by Pippa Grant
Still, it’s tempting.
And it’s taken my mind off the fact that Chase is pumping a fist and hollering as the Twins go up three to nothing in the first inning.
“What is wrong with you people?” Parker says.
“Minnesota proud,” I reply with a shrug.
“From Philadelphia, my ass,” Eloise grunts.
“Pittsburgh,” Parker corrects.
“Pennsyl-whatever,” Eloise fires back. “I can’t believe we believed you.”
She has a point, but it’s been a decade since I’ve wanted to cheer for the Twins. Now that I’ve reclaimed my heritage, I couldn’t stop myself if I tried.
Going to Twins games was a huge deal when I was little. Mom and Dad would take a day off work, we’d drive down to Minneapolis, have sandwiches in the car, and sit in the bleachers where we could each pick one thing from the snack bars. I’d go for cotton candy. Zeus and Ares would try to scam their way into more food, saying it was only one thing if they stacked their hamburgers between two large pretzels as bonus buns.
Chase went with us once. He got a bag of peanuts and spent the whole game tossing shells into my hair when my parents weren’t looking.
Zeus and Ares never went to ball games with Chase’s family. Or to the lake. Or camping. Not like he’d tag along with us.
It never occurred to me that the only way he got to do all those things was with us. That his parents couldn’t afford it. I’m sure his mom didn’t make much, and I never gave a thought to what his dad did.
Or that he might’ve grown up on canned baloney, and buying Crunchy was his way of never having to eat it again.
He was right. Billionaires get to do the weirdest things.
Or possibly I’m spending too much time thinking about the guy who’s sliding his arm behind my back at the baseball game.
I go stiff as steel on the outside and wobbly as my grandma’s blue-ribbon gelatin mold on the inside.
Why is Chase Jett putting high school moves on me?
That volcanic throbbing in my nether regions is back. Lava’s flowing, people. Chase Jett is touching me and my body is betraying me and—
Holy organic sausages, he’s threading his fingers through my hair. Electric sparks light up my scalp, and I have to squeeze my lips together to keep from moaning. Squeezing my thighs together isn’t doing much good either.
I wonder what he’d do if I follow him home. Or if I just show up naked on his doorstep. I could lob a few insults, question his choice in décor, call his dick some names, and he’d probably do me in the foyer.
What the hell is wrong with me?
My head is suddenly slapped forward. “Ow!”
“Knock it off, dickhead,” Eloise says. She dangles a peanut shell in front of my eyes. “Sorry about the slap. He was putting this in your hair.”
I yank his ear and twist. His head flops into my lap, but he’s grinning. Oh, he’s grinning. A delicious, dark, spank me, baby grin. “Your hair’s boring. It needed some glittering up.”
“You’re dead,” I grit out.
Ares snorts. “I see it too,” he says to Zeus. The two of them share a smile and a fist bump.
I have no idea what they’re talking about. Chase apparently does. He flips a double bird at them.
I’m suddenly reliving my childhood, except it’s oddly non-traumatic.
“Can I have my ear back?” Chase says.
“Parker. Hand me a peanut. I need to shove it up his ear canal.”
“Is it orgasmic?” Chase asks. “I only like orgasmic peanuts in my ears.”
“I hate you,” I say, and I’m horrified to realize I’m smiling back at him.
I drop his ear and shove him away.
Fine. Maybe he’s not the devil.
But he’s still not good for me.
13
Ambrosia
By the sixth inning, the Twins and Yankees are tied at four runs apiece. Eloise is acting like a puck bunny and hanging on Ares’s every word. I shouldn’t be surprised—she’s always gone for the guys with a limited vocabulary.
Parker and Zeus are in a contest to see who can catch the most peanuts—Parker’s winning, twenty-three to seven—and Chase has discovered Willow’s stepdad is an honest-to-god king of a small Nordic country, and he’s grilling her on the country’s economy. Give a guy a billion bucks, and suddenly he thinks he can hobnob with royalty.
