“Actually,” Matt said, “I think Kate would sort of love the comparison. A predatory cat? She’d be all over that. Or not,” he muttered when Kennedy gave him a shut the fuck up look.
“She’s my assistant. Leave her alone.”
“She’s our assistant,” Matt corrected. “And she’s single.”
Kennedy gave his friend a look of irritation. “Jesus, Cannon, don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“Not really. And I’m just saying, I saw them talking. They had chemistry.”
Kennedy stared hard first at Matt, then at Jack. “It’s Kate. She’s off-limits.”
“But she’s not married. Is she straight?” he asked, glancing at Matt for confirmation.
Matt nodded, and Jack spread his hands to the sides. “Well, then. Nothing off-limits about that.”
“We made a pact,” Kennedy said, leaning forward. “Kate’s off-limits.”
“Who made the pact?” Jack asked.
“Cannon, Ian, and me.”
“So not me,” Jack said with irritating patience. “Right?”
“Sounds right,” Matt chimed in.
Five minutes ago, Kennedy had been thrilled to see his brother. Jack did most of his business overseas, so Kennedy rarely saw him outside of holidays and occasional visits. He’d been even more thrilled to hear Jack was moving back to New York, and he was glad, truly. And yet . . .
Kennedy had seen what Matt had seen. More than that, he’d heard Kate’s laugh. Kate had a sense of humor, but it was more of a facetious, witty humor, not a giggling humor.
But she’d been giggling at Jack.
Of course she was. That’s what Jack did. He charmed the crap out of women. Easily. John, too, though his other brother had been decidedly less easygoing since his divorce last year. Hell, even Fitz, who’d always been a straight-up geek, had come out of his awkward years with more girlfriends in a month than Kennedy had in a year.
But Fitz and John weren’t here. They weren’t sniffing around Kate.
“Can you just . . . not?” Kennedy said, rubbing his forehead.
“Can I not what?”
“That thing. Where you make every woman in your current zip code revolve around you.”
“What are you worried about?” Jack said, stretching his legs out in front of him, crossing his hands over his trim stomach. “It’s not like I was flirting with your girl.”
Like hell you weren’t.
It took Kennedy an embarrassingly long moment to realize that Jack meant Claudia. Claudia was his girl. Not Kate.
“Besides, you’re not exactly a repellent monk,” Jack was saying. “For reasons I’ve never been able to quite grasp, women seem to flock to your brooding Heathcliff routine just as much as they do my Leo thing.”
Kennedy scratched his temple. His brother wasn’t entirely wrong. Kennedy had never struggled for female attention. He was fit, not awful to look at, and had more money, quite honestly, than he knew what to do with. And while his tastes tended toward classic, bordering even on old-fashioned, to his brother’s point, women had always seemed to like that, too.
Most women. Not all. Definitely not Kate, who had called him stodgy once or twice to his face. Kate, who apparently preferred Jack’s easy grins and lame Titanic references.
Kennedy looked at Matt for help and saw his friend was watching him carefully. Then Matt turned to Jack. “Look, for what it’s worth, if you mess with Kate, I’ll join Kennedy here in kicking your ass.”
Jack held up his hands, palms out. “I get it. I promise not to drag her to my lair or whatever the hell it is you two seem to think it is I do to women. Good?”
Matt shrugged, and Kennedy forced himself to let the issue drop, if for nothing else than his own peace of mind.
To be fair, his brother was a good guy. Yeah, Jack had a larger than usual string of broken hearts behind him, but Kennedy also knew Jack never intentionally led women on. The guy didn’t have the settle-down itch, and he let women know it up front.
Plus, Kate was too smart to fall for a guy who had short-term written all over him. The woman went to visit her parents in Jersey every other weekend and had a half dozen photos of her niece and nephew on her desk. Surely, she had intentions of settling down—
Kennedy frowned a little at the thought. Kate didn’t seem to date much, but then again, Kennedy wasn’t entirely sure he would know if she did. Matt and Ian always seemed to be the ones who knew those details about Kate, not him.
Still, if and when she did settle down, it’d be with some high school science teacher who told corny jokes, not Jack . . . who definitely told corny jokes. Shit.
“Where’s your third musketeer?” Jack asked, interrupting Kennedy’s thoughts.
“Ian? Well, let’s see, it’s four o’clock on a Thursday . . . I’m going to guess he’s working. Some of us do that,” Kennedy said.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure he and Lara are doing it in his office,” Matt said.
Jack sat up straight. “Seriously?”
Matt shrugged. “Some of us do that.”
Jack laughed, and Kennedy shifted slightly in his chair, trying not to look—and feel—like a disapproving old man. He wasn’t a prude. Far from it. He just didn’t fully grasp the concept of being so overwhelmed with lust that one couldn’t wait until they were at home to have sex in as civilized—or uncivilized—a manner as one pleased.
There was a quick knock at the door, and Ian opened it before Kennedy’s “come in.”
Jack rose to greet him, and Kennedy listened with half an ear as they discussed who owed whom what after their poker game last summer.
All three of them actually owed Kennedy, but he didn’t say so. He didn’t need the money. None of them did. There was a reason he, Ian, and Matt were known as the “Wolfes” of Wall Street. They had a good deal more morals than the scam artists they were named after, and their partying had never veered toward the illegal hard stuff. But over the years, they’d had their fair share of late nights, dropped too many hundred-dollar bills on God knows what.
Kennedy wasn’t ashamed of it, not really. The old work-hard-play-hard adage may as well have been written in the Wolfe Investments offices. Kennedy’s family was old-money wealthy, but every dime he spent was his own, earned through determination, smarts, and long hours in this very chair.
But sometimes, at least lately, the whole thing had started to feel a little hollow. Mostly, Kennedy chalked it up to the fact that Ian and Matt had settled down with women so perfect for them that it was vaguely irritating to watch.
Not that he was jealous, but—well, hell. He was, a little. The two of them had always been wilder than Kennedy, and yet here he was, the tamest of the trio, feeling a little left behind.
His brother and friends had moved on to discuss when they could fit in a round of golf at Matt’s club out in Connecticut, when Kate marched into his office, armed with a stack of messages.
She was wearing what he thought of as her work uniform—neutral slacks and a white blouse, one button undone to reveal only a hint of skin at the base of her throat. The woman was the literal definition of buttoned-up.
Kate began handing out sheets of paper. A couple of years ago, she’d implemented what she referred to as her “hybrid” system, a combination of old-school paper messages as well as an email conveying the same message. It was her way of ensuring their I didn’t get it excuse didn’t fly when she had to deal with the aftermath of whatever message they’d forgotten or ignored.