None of us heard it at first. The three of us were too lost in thought, camped out on the bumper of our dad’s old 1955 Chevy pickup. We’d spent two long summers rehabbing this thing with him until it was purring like a kitten. Now, we drove it when we wanted to think of him, or when we just needed to get away from the helicopters and limos and palaces.

We drove it out here, to the cliffs overlooking the water, when we needed to get out of our own fucking heads. Usually, it helped, but not that day. That day, I was pretty sure nothing was going to help. Nothing was going to fix this, or put the pieces back together. Not after we thought we’d found the girl of our dreams only to have her step on our hearts.

The three of us were so lost in thoughts, and in our own pissed-off fury, that we didn’t hear our helicopter until it was practically on top of us. We glanced up, frowning in confusion as to why Ryker would just drop in like this. That is, until we saw who was with him.

“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” Joaquin growled, standing and curling his hand into a fist.

The chopper set down about a hundred feet away from us, the engine winding down as the blades slowed. The side door popped open, and then there she was, bolting right for us.

And damn if my heart didn’t just jump up in my chest. I was so fucking mad at her, and I wanted to hate her so damn much for what she’d done to us and what she was going to do to us with whatever she wrote. But the heart knows what it wants, and I could be mad all I want, but something inside me still fucking soared when I saw her.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Landon muttered, jangling the truck keys, grabbing Joaquin and my shoulders, and nodding to the truck.

“Please!” she was screaming, tears running down her face as she ran to us. “Please just listen.”

“To what!” I growled. I shook my head, squeezing my eyes shut so hard it hurt. “Fuck, Emma, I want to listen to you but how the hell can we trust you? About fucking anything?”

“Because I’m going to tell you the truth. All of it.”

“I think we know the truth now,” Joaquin said bitterly, looking away.

“Not the real one,” she whispered. “Look, you’re right. I came to the club that night looking for a story, or something. But you knew that the minute you met me. You knew I didn’t belong, and that I’d snuck my way in. And you could’ve kicked me out yourselves, but you’d didn’t.” She swallowed thickly. “Why?”

“Why?” I hissed, shaking my head. “The ‘why’ is because we fell for you, Emma! You hooked us in and—”

“I never hooked you,” she spat back. “Yes, I went there for a story, but I never expected you three. There was no ‘angle’ in us meeting, and I sure as hell wasn’t using you for anything!”

“Oh, except to secretly record us so you could write a fucking newspaper story about us?” Landon spat back, venom in his voice.

“That wasn’t me.”

My eyes narrowed at her. “What?”

“It wasn’t me, and that’s the truth. A co-worker—” She swallowed. “This backstabbing bitch I work with hijacked my story and gave me a secret microphone I didn’t know about.”

I laughed bitterly, turning away.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said quietly to my brothers.

“Hold the fuck up.”

We whirled quickly at the sound of Ryker’s voice, glancing past a crying, shaking Emma to see him striding from the helicopter.

“You,” I glared at him, jabbing a finger at him. “We gotta have a serious talk about loyalties, man.”

He rolled his eyes. “Calm down, hot-head. She’s not wrong.”

My eyes jerked up in surprise. “What?”

“She ain’t wrong. We ran a diagnostic of her necklace back at the security center at the palace. It’s all there, secret mic and transmitter and all.”

Landon laughed darkly. “Well great, we have proof that she recorded us, just like we knew already.”

“She’s not lying about not knowing about it though.” Ryker shrugged.

“And how exactly do you expect us to believe—”

“He polygraphed me.”

The grin came to my lips before I could stop it, and I arched a brow at our head of security.

“You put a lie detector on her?”

“Yup.”

I turned back to Emma to see her holding my gaze unflinchingly, her eyes fierce.

Damn.

There was no way I could hold onto whatever anger I had, not with her. Not with that defiant, fierce, fiery passion she had behind her eyes.

“I didn’t know,” she said evenly, looking at each of us in turn.

None of us said a thing, but you could practically see the anger fizzling away.

“There’s still your paper,” Joaquin finally said, his voice tight. “When that story breaks, we’re going to be fucked.”

Slowly, Emma just grinned.

“I’m glad you find that amusing,” Landon hissed. “But—”

“I haven’t even gotten to the best part,” she said quietly with a big smile.

“Spell it out for me,” I muttered.

“They can’t run the story.” Emma’s voice cut the air, her eyes moving to all of us. “For one, recording someone without telling them and without some sort of legal wiretap or surveillance is illegal, in basically all of the kingdoms.”

I arched my brow, the smile teasing my lips as I met her eyes. “I’m impressed.”

Emma grinned widely. “Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the real good part yet.”

And that’s when she dropped the bomb on us.

See, a hidden recording device like the one her coworker Simone slipped her is a couple of pay-grades above what most newspapers would be working with. Actually, when Ryker and his team cracked that fucker open and started poking around, they’d opened up the real bombshell: the hidden recorder was property of the Bellhaven counter-terrorism division.

The bug that’d recorded us to ruin us was from our damn country.

Ryker isn’t a man to leave ends untied either, and it’d taken him all of twenty minutes to get in touch with the head of our security unit, match the serial number of the bug to the master equipment manifest, and figure out exactly who’d signed it out for use in the field. The time and supply location CCTV cameras had been back-checked, and low and fucking behold, guess who’d checked out a spy mic in order to try and ruin the three princes of Bellhaven?

Three members of our own fucking council. The same council that’d spent more of a year so far not being able to pick one of us to run the country.

