He’d sworn he would call her and he hadn’t.

It had been forty-eight hours since she’d walked Cole Williams to her front door and shown him out. She hadn’t heard one word from him since. Okay, so, he’d looked a little dumbstruck when he’d left after she’d shown him the closet of horrors, but he’d said he’d talk to his brothers and they’d do the job. As much as she was salivating over her dream closet, what she really needed was her office finished. She needed space for her paperwork and a clean desk. As it was, she was bringing laptops from room to room and working wherever she could find a flat space to spread out. At the moment, she was spread out on her bed with two computers, a tablet, and her cell phone by her side.

For the first time in her career, she was in the process of selling an incredibly successful company that she had built from the ground up. As great as that felt, she was still unsure about the buyer of the company and his intentions. She spent a lot of time trying to figure out if she was making the right move and completely second-guessing herself. Jonathan Beyer had agreed to most of her terms of sale, but was being a real prick about her condition of keeping all current employees for a minimum of eighteen months. She’d gone to college with Jonathan at MIT and he’d been a spiteful bully then. Nothing had changed. She still hated being in the same room with him, he still rubbed her the wrong way. She still wasn’t sure if she wanted to sell H-Surf to him or not.

She was expecting a call from her assistant, Kelsey, who was due to drive in from the city in the morning, so when her cell rang, she didn’t even look at the caller ID before she answered.

“I need you to remember to bring the Wexler contracts tomorrow and remind me to call Frank about the cars. If I forget to do it tomorrow, I’ll get billed for another three months for using the garage but I want to be fully moved out of the city by then. Oh, and just make a note that I need to get Sandra from Conquer to the apartment sometime next week with some movers to take the rest of the clothes.”

“Julia?” a voice that was decidedly not Kelsey asked. “I’m hurt. I thought you’d be waiting for my call.” She could just hear his familiar smile through the phone.

“I have been, but since you hadn’t called, I hired someone else.” Her blank statement was met with silence. She’d been told more than once that her jokes tended to fall flat—her tone not able to convey humor in the same way that other people’s could. “It was a joke, Cole.”

“Not a funny one,” he told her. “And I know you didn’t hire anyone else because the word is out about you, lady.”

That made her sit up a bit straighter. “What do you mean? What word?”

“You’re officially the siren of contractors,” he told her candidly. “You suck in poor unsuspecting laborers with your good looks and then cut them down with scathing criticism and, apparently, that huge stick up your ass. Their words, not mine,” he added the last part before she could get a word in.

“The word should have been out about them. They were lazy and didn’t deliver what they promised.”

“So you said.” Cole laughed again, making her believe that he was enjoying the whole exchange. “Anyway, we’re in. I wanted to swing by in the morning with my brothers to show them where you want to start downstairs. Tucker was blown away by those digital mock-up things you did. He asked me a million questions about how you made them. Maybe you could show him tomorrow.”

There was no real way to show him how she’d made them unless he knew computers the way that she did, which she highly doubted. It was a program she’d made herself, that consisted mostly of codes and sequences, that created the image in the end. It suddenly planted an idea that made her wonder if there were any other programs like it on the market and how she could sell it. Maybe that could be the next project on her list.

“Julia?” Cole asked. “You still there?”

“Yes. I was just thinking,” she said distractedly while still ruminating how to build on the program she’d already started and how to make it user-friendly. Would it be better if it was geared toward consumer or professional? She’d have to research the market on programs available now. “Tomorrow sounds fine,” she told him.

She hung up the phone, without hearing if he responded, and got to work.

* * *

Okay, Cole thought, so Elliot was pissed. Turns out his brother had been avoiding Julia’s calls on purpose and didn’t want to step foot in their grandmother’s house while she lived there. He’d even used some very creative curse words to describe her character, which Cole had tried to correct. Elliot wasn’t known for his charming and charismatic demeanor by any means, if anything he was remembered for his surly attitude and general lack of smile. He was big and brawny, worked himself to the bone and always got the job done, but he wasn’t interested in smiling while he did it.

