He pulled back enough to smile at me. “I’m still a selfish man. Of course, I want you all to myself. There’s something about the three of us each taking care of you in our own way that works, though. I trust these idiots to care for you no less intensely than I would. That’s enough for me.”
“So, I keep all of you?”
Con came over and sat behind me on the couch. “You keep all of us. And we all fight to protect you from whatever Stacy has planned.”
“I’ve never felt the need to settle down before now, Autumn, but it’s there. I want you. If that means sharing you, I’m okay with it, too.” Zeke stroked his hand over my hair and shrugged. “I feel like this is how it should be.”
“This is how it was always meant to be. I told them about us. From before. About how fucking stupid I was to let you go and how much I’ve regretted it almost every day of my life.”
I looked from Griff to Zeke. “You’re not mad? I just...didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t mean to hide anything from you.”
Zeke smacked his brother on the back of the head. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s this asshole who thought he could cheat us out of twenty million by not revealing that pertinent detail.”
I frowned. “Twenty million?”
Zeke’s face went blank and he tilted his head like he wasn’t sure he heard me. “Huh?”
I looked from him to Con, who looked like someone had just told him there was a bomb in the room, to Griff, who just looked pissed. My stomach twisted even more than it had been. “What did you mean?”
Con shook his head. “It’s nothing. Just this silly thing we did. It means nothing now.”
“Then just tell me about it.”
Zeke forced out a laugh and rolled his eyes. “We just made a silly bet to see who would get you. And now it looks like we all win!”
I lurched forward and vomited all over Con’s shoes.
Chapter 33
***Autumn***
Con tried to hold my hair back for me, but I smacked his hands away. Getting up and walking away from them, I wiped my mouth on my dress and turned to face them. They all looked caught and embarrassed.
“You made a bet? On me?”
Griff held up his hands and moved closer. “It was just a joke, and it never really mattered. It was nothing.”
“Twenty million. Is that how much I was worth?”
Zeke rubbed his hands down his face. “We were just being idiots, Autumn. It was before we realized how much we care about you.”
My stomach wouldn’t settle down and I couldn’t think past the fact that I’d been a game to them. “At what point did you realize you cared about me? Before or after you fucked me? Did you win something when I slept with you that first week? What about when I sucked you off in the kitchen? Was there a bonus for that?”
“Fucking hell, no! Listen to us, Autumn. The bet was just a stupid thing we’ve done since we were teenagers.”
“Has any of it been real?”
The shock and horror on their faces should’ve been enough to convince me that I was jumping to all the wrong conclusions, but I’d gone down that path with one of them before. Trusting them never went well for me.
“Autumn, you need to sit down and just hear us out, okay? This wasn’t anything bad. We stopped caring about the fucking bet as soon as we got to know you.” Griff pointed at the couch and frowned at me, like I was the one disappointing him.
“So. Who gets the twenty million? Will it come down to who fucked me the most? Or who got the slutty nanny to do the raunchiest thing?”
“Stop it.” Con moved across the room to me and caught my arms. “It’s not like that.”
My chest ached so painfully I actually thought I could be having a heart attack. “You’ve said that before. ‘It’s not like that, Auti. I’m not really engaged.’”
The room was silent as they moved closer to me, the stress on their faces real. They were worried about me, or maybe what I was going to do.
