“Hello!” A muffled feminine voice called out from the proximity of the floor.
Pandora pulled her hand out of his with a grimace and started shuffling through papers, looking for something. “I dropped my phone. Dang!”
Then she went right back to her hands and knees, frantically searching. Now Kade wasn’t the only one looking at her ass. Rafe was practically drooling, his eyes travelling from the graceful curve of her spine to the round cheeks of her backside. Rafe’s gaze cut over to his with an interested gleam.
Kade raised his eyebrows and pointed at his watch. It was early, but if they took her to lunch, maybe they could be in bed by twelve thirty. Their condo wasn’t far. Feed her a little. Maybe a nice bottle of wine. Then, before long, they’d hopefully sweet talk the glorious little bundle of chaos into getting in between them.
Rafe frowned and held up his folder, the one that contained the name of the woman they had come here to see. Piper Glen. The supposed savior of Bezakistan. Hopefully not some cold-ass intellectual.
Fucking Pandora would have to wait.
Rafe nodded regretfully and mouthed, “Dinner?”
Yeah. If they weren’t on a plane home with their future wife in tow. He longed for the old days when no one thought a sheikh should be faithful to one woman. They could have married whoever and kept little Pandora as a treat on the side. But no. Now he had paparazzi and tabloid rags and Sunday news shows commenting about where he put his dick.
Which still hadn’t gone down.
He sighed and started cleaning up again.
“Mindy? Are you still there?” Pandora scrambled to put the phone against her ear. “Did you get the check? Good. Buy your books and don’t forget to save some. I can’t send anything else until next payday. I love you. No. I don’t want to hear about him. Unless he’s dead. Then I do. Darn it. No, I don’t wish him ill. Thank you. You’re a good sister.” She shut her phone, a ridiculously old contraption that Kade was surprised still worked. “Sorry about all this. I was talking to my sister and I got distracted.”
She pushed the last of the papers into a haphazard pile that would likely make Rafe crazy. His brother was fastidious, but Rafe simply smiled as he handed her the perfectly placed pile he’d gathered.
“We all get distracted at times,” Rafe said, the smooth words coming out like he’d never ogled her ass. He bowed politely. “I wish you a good afternoon.”
She smiled, pushing her glasses back up. That smile was fatal. Kade just stared because she lit up the fucking room. “Thank you so much. Good afternoon to you, too.”
She turned and walked away, her flats shuffling as she tried to balance the papers and her phone.
“Oh, we have got to have that, my brother.” Rafe stood beside him, his head angled to one side as he watched her walk away.
Kade silently thanked the heavens because Rafe had been as out of sorts as he’d felt the last few months. “Yes, we do. Let’s find Dex and get this over with so we can take Pandora out for happy hour. Then we’ll make her even happier. We should find out her name before we fuck her.”
An arm slapped around his shoulders suddenly, and Dexter James shoved his six foot five inch, two hundred twenty pounds of pure muscle between Kade and his brother. “Her name is Piper, and I’ll kill you both if you lay a hand on her.”
“Piper?” That was Piper Glen? That gloriously messy little fuck bunny was the drab girl in the pictures that Tal wanted to marry?
Two ideas struck Kade as Dex started to lead them to his office. First, his oldest brother’s taste had come up in the world. And second, he better knock out Dex now because he planned to get a lot more than his hands on that sweet woman.
* * * *
Piper Glen managed to make it to her teeny-tiny office without another catastrophe. Except now, she couldn’t open the door.
“Allow me.” Gina Jacobson twisted the handle with a smile and eased the door open. “Here’s your kingdom.”
An eight-by-eight cubby hole was hardly a kingdom, especially with its glorious view of a dumpster in the alley behind the building and its location as far from the elevators as possible. The little room had been given to the lowly researcher. Anyone else would have run. Piper merely sighed as she put her files down, grumbling a bit.
“What happened now, hon? Did that guy from the mailroom plow into you? I swear, I can take him. I have two toddlers. One skinny twenty-year-old is no match for me.”
Piper slumped down, the last couple of minutes washing over her like a bad horror film. “Nope. It was just me. Pandora struck again.”
The employees of Black Oak Oil had christened her Pandora, unleasher of evil on the world, because she’d caused a complete building-wide blackout on her first day. It wasn’t her fault that dumb fuse had blown because her coffeemaker was from the sixties. Some days, she was like one big pitfall waiting to happen.