He’d refused to attend the morning meeting at Julia’s until he’d seen her plans for the house. When he’d seen the blueprint for the upstairs he’d uttered, “What the hell is that?” At Cole’s descriptive answer, Elliot had shoved the plans aside and stomped out of the room.

Around nine the next morning Cole, Tucker, and Elliot drove to Julia’s. Outside, the house looked just the same as it always had, but the insides would be forever changed in all of their eyes. It wasn’t necessarily Julia’s fault though, as the house had already been through another owner before her. He and his brothers had shared such a close bond with their grandmother that the thought of her house not being hers anymore was still unfathomable some days.

They walked up the steps to the front porch and Cole knocked on the door. When no one answered, he knocked again, just a little louder.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Elliot muttered as he reached past Cole’s head and banged loudly on the door.

Still no one came to the door.

“Hang on,” Cole said, grabbing his cell and dialing Julia’s. Still, she didn’t answer.

“Can I help you?”

He and his brothers turned to see a tall blonde come around the side of the house. She had an armful of stuff—papers and a box—but she moved like they weighed nothing. Hell, maybe they did.

“Yeah, we were supposed to meet Julia Hawkins here this morning about doing some work in the house,” Cole told her.

She laughed as she came onto the porch with them. She was a beautiful woman with blond hair, brown eyes, and a wide smile as she took them all in.

“Did she know you were coming this early?” she asked as she unlocked the door and let them in.

“It’s nine in the morning.” The tone in Elliot’s voice implied that the entire world should be awake at such a time.

The blonde didn’t like his response and seemed to take offense on Julia’s behalf. Her eyes narrowed as she inspected him. “Julia doesn’t always work regular business hours. I’m her assistant, Kelsey.” She angled her head around the staircase. “Julia, the contractors are here!”

Cole wiggled his pinky in his ear, trying to find relief from the ringing.

She turned and smiled at him and Tucker, ignoring Elliot. “I’m the youngest of nine. I’ve learned how to use my outside voice.”

She was tall, maybe five ten, and slender. Her jeans looked worn, but he suspected that she bought them looking that way instead of breaking them in herself.

“Julia, the contractors are here for you!” she screamed again. “Why don’t you get started looking around and I’ll get her down here?”

He and Tucker both watched as she went up the stairs. He would have kept watching had he not gotten a smack on the back of his head. Cole turned to asked his brother why he’d done that.

“Dibs,” Tucker said quietly.

“Can we get to work here?” Elliot hissed from the hallway. “This place is a dump. What the hell has she been doing in here?”

They were conferring over Julia’s plans in what would be her office and making a few notes when Kelsey came back down and headed for the kitchen.

“You guys want coffee?” she yelled. Cole wondered if she had another volume other than really loud.

“Sure.” Tucker smiled in her direction. “We’d love some, thanks, Kelsey.” Then he followed her to the kitchen, Cole trailing slightly behind him.

* * *

His brothers were idiots that were happy to be led around by their dicks. Elliot looked around what used to be his grandmother’s dining room and sighed.

An office? Who wanted their front room to be their office? Why did she have to change everything?

When she decided she wasn’t cut out for small town life and headed back to the city, what the hell was he going to do with an office instead of a dining room? Because he knew that’s what was going to happen. She’d get bored and leave, and then he’d finally be able to buy his grandmother’s house from Little Miss Moneybags Julia Hawkins and her last-minute offer. He’d put in a good offer on the house. His realtor had assured him the deal was in the bag. The next thing he knew, someone outbid his offer by tens of thousands of dollars. He couldn’t compete with that and had bowed out, annoyed and angry.

His brother Cole had done nothing but talk about how hot Julia Hawkins was, while Tucker blathered on about her amazing digital constructions. Elliot didn’t care. He didn’t want to be in the house while it was hers. He didn’t want to do the job for her because he didn’t want to change the house. He liked it just the way it was.

He couldn’t even think about the upstairs plan. What he knew as his bedroom was going to become the sitting area of her master closet. She was going to change her clothes smack dab in the middle of his childhood. The good part of his childhood, anyway. He’d been adopted at the age of twelve by the Williams family, and he was loath to let anything from that part of his life go. Anything before that time was worth nothing to him, but his memories with Mary King? They were worth more than some arbitrary amount of money.

