Her Three Protectors [The Hot Millionaires #3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (6 page)

Beck hung up without giving his name. “Two minutes, I reckon. Get ready.”

“Go bring the truck to the front door,” Troy said to Beck.

Sure enough, a squad car pulled up within Beck’s two-minute estimate, and two officers descended on the watcher.

“Go!”

Troy led the charge down the stairs, toting Porcha’s bag like it weighed nothing at all.

“Don’t you guys believe in elevators?”

“Nope. There’s no place to run in an elevator if things get awkward.”

They burst out the front door, Adam and Troy shielding Porcha as they crossed the sidewalk and piled into a Dodge truck idling at the curb. As soon as the door closed behind them, Beck moved away in an unhurried fashion that didn’t draw attention to them.

“Where are we going?” Porcha asked, her head resting in Adam’s lap in the back of the cab so that she wasn’t visible to anyone else who might be watching them.

“To our love pad,” Adam told her, pulling the cap from her head and spreading her hair all over his thigh.

“Sorry I asked.”

“Seriously, darlin’, we’re going to St. Pete Beach. Us gentlemen have a town house there that’s more secure than Fort Knox. No one will look for you there because they don’t know you’re with us.”

“I really do need a passport.” She addressed the words to Adam’s muscled thigh, trying to ignore the intriguing bulge in his pants.

“Where’s yours?” Troy asked.

“At the Jupiter house, but I don’t feel inclined to pop back for it.”

“And if we get you one, what then?” Troy turned from the passenger seat and pinioned her with a look she found hard to interpret.

“I’ll go back to England, of course.”

Troy shook his head. “Baby, you think the people who have the power to get to one of the best-protected racketeers in the country won’t be able to get to you there?”

She slumped against Adam’s legs. “I guess.”

“You can sit up now,” Troy told her.

“Please don’t,” Adam wailed.

Laughing, Porcha levered herself upright. “What would you suggest that I do instead?”

Beck raised his hand. “Can I answer that one?”

“Beck,” Adam growled.

“How about trying to find out who’s chasing you and why they think you know where the stones are?”

Porcha quirked a brow. “Just like that?”

“Why not?” Troy grinned at her. “Nothing like going on the offensive if you wanna rattle a few cages.”

“Yes, but where to start?”

“Presumably, you still have numbers for the two guys who protected you?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know which one—”

“Call them both when we get to the house. If one of them is in on it, he’ll pick up. If they both do, we’ll deal with that, too.”

“Okay.”

Beck turned off the interstate. A short time later, he pressed a button on the dash, and the door to a subterranean garage beneath a tall waterside town house slid up.

“Welcome to our humble abode,” Adam said, opening the door and helping Porcha out of the cab.

“You guys live here together?”

Beck waggled his brows. “And play.”

“When we’re not on assignment,” Adam told her, leading the way up the stairs to a solid-looking door.

“Do you always go on assignment together?”

“A lot of the time, but not always.” Adam grinned. “We both need a break from Beck every so often.”

Beck glowered at his buddies. “I love you guys, too.”

Adam unlocked, stood back, and allowed her to pass in front of him into a surprisingly large living area. She sensed Troy behind her as she gazed through picture windows to the intercoastal waterway immediately beyond a small yard with a boat dock. There was a fast-looking open-cockpit boat secured to it.

“Just to put you at your ease,” he said, massaging her shoulders with rhythmic swirls of his large hands, “the only way into this house is through the garage or front door. Both are solid steel, and an alarm sounds if anyone so much as breathes on them the wrong way. The windows are triple glazed and bulletproof. They’re also tinted, so you can see out but no one can see in.”

“You must have pissed off some real bad-ass dudes,” she said, feeling a little awestruck.

Adam grimaced. “Baby, you have no idea.”

“It’s easier to police than your big estate in Jupiter, plus we have the added advantage of being able to get out by water if necessary.” Troy took her hand. “Come on, I’ll show you round.”

“Everywhere?” asked Adam and Beck together.

“I think she can take it.”

“Then there’s no way in hell she goes up there without us,” Adam said.

“Go where?”

“You’ll see.” Beck took her other hand. “Come on.”

The tour of the floor they were on didn’t take long. A large open-plan living room and gourmet kitchen, full of state-of-the-art equipment, was all there was to see. The study was also equipped with the latest cyber gadgets. There was a half bath and an open-slat staircase leading to an entrance hall at the same level as the garage.

On the first floor, there were four bedrooms, all with their own facilities.

“This one’s for you,” Troy told her, dumping her bag on the bed in a pleasant room painted a pale shade of blue.

“Thanks.” She turned to face her three eager protectors. “What is it you’re not telling me?” she asked suspiciously.

“Come on,” Troy said. “There’s more.”

Another flight of stairs led to the loft. Porcha stepped inside and gasped. The entire floor was the guys’ playroom. An enormous circular bed, easily able to accommodate four people, dominated the centre of the space. The walls were covered with paraphernalia that pegged them as doms. Porcha recognized most of it and guessed the guys could tell she was excited by what she saw.

Troy sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her down on his lap. The other two sat either side of him.

“Your choice, babe,” he said softly, nuzzling her neck. “But you play with one of us, you get us all.”

“Three for the price of one,” Beck joked. “How bad can that be?”

Adam ran a hand softly over her thigh. “You’ll have to submit to us, you do know that?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“Sal didn’t treat you well, did he?” Troy asked. “And now you’re hesitating. You enjoyed it at first, I think, but something happened.”

She let out a long sigh. “Yes, it did.”