Entitled prick.
As for me, I’m trying to enjoy the game. Dusk is settling, it’s seventy-two degrees, and it’s anybody’s ballgame.
What more could I want?
I mean, it’s not like I want Chase to yank me by my hair like a Neanderthal, drag me into the bathroom and make him besmirch my already tattered honor.
That would be crazy.
It’s not like I’ve been sitting here for five innings getting more and more turned on every time the man laughs. Or like I’ve been eyeballing that bulge in his pants, wondering how much longer he can go before he explodes or if being a billionaire somehow gives him magic junk that swells purely to torture the nearby women without causing him any discomfort. Or like I’ve been wondering if there’s any way I could slip my hands into my pants to take some pressure off without anyone noticing.
It’s his cologne, I’ve decided. His newest form of warfare. Odorless pheromones.
I need to steal his recipe. Bottle it and sell it with mobile sex rooms, and then I’ll be a billionaire too.
Or possibly incarcerated again for breaking some obscure pheromone drug and sex peddling laws. Thanks, Chase. Two trips to the pen, all courtesy of you.
I growl at him.
He shifts his attention back to me and lifts a brow.
As if he doesn’t know I’m on to him and his unscented, Ambrosia-targeting pheromones that are making me consider criminal activities.
I roll my eyes.
He grins, but this isn’t the smile he’s been giving Willow.
No, this is a smile of victory. Of power. Of corruption.
That’s right. Corruption. Sexual corruption. All heavy-lidded and smirky and has he always had those long eyelashes? and holy sex on a stick what the hell is wrong with me that I want to bang this man blind?
I lift my chin and look away, and suddenly Zeus is punching me in the arm. “Kiss Cam,” he hisses. “Kiss Cam.”
We’re mid-inning and the crowd’s chanting Kiss her, Kiss her, Kiss her. I lift my gaze to the video board, expecting to see a saggy grandma and gramps or some cute college couple, and instead, I’m staring straight at myself.
And Chase.
Zeus’s giant fist is gargantuan on the screen, poking me hard enough to make my whole body shake. “Kiss Cam. You have to kiss. It’s a rule.”
Fine. It’s a rule. I have to kiss Chase. Because the baseball gods demand it.
I’ll do it. But I’m not going to like it.
I turn to him, and see my exact thoughts written in his eyes. Bet you flinch first.
He was so on.
I lunge at him before he sees it coming. My lips smush against the side of his mouth. My arm bangs the back of his chair. Someone shrieks, and I wonder if my beer is now decorating the suite.
That’s the last rational thought I have before Chase grips my hair, guides my lips to his, and does that holy toe-curling, mind-bending, mouth-orgasm-inducing thing with his tongue. It’s as twisted as his dick is, and oh my god, I want to suck on it until I can’t feel my lips anymore, except then I couldn’t feel the glorious way his twisted, wet velvet mouth-dick is making my entire body light up like a flashing neon video board strung with a billion Christmas lights.
Pleasure here, enter now and suck face until your ovaries explode.
There’s an armrest between us, and that won’t do, nope, absolutely won’t do at all. I fling my leg over his leg—god, I ache, just one little touch, one little stroke, please, I’ll be a good girl and only call you a dick to your face when we’re naked and not in an elevator and—oh.
Oh, yes.
I don’t care if that’s his hand or the armrest or if it’s a fucking bratwurst, something’s rubbing my clit and he’s still fucking my mouth with his tongue and he has an iron grip on the back of my neck and I can’t breathe but I don’t want to because yes, yes yes yes, more, right there, don’t stop, oh my god, I’m rocking on his leg, or his arm, or something, and it’s perfect and I’m suddenly remembering that thing he did with his hand in the elevator and I’m wet and hot and ready and I need to touch him.
I need to touch his cock right fucking now.
I uncurl my hands from fisting his shirt and tug the fabric out of his pants, seeking, searching—
And beer rains down on my head.
I jerk up.