Elliot turned when he heard a small scuffle, followed by a thump, and then a feminine murmur. She was at the bottom of the stairs, one hand hanging onto the railing while the other scratched her head. Her brown hair was a wild mass of curls and tangles down to her ass making her look kind of like Slash from Guns N Roses, only way hotter. She was in nothing but a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of hot-pink boy-short underwear.

She swayed a little and sat down on the steps, then leaned her head against the newel post and promptly fell back to sleep. He wanted to take a moment to study her face, which was striking even in repose, but Kelsey and his brothers came back into the room, drawn by the sound of her coming down the stairs.

“Oh, good.” Kelsey smiled as she walked toward her with a cup of coffee. “She’s up.”

He, Tucker, and Cole stepped farther back into the dining room—he refused to call it an office—while Kelsey approached Julia.

“Okay, Jules. I’ve got coffee.” She squatted down and shook Julia’s knee. “Jules, come on. Contractors, office, work, ya know. Come on.”

Glazed green eyes opened, sightless and lost. “I thought the zoo was here yesterday,” she told Kelsey, her sleepy voice sending a strange shiver down Elliot’s spine.

He and his brothers looked at each other in confusion at her comment.

“That’s great,” Kelsey told her, placating her as she pushed the coffee into Julia’s hand. “Drink that.”

Julia weakly took the cup and gulped a few sips down before resting the mug on her knee. “The cotton candy was yellow.”

“That sounds gross.” Kelsey grimaced before she raised her voice again. “Julia! Wake up.”

Elliot, Tucker, and Cole watched as she blinked a few times, the haze in her bright green eyes clearing a little.

“Ah, there you are,” Kelsey crooned. “The contractors are here to go over your plans with you.”

“This early?” the house thief said quietly. She scratched a small hand over her chest, her lips pursed in a sleepy ineffective glower.

“It’s after nine.” Elliot felt it important to point that out to her. It wasn’t early. Half the world was up and at work at this hour.

That was when she finally looked over and noticed that he and his brothers were taking up a good portion of the real estate in her dining room.

“I’m sorry, Julia,” Cole said as he moved toward her and helped her up off the step. “When we talked last night, I said we’d swing by in the morning and get started. I brought Elliot and Tucker with me to get a feel for the layout you’re looking for.”

* * *

There were men in her home. Three of them, all big and bulky and staring at her. She knew Cole and then there was a man that was clearly his brother. They had the same shade of brown hair, the same brown eyes that watched her with something akin to kindness.

The other man was obviously older by a few years, probably closer to forty, and was far bigger than the other two. If she had to guess, she would say that they weren’t related at all. At least not biologically, anyway. His hair was black, a little too long as it curled at the back of his neck, and he had dark, smoky-gray eyes that held no kindness, just a sort of animosity that Julia had seen before.

Aside from the glare he was sending her way, he was the most attractive man she’d ever seen. He had a chin covered with neatly trimmed dark hair, deep chiseled features, and an indescribable intensity that was solely focused on her, a wide chest with brawny arms crossed over it.

“I’m Julia,” she said, bypassing the moment where she’d thoroughly embarrassed herself, and greeted them all with formal handshakes. Tucker, as he’d introduced himself, the brother that looked like Cole, was staring at her, a strange expression on his face as he looked her up and down.

“You must be Elliot,” she pushed through the awkward moment and piercing stare.

“He’s the one that wouldn’t return your calls,” Cole chimed in, adding to the discomfort.

Her eyes turned back to Elliot who didn’t look the least bit apologetic as he still held her hand in a firm handshake, nor did he offer any explanation. She cut her eyes away, chiding herself for not looking him in the eyes longer, like she was supposed to.

“Get us set up for coffee and breakfast in the kitchen,” she said to Kelsey. She probably could have asked, but she and her assistant had worked together for a long time. They had a system and it worked for them. “I’ll be back downstairs in a few minutes.”

