Chapter 7

7

Zoe

I’m swimming in the hotel pool the following night. God knows I don’t need the extra exercise after two extremely strenuous days with my stepbrothers, but I did need some space to think. Bridger and Jacob almost cancelled another round of meetings to keep me tied to the bed, but apparently there was a billion-dollar acquisition on the line, so they left with the promise to be back in the evening.

My legs barely have the strength to kick and my skin is ultra sensitive, so the cool water feels nice flowing over my muscles. Water has always helped me when I have an important decision to make and I need all the help I can get now.

After just two days with these men, I’m beginning to consider putting off traveling for a while—and that scares me. I’m not the kind of girl who just changes her plans for…two very well-endowed billionaires who treat me like spun gold.

Right?

I snort beneath the water and kick off the wall, starting another lap, ignoring the burn of my muscles. If I keep giving Bridger and Jacob inches, they’re eventually going to take the whole mile. I’m not going to sneak around behind their backs anymore to do product testing. But I have to find a way to convince them I’m a physically capable adult. And that I need the adventure. Need the outlet. And yeah, maybe even a little danger.

I mean, if taking on my volatile stepbrothers as lovers and not even bothering to hide it from the public eye isn’t dangerous, what is? They just have to accept my craziness the way I’ve accepted their jealousy, possessiveness and commandeering attitudes and everything will be A-okay. Now to figure out how I accomplish that.

At the end of my lap, I come up for air and my fingertips spark and go numb.

Catherine.

She’s standing above me on the lip of the pool. Pointing a gun at me.

“Get out of the water, you conniving little bitch.”

Briefly, I consider turning and attempting to break Michael Phelps’s record in the opposite direction, but I know that’s not realistic. Shivering in the water, I glance around the pool, hoping for someone to help me, but it’s dinnertime and the place is deserted.

“There’s no one to save you this time, Zoe,” Catherine sneers. “My traitorous sons are occupied at the office for another hour and that gives me just enough time.”

“Time to what?” I croak.

“Drown you, of course.” She gestures for someone out of view to come forward and I swallow a lump when a man carries over an armful of scuba equipment. I’m so alarmed by her casual mention of murdering me that I almost don’t recognize the bungee instructor until he gives me a sickly smile and cuts his gaze to the side.

“It’s amazing what some people will do to cover their gambling debts, isn’t it?” Catherine murmurs. “I’ve learned to recognize cretins much more easily since I met your father.”

My heart is running a marathon in my chest, but I try and focus. Try to stay calm. The smartest thing I can do is keep her talking. Hope someone can come along and assist me. Though I doubt anyone will stick around once they see the madwoman wielding a gun. “Is that why you want to kill me?” I ask. “My father?”

“He humiliated me.” She shakes the gun at me. “Left me with his brat daughter to go globetrotting with models and sycophants. I put a roof over your head, pay your college tuition. And then you have the nerve to ask me for a job? I was just going to put you in product testing and hope for the worst. But then…” She seethes. “My sons so obviously wanted you. And I wasn’t going to let another member of your family humiliate me. Unfortunately, I was too late. Do you know how fast the news has spread about your little makeout session at the bungee testing yesterday? Once again, I am a laughingstock. And you have to go.”

“I didn’t expect it,” I breathe. “None of us expected…to fall in love. It happened so fast.”

“Love?” Catherine screeches.

Clearly it was the wrong thing to say.

She cocks the gun.

“How did you get out of jail?” I blurt, just barely preventing her from pulling the trigger.

“Money and a good lawyer got me out on bail. They have video of me walking into product testing. So what? I’m part owner of the fucking building. I can walk where I want!” She tips her head at the instructor. “I’m not going to tell the police that he’s the one who really tampered with the harness—at my request—in exchange for him helping me now.”

When her smile turns sinister, moisture starts to blur my vision. There’s no way I can fight off a full-grown man. Or a woman with a gun. What am I going to do?

“Get in the water with her,” Catherine snaps at the man. “Hook her into the equipment and hold her underwater until it’s over.” As the man hops into the water to follow Catherine’s instructions, she gives me a triumphant smile. “This scuba equipment was next on the agenda to be tested. After your little show of rebellion yesterday, they’ll assume you disobeyed them again.”

