Love Under Three Titans

by Cara Covington

  She took a small sip of the white, savoring the taste on her tongue, letting it slide subtly down her throat. Then she shook her head and chuckled. “I invited the three of you to dinner.” Maggie had fully intended to perform the hostess duties—even if it was already past ten in the evening—including all of the preparation and the cooking, too.

  Tonight, however, her men wouldn’t hear of it.

  She paused with her wine glass halfway to her lips. Her men. She couldn’t deny the reality of that thought, since they’d all just shared a hot tub and some damn fine sex.

  “And we appreciated the invitation.” Trevor slid in to the chair next to her. “It gives us the opportunity to spend time with you.”

  “You’ve been working all day, love. Let us take care of you, at least for the rest of the night.”

  The rest of the night? Did that mean they’d stay over and there’d be more bouts of lusty sex?

  Oh, goody.

  As if they’d read her mind, the brothers Benedict each gave her a cheeky grin.

  Richard took the salad out of the fridge and then set the table, Trevor wrapped some potatoes in foil and took them to the grill, and Kevin supervised the outdoor cooking. In short order, dinner was served, and Maggie wasn’t ashamed to admit she was starving.

  Apparently, she wasn’t the only one.

  The next several minutes were spent in mutual munching as they all worked to clear their plates. Maggie liked the way they fit in bed, but she liked the way they fit outside of it, too. Here they all were, having a great meal together in complete comfort.

  During the few dates she’d been on in the past, she’d discovered an odd quirk about herself. She didn’t particularly like the act of eating in front of someone she didn’t know really well.

  Likely goes back to Mother. Virginia Morrison had always been so rigid in policing her daughter’s table manners. Maggie believed herself to have impeccable manners, but her mother had usually been able to find fault.

  Maggie had never felt uncomfortable eating with these men.

  “You cooked my steak just right.” She saluted Kevin with her wine glass and took a delicate sip. Looking around the table reminded her of what the men had been up to earlier that day while she’d been working on her library and conducting research into possible advertising mediums.

  “I didn’t get a chance to ask earlier”—and considering how they’d spent the last few hours, she knew they would never have expected her to—“how did that interview go this afternoon?”

  “It didn’t.” Trevor shook his head and set his fork down. “That reminds me, I never did check to see if I got a return call from Williams or not.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and turned it on. “Not. Likely, the man won’t get back to me until tomorrow, now.” Trevor set his cell phone on the table above his plate and resumed eating.

  Kevin shook his head then used his fork as a pointer aimed at Richard. “That woman sure had a hard-on for you, Rick,” he said.

  “I think someone needs to explain that one to me.” Maggie gave them each a wide smile that they correctly interpreted as trouble—for them, if they didn’t give her the details, and fast.

  Richard laughed, then put his hand over hers and squeezed.

  “That was a poor choice of words on Kevin’s part, love. He meant that she didn’t like me at all—and that was even before I opened my mouth and turned on my irresistible charm.”

  Maggie laughed. Minutes later, laughter turned to shock as Richard explained what had happened at the restaurant that afternoon.

  She shook her head, nearly speechless. She could never understand so-called professionals who behaved in a completely unprofessional manner. “I agree with you,” she said after a moment. “It sounds as if she came to the interview with her mind already made up and pissed about something. You’re sure you’ve never met her before?”

  Richard tilted his head, and although he tried to look wounded, the sparkle in his eyes gave him away. “You think I’m some heartless Lothario, leaving brokenhearted women scattered in my wake like so much flotsam?”

  Maggie cupped his face with one hand and gave him a quick, light kiss. “No, darling, I certainly do not. Although how you’ve managed to live this long without being swarmed by dozens of women is completely beyond me.”

  He took her hand from his cheek and kissed it. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. What I meant by my question was, perhaps you and this reporter crossed paths sometime in the past, in some other arena. Did she ever work for you? Or maybe someone close to her did and got fired. People don’t do things without having a reason. If this reporter was willing to risk a public scene and getting herself fired, she had to have had what she felt was an awfully good reason.”

  “Hmm, I never thought of it like that, but you’re right.” Richard sat back, and Maggie could tell by the way his eyes sort of went unfocused that he was thinking about her question. Then he shook his head.

  “We’ve actually fired very few people, considering the size of our company.” Richard shrugged. “There are even fewer terminations that we ourselves would have been involved in personally. Maybe we’ll get the uncles to look into this—provide some work for the Benedict-Murphy detective agency. It’s not a big deal, really, except that I hate unsolved mysteries.” He took a moment to drink from his own glass of wine. “I’m not a child. I don’t expect, or even want, everyone to like me. But I like to know why I’m hated.”

  “Well, I can’t imagine that any of you have any enemies.” Maggie felt certain she was right on that score. “None of you strike me as being particularly ruthless.”

  Instead of preening at what she’d believed was a compliment, Richard shrugged and looked just a little uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry to disillusion you, Maggie, but I can be ruthless if I need to be,” Richard said. “In fact, we’re all three of us quite capable of that.”

  “We’re Texans.” Kevin said that as if those two words explained everything.

