34.2
Even after all that’s happened, the thought immediately sends a pang of arousal straight to my core, and mentally I curse myself for my attraction to these guys who thought that sending a note-carrying blow-up doll and glow-in-the-dark condoms was an appropriate way to say hello.
These men, the ones who send drones to my house, are the men I tried to protect by hiding out and pretending to have lost my mind – when clearly, they’re the crazy ones.
The crazy men who are standing in front of me in their trench coats and what I assume is absolutely nothing else underneath, while one of the bodyguards yells at them to back away from me.
The insane men who break into the widest grins I’ve ever seen as I stand there, so that I can’t remember why the hell I ever thought that keeping this a secret was a good idea in the first place.
“We have a hell of a lot to say to you, sugar,” Adriano starts.
One of the bodyguards interrupts. “Back away from the First Daughter.”
But I put my hand up. “It’s okay. I know them. They’re my–” I pause, realizing I’m about to say boyfriends, but that’s not accurate because they’re not anymore, are they?
“Say it, Georgina,” Nathaniel orders, his expression intense. “Say what you were about to say.”
But I don’t. I close my mouth, and then I open my mouth again, and then I close it again, and then I open it again. Like a fish. “I was about to ask if you’re planning on flashing me.”
“Well, now, that all depends,” Adriano says. “Are you planning on admitting you were wrong?”
“Admitting that I was wrong?!” I ask. “I just spent a month pretending to have had a nervous breakdown so my psychopathic parents wouldn’t out you two as the guys fucking me at the fundraiser!”
My voice is too loud. Way too damn loud. And I'm yelling in the middle of the street.
One of the bodyguards clears his throat behind me, and I realize they’re right behind me. “Um.” I clear my own throat. “Could I have a few minutes, please?”
“That’s right, you did,” Nathaniel says. “Now, did we ask you to do that?”
“I thought you’d be grateful that I didn’t decimate your careers,” I say, bristling at the question.
Adriano steps closer to me, looking down at me, his expression softening. He’s standing so close and I’ve missed him – them – so much that I close my eyes, breathing him in, drinking in his scent. And I swear that I must have been living for the past month in black-and-white, because when I open my eyes, it’s like everything is Technicolor. I feel alive, more alive than I've felt in the last month. I’m a junkie who needs her fix, and I can hardly breathe as Nathaniel steps closer, taking my hand in his.
“You ever think that you might have wanted to consult with us before you fell on your sword, sugar?” Adriano asks.
“I didn’t want you to have to make that choice,” I say, my voice tight. “If it came down to a choice between me and football, I didn’t want you to have to choose.”
“You should have given us all of the available information and let us make a decision,” Nathaniel says, throwing back exactly what I told him before when he didn’t tell me about the potential contracts outside of Colorado.
“We’re in the middle of the road,” I whisper.
“That’s right. We’re in the middle of the fucking road, and neither of us care,” Nathaniel says.
“What are you saying?” I ask.
“The night we came to the fundraiser, before we got… occupied with other things, I was going to tell you that we weren’t just coming there to apologize. I signed a contract with Colorado,” Nathaniel says. “I’m not leaving. And there’s no morality clause in my damn contract. As long as I’m not robbing banks or stealing handbags from old ladies, nobody's firing me."
“Ditto,” Adriano says. “My attorney says I’m good.”
“And you would have known all of that if you’d come here instead of running off with Vi that night.”
“So… what I did was for nothing,” I realize. “For the last month, I’ve been trying to protect you and… well, why the hell didn’t you go public, then, if you didn’t care?”
“Well, we thought you might have realized that a couple of football players were beneath you, and that you wouldn’t want more attention drawn to the incident than already was on it,” Nathaniel says.
“Why would I think that you were beneath– ohhh. My mother.”
“We did get a visit from the First Lady,” Adriano admits.
“Well. I don’t know what to say.” I can’t think straight when I’m standing so close to them like this– smelling them, nearly touching them– and all I want them to do is pick me up and carry me back into the house and stay there for another thirty days.
“Well, I sure as hell do,” Nathaniel says. “The last month sucked, and I don’t want to do it again.”
