Page 4 of Three Corporate Kings and a Hands-Off Bride

Invigorated, she started to clean up her room and was in the process of folding up the gauze drape she put around her bed when her phone buzzed.

“Hey,” she said, immediately answering the video call from Holly. “Are you done with your scrapbooking manifestation thing? Can I see it? Also, when I said lose your virginity, I meant meet a nice guy with good hygiene and manners andhave yourself a couple of orgasms while you’re at it. But I don’t know why I expected anything less. I know you. You have to be prepared with lists and spreadsheets. Except I don’t understand you leaving this up to the universe.”

True. Alicia had a thing for the art of being nearly obsessively organized, preferably color coded in order of urgency. She’d be utter chaos without her lists. Staying five steps ahead of everything meant she was always prepared to succeed in everything she did.

“I still have a paper I need to write, and this is my fifth plea for an extension. See how disorganized I am?” Holly sighed. “Distract me. Let me see yourVCNwonder book.”

“Forget that. I’m onto something new now. Something so big, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. Also, they took myVCNscrapbook.”

“What do you mean they took it?”

“They came home, thinking I had some guy in my bed, then they took my scrapbook and threatened to burn it after informing me again that they’re the keepers of my vagina and basically whatever goes there has to go through them first.”

Holly burst out laughing. It was true. Honestly, if she hadn’t become instantly obsessed with her new manifestation, she’d be so much madder at them.

Alicia had no idea why her dad thought she needed protecting, or support from the three men he loved as if they were the sons he never had. She couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t around the house, being charming to her mom and learning stuff from her dad.

But if nothing else, Alicia considered herself very level-headed… when she needed to be. Plus she was smart. She could take care of herself. She had head screwed on properly and she wasn’t used to making rash decisions.

No, scrapbooking manifestation was not a rash decision. Science would back her up here.

While she was getting A’s in high school, while also being head cheerleader, she invented and successfully ran a dating agency for octogenarians.

When her grandma complained how hard it was to find good companionship at her age—she was eighty—because it was all about pairing people with common likes, which she found incredibly boring, Alicia came up with an idea at once.

Her granny wanted someone she could have robust conversations with about the things they hated together. Too loud music. Too much ice in their drinks. That one comedian who made fun of old people. So she decided to run a matchmaking campaign where she paired all the over age seventy people with those who shared the same pet peeves. She’d gotten three marriages and two live-in situations for her efforts.

Then she’d graduated summa cum laude from university with a degree in political science while volunteering at three charities, and a dog rescue center. She also completed two fantasy romance novels of two hundred thousand words each.

Those were darn good books too, if she said so herself.

So really, maybe Cade, Eli, and Baxter needed protecting and support from her. They certainly needed more color in their lives. And that’s what she brought to their dark, strict bachelorexistence.Fine, when they told her to make herself at home in their sleek penthouse apartment, she thought of the girliest thing she could do and started in the place where their testosterone thrived. Their home theater. Shepinkedthe heck out of it, so much so, it gave her a head, but they just endured it, instead of her sending her away.

Since that failed, she gave in and introduced them to cushions and carbs and god knew they needed both of those things in their lives.

Chapter Four

They may have known that pillows came in different shapes and styles, but they certainly didn’t care. And with their strict workout regimes, because good gosh they had abs for days, they deprive themselves of sugar.

She littered their place with continental pillows, bolster cushions, and decorative cushions in every shape, size and inners. She forced them to taste test quadruple chocolate brownies, peanut butter cups, macaroons and sweet tea, and helped them discover the joys of eating caramel popcorn with pickles. Then a turmeric shot now again for balance. She was basically showing them how to live a happy life.

“I can’t believe they did that, Alicia. Burn your scrapbook? What? The sexy, gorgeous, shits,” Holly exclaimed, outraged on Alicia’s behalf. Holly thought there were no men better looking than Cade, Eli, and Baxter and she had a boyfriend who was no slouch in terms of looks either. Alicia didn’t care either way.

Well, she cared a little when she bumped into near naked giggling women in the morning, grabbing cups of coffee Alicia had made and then bouncing back to their bedrooms.

Argh.

Although after the first month of her living there, they hadn’t brought their bed buddy’s home. They probably just did it in hotel rooms, or even in their offices, now. As if she were stupid or something and thought she assumed they’d turned into monks.

Her point was that Holly and the whole world’s female population thought of them as the cat’s whiskers where she thought of them as nothing but three heavy, burdensome, annoying unmovable obstacles she had to maneuver around to get through her day until she turned twenty-two in one hundred and sixty-four days.

Yes, she had a count-down spreadsheet for when she finally honored her dad’s wish to the fullest and moved out on her own on her twenty-second birthday.

“Triple the shits,” Alicia agreed. “But it’s all good. I realized I was thinking too small.” And now she would finally get to read her mom’s letter. She also didn’t mention the letter to Holly who she told everything to, but Alicia wanted it to be a secret just between her mom, her and the guy the universe was going to send her way.

“Too small?” Holly asked, almost hesitant.

“I needed something on a grander scale. Something completely and utterly life-changing. They gave me the idea, so I’ll definitively be crediting them in my scrapbook.”

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