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When their dad passed away from a heart attack six months after her seventeenth birthday, Robert inherited the textile company and the house they grew up in.
She inherited a cat. Well, not from her father, but from her grandmother. Which was also the reason Robert was named her guardian in their father’s will in the first place. Damn that cat.
But Robert had no intention of being stuck behind a desk. The man wanted to go off-grid so deep that he never wanted to be found.
So what did he do? By the time Paisley turned nineteen, he left all his earthly possessions to her, and transferred everything else into her name, too. The textile company––and while she owned it, Benjamin, David, and Jackson kept it running enough to keep her father’s legacy alive––and the house she loved so much.
But that still left the cat she had inherited from her grandmother, who had died when she was still little. And it was because of that cat she required a whole ass guardian because clearly no one thought she was capable of taking care of herself.
Okay, it wasn’t just a cat. It was literally a bejeweled cat, as in a cat made of jewels and worth several hundred million dollars. It was a Lloyd family heirloom that had been lost for a few generations before her grandmother went in search of it herself and then left it for her only granddaughter.
With a stipulation.
She needed to have a male guardian assigned to her who would vet her future husband before she got married to make sure they were not just only after her cat, since that was how the cat was lost in the first place One of Lloyd women married a charlatan and he stole her cat. Now Paisley needed protection from pesky historians who wanted to touch her cat, thieves who wanted to steal her cat, and gold diggers who wanted a piece of her cat.
Not even Paisley’s mother, currently residing in Paris, could help get her out of those stipulations. And since Robert rescinded the role—how could he scrutinize any future husband of hers when he and his wife were becoming one with the ends of the earth? Cue his best friends. Benjamin, David, and Jackson.
The bane of her existence.
Chapter Three
The thorns in her ass.
The flies in her ice cream.
The source of her perpetual annoyance times three.
She had half a mind to smash their coconut pies in their perfectly structured faces, but she couldn’t do that to Tilly. She definitely wanted to do something, though.
But honestly, what was it about these three men, currently being fawned over by Tilly like innocent little lambs, that had made Hannah Grable, strong, reliable, levelheaded Hannah Grable, lose her mind and her heart for them?
Paisley took a moment out of her fury to try to see what Hannah saw. Her gaze raked over the three of them collectively as Tilly laid out cake plates and cutlery for them while they charmed her by giving her compliment after compliment.
Yes, they were tall, and she supposed that they were unmistakably muscular beneath their clothes. Okay, that much was evidenced by the broad width of their shoulders and chests. Their jackets accentuated their huge biceps, and the flatness of their stomachs indicated it was only layered with a set of six-pack abs for each of them.
She also couldn’t deny the power in their thighs, molded by the fabric of the suits, and of their rather large feet shod in those Italian-crafted shoes. Fine. They had the bodies of Greek gods. So what?
Her gaze drifted upward to their faces. Strongly structured jawlines enveloped lips that curled up at the sides in a mockingly entitled grin every time they took a moment to look at her.
Benjamin had commanding and brooding gray eyes and kept his dark, almost black hair short. He was entirely unapproachable and was given to growling instead of using his words, but girls still swooned at his feet like there was no tomorrow. Firstly, were those girls’ suckers for punishment, and secondly, she would rather pet a porcupine than him.
David’s eyes were a strong, stormy blue, and his dark blond hair was soft and bore evidence of his fingers threaded more than once through the silky waves. She heard girls say that when he smiled, their panties just melted right off them. What kind of panties were they wearing in the first place? Surely not dependable cotton.
Jackson had the kind of eyes that looked like a pool of simmering gold when he took the trouble to look at someone, which was very rare. And apparently, when he did, girls just went ahead and drowned in them before offering him their ovaries. Why, though? She liked her ovaries inside her body, and she couldn’t imagine a more painful experience than drowning in hot gold.
If she had to be unbiased, she could perhaps begrudgingly admit that to the rest of the population, they were considered quite attractive. Gorgeous even. But not to her. And honestly, she only envied their obscenely long eyelashes, but that was as far as she would go.
But did those fangirls know that Benjamin had a scar that ran across his eyebrow and down over his eyelid that he had gotten in a boating accident when he was sixteen years old when he rescued his mother from drowning? When he was truly angry, he touched the scar because, while he saved his mother’s life, she had lost her eyesight from hitting her head on the rocks. He blamed himself for not being a faster swimmer.
Did they know David wore a ring that belonged to his great-grandfather, the man who raised him with strictness and coldness when his parents were too busy being rich to care for their only son? He twirled that ring around his finger whenever he became defensive or angry.
Did they know that Jackson’s reserved demeanor was born after being adopted from an orphanage when he was ten years old? While he appeared cool, calm, and collected, he was constantly, but silently, watchful of everything around him.
What was she doing? She quickly snapped out of making them appear human in her head. They were not. They were players. Heads of the ladies’ man club. Captain Casanovas. She was sure they got off on their own reflections.
But still, not enough to make her lose her shit over them. Was she the only sane female alive? The possibility was strong now that Hannah, who she had thought was tough, smart, and immune to such frivolous things, had proved Paisley horribly wrong.
Hannah, she sobbed on the inside.
