down.” J.T. shook his head, shoved his fingers through his hair. “That’s not happening. I’m never home long enough to have a dog. What would I do with a wife?” He set his now-empty glass on the credenza with an audible thud. “No offense, but I haven’t slept since yesterday.” He hadn’t even caught a nap on the flight. He’d spent the entire trip trying to resolve the design problem he’d been working on when he’d been summoned. “I’m heading home to crash.”
“I’ll see you at the office tomorrow,” Gray told him as they all moved toward the door. “We need to go over the figures for that possible plant in Singapore.”
“Singapore,” he muttered. “My head’s still in India. Let’s do it when I get back next week.”
“Not a problem.”
“Give me a ride downtown, will you? I took a limo here from the airport.”
Gray told him he’d be glad to, then pulled his cell phone from his pocket when it rang yet again.
“It’s my secretary, Loretta,” Gray said. “She’s at the office working on the white paper for the buyout. If you don’t mind, I’ll talk to her on the way.”
Accustomed to being available at all hours himself, J.T. told him he didn’t mind at all and took advantage of the twenty-five-minute drive into the sprawling city to check his own messages, text back responses to most of them and decide what to do for a meal.
He was hungry for pancakes, which meant it must be morning, body time. Since it was night in Seattle, he phoned for takeout from Rico’s. The Italian restaurant was on the ground floor of the building where he owned a penthouse with black granite and cherry wood in the kitchen and a million-dollar view of Puget Sound from nearly every room. Rather than go through his matronly, enormously efficient assistant, Kate Cavanaugh, who was probably feeding her husband at this hour, he then called HuntCom’s chief pilot himself to let him know he’d need the plane ready for a trip back to New Delhi in the morning.
For now, he wasn’t wasting another second’s thought on Harry’s insane ultimatum.
A day later—the middle of the night where he was, midday where his half brothers were—a conference call from his brothers demanded that he rethink his position. They all agreed that had their father’s threat involved only money, they’d have collectively ignored the man’s demand. It wasn’t just money, though. It was about the things and places Harry knew mattered most to them.
Because of that, and because J.T. didn’t want to give up the island or be responsible for his brothers losing what was important to them, he agreed with what Justin proposed. Even though there were serious doubts about finding marriageable women who didn’t know who they were, and about how each man could get that woman to stay married after the deception was revealed, they would meet Harry’s terms. But only if he signed an agreement preventing him from ever blackmailing them again.
Gray wanted the agreement to be ironclad, signed, witnessed and notarized so Harry couldn’t throw out any new conditions.
What J.T. wanted as he hung up the phone and headed into his bathroom in search of an antacid tablet was to know how Harry thought something that had never worked for him should work any better for any of his sons. As far as he was concerned, no matter what happened, he’d just kissed his life as he knew it goodbye.
Chapter One
J.T. rubbed the back of his neck as he watched the numbers of the downtown office building’s elevator ascend. A run was definitely in order. Or a workout in the hotel’s gym. There was nothing like working up a sweat to lessen tension—with the possible exception of sex. Since he didn’t know any women in Portland, Oregon, and since he wasn’t into one-night stands, a workout seemed his best option for loosening the knots and easing the restiveness he could never quite shake.
His broad shoulders lowered with a long expulsion of breath.
He didn’t want to think about women just then. Aside from making him aware of a different sort of frustration, since it had been a while since he’d had the pleasure of intimate female company, thinking about women reminded him that he was supposed to be looking for one.
He still couldn’t believe the ultimatum his father had delivered two months ago. Two and a half, he mentally grumbled, reminding himself that the clock continued to tick.
His jaw worked in a slow grind as the numbers continued to climb. Justin had discovered he was a father not long after that meeting, but no one knew if he was making any progress with his little girl’s mom. As far as J.T. knew, the guy still didn’t want a wife. He knew for a fact he didn’t want one himself.
He wanted nothing to do with the whole home-and-family thing. He knew firsthand that commitment on that level simply didn’t work. He couldn’t even remember his own mother, his father’s second wife. She had bailed when J.T. was two, leaving him to a series of nannies, au pairs and the two succeeding stepmothers who’d pretty much ignored him before they’d abandoned him and their sons, too. They’d literally taken the money and run, which had pretty much proved to him long before he graduated from high school that women could be bought.
He’d learned a couple more valuable lessons back then, too. He’d learned that women pretended to care only when they wanted something in return. And that the best way to get any attention from anyone was to get into trouble. A visit from a truant officer was usually good for at least a ten-minute audience with his father. That was often the most time the man spent with him all week.
The elevator slowed. Over the quiet drone of the Muzak, a refined ding announced his floor.
He didn’t cause problems now. At least, not the kind that involved threats of expulsion or fines for speeding tickets. He’d refined his talent for trouble into a tendency to merely break or bend any rule that didn’t suit his purpose. His opinion of women, however, hadn’t changed much. His father’s rules for the Bride Hunt were that the women not know who they were or anything about the family wealth. When he got around to looking for a woman, which he was still in no rush to do, his personal requirements would be more specific.
The woman would have to have good genes. Preferably, in a tall, leggy blonde sort of way. She couldn’t come with any emotional or familial baggage. And she needed to have a career she wanted to keep so she’d have interests of her own. His father had said that the woman had to fall in love with him—not that he had to fall in love with her. Not that he believed for an instant that his father’s demands could be met—which was why he was about to implement Plan B.
The elevator doors slid open. Stepping into a wide hall, vaguely aware of the sounds of construction coming from a floor below, he noted the plaque on the wall indicating the direction of the suite he was looking for.
Plan B was to have everything in place to open his own architectural firm so he’d have something to fall back on when his father sold out. He figured that would happen in nine and a half months, when the time for the hunt expired. The logistics of that new venture became the sole thoughts on his mind as he opened the door marked Kelton & Associates.
A spacious reception area of white walls, gray industrial carpet and a wide mobile of what looked like stainless steel boomerangs greeted him. Beneath the slowly moving mobile sat a large amoeba-shaped Lucite secretarial desk. A state-of-the-art computer monitor and telephone system, lines ringing, occupied the short side of the curved L.
He’d chosen to interview this particular marketing firm