“I’m a certified diver,” I say, trying to evade the instructor. “How do you plan to—”

“Oh, there’s no oxygen in the tank. Didn’t I mention that?” She laughs. “We were going to bring you down to the river to stage the accident, but you made it easy by going for a swim.”

This woman has lost her marbles.

Does she actually think Bridger and Jacob are going to believe I went to the office and brought home equipment to test it alone? Just to be obstinate?

Okay, yeah.

After my actions yesterday, they could totally believe that.

“Please don’t do this. I’ll…I’ll leave. I’ll leave and never come back.” Or at least, I would try. I have no doubt Bridger and Jacob would track me down to the ends of the earth. “Catherine, please. I’m sorry about what my father did—”

“Shut up!” She fires a bullet into the water, about a foot away from my elbow, and I suck in a breath, turning to little more than a bobbing ice cube.

My shock allows the instructor to get a hold of me. He wrestles me back against his chest and straps me into the equipment, his strength thwarting my struggles. Not to mention he can touch the bottom of the pool here and I can’t. I flail helplessly, watching as Catherine tosses fins and goggles into the water, maybe to make it look as though they came off? Or I never got them on? I only have a moment to speculate before the useless mouthpiece is shoved into my mouth and I’m forcibly pushed under water.

Desperate, I try to breathe.

There is just enough oxygen in the line for a gasp and then nothing.

I’m going to die.

Twin bellows of rage cut through the water and I let my struggles cease. My heart swells in my chest knowing they came to save me, while I’m also terrified that Catherine will fire the gun at one of her sons. It’s an unthinkable possibility and I start to fight in the instructor’s hold again, wanting to get to them. To shield them, help them. Anything.

There’s a loud splash somewhere nearby and then I’m being ripped away from my captor into Jacob’s arms. He pulls me to the surface and the mouthpiece is gone, gone so I can breathe and I suck in droves of air while Jacob shouts at me, his eyes wild and rimmed with red, pool water streaming down his face. “Zoe! Are you okay? Jesus Christ. Angel, say something!”

I nod through my sputtering, but I can’t gather words. My throat is one fire.

“Jacob! Is she okay? Tell me she’s okay.” Bridger calls from outside the pool, his expression haggard. There’s a gun in his hand and he’s pointing it at his mother who is face down, hands behind her back. Her lips peeled back in a grimace.

The cops are rushing in from all sides of the pool area, guns drawn, walkie-talkies crackling and sirens approaching from somewhere in the distance.

“She’s alive.” Jacob plants kisses all over my face, crushes me to his chest. “Scared but alive.” He swims with me to the edge. “Everything is okay now, angel. We’ve got you. Never again. She’ll never touch you again.”

Jacob boosts me up onto the concrete lip of the pool and Bridger is there, kneeling and pulling me onto his lap. Burying his lips in my hair. The cops have taken over the arrest of his mother and I watch over my stepbrother’s broad shoulder as she’s hauled toward the exit, struggling in the officer’s hold.

“No one is going to bail you out this time,” the cop says dryly.

“We found out she’d been released and came straight here,” Bridger says raggedly. “You weren’t in the room. We couldn’t find you anywhere.”

“She’s been living with me for a while,” I manage, still gasping. “She knows I like to swim before dinner.”

Jacob crowds in behind me, wrapping his soaked arms around us as far as they’ll go. Bridger tips up my chin and kisses me, right there in front of the milling police officers and harried hotel staff. His tongue pumps in and out of my mouth, telling me without words that I’ll be responsible for abating his hunger later. Just as my thighs start to climb my oldest stepbrother’s hips involuntarily, needing to get closer, Jacob growls and tugs my hair back, attacking my mouth from behind, his erection stiff against my backside. “We’re never letting you out of our sight again.”

The decision I struggled with earlier comes into clear focus.

I don’t want to give up my life.

But with every passing moment, it’s becoming obvious that I have a connection to these men that can’t be severed. Not without all of us being miserable.

“You’re never letting me out of your sight?” I whisper.

Bridger’s jaw is made of granite. “No.”

“Then I hope you like to travel.”