“You told my brother.” The comment was a challenge. Not a question.
“Your shift, sir, was... unprecedented.” Manny’s face was an impassive slab of putty.
The tension inside Gavin’s chest twisted his core, a hard grunt of disgust making his throat hum. Asher Stanton made it a habit to exert as much control as possible over his younger brother. Gavin’s rebellion—leaving the family’s traditional businesses for twenty-first-century high-tech—had been hard fought. The Stanton Corporation stretched back centuries, started in Gavin’s country of birth in a London shipyard long before the colonies were touched by Brits.
Moving into biotech was an unexpected, and unwanted move on Gavin’s part.
Too bad.
Gavin was less concerned with his brother than with the woman. “Her name?” he asked, changing the topic abruptly.
If it flustered Manny, he did not show it. “Lilah. Lilah Murphy. Lilah with an h.”
“Lilah.” His mouth devoured the word, the feel of it like licking a rose petal. He hardened at the thought, mind racing to an image of that creamy skin, those big, brown eyes, that long hair stroking his own naked form in bed, dipping and dragging those blonde locks against his—
“Yes, sir. Twenty-five. Just fired from her clerical job today. College graduate.”
Gavin smirked. That’s right—Manny was a former CIA operative, too.
A walking encyclopedia with fists the size of hams. Perfect.
Morgan entered the room with a glass of sparkling water and set it on a small, polished oak tray on a marble-topped coffee table. He and Manny exchanged a glance that piqued Gavin’s curiosity, but did not divert him from his all-consuming thoughts about Lilah.
Lilah. With an h.
Manny cleared his throat. Gavin shot him an aggravated look.
“You might wish to know that the Patriots lost.”
“The—what?” This was too much. Gavin jumped up, head pounding, and fumbled for his phone. Without a word, Manny produced it from thin air and handed it to him.
Gavin checked the score.
“God damn it!” he shouted, throat sore from the shift. Manny produced a cough drop. The man really did read his mind.
“They were favored by a touchdown but they lost 41–14!” Gavin threw his highball glass into the fire with a frustrated pitch.
“I am sorry your beloved team lost.” If Manny was being sarcastic, his tone hid it well.
Gavin snorted. “It’s bad enough I get...distracted in Waltham.” One big, curvy blonde distraction. “And wind up naked in the limo with an erection the size of the Prudential building. But missing the game?”
Manny shrugged. “At least you missed one where they lost.”
“Stop trying to help. Stop speaking at all, in fact.”
Manny shut up.
A loud shout from the old elevator that provided entrance into the club caught everyone’s attention.
“Morgan! My kingdom for a scotch!” boomed the voice.
“Derry’s here,” Gavin said with a frown.
A veritable giant of a man burst into the shadowed room, taking up even more air than space. With thick, onyx hair halfway down his back, sloped eyebrows and bright blue eyes, Gavin’s younger brother, McDermott Stanton, could be summed up in one simple word:
“Bastard,” Gavin muttered.
Not literally, of course. He and Derry were blood brothers. Half brothers. That didn’t mean Gavin had to like him, though.
“I heard you found the One!” Derry announced, tossing his suit jacket on a well-oiled leather wingback chair. The fine cloth slipped to the floor.
Gavin glared at Manny, who made a slight shrug with one shoulder. “Did you post this on social media?” he asked with a snort. Manny wisely did not reply.
“It went viral the old-fashioned way,” Derry joked, clapping Gavin’s shoulder. “From Manny to Asher to the servants back home to me.”
“The servants told you?” Gavin stood toe-to-toe with Derry, who was a few inches taller and packed with more muscle. What Gavin lacked in size compared to his younger brother, he more than made up for in business prowess. As the only brother to make his own billion, Gavin had set a standard for the other three to match.
Derry’s… achievement, if you could call it that, came in an entirely different field. Two hundred years ago he would have been called a rake.
In the twenty-first century, the proper term was man whore.
“A servant told me. A juicy morsel of luscious softness, all pink and moaning,” Derry said with a leer.
Gavin felt Manny roll his own eyes, though the man didn’t even blink. Derry’s offhand comment that their older brother, Asher, now knew about Lilah didn’t go unnoticed. In fact, it was the most important statement Derry had made, and he’d buried it.
Interesting.
“But only after I made her cry out my name like she was praying to God. Which she didn’t need to,” Derry added with a wink, slugging down the scotch he’d bellowed for moments ago, “because she was fucking him already.”
“Accomplished and modest,” Gavin replied.
“I aim to please.”
“You aim to score.”
“Same thing.” Derry’s thick brows curved in a masculine arc over eyes that were always on alert, ever-vigilant, searching for hedonistic fun. “And it seems you’ve scored. The One, huh? Have fun with that,” he laughed. “Only one woman? That’s like eating only one food for the rest of your life. Better make it a good one.”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” Gavin warned, hands curling into tight fists, chest broadening with a deep breath that set his senses on alert.
“Oh!” Derry said in a teasing voice, eyebrows up, face playful. “It’s like that already? The One really is the one? How quaint. You fuck her already? She any good in bed?”
Manny inserted himself between them so carefully, with just the hint of a foot’s movement, as Gavin’s smartphone buzzed in his suit jacket. Blood pounded through him like a drumbeat, his eyes on Derry as he answered the text, Derry’s own phone buzzing too.
Derry swiped his coat from the floor and lumbered to the elevator doors while Gavin scanned his text. A simple computer error closed down the stock market in a tiny country the international news media didn’t care about. Millions on the line, but a sequence of rapid subsequent texts claimed it was all under control.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Gavin shouted at Derry’s back.
“Wherever I damn well please. While it’s cute watching you turn into Mr. Darcy over a woman you haven’t even dipped your knot into, this has become boring.” He faked a yawn.
Gavin’s legs braced in preparation to lunge. While they weren’t fighting schoolboys anymore, he wasn’t above teaching his “little” brother a lesson or two with fists and fang.
Ding! As he stepped on the elevator, Derry shook his phone in the air and called out, “Always nice to get a booty call from my favorite threesome. Life is a buffet. Have fun eating nothing but oatmeal!”
The elevator doors closed as Gavin’s phone exploded with texts. Maybe the problem wasn’t under control after all.
Work was imitating his life.
And it was all because of her.