One Bride for Five Mountain Men: A Reverse Harem Romance

by Jess Bentley

  Oh my, what am I saying? The wine must already be going to my head.

  He leans forward, cupping his square chin on the palm of his hand and tapping at that sculpted cheekbone with his fingertip.

  “So tell me more about you,” he invites me. “I love your accent. I love the way you talk.”

  “My accent?” I repeat. “I don't have a… Oh, I suppose I do. I never thought about it.”

  “Yes, I like the sound of it. It's so refreshing to hear you talk.”

  “Oh, you have heard me talk before, haven't you? Madame Brevelle has called on me at least four times. Remember all those questions about Corot? I felt like she was daring me not to know who he was!”

  “Ah yes, the French are very possessive of our reputation as artists,” he agrees readily. “No, but what I mean is… you know.”

  I take another sip of my wine. At first it had seemed a little rough, a little astringent, but now the sweetness is really coming through. I like the way it makes my blood feel thick as honey.

  “What do I know? About Corot?”

  He tips his head to the side and wrinkles his nose slightly. “You know. There is no sound. On your… videos? Your, um, broadcast? Stream! That's the word!”

  He smiles broadly, congratulating himself for remembering the word stream, apparently.

  My mouth has gone suddenly dry.

  I set the glass down in front of me slowly, turning it in place and pressing my palms flat to the tablecloth.

  He knows. He recognized me.

  “Oh, you know… I really should be going,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper.

  He looks alarmed. “Did I make a mistake? Did I say something to offend you?”

  I shake my head tightly. “Oh, no. Of course not. It's just that I haven't eaten… Too much wine, you know.”

  The push myself to standing and try to take a step away from the table but his hand is quick and encircles my wrist. That innocent, farm boy sweetness has somehow been replaced by raw strength.

  I should have seen this coming! I scream at myself. I should have known I could never have a normal life!

  I twist my hand away roughly, saying thank you as loud as I can and attracting the attention of several of the other restaurant patrons. I hobble away, sticking him with the bill. I could have paid, of course. But at least I figure that will slow him down.

  Automatically I storm toward my apartment, and then realize what a foolish move that is. Instead I double back across the street, cutting across the park in no particular direction, just away. Away from where he is. Away from the ridiculous farce of my first normal date with a stranger in Paris.

  After a little while, I begin to feel more confident that he's not following me, but now I'm blocks away from where I need to be. I squint down the street, looking for a taxi and then suddenly realize where I am.

  Standing right in front of R’s apartment.

  Maybe it's the wine, but this feels like some kind of sign. After a few moments I tap my finger against the button, half hoping it is miraculously out of service. But I hear the electronic click as he engages the answer button, far above me in his flat.

  “Jordan? Is everything all right?”

  I don't even know what to say. I hang my head slightly and some part of me realizes that he can see me, even though I can't see him. What a strange, fitting coincidence. Everything old is new again.

  “King,” I finally say when I find my voice, “let me up. I need you.”

  I expect him to press the buzzer that disengages the deadbolt, but instead the door swings open and there he is, shirtless in just his pyjama bottoms, his arms out from his sides as though ready to fight. His eyes dart along the darkened street, looking for trouble.

  “It's okay, I'm alone,” I tell him.

  But he cups my elbow and pulls me inside, protectively shielding me with his body. Despite everything, I'm grateful for this. I realize I am thankful for his unwavering commitment to protecting me, even when he was being an absolute jackass about it.

  He fixes me a brandy and I curl up in my favorite spot on the leather sofa, sipping it though I know I've really had enough to drink at this point. I tell him about Daniel, about a momentary blush of hope crushed to bits again by the past that just won't stay in the past.

  He nods, listening to me go on and on and saying nothing. But when I finally finish, when I'm spent explaining and have no more words, he frowns sympathetically.

  “Jordan, there is something else you should know,” he begins.

  I tip my head back dramatically, letting it fall on the sofa. “Oh my God, what else can there be?” I ask the ceiling.

  “The website is still active.”

  I pick my head up and stare at him, not understanding. “Kelsey's website? That's impossible!”

  He gnaws the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. I can see how sorry he is to deliver this news to me. I'm not sure if I should be grateful that he is still keeping tabs on me or if I should throw my drink in my in his face and storm back out. After all, isn’t it people just like him who made this nightmare possible?

  But instead, I take several deep breaths. Somehow, this new turn of events doesn't floor me the way it would have six months ago, even two weeks ago.

  “Okay,” I nod. “What are we going to do?”

  His eyebrows go up, but he doesn't move toward me. He's being cautious, I can tell. He is afraid I'll run away.

  “Okay, well, you have some options,” he says, dropping his voice to serious businessman levels. I bite my lips together to keep from smirking at the sense of fondness that wells up in me. I used to love this tone of voice, didn’t I?

  “What kind of options?”

  “I can have someone look into it for us… Find out who is running the site. See if you have a connection, or if there is any easy way to get it dismantled.”

  “How do you do that?”

  He shrugs one shoulder. “I have people.”

  “But it's the middle of the night, R,” I remind him.