“Oh, and that microphone has built in storage in addition to a transmitter.” Ryker slowly grinned a wicked smile. “And those morons had the thing on the whole fucking time before her shitty coworker even gave it to her. The three councilmen offering Simone a bunch of money to get her coworker to bug the Club, and promises of more money if she could help bring you three down.”

He chuckled.

“We in the security business like to call that ‘conspiracy and treason.’ We’ve got all of it on tape back at the palace, and I’ve taken the liberty of bringing your legal team into the mix.”

Emma cleared her throat. “Oh, and we’ve also got Simone fucking my boss, Martin, in order to get a raise and a title bump that I was up for.”

I whistled lowly, shaking my head and taking this all in.

“Thank you, Ryker,” I finally said quietly, nodding solemnly at him. “Honestly, thank you, for everything.”

He just grinned.

“It’s what I do, Your Highness.”

“Ryk, could you give us a—”

“Say no more,” he chuckled at Landon. “I assume you’ve got enough gas to get your own asses back to the palace in that thing?” He nodded at the pickup, and my brother nodded.

“Well, that’ll be all from me then.” He turned and nodded at Emma.

“Remember what I said, sweetheart.”

Emma grinned as she hugged him. “You know I will.”

“Gents.”

Our cranky, sarcastic, bad-ass head of security tipped an imaginary hat at us before he headed to the chopper, started the rotors, and slowly lifted away, leaving us and Emma alone on the cliffs.

She turned to us, her face full of that fierceness, her eyes blazing with emotion as she took a stop toward us.

“I never—”

She never got a chance to finish before all three of us were suddenly surrounding her and swooping her into our arms. Emma moaned, melting into us as the three of us pulled her tight. I tilted her chin up, and before she could say another word, I did what I basically decided right there to do for the rest of my life: kiss her, and love her, fiercely.

I kissed her heatedly, groaning into her soft, pouty lips before I let Landon pull her away. He claimed her mouth next, kissing her with a growl as his hand moved to cup her ass possessively. Joaquin took her last, kissing her mouth and pulling her against him until they broke apart gasping for air.

“I can’t believe Ryker fucking polygraphed you,” I muttered. “Remind me to have a word with him.”

Emma giggled, throwing her arms around me.

“It was my idea, you know.”

“We never should have doubted—”

“You should have,” she said quietly. “It’d be weird if you weren’t nervous,” she said with a wink. “Didn’t you once say that to me?”

“Slightly different circumstances,” Landon purred. “But yes.”

The four of us moved back to truck, pulling the back hatch down and climbing into the bed. We lay back, staring out at the sun dipping over the horizon on the ocean as Emma — the one, perfect, incredible girl that all three of us had fallen for, snuggled up to us.

“So what happens now?” she said quietly.

“Well, now we clean house back home,” Joaquin muttered. “No more fucking around. I’m done waiting for this council to deliberate this, and they’ve just proved that they’d rather torpedo all three of us than actually do anything.”

“We are the princes,” Landon said with a shrug. “We could just disband the council and declare ourselves a united governing force.”

“The people might not like it,” I said pensively, stroking my jaw. “But then, the people need a working government.”

“You know you three have some of the highest approval ratings in the kingdoms?”

I glanced at Emma and grinned. “Is that your personal opinion?”

She giggled. “Well, obviously, I’ve got fairly high approval ratings of you, but then, I might be biased.”

“Multiple orgasms will do that,” Landon chuckled, making her blush bright red as she turned to pull him into a kiss.

“Okay, yes, but I mean by the public. By your people. The paper does these approval things all the time for regents and rulers, looking for whoever they’re going to try and dig into in the press next. But you guys always came back with these glowingly high numbers.”

Landon sighed dramatically. “Like I said, it’s the multiple orgasms.”

Emma groaned and needled her finger into him as Joaquin and I chuckled.

“Better not be giving anyone multiple orgasms,” she pouted.

“No one but you, Princess,” I murmured, taking her hand.

“Not a princess,” she said, sticking her tongue out at me.

“Yeah well how’d you like to be?”

She froze at Joaquin’s words, slowly turning to meet his eye.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what we mean,” I said softly, turning to meet my brothers’ eyes and nodding.

We were all thinking it, and really, what were we waiting for? We’d found the girl of our damn dreams, and the idea of letting her get away from us, especially because of some dumb rules and traditions in our kingdom that no one gave a shit about, was too much to even consider.

And after all, we were damned princes.

“Stay with us,” I murmured, pulling her close as the sun dipped low. “Stay with us for always. And don’t just be our princess, be our Queen.”

She swallowed, her face going pink as her breath caught.

“What are you saying?”

“You’re the investigative journalist here, right?” Landon teased. “Piece it together.”

She snorted a laugh. “That a proposal?”

“No, this is.”

Emma gasped as the three of us suddenly moved away from her. We pulled her up until she was standing in the truck bed, and the three of us slowly sank to one knee in front of her. She brought her hands to her lips as I glanced at my brothers.

“We doing this?” I whispered.

“Hell yes,” Joaquin said evenly, nodding.

“Damn straight,” Landon added. “We’ll deal with the council when we get back. But this?” He looked up at Emma — our perfect, fantasy girl come to life — and grinned. “I’m not letting this get away from us.”

“Emma Wright,” I said slowly, looking up into her eyes. “Will you—”

“—Marry,” Landon added.

“Us?” Joaquin finished, but he barely got the word out before she was screaming and throwing herself into our arms.

“Yes!”

She screamed it, again and again as she peppered our lips with kisses and let us pull her into our arms as we spun around.

The how, the when, the what — all of it could come later. But for now, well, we’d found it. We’d found the strength, the purpose, and the heart we’d ben looking for our whole lives.

And we were never, ever going to let her go.