Just in time, too, because Ares has dropped the twin beer cans he just crushed over our heads and he’s grabbing Chase by the back of his shirt and lifting him like he’s a feather. Or maybe a small bird. Or maybe a guy about to be murdered by an angry, three-hundred-fifty-pound brother whose day job is being a monster on and off the ice.
Someone screams.
I’m pretty sure it was Parker, but it might’ve been me, because it’s totally worth screaming over the way Ares looks like he’s contemplating tossing Chase out of the suite.
Right there.
At the edge of the suite.
Just drop him six stories onto the unsuspecting fans below.
“Out the door, dumbass,” Zeus bellows.
My heart is simultaneously in my gut and in my throat, my legs are the consistency of melted jelly beans, and I can’t catch my breath.
Ares twists Chase and stares him right in the eyeball, close enough that they both go cross-eyed. “That’s my sister,” he growls.
“And she’s a big girl who can kick your ass,” Chase growls back as if Ares doesn’t have at least eight inches and well over a hundred pounds on him and why am I thinking about inches and pounding and getting turned on again?
“Holy fuck,” Eloise whispers.
I’m simultaneously mortified and lustified. And if you don’t think lustified is a word, trust me, it is, and I am so that right now. Hornified too, which is like being horny and horrified all at once.
And I can’t make up any more words, because I’m going to throw up because Ares is going to throw Chase out of the box.
“Ares, put him down,” I order, but I sound like a sex-crazed nympho at a dildo party.
I don’t know. I’m not thinking straight. Just go with it.
And for God’s sake, someone make my brother put Chase down.
Either Ares reads my mind, or I shriek that last part out loud, because he finally puts Chase down. In the doorway. Which he flings open for the sole purpose of shoving Chase out of the suite, and then slams it shut again.
“You called him Chase,” Ares says. “Not Dick.”
Oh, shit. Oh, double hornified lustified shit.
He’s right. I didn’t call Chase a dick.
I like to think it’s because I’m a nice person, but the truth may be far more sinister—and hornifying—than that.
Zeus is looking at me with his hockey game face. I’ve seen that face make grown men cry. I’ve seen that face make lumberjacks cry. It would probably make God cry, but for other reasons that aren’t really relevant now because Zeus does exist and that is God’s fault.
But that face won’t make me cry, because I know Zeus is ticklish on his third rib and that he’s terrified of daddy long legs, which I silently communicate back to him.
“You have a problem,” he says.
I toss my hair. “I just wanted him to think he was doing a good job. It’s my charitable act of the day.”
I have a problem.
My phone dings somewhere in the suite. My three wide-eyed friends all lunge for the floor in front of the chair that probably needs to be disinfected or burned, and all three of them simultaneously gasp.
“Oh my god, Sia, you have a problem,” Parker whispers.
“We’ve established that,” I start, but my brain catches up quickly.
The Kiss Cam.
We just dry-humped on the freaking Kiss Cam. It’s probably already on Facebook and YouTube. My mother’s going to see this.
My fingers go numb.
Thankfully, so does my vagina. Would’ve been nice five minutes ago, vagina.
“What country did you say your mother married into?” I whisper to Willow. “And do they need a social media manager?”
Parker shoves the phone at me. “Hide this from your brothers. I’m taking you home. And making sure you stay there.”
I glance down, read the message, and every last inner muscle Chase hit the other night clenches in anticipation.
Mortification be damned.
Chase just texted that he has a sex room. And that I’m welcome to join him in it anytime.
14
Chase
Bro doesn’t text me back. She doesn’t drop by my place, doesn’t bang on the door to wake me up at some ungodly hour in the middle of the night—bang, that’d be funny except I didn’t get any last night—and she hasn’t booby-trapped my office with glitter bombs or rotting fish or lingerie that smells like her pussy.
It’s like I don’t exist to her.
She’s so fucking good at fucking with my mind.