  She instinctively turned to Trevor, knowing he’d explain. As if he’d read her mind, he nodded. “If someone we love is threatened or harmed or even treated badly, we won’t stand idly by and do nothing. We’ll strike back, quickly and without hesitation. And if the cause is just enough, without mercy.”

  Something in the almost-casual tone of that sentence, which really was anything but casual, alerted Maggie. There was something here, and she wondered if it could be at the root of that reporter’s strange behavior.

  “Okay.” She looked at each one of them. She chose her words carefully. “Is there someone with whom you needed to become ruthless lately?”

  They exchanged glances, and Maggie knew they were communicating with each other, even though none of them said a single word. Finally, with both of his brothers staring at him, Richard exhaled and met Maggie’s gaze.

  “We made a mistake several months ago, when we were still in New York.” He sat back slightly and reached for her hand. Without hesitation, she gave it to him.

  “We acted out of the best of intentions,” Richard continued, “but that doesn’t really absolve us from blame for what happened. That mistake put a man into a position whereby he was able to hurt someone we love.” He paused and looked at each of his brothers. Then he faced Maggie again. “So of course, we had to fix it.”

  Maggie couldn’t claim she understood completely what it was Richard was telling her. But she recalled a conversation she’d heard the day after her niece’s engagement party, a conversation between Ginny and Tracy about the brothers Benedict.

  “Did the mistake you made have anything to do with your sister, Julia?”

  All three of the Benedicts looked a little uncomfortable. But they didn’t let that stop them from answering her.

  “It had everything to do with the squirt,” Richard said.

  “She worked with us for a time, before she went off and got a posit
ion with the Port Authority,” Trevor said. “She enjoyed the work—she’s very much like me, a people person. Anyway, as time passed, we noticed that she rarely dated, and when she did, it was just one man at a time. We thought she wasn’t interested in ménage relationships. We also thought she was unhappy—lonely. The relationships she had with these men didn’t seem to last long, and she appeared to be…sad.”

  “We thought she wanted to have a steady relationship but, for whatever reason, couldn’t find the right man,” Kevin said. “For all that she’s a people person, she’s not as outgoing as some people think she is.”

  “After she’d left the company, we took on a consulting firm, based in London, to help us come up with a strategy for expanding Benedict International’s presence overseas.” Richard rubbed the back of Maggie’s hand with his thumb. An almost absentminded gesture, she noticed he seemed to do that when he was nervous or stressed.

  “Anyway, long story short, the man who came over and met with us seemed like the sort of man Julia would be drawn to. Sophisticated, well educated…” Richard’s voice trailed off.

  “He looked good and smelled good,” Trevor said. “We’d run some basic background checks on the company, and the family—it was a family-run business, four generations on—and we decided, in our big-brothers-know-it-all kind of way, that this guy would be perfect for her.”

  “And because we know our baby sister,” Kevin said, “when we arranged for her to ‘accidentally encounter’ the man in Rick’s office, we acted reluctant to introduce him to her and then told her to forget she’d ever met him, that he wasn’t for her.”

  “Oh, dear.” Maggie had a bad feeling. “I take it what happened next was more than just a romance going bad?”

  “Yeah.” Richard looked thoroughly pissed, and Maggie bet it was a toss-up as to who he was most angry with—his sister’s unnamed suitor or himself. “We didn’t find out the truth of the matter until after she’d dumped the bastard. Suffice it to say he treated her like shit. And then we found out the entire time he was dating Julia he had a fiancée waiting for him over in England. He thought he could use Julia and then just toss her aside.”

  Because her niece Ginny’s experience was so fresh in her memory, she squeezed Richard’s hand and asked, “That bastard didn’t hit her, did he?”

  “No! No, love. Although the three of us believe things might have been heading in that direction at the time Julia finally got rid of him, she says he didn’t. We believe her.”

  “Which is why the bastard is still alive and walking around on two legs,” Kevin said.

  Richard shrugged and then opened his hands, palms up. “Exactly. We’re not unreasonable men. We didn’t beat the hell out of him. We simply ruined him—socially and financially.”

  * * * *

  Rick stood by the doorway and watched Maggie sleep.

  She’d taken their confession well, all things considered. She hadn’t pitched a fit nor gone all cold on them. She’d simply looked from him to his brothers, that one eyebrow of hers arched ever so slightly, and asked, “Can any of you be arrested for what you did to this prick?”

  If he’d doubted before that moment Maggie was the one woman meant for them, he doubted no more.

  “No, ma’am,” he’d replied smartly.

  “You should know that our ‘payback’ wasn’t, however, without cost to us.” Trevor had announced that.

  Maggie nodded and said, “And it shouldn’t be.”

  And that had been the end of it. She hadn’t asked for details, and for all intents and purposes, the matter had been dropped.

  Maggie Morrison, you’re one hell of a woman.

  They’d made fast work of finishing dinner, setting the kitchen to rights, and then indulging themselves in their woman, a dessert tastier than any pastry they’d ever nibbled on.