  He smiles, dropping his head onto his fist on the back of the sofa. His muscles are long and thick, their restful state belying the strength I know is there. I cannot let my gaze linger too long on his skin.

  “It’s not the middle of the night in the States.”

  “Yes,” I chuckle. “I guess I never get used to that, do I?”

  It only takes him one phone call to get the details.

  The site is still operational, with even more videos on it now. According to some third-party ranking site, it's more popular than ever. Which means I am more popular than ever. Which means…

  “I can't even think about this anymore,” I whisper, defeated as we stare at the blue light of his laptop, scrolling through the data his investigator had sent over immediately. Traffic rankings, back links to the site, a whole network of people who been sharing images of me, even on Pinterest! Fucking Pinterest!

  His arm loops around me, drawing me closer to him. I nuzzle against his neck, breathing deep the woodsy smell, letting its warmth seeped through my blood and maybe feeling just a little bit better.

  “Can I stay with you tonight?” I ask tentatively.

  He presses a kiss against my hair and lingers there for a few moments.

  “Of course you can stay. I'd like nothing better,” he murmurs.

  “Thank you,” I sigh, “and in the morning, will figure out how to shut this all down, yes?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Chapter 20

  Raleigh

  When my cellphone buzzes on the nightstand, I instantly wake up, grabbing it and sliding carefully from the bed. I thumb the connect button to get it to stop ringing but I don't say anything until I'm a safe distance away. Jordan is sleeping so peacefully, I don't want to disturb her. After all the fretful nights she spent, I figure solid sleep is the least I can offer her.

  “Hello? King?”

  “Reggie,” I finally answer. “I'm here. What have you got for me?”


  I hear him swallow and imagine the thirty-ounce coffee he traditionally keeps no more than three inches away from his face. It's the middle of the morning in New York, and I'm expecting good things from him. It's amazing to me that I can hear somebody swallow a half a world away.

  “Well, boss, I’m not sure you're gonna like all of this.”

  I scrub my hand over my face and fall into the sofa.

  “I figure if it's important you will just put it in the report.”

  “Yeah, it is,” he says.

  “So just tell me, Reggie. Spit it out.”

  “Okay. The site is registered to an LLC under the name ‘Head Monster.’ I checked the LLC filings and there's nothing there. Bunch of dead ends.”

  “So keep digging,” I tell him, even though I don't have to. Nobody put their personal information in LLC filings. That’s why we have LLC filings, to conceal identities when the situation is sensitive.

  “Yeah, of course. I'll get it, I just need to keep pinging every resource I can find until somebody cracks. Obviously they don't want us finding out who they are.”

  I stifle a yawn. “Obviously.”

  “But I got a lead on a couple of things…” he says.

  I knew this part was coming. Reggie always likes to give me a little dollop of bad news at the beginning, to bring up the drama. That way, he thinks that when he gives me a little bit of good news, I am going to be super impressed. I'm impressed, but not super impressed. I figure this is what I'm paying him for, and he really needs to get on with the show here.

  “What did you find out, Reggie?” I ask him, letting my irritation edge into my voice.

  “See, all these streams that are coming from Head Monster’s site used to be in different places, on different sites. But the funny thing is, they're not that far apart. Like, geographically not that far apart. I tracked some of the IPs and they’re right in her back yard.”

  “Really,” I scoff. Now, that is interesting.

  “And always girls about the same age. So I started to wonder, do they maybe know each other? And after poking around a bit, asking around a bit, I got my answer. They all went to high school together. Maybe college too. But at least three of them went to high school together.

  “So… are you saying that you think Kelsey set up a successor? She tapped somebody to run the site after she was gone?”

  I can almost hear Reggie shrug, way on the other side of the world.

  “Yeah, that's a possibility. Definitely. But every time I try to find out who it might be, I'm in a dead-end, boss. I don’t know what to tell you there.”

  “Yeah okay, just keep at it… I'll talk to you later —”

  “— wait, there's more.”

  “Oh?”

  Another huge gulp. I can almost see him rubbing the stubble on his weather-cracked cheeks. Reggie has been with me a long time, maybe twenty years.

  “Yeah… the site is making a lot of money, see? I mean a lot of money. More than it was before. But there are also clones. Maybe a dozen I found so far.”

  “What you mean by clones?”

  “I mean, the content that's being streamed out of the site is also being licensed to other sites. Couple of those just take the whole thing, but others are using one feed, maybe three feeds. Licensing is making things complicated.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah… I mean, if you are thinking about shutting this whole thing down, you gotta move fast. Thing’s like an octopus. Every time I follow one tentacle, it splits off into two or three more tentacles. Unless you get, you know, the head of the octopus…”

  “All right, that's enough,” I growl, cutting him off. This is not the way I want to start the morning.

  “Okay, okay,” he backs off. He knows me well enough to know when I have hit my limit. He'll write a report, shoot it to me via email. Jordan and I can go over it and see what we can thread out.

  I thumb the face of the phone to disconnect the call and let it drop to the rug underneath the couch. Already the sky is getting light. Dawn is here.

