Page 120 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
“We’re good at secrets, Tess,” Owen says softly, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “We kept the desert a secret. We kept the startup phase a secret. We can keep this a secret.”
“For how long?” she asks.
“As long as we need to,” Ethan says. “Until we own enough of the board to tell them to go to hell.”
Tessa looks at the three of us. We’re surrounding her. A phalanx of muscle and will.
“It’s too much,” she admits, her voice small. “Three of you. It’s… overwhelming. I feel like I’m going to break.”
“You won’t break,” I say.
I move my hand from her wrist to her knee, squeezing gently.
“You’re stronger than the system assumes,” I tell her. “I’ve observed you. You handle stress by turning it into kinetic energy. You handle chaos by organizing it. You aren’t fragile, Tessa. You’re resilient.”
She looks at me, searching my face. She’s looking for the doubt I don’t feel.
“You really think we can do this?” she asks. “Be… us? And still work together?”
“I don’t think,” I say. “I calculate. And the probability of success increases exponentially if we’re together.”
“Why?”
“Because when we’re separate, we’re distracted,” I explain. “Ethan is angry. Owen is reckless. I’m… stuck in the loop. But with you?”
I really look at her. The softness of her skin against the rough sheets. The way she looks at us, not with fear, but with a reverence that terrifies me.
“With you,” I say, “the noise stops. I can focus, code, and function.”
“You keep him sane,” Owen whispers, leaning his forehead against her shoulder.
Tessa lets out a shaky breath. She looks at Ethan.
“And you?” she asks. “You’re the CEO. You’re the one with the most to lose.”
Ethan reaches out, cupping her jaw. His thumb brushes her lower lip.
“I’ve got nothing to lose,” he says roughly. “Not anymore. Because if I lost you, the company wouldn’t matter. The money wouldn’t matter. I’d burn it all down just to keep you in this bed for five more minutes.”
The raw honesty of it hangs in the air.
Tessa shivers.
“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay.”
She leans into Ethan’s hand. The panic recedes, replaced by something else. Something warmer. Something dangerous.
“So,” she says, a small, nervous smile touching her lips. “We have an hour?”
“Forty-five minutes,” I correct, glancing at the digital clock on the bedside table. “Allowing for shower time and transit.”
“Forty-five minutes,” Owen muses. He looks at Tessa, his green eyes darkening. He looks at the way the sheet is slipping down her chest. “That’s plenty of time.”
“For what?” Tessa asks, her breath catching.
“Round two,” Owen says.
He moves before she can answer. He pulls the sheet down, exposing her to the morning light. Her skin is flushed, covered in the red marks and bruises we left on her yesterday.