  She’d fallen asleep before he’d left the bed. Now she lay snuggled in between his brothers. The wide empty space on the right-hand side of the bed beckoned to him. He’d already checked the time, so he knew it was just gone two a.m.

  He was tired but for some reason felt wired, as if sleep was going to elude him tonight. It happened sometimes.

  Mentally shrugging, he made a decision.

  It took Rick only five minutes to pull on his pants and jog through the field to the Grandparents’ House. He grabbed his laptop and a Coke and headed back to Maggie’s.

  He settled himself in the large armchair in the corner of the bedroom and turned on his computer. He’d just peruse his e-mails and see if anything important had happened since they’d left Houston earlier.

  His gaze returned to the bed. When they’d set the thing up, he and his brothers had chosen the largest sized mattresses—the ones that were meant for four. Triplets weren’t overly common in the families, but they happened.

  Some, when they married the same woman, chose to sleep all together in one bed. Some added another bed to the master suite, with the husbands rotating as sleeping partners for their wife, who’d be tucked in between them. Rick mentally shrugged. He’d have to see what his brothers—and Maggie—preferred.

  Jumping the gun there, aren’t you, Romeo? You’re not a family yet.

  Maybe he was getting ahead of himself. Or maybe, he’d just consider that he was keeping a positive outlook on their future.

  That would certainly be a change for him.

  He sipped his cola and ran through the e-mails, many of them just routine, mostly business associates “keeping in touch.” He tried not to let these relationships slide. A business titan he may be—and how he really hated the pretentiousness of that moniker—but to himself he was just a guy who’d been lucky enough to be born into a phenomenal family with a lot of prime opportunities and options.

  One e-mail snagged his attention, because it was an alert from the legal department. He opened it, not expecting anything earth-shattering. Sometimes lawyers could be a little too anal—even the lawyers working for Benedict International, some of whom were family.

  Elwood Michaelson has exercised his option to recall the contract on the Michaelson Enterprises sale, citing a need to reconsider. We’ve returned the document, of course. We’ll await your instructions for future action.

  Huh. Rick forwarded the missive to his admin. He asked Janice if there’d been anything in the tone of her conversation with Michaelson’s secretary the other day that had seemed off.

  Hell, he was supposed to meet with the man next week. He rechecked his e-mail in-box, to see if there was any kind of message from him postponing their meet. There wasn’t, and Rick wondered if the man wouldn’t as soon have his secretary call Janice to cancel on Monday.

  Elwood Michaelson was not a businessman of the twenty-first century, which was why his company was in danger of going down the tubes.

  He’d seemed happy with the proposed deal, which would give Benedict seventy-percent ownership and put Rick in the driver’s seat.

  They could have offered to buy the business outright, but Michaelson had started his company from nothing and had prospered well. All he needed was some guidance and some upgrading to the new, ever-changing technologies of the day to become competitive again.

  That’s what Rick loved doing, revamping businesses to make them vibrant again. Michaelson had no sons or daughters interested in taking over for him, but he had a grandson, and that young man had just entered college, aiming for a business degree.

  Rick shook his head. He knew that if Michaelson turned Benedict International down, there were others waiting to step into the void. All the others were interested in a complete buyout, leaving Michaelson with a handful of cash—but not nearly the amount that the company could be worth. Of course, such a deal would leave nothing for his grandson to step into.

  Not my problem.

  No, it wasn’t, but he could still look into the situation. He’d make some calls in the morning and see if he could figure out what was going on. He recalled that his father, Carson, knew Elwood Micha
elson. Perhaps he’d get him to give the man a call.

  Maybe Rick shouldn’t care if a prospective business partner suddenly wanted to quash a deal, but he did. It wasn’t about the money. Even if he never did another thing for the rest of his life, he’d have more than enough money to support his family and his family’s families.

  No, what bothered Rick was that if Michaelson refused to do business, then that man’s life’s work would end up being another victim of modern-day slash-and-burn economics, and his legacy would thereby cease to exist.

  Motion on the bed drew his attention. Maggie lay on her side, facing him, her eyes open, a soft smile on her lips. His cock began to stir, and he knew he’d get no more work done that night.

  Rick made a vow that come the morning he’d do all he could to reach out to Michaelson. He couldn’t let someone make a mistake without doing all he could to prevent it.

  That was the Benedict way.

  Chapter 16

  Maggie felt loose and limber and would have sworn she’d had her fill of exciting, electric orgasms for one night.

  Then she turned her head, saw Richard Benedict sitting in that armchair looking so bookishly sexy, and felt every feminine hormone in her body go on lust-alert.

  She thought it just might be possible that the brothers Benedict had turned her into a sex addict.

  Hooray!

  Richard looked up, met her gaze, and gave her that little half smile of his that she so loved. He went back to his work, but she waited, not at all surprised that in just a couple moments he closed his laptop and set it aside.

  He started to get up out of the chair, but she shook her head “no” and then held one finger up against her lips.

  Richard eased back down and spread his hands, palms up, telling her the ball was in her court.

  Maggie nearly giggled. His balls would soon be in her hands, if she had anything to say about it.

  She moved carefully, wanting to see if she could extricate herself from between two of her lovers without waking either one.