“We won’t do anything to you that you won’t thank us for, not if you enjoy being spanked and—”

Porcha shuddered. “I do. Believe me, I love it.”

Beck groaned, touching an erection through his combat pants. “Then why—”

“I think we need to understand what went wrong between Porcha and her husband and make sure we don’t make the same mistakes.” Troy ran a hand lightly down her spine. “You ready to tell us? Does it hurt to talk about it?”

“No, I want you to know.”

“We want to help you get over it,” Adam assured her, his hand now resting tantalizingly short of her pussy. “And, all modesty aside, we know what we’re doing. Tell you what, why don’t we go back downstairs, I’ll cook us all a decent meal, and then we can talk about it?”

Porcha watched in a trance as the three men acted as a tight team, their joshing a thin disguise for the deep friendship that sealed them as a unit. Beck volunteered to go out for supplies, taking with him a long list written in Adam’s spidery scrawl.

“I need to shower,” Troy said, heading for the stairs. “Won’t be long.”

“Can I help?” Porcha asked Adam, strolling into the kitchen area and looking round his shoulder to see what he was cooking.

“You can keep me company.” He turned behind him, grabbed a bottle from the fridge, and waved it at her. “You look like a white-wine kind of gal.”

“Yes, please, I could use one.”

He opened it, poured her a glass, and opened a beer for himself. “You all right?” he asked. “Sorry, stupid question. Of course you’re not, but we will sort this. If it’s any consolation, we’ve been doing this a while and haven’t lost a client yet.”

“You guys are really close, aren’t you?”

“In spite of Beck being an ass, yeah, we are. We were all in the military together, back in the day. That’s how we met.” He stirred something in a pot. “That’s where we met Georgio as well. He was our CO.”

“Oh, I didn’t know.”

“Well, none of us talk about those days much.” He checked the oven temperature and shook his head. “Then we were all mercenaries for a while, risking our butts in various hellholes at the ass end of the world. We made enough money to quit a few years ago and now do what we do…well, because we don’t know how to anything else, I guess, and because we need something to get up for in the mornings.”

That was quite a speech for Adam. Porcha already had him pegged as a man of few words.

“I’m glad you do,” she said, meaning it. “You make me feel safe.”

“That’s the general idea.” He took silverware from a drawer. “How did you meet Georgio?”

“In London. I was a nurse, if you can believe it.”

Adam waggled his brows. “I’ll bet you cause a general rise in the male patients’ collective temperatures just by walking onto a ward.”

“Hardly. Georgio’s wife had leukaemia.”

Adam shot her a look. “I had no idea he was even married.”

“Oh, he was married all right. They were devoted to one another.” Porcha shook her head, filled with sadness when she thought of Maria’s untimely demise. “If you could have seen them together. It was as though the rest of the world didn’t exist.”

“We were in Africa popping bad guys about then.”

Porcha, watching Adam work with economical efficiency in his kitchen, had trouble imagining him murdering anything more vital than a soufflé and told him so.

“You’re really at home in a kitchen.”

“I should be. My folks have a string of them back in Philly. I could cook before I could walk. I always intended to go into the business myself but—”

“But you got a taste for what you do now and prefer it that way.”

He stopped what he was doing and dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “Yeah, I guess. We get on so well that it would be like cutting off my own arm if I left the guys.” He grinned. “Besides, someone has to make sure they eat right.”

“What do the others do whilst you’re taking care of their nutritional needs?”

“Beck can make anything with an engine talk to him.” He laughed. “That truck we brought you back in looks like millions of others on the road, because we want it to blend in. But under the hood it’s a whole different story. It can outrun just about anything on the road if need be. Don’t tell him I told you this, but Beck’s a top-notch driver who could give a lot of professionals a run for their money.”

“And Troy?”

“All those gadgets in the study. He’s the cyber prince. Keeps all our communications up to date, amongst other things.”

“Yes.” Porcha smiled. “I can imagine him being at home doing all that stuff. He’s a bit of a control freak, isn’t he?”

“We all are, babe. Goes with the territory.” He turned his attention back to his cooking. “You were telling me about Georgio and his wife.”

“Well, he brought his Maria to London because the best specialist in the world at the time was based there. I looked after her in the private clinic he checked her into, and we hit it off from the word
go
. So, when Georgio brought her back to the States, knowing she didn’t have much time left, he asked me to come, too, as her private nurse.” Porcha paused to take a sip of her wine. “I was in a bit of a rut at the time. I couldn’t shake off a persistent bloke who wouldn’t accept our relationship was going nowhere, and so I decided a trip to the States was just what I needed.”

“How long did Maria last?”

“Six months.”

“We wondered why he got out of the mercenary business and came on home.” Adam sighed. “He should have told us.”

“He probably didn’t want to distract you.”

“Yeah, that would be it. Anyway, at least he set up his security business and we had something to come home to.”

“My relationship with Georgio was never sexual, in case you’re wondering. More father and daughter, I guess, but I know a lot of people thought there was more to it than that. He wanted me to stay on with him after Maria went, but I couldn’t do that. There was a big wide world out there, I was only twenty-two—”

“How long ago was this?”

“Just over three years. Anyway, I fancied Mexico. Georgio knew someone with a club down there, a respectable nightclub if that’s not a misnomer. He got me a job as a hostess, meeting and greeting the punters.”

“And let me guess,” said a voice from the doorway, “that’s where you met your husband.

They both turned to see Troy standing there, unsure how long he’d been listening. He was wearing long shorts, a clean shirt, and was freshly shaved. Adam tossed him a beer, which he caught one-handed, and he popped the tab.