley’s guardians and continued to drop everything in her life to come and make them their favorite coconut cream pie whenever they requested her to do so.
They had no shame. And there was no hope for Tilly either because she loved them as much as she loved Paisley’s brother. Just thinking of her brother, Robert, was enough to induce hives. Three years later, and she still hadn’t forgiven Robert for the stunt he pulled on her all on one rainy afternoon.
“What did they do now?” Tilly asked with a twinkle in her eyes, clearly from just the thought of them. Blech. She was well versed in the fact that the source of Paisley’s strife for the last three years came only from three guys. Well, four if she counted her brother, Robert, who was the root cause of her demise, but the coward had packed a small bag and trotted to the ends of the earth. True freaking story.
“Oh, you want to know what they did now? I’ll tell you what. The worst—” She quickly stuffed another piece of chocolate into her mouth to quell her fresh, rising anger enough that she could formulate full sentences at the very least. “They,” she began, talking with food in her mouth, be damned.
But just as she was about to embark on a full rant about what they’d done this time around, her skin started to sizzle and her heart started to pound in her chest, which was the direct opposite of what was happening to Tilly. Their ex-housekeeper’s eyes lit up, and her cheeks turned even rosier.
They were here.
And then they strolled into the kitchen, and even the rays of sun filtering in from the large bay windows in the kitchen bowed to them. In their ridiculously priced suits, draped over their ridiculously hard-sculpted bodies, their aura of arrogant dominance preceded them as if they owned the world and everyone in it was born to do their bidding.
Her heart beat so thunderously, furiously loud now at the sight of them; her nipples stood on end, and she thought she was going to have a cardiac event right there and then. Her blood heated up with fury, and a zillion butterflies crashed into each other in the pit of her stomach and then tugged on every nerve in her body, which forced her to tighten her thighs so hard that she was at risk of splitting a vein open as she felt the furor of intense heat right even between them.
It was the weirdest thing how they consistently brought out this level of ire in her in every part of her body the instant her eyes were set upon them. No one else on the planet made her feel this way before, and she was certain no one would. But damn, was she justified for feeling this way.
They had cost her what was supposed to be her best friend, and that just amplified her anger. She was so mad she just wanted to scream and throw things with marksman precision at their heads and their dicks.
But, oh, no, they didn’t care one bit that she was heating up like a volcano, about to blow, and it was all their fault. They greeted her without much fanfare, oblivious to the murderous look in her eye, or rather amused by it probably because she wanted to kill them every other day, and instead gave Tilly a bunch of kisses all over her face until the older woman was at risk of expiring from blushing too much.
So there they were, literally, just contaminating the air with their stupid cologne and their stupid faces.
Benjamin Harris. David Stone. Jackson Barret.
Her brother’s best friends. The only men he said he’d ever trust, and because of that, Benjamin, David, and Jackson became her problems because her overprotective brother named them her three guardians on a whim and capsized her whole life over in the process.
She had known Benjamin, David, and Jackson most of her childhood. As her brother’s best friends, they were in and out of their house constantly after meeting in school and going to the military together.
The only difference was that their families collectively ran multi-billionaire dollar companies, whereas Robert, her brother, took over their father’s moderate textile company, which made the Lloyds comfortably rich but was a drop in the ocean when compared to HSB Industries, a conglomerate of companies with Benjamin, David, and Jackson at the helm now.
She then went away to school on the other side of the world and saw them maybe once or twice over the course of the years. Until she turned nineteen, her brother fell on his head, was abducted by aliens, and was cloned. That was the only plausible reason she could come up with to explain his rather bizarre behavior.
Robert met Katie Williams, fell in love with her, and married her in the space of a month, which was great because Katie was awesome, and Paisley loved her. But then Robert, upon meeting his soulmate, experienced quite a shitty existential crisis—shitty for Paisley, that is—got it into his head to ditch his role as chief CEO of R. Lloyd Textiles and whisk his brand-new bride literally off the face of the earth where civilization existed so they could go exploring the unexplored. Again, not a bad thing. Paisley was all for doing you.