“Ditto,” Adriano interjects. “For the good of mankind, you just can’t leave us again.”
“For the good of mankind?”
“That was a little dramatic,” Adriano says. “For the good of everyone around us. Is that better?”
I raise my eyebrows. “That’s what you came out here to say?”
“Nope,” Nathaniel says. “We came out here to say we love you.”
“We love you and we fucking want you,” Adriano adds. “And neither of us give a shit about anyone else's opinions about those facts.”
“We love you. We want you. And you’re ours. That pretty much sums it up, right, Adriano?” Nathaniel asks.
“And we’re taking you home,” Adriano says. “Your house or ours. Pick one, but make sure it’s one you’re comfortable with.”
“Why is that?” I ask.
“Because you’re not going to be able to walk tomorrow,” Adriano starts.
Nathaniel interrupts. “Sweetheart, you’ve been gone for thirty days. If you think you’re going to be able to walk anytime in the next month, you’d be mistaken.”
“Is this the part where I’m supposed to tell you to pick me up and carry me inside the house right now?” I ask. “Or do I get half a second to say ‘I love you’ back before you threaten to immobilize me?”
“Say it,” Adriano orders.
“I just did!”
“Say it again,” Nathaniel commands.
“I love you both.”
They don’t let me utter another word. Adriano brings his mouth to mine, his kiss soft and tender and gentle at first but quickly turning into something entirely different as his tongue finds mine. His hands go to my face, his palms on either side, and he kisses me and kisses me and kisses me until I’m breathless.
When he finally pulls his lips from mine, I don’t have a second to catch my breath before Nathaniel is sliding his arm around my waist to the small of my back and yanking me against him. His hardness is evident even through the coat, and heat floods my body at the sensation of him pressed against me. I melt into his arms, my legs practically turning to jelly as he kisses me hard, rough, passionate, not the least bit tender.
Adriano’s kiss is welcoming. Nathaniel’s kiss is punishing.
When we finally stop, my lips are swollen and my body is aching with need. I don’t want to stand here in the middle of the road with them. I want to go home with them. I want to show them exactly how much I missed them.
I’m about to tell them just that when a golf cart pulls up with a bright green and yellow van driving slowly behind them. One of the security guards from the front gate steps out of the cart. “I apologize, Ms. Aschberg. We’ve been tighter with security given your situation, but this was a special delivery for Mr. Jackson and Mr. Ashby, and they’ve had… unusual deliveries in the past, and the bananas had paperwork, so we let them in escorted.”
The bananas?
The van door slides open and bananas begin pouring out. Not the fruit kind, but the human-dressed-as-fruit kind.
Carrying musical instruments.
My bodyguards step in front of me, trying to act as a barrier between me and the bananas, but I wave them away. “It’s okay,” I say, laughter starting to bubble up in my chest. “They’re bananas, not assassins.”
“As I said, this was highly unusual, but Mr. Jackson and Mr. Ashby have had unusual deliveries in the past,” the security guard tries to explain.
“What the hell? Did you do this?” I ask, my mouth gaping as more bananas pour out of the van. There must be fifteen of them. I don’t know how they all fit in the vehicle, but they’re forming a little group in their yellow tights and their banana costumes. They’re even wearing little banana stem hats on top of their heads.
“I swear this was not my work,” Adriano says, laughing as a trombone blares out notes that startle me, making me jump.
“Which of you hired a marching band dressed as bananas?” I can’t cover my laughter, and I snort loudly as I hold my hand over my mouth.
“I wish this were our work,” Nathaniel answers as the marching band begins belting out REO Speedwagon’s Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore. “I think I know whose work it is, though.”
“Annie,” Adriano chimes in. I give him a look that says I don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, and he laughs. “We’ll tell you later.”
And that is how I, Georgina Carter Aschberg, former head of my parent’s foundation (before I was fired), and the notoriously slutty soon-to-be estranged daughter of the very conservative President Arturo Aschberg, came to be standing here in the middle of the road in my formerly quiet, historic neighborhood with my football-player, trench-coat-wearing, drone-flying, naked-bongo-playing boyfriends, listening to a marching band of bananas play REO Speedwagon.