  Another day of trying to juggle this mystery, that mystery, and the actual empire I'm supposed to be running while I'm here. If I'm honest, I haven't been doing my absolute best with King Enterprises. Jordan's justice has been at the forefront of my thoughts and I've been distracted, much less than effective in my responsibilities.

  I get up and go to work into the dining room, swiping my laptop from the side table and opening it up. The screen flickers immediately to life and I run through my emails as the room slowly brightens. Through the thin, antique glass, I can hear the sounds of the street below coming to life. Minutes fly past as Paris wakes up, more or less all at once.

  The bedroom door opens behind me and I hear Jordan padding in her bare feet to the kitchen. She leans on her elbows on the countertop, squinting at me over the top of a coffee cup.

  “So? How's your day running the Empire so far?” she says cheerfully. I smirk but don't look up, narrowing down a list of emails I probably should have responded to before now. Luckily I have a fabulous team in place and nothing has gone completely sideways.

  “Want me to go?” she asks.

  “Um,” I start, but then realize there actually is a thread of emails that I need to take care of. Needed to take care of, past tense. Probably last week. Dammit.

  I start a new conversation of email, attaching quarterly reports from a different business I run so that these newbies can get an idea of the kind of excellence I expect.

  “Hello?”

  “Just one sec.”

  I fire that email off, then another, but another, just real quick…

  “Hey, are you listening to me?”

  I stop what I am doing, looking at her as though she just showed up. She knuckles her hip and scowls at me, shifting her weight to one side. Even in the nearly sheer cotton nightgown, she looks fierce and determined. She's definitely not the shrinking violet she was months ago.

  “I'm sorry, Jordan,” I sigh sincerely. “I could stop for a bit. Please tell me what you are saying?”

  “I was just telling you, I think there might be a way that we could figure out where some of these girls are. I mean, if we went back and looked at the oldest videos, the old timestamps, we could maybe find out a location? Like they do in television shows, look at the backgrounds and see if there's some common place?”

  I shrug. “Oh, there is. Some of the girls who are in the streams now apparently are connected to you somehow…”

  Her mouth drops open. “What are you talking about? How do you know that?”

  “Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you… Reggie called me this morning.”

  She pulls out a chair and drops into it. The way that she's crossing her arms, it doesn't seem this news is getting as much of an excited reception as I would've hoped.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “You were asleep,” I explain. “I didn’t want to wake you. It was like the middle of the night.”

  “This is my life we’re talking about, R,” she reminds me, as though I need reminding. “If Reggie calls with some important detail like that, you can definitely wake me up.”

  “Duly noted,” I say softly. “It won't happen again.”

  “We’re a team,” she insists. I feel like I'm in a performance review, getting a run down of my responsibilities.

  “We are definitely a team,” I agree.

  “Okay… Now that that's settled. What did Reggie say?”

  I take a deep breath, trying to gather it all into sense. Somehow my emails jumbled up the events as Reggie told them to me and it takes a few seconds to get it all sorted.

  “Okay so… the site is live, as you know. There are more streams, as you also know. But, what's new is it seems as though the streams are being licensed to other websites. Once they are licensed, the original copyright holder starts collecting revenue from lots of different places. they’re making a lot more money, which should be more trace
able, but it's a lot harder to shut down. We need to get on that, but I am not entirely certain how.”

  “What makes you think they’re connected with me? Why can’t they just be, you know, spread out?”

  “Reggie was able to track down a couple of the girls, I guess… Or people who recognized them. It's beginning to look as though you maybe know each other? Or perhaps you're affiliated somehow through high school… Through college… But this ‘Head Monster’ is really good at keeping their tracks covered —”

  “—excuse me, what?”

  I pause for a beat, remembering I didn't tell her that anything about the LLC. How am I supposed to explain corporate law to her in a nutshell?

  “Well, you see, LLCs are set up in such a way that —”

  “—I know how LLCs are set up, R,” she rolls her eyes. “I went to college. I'm not a moron. Please don't speak to me like I am a child.”

  Dammit. I'm doing it again. I try to remind myself that helping her sometimes borders on controlling her. I don't want to tip over to the side of just controlling her, at least not when we’re out of bed, but it's a struggle. I admit it.

  “I mean,” she starts again, spreading her hands out into stars on her knees, “did you say head monster?”

  “Um, yes… Reggie said that's the name of the LLC that's running the main site.”

  She begins to laugh. It's a full throated, heavy laugh that starts at her belly and tips her head back. Pretty soon she's shaking, filling the room with the sound. I’m not sure what's going on, exactly. Has she finally snapped?

  “Does that mean something to you?” I ask her. “Is someone trying to send you a message? Some kind of monster?”

  She laughs for a little while longer, obviously trying to control herself. As she finishes, her cheeks are flushed and she sighs, wiping tears from where they’ve rolled down to her jawline.

  “Not some kind of monster,” she giggles. “Some kind of head monster. It's a nickname. I mean, it's actually kind of an insult. And I think I know who would have the balls to name an LLC that.”

  I smile at her, watching how her demeanor has changed from just that small piece of news. I can see hope flickering in her, maybe even the seeds of triumph. She looks stronger.