Oscar Hayden looked up from his computer toward the woman sprawled out on the mattress and grinned. He could see the peaks of her nipples through the sheet.
He usually didn’t like pet names because they brought up some past shit for him, but it didn’t bother him with her. Probably because the sex they’d just had was so fucking incredible.
He glanced back at the laptop, tablet, external hard drive, and tool roll he had open on the hotel desk. “Give me a second.” The tablet was in pieces—he’d had to use the hotel room hair dryer plus his heat roll from the tool kit to melt the special glue that held the tablet’s glass front to the body of the device. With that off, he’d been able to dissect the innards, connecting directly to the external hard drive and his computer in order to run the tests and analysis he hadn’t had the time for until now.
Selene Tanaka wrapped the sheet around herself as she slid gracefully off the bed. Her bare feet were silent as she walked over to where he sat. He’d pulled on a pair of boxers when he left the bed, but hadn’t bothered with a shirt.
It had been a wild couple of weeks due to an insane series of events started by his dipshit brother and an inadvertent tablet switch. Well, one of his dipshit brothers. He had two, the three of them identical triplets—his mother had occasionally remarked that if the fourth divided zygote had kept growing, giving her identical quadruplets, she’d have changed her name and left the country.
Langston, the current dipshit in question, had agreed to join a weird secret cult. The cult had dangerous enemies, and Oscar had come to Boston to help Langston track down a bomber. Langston hadn’t exactly asked for his help, but Oscar needed to protect his brother.
To give credit where it was due, the cult mobilized an effective strike team. They’d come close to capturing the bomber, a man named Luca Campisi, two days earlier, but he’d managed to escape by setting off a series of trash can smoke bombs around the Boston waterfront.
Langston would bitch if he heard Oscar calling the Trinity Masters—a secret society that had been around since the United States rebelled against England—a cult. The colonists traded King George for George Washington, and in addition to proclaiming that freedom, the founding fathers had opted to create a secret society that would bolster and protect the fledgling nation, modeled on a similar society—the Masters’ Admiralty—in Europe.
His sister Sylvia had joined the Masters’ Admiralty and moved to Europe. Now Langston was in the Trinity Masters. Oscar had been invited to join both cults as well, but the price of admission was too steep.
While being a member of the Trinity Masters had clear benefits—access to influential people, with the accompanying benefits of also accessing the money and power those people had—there was, in addition to loyalty and secrecy, a marriage requirement; specifically, an arranged marriage between three people.
Oscar had spent the last couple of years trying to recover from having his heart dropkicked by Faith, the woman he’d truly believed to be the love of his life.
Dating was an unholy nightmare, so he couldn’t deny there was a bit of appeal to the idea of having someone choose a spouse—wait, spouses—based on intellectual affinity and potential to innovate, and not anything as sticky as emotions.
However, Oscar had seen for himself that just because it was an arranged marriage with purpose didn’t mean the unions were wholly cerebral. Langston and Sylvia both fell in love with their trinities. If there was something the Haydens had in common, it was that they all tended to lead with their hearts. And if there was one thing Oscar didn’t have to give anymore, his heart was it.
He wasn’t going to join, but he had to admit the cults had good taste in members. After all, they wanted him to join, and his siblings, which clearly showed they knew quality.
And Selene? She was a member. And she was fucking amazing.
“What are you doing?” she asked, looking at the items he had spread out on the desk.
A brilliant theoretical atomic physicist at Cornell, she was rational, perceptive, and intelligent to a level that, if he was being honest, was a little intimidating. He and his brothers were all smart and successful, all hoping to change the world in their own ways. Selene would change the world. She was