* * *

Elliot had thought the front of her shirt was racy, but he’d nearly choked when he’d read the back. Who Needs Big Tits? the front asked, in big, bold letters. He’d been helpless not to look, his brothers doing the same. The shirt itself hadn’t been that thick and he’d been able to see her nipples poking into the fabric on her chest. That had been enough for him to forget about the size.

That had been before she’d turned her sweet ass around and scampered out of the room, her hair flying around her. When you have an ass like this! was scrawled across the back, a big arrow pointing right at her luscious ass.

Yeah, Cole hadn’t been exaggerating. She was gorgeous, there was no doubt about that. He was still pissed that she’d stolen his house and that she was trashing the place. He certainly didn’t like her, but he wasn’t blind and he could appreciate a fine-looking woman.

“You all might as well sit and have coffee and something to eat. Her few minutes and your few minutes probably aren’t the same thing,” Kelsey told them as she set out a coffee carafe and a tray of pastries on the kitchen counter. Cole and Tucker sat themselves down like this kind of shit happened at client meetings all the time and started choosing pastries.

Tucker made an appreciative sound as he bit into one. “Where’d you get these? They’re amazing.”

“Oh, I got them in the city before I drove out this morning. I keep hoping if I put them out, Julia will try some, but she never does.” She shrugged. “More for me, I guess. And now you.”

“You live in the city?” Tucker asked. Cole seemed content to eat pastries while watching the byplay.

Elliot had no desire to sit and watch his brother hit on Ms. Julia of the Gorgeous Ass’s assistant. Why the hell did the woman need an assistant? She couldn’t make her own coffee? He’d never much liked high-maintenance women. There tended to be too much drama that revolved around everything.

“So you live in the city but work out here. Kind of a long commute,” Tucker commented.

“I’m moving here shortly,” Kelsey told him as her phone rang and she answered it quickly.

“Kelsey Riggs. Oh good, thank you, Anna. If you could just email me those contracts, I’d appreciate it, and just cc Julia and Jonathan both on everything.” As she spoke she refilled their coffee mugs and made sure there were fresh pastries. She was efficient, he’d give her that.

He checked his watch. It had been almost twenty minutes. How long did it take to throw on a pair of jeans and get going? Besides, they’d all already seen the plans, what the hell did they need her for anyway?

It was at least ten more minutes, listening to Kelsey on the phone talking about contracts and cars and who knows what else, before he heard Julia Hawkins come down the stairs.

The first time she’d come down, she’d been barefoot and had seemed so tiny to him, almost innocent and childlike. Now she was in a pair of distressed designer jeans that clung to her every curve, tucked into a pair of insanely tall boots. She wore a sporty sweater that looked luxuriously soft from where he stood, a complicated braid hanging over her shoulder. Her makeup was tasteful but obvious, highlighting her eyes. They were the most unique color he’d ever seen, reminding him of the bright green of natural sea glass.

She walked toward him, but turned sideways to sidle past him to get into the kitchen where she took the full cup of coffee Kelsey was holding out for her.

“I got updated sales contracts from Anna this morning,” Kelsey began as Julia took her first sip. “I emailed you an itinerary for the weekend and a note about Frank, though I already put that on the schedule, and Susan will be by before the movers in two weeks. Employee contracts should be in your email if you want to look them over, otherwise I’ll double check everything before you finalize the sale.”

“Thank you,” Julia said briskly.

“No problem. Now, you need to deal with this contractor business, unless you want to hand over the reigns on that.” At Julia’s blank look, Kelsey nodded. “I didn’t think so. If you’re done with me for now, I’ll call the cleaners to get on the books for when you wrap up in the city, get your mail for us to sort later, and get all this food put away.” At Julia’s nod, Kelsey gave a quick wave and walked out the back door.

“Wow.” Cole laughed. “I think I need an assistant, too.” He looked to Elliot. “Think we can swing it?”

“You should look into it,” Julia said as her eyes cut to Elliot then away again. “They’re great at returning phone calls.”

Tucker snickered. “She sunk your battleship, Elliot.”