After years of fruitless searching for their mate in the Netherworld, their father arranged a meeting with a seer to foretell their future. The seer told them that they had been looking in the wrong place. Their predestined bonded wasn’t a nymph, or even an otherworldly being. Their mate was a human.
After hearing the revelation, he and his brothers came to the surface world. They had been overwhelmed with the fact that their bonded was one among millions of marriageable human females on Earth. How were they supposed to find her?
Their father had been lucky. He caught his mate’s scent as soon as he swam to the beach and saw her frolicking by the water. Spiriting her away on the spot wasn’t a problem. But convincing her to accept her fate was a tricky one. Justin recalled their father had told them that he’d had to deal with a lot of kicking, screaming, and black eyes when their mother demanded to be freed and sent home.
For years after they had arrived on the surface world, he and his brothers had moved from town to town, country to country in search of their cevborn. Justin had been a gym teacher, police officer, bartender, bank teller, working different odd jobs to fit in with the humans’ society to see if their mate was among them. Ralph and Matt did the same and still their cevborn was nowhere to be seen. Then, eighteen months before, Justin had come to conclusion that what they had been doing was ineffective. Instead of looking for their mate, why not try to lure her to them?
He observed that human females were drawn to clothes and beautiful things and could be quite obsessive about it. Justin thought launching a career in the fashion and cosmetic industry where they’d be dealing with women all the time would be a perfect cover. The design house they started became an instant hit and women from all shapes and races flocked to him and his brothers. Unfortunately, none of those doting admirers were their mate.
Matt had grumbled about it, saying that Justin’s idea was a complete waste of time. But his brother soon had to eat his own words when Anna Vincent showed up in Bancroft’s office.
Marian Bancroft had warned Justin that Anna was up to no good, but Justin couldn’t care less. She was their long-awaited cevborn, the woman they would soon claim and bring back to their underwater palace in Azura.
Nothing else mattered.
Justin read the contract Anna Vincent had just signed one more time and smiled. With it, they were one step closer to making her theirs.
Matt glanced over the contract and frowned. “One year. Do we have to wait that long before we can bring her home?”
“Sooner, I hope. If we don’t scare her off first.” Justin folded the contract and stowed it in his drawer.
“Like Mother, you mean?” Ralph added.
Matt snorted a laugh. Justin grimaced. Their mother was a fiery woman, but she and their father were the most loving couple he had ever known. If being claimed by one nymph king scared a human woman out of her wits, Justin felt wary about how Anna would react when she was claimed by three.
Female nymphs never gave birth to multiple babies. However, he and his brothers were an exception, thanks to their mother’s genetic traits as a human. Since his kin believed that only one predestined mate was bound to one birth, sharing a womb with his brothers meant he was also bound to the same woman.
Anna Vincent.
“So.” Justin tapped his fingers. “Who will initiate her first?”
“Me,” Matt announced quickly.
“Why you?” Raphael threw him a dirty look.
“Because she hates me the most.”
“You were too harsh on her,” Justin added. Anna had looked offended when Matt called her frumpy.
“Well, somebody has to play the bad guy if we want to make this convincing. You think whoever sent her won’t get suspicious if we hand everything over a little too easily?”
Justin couldn’t argue with the logic. After he discovered Anna Vincent was their cevborn, he’d hired a private detective to dig out everything about her. Anna was the only child in the family. Her mother was rumoured to have left her father for a younger man when she was only three years old. Anna went to MIT for a year, then dropped out for financial reasons.
The detective didn’t find anything out of the ordinary about her until he saw she was being forced into a car by a group of unscrupulous-looking men. A little more digging revealed that Anna’s father had ties with Ivan Koleniskov, a member of a Russian mob family who ran dirty jobs for Beautycor, the cosmetic company that had been itching to drive the Martels’ design house out of business.
Anna and her father, Joseph Vincent, hadn’t struck him as people who liked conning for their living. Joseph Vincent went into an early retirement because of his health problems, and Anna worked in a boutique law firm as an IT support tech to support both of them. The father and daughter had lived a normal life until a couple of weeks ago when she suddenly quit her job and showed up in Marian Bancroft’s office. It was easy to figure out what she was up to. With her father’s affiliation to Koleniskov, more than likely the mobster had forced father and daughter to work for them.
Since he knew what Beautycor was after, Justin guessed Anna was sent to spy on them.
A corporate spy to unearth their trade secret.
Justin found the turn of events highly amusing because Anna wasn’t cut out for a spy job. She was a smart woman, but from his observations, he found her too gullible and too trusting. There wasn’t a shred of cunning in her personality that was needed to make it in this cut-throat business.
“Whatever you do, just don’t scare her,” Justin warned Matt. “We need to make her trust us.”
Matt scowled. “Do I look scary to you?”
“This is New York. Not an Azura training field. Sometimes you forgot where you are.”