I spend the next morning interviewing candidates for the executive board. I’m going to have to go outside the company for some positions, but there’s a lot of talent internally, and as I explain to each of my prospective board members my long-range goals for Crunchy, I’m also getting re-invigorated. When I’m done, there won’t be any more canned baloney. No more chemicals hiding in our food and manufacturing processes to make people sick—those canning it or those eating it. Or those doing both. No more kids going hungry in schools either.
What good is being among the world’s richest men if you can’t solve a food supply problem?
And before you start throwing shit—I’m not putting people or industries out of work, either.
I’m going to buy them and fix them.
All of them.
Because I fucking can.
I’m in the middle of interviewing Tina, the world’s perkiest woman, for a position in sales management when I hear a commotion break out in the lobby. My door flings open. “Gentlemen, you can’t just go in there,” my admin assistant says as thirteen-plus feet and seven hundred pounds of Viking hockey players get stuck battling each other to get through my door first.
“They’re harmless,” I tell Tina.
I hope I’m not lying.
“Oh my god, it’s the Brute and the Force,” she whispers reverently.
Zeus wins the battle of the doorway and strolls in first. He whips out a Sharpie, signs Tina’s head, and then scrawls his name across my desk before doing a mic-drop with the marker. “We need to talk.”
Ares adds his signature to Tina’s left arm and eyeballs the front of my desk in a way that makes me think he’s using X-ray vision to locate my crotch.
To sign it or turn it into ground meatballs is anybody’s guess.
“Thanks for your time,” I say to Tina. “I’ll be in touch.”
“If we had a sex room, I’d so be using it right now,” she whispers reverently as she stumbles to her feet. “Can I get a picture before I go?”
I take her phone and snap a picture of Zeus and Ares holding her mermaid-style, then a normal one with her dwarfed between the two men. If they have time for pictures, they’re probably not here to chop my legs off.
When the door shuts, Ares sits in the leather chair Tina’s just vacated. It creaks, there’s a snap and a plume of glitter, and suddenly he’s in a crumbled pile of old leather, springs, and wood that’s seen better days.
Like yesterday, before a behemoth squashed it with his ass and released one last hidden glitter bomb.
“Dude,” Zeus says. “We talked about you and chairs. What’s the rule when you don’t know where
it’s been?”
“Don’t sit in it.” Ares hangs his head.
I offer him a chocolate from the glass candy dish my admin insisted I needed. He swallows it, wrapper and all, then grabs the bowl and drinks the rest down.
I’ve mentioned I missed these guys, haven’t I?
“You’re my fucking hero,” I tell Ares.
He grunts and eyes the candy dish like he’s contemplating taking a bite of it too. We all ignore the glitter flickering through the air and coating us.
“You need help,” Zeus says to me.
I pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about. “You quitting hockey to be my security guards?”
“No, fucker. But I know a few guys who retired last year and wouldn’t mind that kind of work. I’ll get you their names. They take orders well from smaller men. Sometimes. When the money’s right.”
“Much obliged.”
“He means thanks,” Zeus translates for Ares. He looks back at me. “And you need help with Ambrosia.”
If by help, he meant electric shock therapy treatments to get over this growing obsession that started in my dick and spread to my brain, I’m inclined to agree.
“Come again?” I say, then wince.
Ares snickers, but it’s his you’re two steps from fucking up and I’d be happy to use you like a nail that needs to be pounded into concrete with Thor’s hammer snicker. Dude talks in small sentences, but he does his silent communication in metaphor. It’s one of the things we love about him.
“Flowers,” Zeus says. “Wine. Candlelight. You need to woo her right.”
There’s something wrong about a freakishly large beast telling me I need to woo his sister. I rub a hand over my mouth to keep from telling him his sister is a pain in the ass and that his flowers, wine, and candlelight would all be seen as tools of psychological warfare and take me backwards in my quest to get back in her pants.
Or skirt.
Hell, I’d even take her in monk’s robes, a tutu, or a shark costume. Or all three together. At this point, I’m not too picky. I just need to do something to return to her puss—ah, the land of sane, functioning, rags-to-riches businessman.