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To distract herself further, she continued rummaging in her bag for something else to bribe them with. And came up empty-handed. She could hardly give them her perfume or her e-reader. No way, she loved her books too much. They’d have no use for her lipstick or a tampon either.
She retrieved from a secret side compartment, a half-eaten Snickers bar, which she had munched on her way to the law office of William Lester Montgomery, and then had to fold the wrapper over what remained before she stuck it into her handbag.
She gasped in shock as Aston snatched it out of her hand, peeled the packaging off her half-eaten chocolate bar, and proceeded to bring it to his mouth.
“But I already bit into… that,” she said, trying to stop him. But she was too late. The electric shock waves Beckett had instigated grew into waves of blinding hot flames as Aston put his mouth where hers had been not even an hour ago. She couldn’t understand why her lips started to tingle.
Yet again, she used poking around in her handbag as an excuse to camouflage the flooding heat ricocheting off her skin as if she really had a gold mine in there, she could use to pay them off to leave her alone.
But yes, she wouldn't be Rayne Alice Bradshaw if she didn’t add one more mortifying event to her daily roster.
She froze on the spot when a whisper of red tumbled out of her handbag and floated to the floor of the elevator.
Oh god. No. No. No.
Besides her shoe plight, she had worn a below-the-knee pencil-tight skirt to work that morning and hadn’t made sure she was wearing the correct underwear because she was late as usual.
That meant by the time she got to the office bathroom, after removing her coat and turning around to inspect her backside in the full-length mirror stuck to the wall, the lace outline of her panties was clearly and horribly visible through the fabric of the skirt. She hadn’t even overthought it. She simply slipped them off, straightened her skirt, and stuffed the offending slip of a garment into the bottom of her handbag.
Now that same troublesome piece of material was lying on the prickly gray carpeted floor of the elevator.
She may have broken a vertebra or two in her attempt to pick up her panties, but she was apparently too slow. Keaton, with lazy ease and sleek agility, had already collected them off the floor and then inspected them.
“Don’t touch that. I wore it this morning,” she blurted, then instantly wished she had a roll of duct tape in her handbag instead of her underwear.
Keaton, honest-to-goodness, grinned at her, then, without taking his gaze off her, he slipped her panties into the pocket of the pants of his suit.
Rayne spun around and faced the heavy steel doors of the elevator, willing them to open immediately and let her out.
What did she expect?
She had tried to bribe them with a cheap crystal stone, a half-eaten bar of chocolate, and a pair of her used panties. As they stood behind her, she could feel their amusing grins scorching her skin and making her thighs more slippery with the fountain of the wetness they seemed to have released from her like sluice gates.
As they stood behind her, Beckett had her crystal stone in his pants pocket. Aston had the wrapper from her chocolate bar in his. And Keaton had her panties in his.
Her plan had undergone a full-scale flip. As soon as the doors opened, she was going to head to her car and not look behind her.
Chapter Three
She thought they were strippers. And before that, she thought they were underwear models. Beckett King and his work partners and lifetime bonded brothers, Aston Lane and Keaton Reed, would have had to be without a pulse not to have snickered a bit behind the stoic expressions they maintained on their faces.
They had seen some crazy shit in their lifetimes, so far. They’d also met some of the most dangerous people that ever lived, usually begging for their lives at Beckett’s, Aston’s, or Keaton’s hands, but nothing and no one could have prepared them for the sight of her.
There weren’t many questions they got answered when their ex-boss and all-time mentor, Patrick Riggs, the only man they trusted and the only father figure in their lives, drew them out of semi-retirement with the most unusual request. Their services had been activated, but information was scarce and rather cryptic.
Safeguard a twenty-three-year-old female for the duration of a month. That was all they had. That and, of course, that her aunt, a woman they knew nothing about either, had initiated the detail.
The instructions from Patrick were clear on two things. Ask no questions about her aunt until the month was over.
Patrick knew they wouldn’t refuse the assignment, not when he called in one of his last remaining favors. He called it his deathbed favor, and he was cashing it early considering he was seventy-four but as robust as a forty-year-old.
Apart from not asking any questions, the second thing was that she wasn’t in any clear and present danger. In other words, she wasn’t on a hit list, had not unknowingly witnessed a high-profile crime, or committed one herself, and needed their protection.
That’s where the cryptic part came into effect.
The intel file Patrick had given them—information he’d had a junior compile after following her for a few weeks prior—was anything but simple.
Rayne Alice Bradshaw was described as a brown-eyed, dark-haired, twenty-three-year-old female, born to Cole Bradshaw and Lora Philips. There weren’t any images of her in her file, which they found odd.
